After a gap of over six months (!), I'm at last ready to complete my series of posts examining the lessons and mistakes of Plato. This is the first in a three-part series examining Magnesia, the fictional state proposed in Laws. It tends to get a lot less attention than the much more famous Republic, and initially I was inclined to see why. But something kept nagging at me, and after months (quite literally) of reading, re-reading, and - yes really - statistical analyses, this one evolved into what I'm quite sure will be the sequence of posts with the highest effort/reward ratio. Doesn't really bother me. Like photographing a famous landmark, no amateur scholar should expect to find anything that professionals haven't done better a thousand times before : that's not the point. The point is self-examination and expression. Laws, I think, is one of the most fascinating of all Plato's dialogues, but not in the more immediately obvious ways of some of the others.
In this first part, I look at the purpose of the law according to Plato. I look at the flaws and glaring inconsistencies that point, I think, to an unresolved paradox : laws must be unchanging, says Plato, but they must deal with changing conditions. I discuss how the relation of the law with respect to society, and why Plato seems to conclude reluctantly that you can neither have good laws to guarantee good citizens, nor good citizens to guarantee good laws - both must be established simultaneously. The system and the people are dependent on each other for survival and prosperity.
In part two I look at Magnesia from a statistical analysis of its laws, revealing which parts Plato deals with consistently and which appear to have been made up on the spot because he got bored (there's only so many laws you need about bees and fruit, after all). I also look at the role of religion and suggest what kind of theological beliefs Plato may have really had, and how he had no scruples about the state behaving as an interfering busybody. Finally in part three I look at the philosophical basis for Magnesia, and how the nature of a state's political system is strongly dependent on whether intelligence depends on nature or nurture and also there's that song from the Lego movie and everyone gets drunk.
... when the United States set about writing its constitution, the authors had read Laws. They, and many others, set about to divide government - but not too much, lest it fall into the Persian trap of too much authority vested in any one man and thus tyranny.
ReplyDeleteBut everyone who came after Plato, who'd read Laws, was constantly trying to figure out how to keep their proposed forms of government from collapsing into anarchy.
To my mind, Laws, for all its internal contradictions, makes one solid point, and it's right at the start of Book 3: If a man wants to know the origin of states and societies, he should behold them from the point of view of time. Law evolves.