The Argument and the Action of Plato's Laws

Leo Strauss

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780226231648
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

The posthumous publication of The Argument and the Action of Plato's "Laws" was compiled shortly before the death of Leo Strauss in 1973. Strauss offers an insightful and instructive reading through careful probing of Plato's classic text."Strauss's The Argument and the Action of Plato's 'Laws' reflects his interest in political thought, his dogged method of following the argument of the Laws step by step, and his vigorous defense of this dialogue's integrity in respect to the ideals of the Republic."— Cross Currents "The unique characteristics of this commentary on the Laws reflect the care and precision which were the marks of Professor Strauss's efforts to understand the complex thoughts of other men."—Allan D. Nelson, Canadian Journal of Political Science "Thorough and provocative, an important addition to Plato scholarship."— Library Journal "The major purpose of the commentary is to provide a reading of the dialogue which displays its structural arrangement and the continuity of the argument."—J. W. Dy, Bibliographical Bulletin of Philosophy "The reader of Strauss's book is indeed guided closely through the whole text."— M. J. Silverthorne, The Humanities Association Review Leo Strauss (1899-1973) was the Robert Maynard Hutchins Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of political science at the University of Chicago.

Book One

At the beginning of the Laws the Athenian stranger asks his two interlocutors, the Cretan Kleinias and the Spartan Megillos, whether a god or some human being is responsible for the disposition of their laws. The Cretan replies: a god, stranger, a god to give what is at any rate the most just answer; with us it is Zeus—with the Spartans, they say, I believe, that it is Apollon. The most just answer is not necessarily the most true answer. Is Zeus’ having been responsible for the Cretan laws known only through what the Cretans say? Are the Cretans infallible? Is their veracity beyond doubt? Be this as it may, precisely if we are entirely unsuspicious, we can imagine that the Athenian stranger has come to Crete looking for the best laws. For if the good is the old, the best is the oldest; but in order to be simply superior to what is of later origin, the oldest must be superhuman, divine; the Cretan laws, however, are the work not only of a god but of the highest god, and they are apparently the only laws of this description. Accordingly the dialogue opens with the Athenian stranger inquiring with an old Cretan about the old Cretan laws. More precisely, he inquires with an old Cretan and an old Spartan about the origin of the laws of their communities: the Cretan laws are not so unqualifiedly superior to the Spartan as not to need supplementing in some way by the latter; the oldest, even if it is the work of the highest god, is not simply the best. The Athenian is silent about the claim raised by the Spartans on behalf of their laws. This claim is not supported, as the Cretan claim to some extent is, by the authority of the most ancient poet. Homer makes clear that if Zeus gave the Cretans their laws, he gave them through the intermediacy of Minos, although neither Homer nor the Cretans vouch for Minos’ justice (cf. 706a7ff.).

The Athenian does not question the divine origin of the Cretan laws. On the contrary, he infers from the fact that his two interlocutors have been brought up in habits bred by laws of this kind, that they would like to discuss governments and laws while walking from Knosos to the cave and sanctuary of Zeus, i.e., while walking, as Minos had done, to the place where he had received his instruction from Zeus; they ascend to the origins of the Cretan laws; their going to the cave of Zeus is an ascent. Because of the summer heat they will seek the shade afforded by the trees and make frequent stops. Since, in addition, they will converse with one another (which Minos did not do), their walk will be agreeable despite its length.

The Athenian now approaches the question of the divine character of the Cretan laws from a different angle: if those laws are divine, their end must be the proper end. The Athenian asks Kleinias with a view to what has the Cretan law established certain institutions. According to Kleinias the Cretan legislator has established all Cretan institutions with a view to war, while considering of course the nature of the land. The Cretan legislator, not blinded by a vulgar error, had seen that all cities are engaged, as long as they are, in a continuous war against all other cities; peace is only a word; universal war is according to nature; men possess nothing good if they are not superior in war, for all good things belonging to the vanquished become the possession of the victors. As we see, Kleinias asserts spontaneously and without any preparation what the Athenian ambassadors on Melos assert after having ascended from the discussion of the case at hand to their fundamental premise. Megillos agrees with Kleinias at least up to the point that a well-ordered city is characterized by its ability to vanquish the other cities in war.

