Socrates in “The Republic” shows that the soul itself—that is, its formal “constitution”—is discovered by raising and taking down cities. Both the soul and the city ought to be ordered according to the private-public virtue of justice, whose presence is the greatest good, and whose absence is the greatest ruin, to cities… (click the link below to view the full essay by Eva Brann)

Source: Socrates on the Founding & Degeneration of Cities – The Imaginative Conservative