Classical Utopianism in Plato’s Laws

Abstract

Focusing on the fifth book of the Laws, this chapter inquires into how humanity might imitate something from which it must simultaneously withdraw, as the Athenian apparently urges. The chapter shows how the Athenian makes good the suggestion of Socrates in the Republic that it is “the nature of acting to attain to less truth than speaking,” but not merely in the sense of being always an approximation to what is said or thought. Sometimes what is done resembles what is said or thought only by being done differently. The argument here is that by representing the simply-best regime as an object of reverence, something divine that inspires awe, the Athenian keeps his mortal addressees from overreaching themselves, even as he relates to them a dangerously impossible object of admiration. Reverence for the divine permits political men to grasp what would otherwise be known to very few, and to put into practice what must otherwise remain in speech. Politics at its best depends on observing how practice must divert from speech, but without losing sight of what speech itself marks out as best. And it is the pathos of distance felt by the reverent man that allows him to adjust his practice accordingly.