The Athenian attempts to refute the Cretan by showing that if being victorious over other cities is the best for the city, being victorious over his fellow citizens would be best for the individual. When Kleinias agrees without hesitation, the Athenian, considering that each man is not simply one, asks Kleinias whether victory will not also be best in the relations between the parts of each man. To the Athenian’s surprise, Kleinias enthusiastically agrees: the individual is indeed the proper starting point for the understanding of the city; enmity, war, is supreme even within each man; how else could victory over oneself be the first and best victory? Descending at the Athenian’s suggestion from the individual to the city, the Cretan observes that a city in which the better people vanquish the multitude, i.e., the inferior people, is superior to itself and most justly praised on account of that very victory. But when the Athenian thereupon suggests that if the unjust majority of the citizens overcomes and subdues a just minority, the city is inferior to itself or bad, the Cretan finds that suggestion very strange—for it implies that victory as victory is not good—but admits that it is most necessary to agree to it. The concern is no longer with superiority to outsiders but with the right kind of inner structure.

In order to convince the Cretan fully, the Athenian ascends again, not to the individual but to the family: however natural war may be, kinship is also natural. It would not be surprising if the majority of the sons of the same father and the same woman were unjust and the minority were just. (In this context the Athenian utters a timely warning against undue concern with the becoming character of words to the detriment of concern with the natural correctness of laws; both interlocutors agree; Megillos’ agreement is his first spontaneous utterance.) Now the question arises who would be the best judge in settling the domestic conflict: he who destroys the bad and commands the better ones to rule over themselves, or he who keeps the inferior ones alive and makes them voluntarily obey the honest ones (the honest ones being the sole rulers), or he, the third in respect of virtue, who would establish amity among all brothers, whether just or unjust, by giving them laws (and not limiting the right to rule to the good). The first is inferior to the second, for “who would rather kill someone than use him alive and obedient?” (Xenophon, Memorabilia I 2.11.) The second alone establishes aristocracy strictly understood, i.e., the rule of the better over the worse. The most important, which means in the present case the best, occupies the central position. The Athenian stranger makes tacit use of the critique of law as such which another stranger develops in the Statesman and which is, indeed, not immediately intelligible to the two old law-bred Dorians. At any rate, Kleinias, as distinguished from the Athenian, does not have the slightest doubt that the third would be the best judge, although he had previously admitted that a community in which the better people subdue the majority consisting of unjust men, is most justly praised: the judge of the third kind would be a legislator at the same time.

One must wonder why the Athenian does not speak of the father as the natural judge of his sons. (He had silently dropped the mother in 627c4.) The answer is implied in the order of rank of the three kinds of judge. The first two are concerned with goodness rather than kinship (fraternity); the third is concerned with kinship rather than goodness. Goodness and kinship are two very different things. The disregard of this difference is the root of what is at present vociferously disapproved of as “racism.”

Arguing from the Cretan’s admission, the Athenian concludes that the legislator will order the city with a view not to war but to peace and amity. He thus does not yet exclude the possibility that the legislator might establish internal peace in order to enable the city to wage external war. Nevertheless, he feels entitled to conclude further that war and victory do not belong to the best things but that even a city’s victory over itself belongs only to the necessary things: war is not waged for its own sake but for the sake of the fruits of victory, of the good things which one expects to obtain through victory. In other words, internal (or external) war is not the natural state of the city but, rather, comparable to disease of the body or, at best, to its cure. Is peace then the natural state of the city? There seems to be a difference on this point between the statesman and the legislator: the good legislator gives laws with a view to peace. We know already what the end higher than peace is: goodness or virtue.

Kleinias becomes aware that if, or rather since, the conclusion arrived at regarding the good legislator is correct, the Cretan and the Spartan laws are defective. The Athenian wishes to avoid a harsh fight, at least for the time being. He therefore takes issue not with the divine legislators but with a man without authority, an Athenian expatriate who had become a Spartan citizen: the poet Tyrtaios. Instead of attacking the Cretan and the Spartan, let alone their divine legislators, the Athenian attacks a fellow Athenian. He proceeds like Socrates, who prefers to take issue with the poets’ stories about gods and heroes rather than with the stories embodied in public worship. It was an Athenian who found the words for the Dorian view; and the Cretans owe their knowledge of Tyrtaios’ poems to the Spartans. As far as speech is concerned, the sequence is not Crete-Sparta-Athens but Athens-Sparta-Crete. As far as speech is concerned, the oldest is not the best. The Athenian, making common front with his interlocutors, engages in a kind of dialogue with Tyrtaios who, being a poet, had praised not the fruits of war but the virtue of war. The conversation thus turns from war (or peace) to virtue as choiceworthy for its own sake as the end of legislation. Tyrtaios had praised most highly courage in war against men of alien stock. Claiming to speak on behalf of his interlocutors as well, the Athenian quotes Theognis, a poet of a later age who was a colonial, as witness for the view that “the whole virtue,” or justice, moderation, good sense united with courage, is better than courage alone. Since he does not take issue with Theognis, he does not engage in a dialogue with him. (The underlying reasoning can be stated as follows. We grant that excellence in war is the excellence; but foreign war is milder, is much less of war than civil war; hence the best men are those who excel in that greatest war: they need the greatest virtue [cf. 630a2 and c3–4].) Accordingly, every legislator who is not entirely worthless, and hence in particular the Cretan legislator, who was instructed by Zeus, will give his laws with a view above all to the greatest virtue, which one may call “complete justice.” To the Cretan’s remark, which is free from indignation, that this demand amounts to a condemnation of the Cretan legislator, the Athenian replies that what is at fault is not the laws of Lykourgos and Minos but their accepted interpretation. He appeals as it were from the accepted interpretation of revelation to revelation itself, which discloses its true meaning only to those who never forget that, being divine, it is supremely reasonable. On the other hand, however, he ascribes the Dorian laws to Lykourgos and Minos rather than to Apollon and Zeus.

