Plato, Politics and a Practical Utopia

Social Constructivism and Civic Planning in the 'Laws'

Kenneth Royce Moore

• Publisher: Continuum
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781441147523
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia de la antigua Grecia

Dealing with themes of urban planning, constitutionalism, utopianism and social construction theory, this book analyzes the city of Magnesia, Plato's second-best city-state in the Laws, as if it were an actual ancient city-state. The book details the demographics, economics, military capabilities and polity of Magnesia using (post)modern critical theory and contemporary data on ancient city-states.
Examining the key features of the proposed city-state in detail, Kenneth Royce Moore considers Plato's proposed military as well as his invention of national service, and compares this with known militaries of the era. The author demonstrates that economic growth is not its priority, highly restricted with an aim toward stability rather than expansion. Moore also considers the Magnesian political system in the light of existing polities of the era, concluding that Magnesia will have a strikingly different form of government than any other actual city-state in antiquity, albeit derived in no small part from Athenian, Cretan and Spartan traditions. This book puts "flesh on the bones" of Plato's fictional utopia and reveals how surprisingly practical it could have been.

Chapter 1

The Development of the Polis and
its Re-Development Under Plato

The end of law is not to abolish or restrain, but to preserve and enlarge freedom. For in all the states of created beings capable of law, where there is no law, there is no freedom.

—John Locke ¹

So, out of those primitive conditions all the features of our present-day life developed: states, political systems, technical skills, laws, rampant vice and sometimes even virtue.

—Plato, Laws 678a

The Kallipolis of the Republic represented the ideal form that a city-state might take whereas Magnesia signifies a condition that is more realistic yet somewhat less than the ideal. “The state that Plato describes in the Laws is therefore not a Utopia”, as Morrow famously wrote, “it has a definite location in Greek space and time”.² It is no less ‘utopian’, however, in its design, albeit with potential for practical realization. The Republic (probably written in the 380s and/or 370s) is about an imaginary polis and represents a quest for the definition of Justice in the psychē more so than a realistic guide to ideal government. The Laws, also describing an imaginary city, is not centrally concerned with finding a morally absolute definition – although it presumes the existence of just such a thing.

Since this book is on Plato’s fictional polis, Magnesia, as outlined in his Laws, it is appropriate to begin by asking several questions in the Socratic manner. What is a polis? How did it develop? And what is the place of Plato’s Magnesia in the history of its development? Although it is the product of speculative philosophy, Plato’s narrators in the Laws describe their hypothetical polis in considerable detail. Unlike the Kallipolis of the Republic, there is every indication that Magnesia could in fact come to exist in reality. It is therefore helpful to think about its description as if it were a real city, to compare it with existing ones and to consider the above questions with regard to it as if it were going to exist. While clearly utopian, Magnesia no less falls firmly into the history of ideas concerned with urban planning and the development of the modern city from its origins in farthest human history – not the least of which being Plato’s borrowings from existing legal texts such as the Code of Gortyn on Crete and the Great Rhetra of the Spartans as well as the potential influence, albeit indirect, of others like the Code of Hammurabi.

There have been 37 identified city-state building cultures. More than half of them either occurred after antiquity and/or belong to other cultures that had no contact with ancient Greece. For many of those that do form part of the historical continuum of the Mediterranean and, by extension of Europe itself, it is not always clear that there has been an unbroken line of development, implying direct or indirect cultural contact, or, at any rate, none that can be unambiguously demonstrated. Even so, the ancient Greeks or their forebears did have contact with most of these civilizations and there must have been some impact upon them in consequence. The most ancient, known city-state culture was that of the Sumerians in Mesopotamia (ca. 3100–ca. 2350 BCE). A line of historical development can be observed between these and other ancient Near Eastern city-state building cultures such as those in Syria (ca. 2000–ca. 1700 BCE), Palestine (ca. 2900–ca. 2300 BCE), Assyria (ca. 1970–ca. 1700 BCE), the Hittite Empire (which broke up ca. 1200 BCE) and the dynastic Egyptian civilization, which runs parallel to many of the others while influencing all of them.³ In each case, the given city-states became part of larger empires and so not usually independent (not truly “states”) in the way that Greek city-states tended to be, though they may have developed initially in that way.

Closer to the vicinity of Hellas, a more familiar trend is obtained. During the Middle Bronze Age (ca. 2000–1650 BCE), there were several hundred city-states in Anatolia. These formed networks or leagues, each with its own hegemon, along with a number of dependent and semi-independent, minor city-states and villages.⁴ The culture of ancient Greek city-states spanned the Eastern Mediterranean world. There were around 1,500 poleis which were situated in Greece and Asia Minor. In the Archaic period alone (ca. 750–550 BCE), hundreds were founded along the Mediterranean coast and the Black Sea. Later, in the Hellenistic Age (ca. 330–200 BCE), several hundred new Greek poleis were founded in the Near East in no small part thanks to the efforts of Alexander of Macedon.

The Minoan civilization on Crete (ca. 2200–1450 BCE), appreciably influenced by Egypt, and the Minoans’ heirs the Mycenaeans (ca. 1450–1200) dominated the Mediterranean and clearly had an effect on the Greeks of later eras. The Mycenaeans were a palace-building culture, based on divine or semi-divine monarchies. One has only to look in Homer to see the fictional accounts of their rulers such as Agamemnon, Menelaus, Odysseus etc., all reportedly descended from the gods themselves and each with super-human attributes, or the founding myths of many Greek poleis with divine or semi-divine rulers such as Cecrops, Erechtheus and Cadmus. The Mycenaean citadels often provided the urban core around which Archaic and Classical poleis emerged and connections with these mythical persons and events attributed to the Minoans and Mycenaeans form the foundation myths of the Greeks from whom their aristocracies in later times often claimed descent. The Minoan and Mycenaean cultures were also societies whose rise and decline chiefly centred on the martial designs of their rulers.

