Introduction

This volume embodies a cooperative, intensive, and comprehensive interpretation of Plato’s Laws, a single, massive dialogue that challenges even the hardiest reader. In general, it is useful to focus on a single dialogue because of the sort of thing a Platonic dialogue is. While Plato’s works certainly deal with common themes in common ways, each dialogue also has something like the integrity of a work of art; it has, so to speak, its own rules. An elaborate dramatic conceit, unique and well-drawn characters, novel images and arguments, all contribute to making the individual dialogue an appropriate object for study. It seemed to us especially appropriate in the case of the Laws—whose mere length sets it apart, as do its unique setting, principal speaker, and fresh take on politics—to undertake a reading in common calculated to bring out what is distinctive about the dialogue.

Sharing the end of reading in common, our essays cover the whole dialogue book by book, and several reflect on it as a whole. Forgoing the aim of complete commentary, the authors were invited to highlight whatever aspects of the text they judged most salient and fruitful. Finally, before final versions were due, authors had access to draft copies of one another’s essays and, to greater or lesser degrees, incorporated responses to one another’s work. All these features, we think, lend the volume an even higher degree of cohesiveness than would come from merely working from a common text. The authors come from diverse backgrounds and even disciplines: philosophy, political science, classics, history, each charting a different path through the vast wilderness of the Laws. While their essays are at least as diverse as their backgrounds, there is nonetheless a theme common to most if not all that can serve as a starting point for introducing the material in this volume.

Partly by comparing other dialogues of Plato (most notably the Republic, of course), and partly through thinking about our own times, the reader of the Laws is bound to consider the idea of a free, rational, non-coercive politics in accordance with the good, which the dialogue at times seems to present as a real possibility and at others as a hopeless delusion or a far-distant promise. Throughout all the dialogues, Plato is attentive to the elusive nature of the good and of our relationship to it, paying special attention to how certain ways of relating to the good uproot us from it, leaving us prey to tyrants within and without; the passions, opinions, and errors that hold sway in our common life and discourse tend to make political life a bloody contest or a bitter disappointment. In the Laws in particular, we see Plato puzzling once again over the task of instituting a community in such a way that it is open to the good, even if it begins as one that might well be harmed by philosophical openness and that in any case has not been well prepared for it by the traditions and practices of its erstwhile progenitors.

As for the Republic, even its Athenian dramatic setting did not provide the most auspicious prospects for a free and rational politics, and Socrates’ late appeal to a “pattern laid up in heaven” attests to the remoteness of that hope. The Laws’ Cretan setting and its aged and hidebound interlocutors—one a somewhat undistinguished Spartan, the other an internally conflicted Cretan, neither naturally well-disposed toward Athenian political innovation—do not appreciably brighten one’s hopes. Nonetheless, the nameless Athenian Stranger has been invited, with only a little in the way of subterfuge, to discuss the founding of a new city, and so long as he is there in that capacity, his view of the matter may have some beneficial effect on the progress of the conversation.

But just what truth about politics does the dialogue bring to light? Better: what understanding of political life does the Athenian bring to this conversation? One possible view of the Athenian Stranger is that he behaves more as a rhetorician than as a philosopher and as someone who in some sense fundamentally endorses Kleinias’s account of politics as war among people and within the soul, although perhaps the Athenian holds this view reluctantly and sometimes in frustration. Another possibility would be to take the Athenian Stranger more as a philosopher, and see the dialogue as a call to move beyond the occasional endorsements of Kleinias’s vision of politics as coercion and deception to embrace a politics of reason and truth. A third possible view would discover in the ambiguity between rational politics and coercion a kind of truth all its own, and in the strife between reason and force something that is simultaneously a threat to and resource for the healthy functioning of laws. In different ways and to different degrees, all of these views are present in the essays collected here, and the collection allows the reader to pose anew both the interpretive questions concerning the Athenian’s or Plato’s ultimate views and the general philosophical question of what understanding of politics ought to guide the founding and functioning of our commonwealths.

