As in the Statesman, the Laws describes a mythical lost era - ‘‘the time of Cronus’’ - when superior beings (daimOnes) ruled men as shepherds rule sheep. Since weak and fallible mortals were not in charge, the city achieved ‘‘peace, modesty, good laws, justice in full measure, and so made the tribes of men free from stasis or civic conflict and happy.’’ The rule of mortals, unfortunately, can never fully achieve the ends of political community. The only hope, says the Athenian, is that
We ought by every means to imitate the life in the age of Cronus, as tradition paints it, and order both our homes and our cities in obedience to the immortal element within us, giving to reason’s ordering the name of ‘‘law.’’ But if an individual man or an oligarchy or a democracy, possessed of a soul that strives after pleasures and appetites and seeks to fill itself with these things. . . if such a one shall rule over a city or an individual by trampling on the laws, then there is, as I said just now, no means of salvation. (Leg. 713e)2
The passage encapsulates the main principles of political theory in the Laws. A good political community is one with determinate goals, virtue, and happiness; and the chief means to those goals (given current less-than-ideal conditions) is the law or laws. The rule of law is said to be akin to the rule of reason, ‘‘the immortal element within us.’’
The passage also makes clear what political problem the law is meant to solve - stasis or civic conflict - and explains that such problems result from the rule of men rather than laws, and the rule of appetite and pleasure rather than reason.
How, then, do laws prevent stasis? They do so on several levels. Specific laws, for instance the laws on the distribution of property, will be designed to eliminate causes for conflict, such as extreme wealth or poverty (Leg. 744d, cf. 729a1 and 757a). More generally, the sovereignty of law itself over any ruler, group, or faction means that the laws can benefit the whole city. When law is not sovereign, the Athenian argues, but rather the ruler or rulers are, those rulers will seek their own benefit at the expense of others. Such states, named as oligarchies, democracies, and tyrannies, are not true constitutions (politeiai) but are rather ‘‘conflict-tutions’’ (stasioteiai) (715b-d). Further, because the laws of Magnesia do not aim at the good of a particular faction, but rather at the whole city or citizenry, they are not threatened by the development of virtue throughout the whole political community. The city aimed at the common good, virtue and happiness, is also said to be ‘‘free’’; it consists of ‘‘voluntary rule over willing subjects,’’ as opposed to the rule of a faction, which is said to be ‘‘voluntary rule over unwilling subjects accompanied by force of a sort’’ (832c).
A ‘‘conflict-tution’’ may have criteria for holding office, such as wealth (as in oligarchies), or ‘‘strength, size, or birth’’; by contrast, Magnesia’s criterion for office is obedience to the law: with the most obedient citizen qualifying for the highest magistracies, and so on proportionately down the hierarchy (715b). Magistrates ought to recognize the law as ‘‘master’’ - they ought, indeed, in the Athenian’s peculiar phrase, to be ‘‘slaves to the laws’’ (715b-d). Nor is this true only of magistrates: ‘‘every man’’ ought to serve the laws first, since one cannot be a good master without being a good servant (762e).
While the phrase ‘‘slaves to the laws’’ might suggest forceful rule or at the least robotic citizens carrying out orders in blind obedience, a closer look indicates otherwise. The language of slavery here is meant to explain the relationship between reason as embodied in the laws and one’s appetites and desires; the human excellence sought by the laws is constituted by the authority of reason in the soul. At the beginning of the general prelude to the laws in book 5, the Athenian describes the relationship between the soul and the body as a master and a slave:
Of all a man’s own belongings, the most divine is his soul, since it is most his own [oikeiotaton]. A man’s own belongings are invariably twofold: the stronger and better are master [despozonta], the weaker and worse are slavish [doula]; wherefore of one’s own belongings one must honor those that are master above those that are slaves [douleuon-ton]. (Leg. 726e1-6)
One ought to be a slave to the laws as one is a slave to reason - which is to say that reason ought to rule over one’s appetites and desires as a natural superior over a natural inferior, as a shepherd over his sheep. The appetites have nothing to offer as a standard for the guidance of one’s life, although properly directed they can of course drive one to live the life reason demands. The exclusion of the appetites as such as standards for how we ought to act is suggested in the definition of injustice as the domination or tyranny of the soul by anger, fear, pleasure, pain, envy, and desire (Leg. 864a), as well as in the age of Cronus passage quoted above. (For Aristotle on the rule of reason, see Depew, chapter 26).
The citizens are thus ‘‘slaves’’ to the laws in that they treat them, as expressions of divine reason, as having absolute authority over appetites, desires, and emotions. Reason’s authority is necessary for one to attain one’s good and to achieve human excellence or virtue. Furthermore, since in the passage above about the slavery of the body to the soul, the soul is said to be ‘‘most one’s own,’’ and since at least in some sense no one does wrong or is vicious willingly (Leg. 860de, 861d), there is a way in which following reason involves doing what we really want.
The promotion of virtue and the prevention of stasis or civic conflict so turn out to involve the same central condition: the rule of reason in the souls of magistrates and citizens. Just as the law must be sovereign over the will of any individual magistrate or potential ruler, preventing self-serving or faction-serving behavior, so must it be sovereign over the impulses, appetites, and desires of the individual citizen. In other words, stasis is a manifestation of vice; it results from self-seeking or greedy behavior in magistrates or citizens. It is prevented by the promotion of virtue - the rule of reason - which in Magnesia is attained chiefly by obedience to the law. And obedience to the law is meant, in the end, to promote virtue and the rule of reason not just by coercion, but by the education required by laws as well as the persuasive prefaces attached to them.
However, the identification of law as an expression of reason deepens the question that I raised earlier. If law is reason, and as such is truly ‘‘one’s own’’ and commands one’s true good, what one in fact really wants, to what extent are laws simply correct moral rules that allow for the self-fulfillment and well-being of a rational creature, and to what extent are they coercive injunctions? What accounts for maintaining the coercive function of law, if law is so truly in accord with one’s nature and if it correctly produces one’s good?
The answer must be that the effectiveness of laws as reason must depend on the rational capacities of the citizens. If then, the laws fail to be utterly persuasive on their own terms, it must be, in the view of Plato in the Laws, because of a failure in rationality in the person persuaded. And this in turn would seem to indicate a failure to achieve the central goal of the laws, virtue. To explore this question in detail, and to see clearly whether and how it is problematic for Plato, we will have to look at Plato’s chief innovation in lawmaking: the preludes.
World History