The Greek polis, or city-state, itself was the product of a peculiar line of civic development. It came into being in consequence of particular cultural and historical forces and has since proven to be something of an evolutionary dead end, though integral to the development of modern cities as well as states.⁵ Most of the poleis in ancient Greece, apart from those founded as colonies (apoikismos), arose out of the Archaic Age (ca. 750–500 BCE). The process of their development was gradual and largely lacking in our extant sources, apart from certain foundation myths mentioned above, that served more to promote civic unity than to provide accurate insights into actual development.⁶ Ancient Greek city-states that were not colonies sometimes coalesced around the pre-existing nuclei of Mycenaean or Dark Age fortresses. Frequently, several villages in a given area unified by degrees to become a larger community and political entity (synoikismos). This process implied “emigration from a group of closely set neighbouring settlements to a place in the vicinity or an unoccupied place where a new polis was founded or to an already existing polis whose population was powerfully increased by the immigration”.⁷ Other poleis developed naturally over time as populations increased usually in concert with prospering economies. Most Classical Greek poleis differ from other city-state cultures in that they did not lie together in a single large region with ready communication by land, as in the case of the Persian Empire, Egypt, India or China. The Greeks’ main form of communication was by sea and so they follow more closely the seafaring traditions of the Semitic Phoenicians (ca. 1550–300 BCE) who were a significant cultural and genetic influence. It is crucial to bear in mind that, for both the ancient Greeks generally and for Plato particularly, the city-state is also a state and not just a city within a larger polity. As shall be discussed later on, a polis consists of an urban centre and a hinterland composed of the surrounding territory that could sometimes be quite a sizeable area and include, in many cases even by modern standards, a large population of citizens and subjects.

The development of the polis in ancient Greece made some notable departures from traditional city-states in the Near East. Having largely rid themselves from autocrats claiming divine heritage and with outrageous fantasies of unqualified power, “their cities were cut closer to the human measure”.⁸ Not being subject to the whims of absolute monarchs with all their attendant compulsions for regimentations of militarism and bureaucracy that they usually entail, a more participatory political culture emerged. This was based in no small part on the norms of village life where all able-bodied citizens were expected to pull their own weight. Whereas government under aristocracies was a specialized role, Greek city-states mostly had a constant rotation of human functions and civic duties. This encouraged the full participation of citizens in virtually every aspect of common life. Thus democracy breeds progress, or so it has been maintained.

It is worthwhile, however, to reflect briefly on this Hellenocentric view of the advancement of civilizations based on democracy and liberty. First, the essence of many of the scientific and mathematical ideas that flourished in Classical Greece already existed in the Egyptian, Babylonian and other Near Eastern cultures and in cultures farther afield. They were clearly brought together and applied in unique ways particularly by the Greeks, in many cases surpassing their forebears, contemporaries and other civilizational influences. However, the ‘elephant in the room’ for Hellenocentrism is China. This was a city-state building culture that developed most, if not precisely the same, arts and sciences as Classical Greece, evidently in parallel. And it was a civilization that was ruled by god-kings that represented a kind of logical, aristocratic evolution from those of the Bronze Age which the Greeks had rejected. An authoritarian society, in other words, produced a comparable level of advancement to that produced under a more participatory political culture. Whether this is an instance of purely parallel development, or whether there was some actual influence from one culture to the other, will be left for others to decide. But it is a worthy question: if most of the same arts and sciences that we associate with Classical Greece emerged in spite of democracy, as opposed to on account of it, then is it not the case that the ‘big picture’, so to speak, is much more complex? Even so, it is beyond the remit of this text to address such issues, though they should be borne in mind.

Most poleis by the Classical era had some self-ruled element, by varying degrees, with democratic Athens at one end of the spectrum and aristocratic Sparta at the other. But even the Spartan monarchy was in effect constitutional and there was an assembly of the citizens, the apella, which wielded some political power, albeit much less democratic than elsewhere. A sparse material culture too, not solely devoted to the appeasement of the nobility, perhaps fostered a new kind of economy of abundance that permitted a flourishing of the arts and sciences. We have the Greek polis to thank in no small part for significant innovations in architecture, political science, drama, poetry, sculpture, painting, logic, mathematics and philosophy, to name a few of the major ones. These advances were in no small part the direct consequence of the peculiar formation of civic culture in the Classical polis. It is these upon which Plato ultimately depends for his conceptualization of the polis in the Laws, even maintaining many of its democratic elements as essential features of his proposed polity.

The Laws, being a discourse on the very essence of law and government, had and still has considerable political ramifications. It was written in an era when “colonies were springing up all over the place” and “discussion about what a ‘perfect’ society would be like was quite a practical concern and not just an academic exercise”.⁹ The Athenian Stranger, an elderly gentleman, meets up with two other characters (Megillus the Spartan and Kleinias the Cretan, also elderly) on the road out of Knossos. They are on a pilgrimage to an...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• 1  The Development of the Polis and its Re-Development Under Plato
• 2  Platonic Economics: Fleshing the Bones of Magnesia
• 3  The Magnesian Military, National Service and Mythical Amazons
• 4  The Legal System
• 5  The Magnesian Polity: Classical Democracy Recast
• 6  Welcome to the City of Magnesia
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index