According to the first of these three types, the Athenian Stranger is willing to put forward a vision of non-coercive politics, but what he ultimately accepts as the underlying truth of the matter is the force and deception that protect political community from its own self-destructive impulses. This is to attribute a degree of strategic deception to the Athenian, whose actions are read as manufacturing political community by coercive means. For example, on this view, the preludes to individual laws and to the laws as a whole are interpreted as bordering on manipulation, even though the Athenian presents them as persuasive speeches intended to educate the community on the need for the laws and their obedience. The preludes have the function of maintaining the community within the parameters of a workable although not ideal, and distinctly not philosophical, political space.

Conversely, one might see in the Laws the promise of a philosophically rigorous politics of free, non-coercive persuasion. This perspective sees the Athenian Stranger as upholding the value of openness demanded by reason and valuing various rational practices in everyday political life. By prioritizing the spontaneity of play and emergent order over the violent submission to external authority, the Athenian Stranger might be taken to have in view the ideal of self-moving soul articulated explicitly in Book 10, which would be echoed in the procedures for training judges and forming the Assembly, which are described in Book 12. Insofar as the Athenian Stranger does make use of coercive means, therefore, they can be seen as provisional or even provocatively ironic measures taken in service of promoting the freedom of the citizens. This stance reads all concessions to externally imposed order as a kind of facilitating constraint.

A third possibility is to view the Athenian as rightly acknowledging the priority of spontaneity over coercion and yet also recognizing the necessity of force, violence, and deception not only as a provisional measure, but as responding to the implacable limitations and ambiguities of human freedom itself. On this view, what comes to the fore are what could be called “sub-political” forces, such as geography, economic and erotic practices, etc., as both violent and potentially liberating. It is surely partly because of the unprecedented level of administrative detail found in the proposals of the Laws that such matters have greater prominence than in other writings on politics, but this third view is also to be explained on the basis of what is internal to the question itself. For the embodied, desiring being who comes from somewhere in particular, freedom is not to be found in the mere negation of these determinacies, nor in their remainderless transubstantiation into the universal. Rather, they must be understood in their necessity and in the indelible mark they will leave in the heart of any future community, however well managed. On this third view then, political life would subsist in the tension between freedom and coercion.

Having given this general account of the possible interconnections of freedom and coercion, let us pass on to some more particular ways in which this theme gets played out in the dialogue and in the essays in this volume. As will become clear, this is not intended (and would not succeed) as a summary of all that is to be found in these rich explorations, but it will enable us to highlight some of the contributions they make to developing and sharpening the question.

In a different way, the relationship between coercive and rational politics can be seen from the framing structure of the dialogue as a whole. Framing decisions, which are not brought up within the dialogue for explicit discussion, are examples of the way the dialogue itself might be read as manipulating the reader, leading the reader without her consent, or at the very least demanding that the reader be alert to decisions that do not seem open for discussion. To call these decisions coercive or manipulative is just to point out that all rhetoric draws substantial power from its ability to posit a starting point and grow momentum without asking for permission, and it is to claim that Plato’s Laws is an example of a particular kind of rhetoric.

The Laws, for example, picks its frame in a very specific way. One notices a lack of explicit reference to the Good or the Forms generally, or to mathematics, as Mitchell Miller points out in his essay. One might surmise, by virtue of this excluded content, that the Laws takes place entirely within the domain of pistis (trust) of the citizen, borrowing Socrates’ term for the sort of opining that deals in stable, recognized objects (Republic 511e). That is, the Laws and its many individual discussions are directed ultimately at the citizen’s trust in the inherited ways of the city and its unspoken structures of authority, rather than at the citizen’s understanding the reasons behind the city’s ways. We might interrogate the text with this question in mind, namely, whether the city makes paths available for its citizens to step out of its defining framework. The discussion does at times explicitly provide a route out of pistis for individual citizens, such as judges and members of the Assembly, but these are provisions for a relatively small number of citizens, and the procedures involved are not a matter of public scrutiny, perhaps not even for those enlightened few. For the citizenry in general, the rule of law is first and foremost predicated on an explicit recognition that the claims made on us by pleasure and pain are inescapable, and that therefore there is a material limit to the kind of freedom and rationality possible for the body politic. For both types, ordinary and extraordinary (or privileged) citizens, the mere fact that the city is something founded places the manner in which political questions are framed somewhat out of reach, and so to speak, forces it upon them.

