Plato’s Republic is a work of the greatest and most lasting significance. Ever since Plato’s time, it has been the focus of sustained philosophical reflection and analysis and the subject of innumerable studies interpreting the Republic as a whole or focusing on specific aspects of it.  However, the story of decline of polities and the corresponding human characters narrated by Socrates in Books 8-9 of the dialogue (Rep. 543a1-580c9) has received relatively less attention in respect of other parts of the Republic, even though it has been the object of some outstanding studies in recent years. The volume of Entretiens 71 approaches this remarkable text from an interdisciplinary perspective in order to highlight its philosophical and dramatic complexity, its dialectical and philosophical significance, and the many ways in which it is acutely pertinent to political and moral issues of our own times.  The volume consists of nine papers and the discussion that each of them received during the actual Entretiens at the Fondation Hardt in late August 2025. The authors are scholars in different fields, ranging from philosophy to literature, drama, history, political science, and reception studies. Prominent themes include the rôle of the story of decline in the overall scheme of the Republic, the literary features and intense theatricality of the narrative, the complex relation of the polities depicted by Socrates to their historical counterparts, the patterns of psychological and political causation accounting for the degenerative process, the striking and in ways unique representations of democracy and tyranny, and the reception ofs Socrates’ narrative by ancient authors and posterity.