Law, for Plato, is an expression of reason. Reason is the ‘‘immortal element’’ within us and has its ultimate source in divine reason, nous or understanding, which orders everything into its best condition (Leg. 713e; 903a-905b). Law is associated with order and harmony throughout the dialogues (e. g. Grg. 503e-504d; Phlb. 26b), but in the Laws the connections between divine reason and the forms of human order are perhaps clearest (Morrow 1960: 560-1; Bobonich 2002: 93-7; Laks 2000: 260-1, 275-8).
There is no question that, in Plato’s Laws and related dialogues, reason is the source of real order, and accordingly, beings capable of reason (human souls, divine intellects) are higher and more authoritative than the passive recipients of order (bodies and materials) (Bobonich 2002: 97). The difficulty that becomes clear from our discussion so far is that there is some evidence that certain forms of order can be achieved by passive obedience rather than active understanding; and while a passive, orderly soul is not the ideal result of the rule of knowledge, it may well be all that the regime outlined in the Laws can obtain for a great many of its citizens.
It thus seems plausible that even an externally enforced order, or an order attained without full or proper grasp of its goodness, is a weak form of human excellence for Plato. This would explain why the preludes aim at the rule of reason in citizens even while providing not much more than a very general and low-level grasp of the good. The scale of human excellence, on this view, would then correspond to a scale of orderliness: from the least orderly, whose behavior is coerced; to the ‘‘common’’ virtue of the average citizen of Magnesia, consisting of sincere desires and correct, loosely justified, beliefs; to the most orderly and most virtuous person, whose own reason fully grasps the good in his life and who actively shapes the world accordingly. Unity and order within the soul are still the highest human achievement - and each citizen does live in accordance with reason to the best of his ability - but conformity with an external unity or an external order may yet provide a similar, if weaker, form of human good.
We began by noticing close connections between the rule of law as an ideal of contemporary liberalism, as a way of restraining the use and abuse of political power, and the rule of law as described in both the Statesman and the Laws. These connections are undeniable, as is the influence of the legal structures of the Laws on liberal political ideals, via Aristotle and Roman writers. What I have suggested is that a closer look at the rule of law in Plato indicates deep and unbridgeable differences: the law for Plato remains an explicit second-best alternative to political expertise; the rule of law, like the rule of political expertise, is ultimately and irreducibly perfectionist in its aims; and, to the extent that the rule of law does indeed consist of an externally imposed order, it is baldly inconsistent with contemporary liberal ideals of autonomy and the rights of the individual.
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