Just as Pericles had famously set the stage for fifth-century Athenian politics with his call to fix one’s eyes on the power of Athens and become her lover (), so too here in the Laws we see a kind of rhetorical gesture meant to inaugurate a political orientation. Without deciding the dramatic dating of the Laws, the controversy surrounding which is discussed by contributors in this volume, we might still notice the rhetorical impact the Laws would have as a fourth-century Athenian political document. The mid-fourth century was a time, centering around 355 BCE, in which Athens turned decisively away from the Periclean vision of empire toward the ideals of peace and wealth, as Mark Munn points out in his essay. The retrenchment of Athens within its own territorial boundaries might shed light on the insular character of the regime imagined in the Laws. Seeing the Laws as a kind of inverted Pericleanism might help the factive reader to extricate many of the defensive military proposals considered by the Athenian Stranger, for instance, from their apparent contingency and, most jarringly, their apparent irrelevance to fifth-century Athens, in which the other dialogues seem so happily nested. Noticing these kinds of parallels answers the very familiar call of Platonic dialogue to dig up its unstated framing assumptions and bracket their rhetorical impact for the sake of thinking about them.

The lengths to which the Laws goes to assert its framework without discussion or appeal to the reader’s rationality is in itself a provocation to do the work of excavating those assumptions and to transform the rhetoric of the Laws into philosophical discussion. But at the same time we might be bending the dialogue a little too far. The Laws may not allow the reader comfortably to employ the strategies that are solicited by other dialogues, and therefore one might gain some relief from the idea that the text does not demand to be read as an endorsement of a philosophically grounded constitution. Following this supposition, one would want to examine seriously the evidence that this is a more manipulative text, or at least a differently manipulative text, than anything else written by Plato.

The text will not let us ignore the wide berth the Athenian Stranger offers coercion and deception in the education and maintenance of the citizenry, which might lead one to conclude that the Athenian is placating his Spartan and Cretan interlocutors with regard to their political assumptions and winning their trust in order to supplement those assumptions with non-coercive elements, such as we find in the preludes to the laws. However, this view cannot exclude the possibility that, to the contrary, the Athenian is extending and perfecting the coercive methods of his interlocutors precisely by clothing these techniques in the garb of freedom and rationality. There is, again, a kind of relief in being able to entertain the thought, often and with good reason considered taboo for the interpretation of Plato, that the Laws at least only adopts non-coercive political practices (or the rhetoric of such practices) in order to extend and perfect coercive techniques. As Michael Zuckert points out, the strategies necessary for introducing the Spartan and Cretan interlocutors to the practice of giving preludes to the laws indicate the larger truth that politics cannot be pacified; command and coercion will not disappear into persuasion. Michael Zuckert’s essay forces one to wonder whether politics, which on his reading is inextricably tied to war, does not render the ideal of a free community into another technique of coercion. This general view seems supported by key indications in the text, for instance, the claim that the subject they are considering, human political community, is the “truest tragedy” because it requires us to be exceptionally serious about matters that are comically shameful, i.e. human matters, as David Roochnik’s essay details.

One finds throughout the text a good measure of “coercive freedoms” and, in general, support for the view that the political measures they are discussing are intended as serious techniques grafted on to silly, or worse, irrational and self-destructive, communities. The very stuff of political community in Aristotle’s view—political friendship—appears at times in the Laws to be founded more on self-consoling discursive practices concerning the distribution of authority and responsibilities than on the intuition of a shared good or the real production of a kind of equality that navigates between the extremes represented by monarchical and democratic constitutions. Gregory Recco’s essay develops the idea that the Athenian Stranger’s proposals for responding to tensions concerning equality seem to favor, as well as embody, salutary rhetoric. There are other similar examples of “enforced freedom.” Most obviously, the type of virtue promoted among those citizens who cannot be made virtuous, or that part of the soul that cannot be turned toward the good, seems to be very much like the kind of shame–virtue described by Socrates in the Phaedo, that is, virtue based on a vice, such as courage that is motivated by fear. More specifically, for those citizens who are irremediably warlike, the law code encourages the thought that we are governed by beings higher and stronger than ourselves, as if the love of strength could not be corrected, but it could be forced to resemble virtue.

