An Origin for Political Culture’: Laws 3 as Political Thought and Intellectual History

Carol Atack

doi:10.1163/20512996-12340295

Abstract

Abstract Plato’s survey in Laws book 3 of the development of human society from its earliest stages to the complex institutions of democratic Athens and monarchical Persia operates both as a conjectural history of human life and as a critical engagement with Greek political thought. The examples Plato uses to illustrate the stages of his stadial account, such as the society of the Cyclops and the myths of Spartan prehistory, are those used by other political theorists and philosophers, in some cases also drawing on the presence of the same stories in classical Greek epic and tragedy. By incorporating his critique into a timeline Plato is able to suggest that some approaches are limited in scope to specific social conditions, whereas his Athenian Stranger presents his analysis from an external and superior viewpoint, looking down on human society from above.

Highlights

There is a developing tradition of reading Plato as engaged in a systematic critique of Greek political culture and theoretical responses to it, often using the Republic as a starting point.[1]
Plato’s survey in Laws book 3 of the development of human society from its earliest stages to the complex institutions of democratic Athens and monarchical Persia operates both as a conjectural history of human life and as a critical engagement with Greek political thought
The examples Plato uses to illustrate the stages of his stadial account, such as the society of the Cyclops and the myths of Spartan prehistory, are those used by other political theorists and philosophers, in some cases drawing on the presence of the same stories in classical Greek epic and tragedy

Summary

Developmental Frameworks for Political Thought

Plato’s account draws on a well-established tradition of Greek political writing. Schematic models of the past are common in Greek literature; they incorporate varied attitudes to change and openness to the possibility of progress. Plato’s conjectural model in the Laws surveys the development of human community in its broadest sense, as the presence of non-Greek and non-polis examples – Troy, Egypt, Persia – suggests.[16] Even Sparta, in its early history, can be seen as an ethnos state rather than a politeia (683a7-8). A secondary goal emerges, of demonstrating how other political thinkers’ use of specific examples, and perhaps even specific types of example, such as heroic foundation story, narrow their scope and fail to attain the lofty perspective that is the Athenian Stranger’s ideal Throughout this survey, Plato draws on other thinkers’ assessments of human arrangements and links them to particular stages within the model, often because they themselves have identified them as exemplars. Dienstag identifies such an approach as characteristic of political theorising; acknowledging the literary basis of exemplarity in Laws 3 reveals its theoretical and critical purpose

Antisthenes and the Homeric Cyclopes

Conclusion