A Six-book version of Plato's Republic: same text divided differently, or early version?

Of the many deep-rooted problems that scholarship on the Republic cannot avoid, few are as crucial as that of trying to assess how far it is a work of politics, and how far one of personal ethics. On the one hand there are three separate texts that appear to testify that the heart of the work is to be found primarily in books II (after 369b), III, and V (up to 461e); the first is the recapitulation at the beginning of book VIII (543a-c), the second the reminder at Timaeus 17c-19a, and the third Aristotle’s account at Politics II.1-5. On the other hand there are several indications within the work of a certain pessimism as to whether the political theory could ever be successfully put into practice, and even then whether it could endure. While V.472a-e constitutes important evidence that Plato is not investigating the ideal city for genuine political reasons, the most important longer passages of pessimistic material occur early in book VI, at 487b-97a, a section of ‘gloomy realism’ in Waterfield’s words (1993, 219), and in books VIII-IX (to 588a), where we meet the account of the degeneration of the ideal state through successive stages into tyranny. In consequence, the Laws is often treated as Plato’s exercise in practical politics, while the Republic is relegated to a kind of theoretical exercise, producing a paradigm-state that Plato had never dreamed of trying to bring into existence.