Robert Metcalf, in his chapter, argues that the preludes operate at the level of pistis, appealing not to established authority but to the judgment of the citizen. However, this appeal most often provides rhetorical, not philosophical, reasons for following the law and accepting its authority. Again, it seems that the appeal to the independent judgment of the individual extends coercive practices rather than supplanting them with a vision of independent judgment. In these examples and others one sees the laws aiming to manage, rather than transform, vice. The “penalties” () detailed in Book 9 acknowledge a degree of violent enforcement of social constraints for the sake of a successful community, as Catherine Zuckert makes clear. The sober realization of the impossibility that the lawgiver’s task will be completed with any degree of sought-after perfection, as well as the recognition of intractable limitations faced by lawgivers, all point to the community’s dependence on exceptional human nature and extraordinary measures if there is to be any improvement of the human lot.

There are two places perhaps more than any others in the Laws where it seems that the Athenian’s coercive deceptions will enable citizens to live within the social order while managing their own disordered lawlessness separately. First, the Athenian’s treatment of eros, which elsewhere in Plato is a force harnessed for its potential to embody virtue and transform the individual soul, strongly suggests institutionalized transgression or inversion of the law, permitted because the shame it engenders makes citizens more easily coerced. As Francisco Gonzalez shows, eros is an “outlaw,” i.e., something outside the law that becomes an institutionally accepted perversion of law that the law is in a position to control more than educate; the aim is precisely not to educate desire. Similarly, in Books 11 and 12 we see problems inherently associated with the possession of private property. By pointing to several of the restrictions prohibiting citizens from the type of interpersonal association and institutions that uproot them from genuine political possibilities, for example, commerce and innkeeping, Eric Sanday shows that there are practices and institutions of the same sort that are essential to the functioning of the city—not just its economic function but its self-preserving management of perverse elements that resist being brought under the law and educated. Private property provides a place for the uneducable parts of the soul to house itself, a relatively safe arena in which unmoored and untrained desire can indulge its impulse and potentially exhaust itself relatively innocuously, at least with respect to the city’s good. Similarly, Gregory Recco shows how the Stranger appears to make room for the disappointment of political ambition not by educating it, but by presenting its necessity in a quasi-ritualized and mystifying form, so as to neutralize it.

It should not be concluded from these indications, however, that the city described in the Laws employs only coercion, manipulation, and deception, or that it is animated only by the norms of order and stability. In fact, the manipulative stratagems aimed at apparently uneducable elements of the city and citizenry have in some instances the ultimate aim of holding the city to a vision of the human good that needs time to take root. In other words, what is uneducated today may not always be. Indeed, if the city is really to last, perhaps its stability must not be a brittle rigidity, but something more supple and responsive to unforeseen and unforeseeable developments. The city must thus make provisions for its own development into a self-conscious, self-moving, intelligent whole. It must contain at least some elements capable of coming to know and empowered to make that knowledge effectual. The institutions concerning education and deliberation, therefore, cannot merely be tools of indoctrination and control. Eric Salem explores the art of introducing new and more liberating institutions in his study of the Athenian Stranger’s opening exchange, in Book 1, with the Cretan and Spartan interlocutors, where we see an interest in the unfamiliar being seeded and nurtured in their discussion of the initiatory power of Athenian drinking practices. Throughout this volume, essays attest to the Athenian’s recognition of this necessity and to his making provisions, however incomplete or inchoate, for real freedom within the confines of the proposed Cretan colony.

For example, the story the city tells about itself is not an accurate description of its historical origins, but it need not be historically accurate in order to do justice to the city’s animating principle. The city founders are sober-minded about what is possible for the city to accomplish, the degree of freedom and rationality that can be realistically attained in political life. They carve out a myth of origins that does justice to the city’s potential for achieving freedom and virtue, much like Socrates’ story of the “priests and priestesses” in the Meno’s account of the soul’s prior existence (Meno 81a). The prior life of the city tells a story of cyclical cataclysms, emergence, and development through stages of political constitution, from dynasty to aristocracy, descent from the mountains into the plains, and the founding of historically specific cities: Ilium, Sparta, and Athens. The goal for this strand of political rhetoric is freedom, i.e. the reconciliation of the very widely divergent principles of Athenian freedom and Spartan coercion into a workable unity. As John Sallis points out, the Athenian sees in music and musicality a paradigm by which freedom and necessity might be woven together within the context of establishing the proper beginning, the beginning that the lawmaker needs in order for the city to achieve what it is capable of being.

