Professor Ballingall’s New Book on Plato’s Laws
Last summer I was able to bring to fruition a book project on which I had been working for many years. Plato’s Reverent City: The Laws and the Politics of Authority is published with the Recovering Political Philosophy Series at Palgrave MacMillan, edited by Thomas Pangle and Timothy Burns. The book offers an original interpretation of Plato’s Laws and a new account of its enduring importance.
I first became interested in the Laws as a graduate student at the University of Toronto, where I was fortunate to study Plato with one of the world’s foremost scholars of classical political philosophy, Ryan Balot. At Toronto, Ryan taught a seminar on the Laws that was quite simply unforgettable. He helped us appreciate how this longest yet long-neglected Platonic dialogue explores questions with which every thoughtful human being must wrestle. How we should we live our lives, both individually and collectively? Should we leave it up to each person as much as possible? Or does the flourishing of each presuppose a discipline and collective action that must limit our individual discretion? Should we rule ourselves as much as possible? Or should we follow the lead of the wisest among us? How can wisdom even have authority if so few of us have the eyes to see and the ears to hear it?
The amazing thing about Plato’s Laws is how it shows the inevitability of such questions to practical politics. As frustrating and dysfunctional as politics can be, it confronts us with problems of the greatest magnitude, even if we seldom do the work to recognize as much. On the reading of the Laws that I propose in the book, we are encouraged to consider how politics would be improved by a civic culture that fosters such recognition—that teaches citizens to stand in awe of the problems that politics must navigate. Indeed, the Laws suggests that there is a virtue or excellence of character disposing people to take this attitude, the closest English word for which is “reverence.” At its practical best, politics nurtures and benefits from the reverence of citizens and statesmen.
Once I began to understand the importance of reverence to the teaching of the Laws, I was struck by how our own politics stands in dire need of it. It’s not just that we’re exceptionally disrespectful of those with whom we disagree; it’s that we’re disrespectful of the questions or problems that lie behind our disagreements. The more contempt we have for the tasks of politics, the less respect we have for our political opponents, and for ourselves as political participants.
There’s a paradox here: the less seriously we take what it is that we are doing, the more arrogant and complacent we become about it. Such attitudes are anathema to healthy politics. If the problems at hand are trivial, then they should admit of obvious solutions, namely those that occur to me. Whoever takes a different view must then seem unreasonable, the more so the more forcefully he presses his “absurd” position. Contempt inspires arrogance, arrogance disdain. And it’s this disdain that is being mobilized by reckless demagogues the world over to whip their followers into frenzies of revolutionary pathos. Remarkably, then, Plato’s Laws anticipates this trend and diagnoses its origins in a cause that we otherwise have trouble describing. My hope for the book is that it helps at least a few readers better understand, not only Platonic political philosophy, but one of the deepest veins of our current predicament.
-Professor Robert A. Ballingall