For socrates the danger of equality in the democratic regime is not that it elevates those who are of lesser worth slaves, artisans, woman but that it allows us to sidestep the decisions that any political regime requires. It is here that philosophy enters, for philosophybis to lead us to the capacity to make those judgments, those decision. The problem that remains, though, as we learn from the conversations between Socreates and Glaucon about philosophy and the forms to which the philosophers seek to gain access, is whether the knowledge to which philosophybaspires is ever accessible, whether the ascent from the cave into the full light of the sun is ever possible and thus whether we may bevleft living in a world of indecision where democracy, insofar as it is gentle, is the best regime . Plato's study of democracy is more than a stuy of which political regime we might choose if we were in the position of the seven Persian conspirators of book 3 of Herodotus. It is to make us aware of some of the profound tension at the heart of democratic theory and thus as I read Plato to move us beyond the political world of contradiction to the philosophical challenge of transcending those contradiction