One should also consider the possibility that it is not the egalitarian ideal of the city as a whole that motivates the Athenian, who seems in some instances satisfied (or constrained) to provide for an environment in which a few exceptional human beings can flourish according to a godlike ideal. The development of a few heroes of the human community would in this view have a transformative effect on the community as a whole, even if that community can at best achieve a condition in which it simply preserves itself and provides the proper conditions for a few to excel. Toward this end, and in some sense challenging this characterization, all citizens are exposed to the transformative potential of play in their education; they are all initiated into the practices on which self-legislation is founded. There is a sense that all citizens idealize self-moving spontaneity and freedom during maturation, but some fail to safeguard that principle and in their adult lives turn their back on a higher promise. Although it is not thematized explicitly in the dialogue, the repeated references to the problems associated with the young, especially the three types of atheism described in Book 10, strongly suggest a second birth and a second education in human development, similar to the one rooted in childhood experiences. The second birth of human education takes the form of transforming certain, potentially inevitable, views concerning the cosmos and divinity, which have to be reoriented away from the simply self-sufficient materialist attitude that is either necessary or in some sense unavoidable. Sara Brill clarifies this inevitable shift toward atheism and the corrective “prosthesis” in her essay focusing on the ambiguity of the human soul, which is rooted in nature and simultaneously beyond nature, both “exceeding nature” and being “exceedingly natural.” Brill draws attention to the legislative cosmology with which atheism will be excised from the soul, in which the laws themselves are the prosthetic limb that brings order to the disordered soul.

From the point of view of educating free individuals, the lawgiver cannot force people to be free, only provide the conditions in which such a promise can be fulfilled. It is then up to the individuals to freely embrace, or freely renounce, their freedom. The young who demonstrate a particular facility with their education will be led through an educational path that fulfills the promise of the human capacity for play and autonomy. John Russon makes it clear that in principle, through the educational practices proposed by the Athenian Stranger, the city embraces an ideal of spontaneity and self-legislation, and that this ideal is purposefully instilled in the citizens from the beginning of their maturation. This comes through exposure to other ideas and practices, which they will be sent out to study, and companionship with uniquely talented individuals—experiences which constitute an education of the best citizens. As Patricia Fagan makes clear in her account of the ancient Greek literary context in which the Laws is placed, there is a double imperative for a non-Cyclopean politics in which the strangeness of one’s own inherited ways is manifest through encounter with what is strange, both outside oneself in the world abroad and within oneself in one’s own spontaneous impulse toward play. It is worth noting, however, that even these “best” citizens are not able to rule autocratically without becoming corrupt, which may explain the Stranger’s attention to the geographic and more broadly material foundations of the city. In the end the Laws as a whole values the organization of many citizens and of institutions over the rule of the king.

These questions and quandaries concerning freedom, truth, and coercion are not likely ever to be definitively dispelled by philosophical, political, literary, or historical interpretations, however ably carried out. Nonetheless, in a spirit of thanksgiving for the intellectual generosity of our contributors, we offer this collection of essays in the hope of furthering the conversation concerning what is widely regarded as Plato’s last great work, whose obscure byways and troubling indications led us to call on friends new and old for assistance. The hope for a free, rational arrangement of our political lives founded on shared insight into the human condition is paradoxically well-served by this ancient conversation among old men already living near the end of the age of the polis, striving to understand from what sources, human or divine, they might draw in order to found a new city. Unlike founders of a city, who live apart from the citizens-to-come and perhaps have less reason than they to share in a spirit of trust concerning the city’s all-too-human institutions, we readers of Plato’s Laws find ourselves, as readers, in a position to be envied by founders and citizens alike; to read is already to have as one’s explicit task to understand the alien logic and unfounded structure before one and to make one’s peace with it, in freedom from all constraint, violence, or necessity.