The Athenian delineates now what we may call the natural beginning of an inquiry into divine legislation as distinguished from the beginning imposed on him by the opinion of his interlocutors. The latter beginning, concerned with the origin of the Dorian laws, led to what the Cretan regarded as the most just answer. The natural beginning is concerned with the end with a view to which divine laws must be supposed to have been given; it leads to an answer that is both true and just. He praises the Cretan for having said (which he had not said) in his interpretation of the Cretan laws that the Cretan legislator had laid down his laws for the sake of virtue, but blames him for having identified virtue with its lowest or smallest part, namely, courage. He then tells the Cretan how he should have spoken in interpreting the Cretan laws. He should have said that the laws of the Cretans are, not undeservedly, very famous among all Greeks, for they provide all good things. Of good things there are two kinds, human and divine. The human goods are: health, beauty, bodily strength, and that wealth which is enlightened by good sense. The divine goods are also four: good sense, moderation or temperance, justice, which is a mixture of good sense and moderation with courage, and finally courage. The order is in both cases one of descent from the highest to the lowest. What is said about the divine goods articulates what was previously called the greatest virtue or complete justice. In this explanation, justice is analyzed so that it appears as a combination of the three other virtues (good sense, moderation, courage) with the understanding that the combination is inferior in rank to two of the virtues which are its ingredients. This inferiority seems to be due to the fact that its third ingredient, courage, is the lowest of the virtues. What does this mean? The place occupied by courage in the order of the divine goods is occupied in the order of the human goods by wealth, an external good. Courage as the virtue of war is directed toward the external; it is a virtue of self-assertion against those without. Justice requires courage—manly self-assertion (cf. Republic 549c2–550a1)—because it has to do in the first place with possession and acquisition (cf. 632b1–7). The relatively low rank assigned here to justice is connected with the fact that justice as practiced in the city adumbrated in the Laws, in a noncommunist society, is in the first place the virtue governing mine and thine. The strangeness of what the Cretan should have said is not diminished by the fact that he should also have said that the divine goods are the necessary and sufficient conditions for the human goods, at least as far as the city is concerned; virtue guarantees happiness, which includes the well-being of the body (health, beauty, strength) and even the right kind of wealth. How strange this whole exposition was for the Cretan, we are not permitted to know, since the Athenian does not give him an opportunity to voice his views but continues in his speech, the longest speech hitherto.

The Cretan should have continued that the order of the good things just sketched is established by nature. The legislator must follow the natural order. The Cretan has said or almost said the same; but he and the Athenian understand “nature” differently. The legislator, the Athenian continues, must proclaim to the citizens that his commands have in view the good things aforementioned in such a way that the human goods are ordered toward the divine goods and the divine goods in their turn (and therewith all goods) are ordered toward the Leader Intellect. (Hence Intellect is different from and superior to good sense; see the mss readings of 631c7.) The Athenian thus tells the Cretan to say, not what the Cretan legislator has done in the past, but what every legislator, including Minos, must do in the future: the Cretan ought to have risen to the natural order, which is older than any legislation. He ought to have ascended to the origin of the Cretan laws, nay, of all laws.

Furthermore, the legislator must regulate human life from birth to grave; he must, through the very laws, correctly blame and praise the wrong and the right kind of pains, pleasures, and desires; he must teach and define what is noble and what is not in each case, as regards anger, fear, and other perturbations caused by misfortune or good fortune; thereafter he is compelled to watch the citizens’ acquisitions and expenditures and the associations which they form and dissolve voluntarily or involuntarily, to observe in all these cases what is just or not, and to assign honors to the law-abiding and impose fixed penalties to the transgressors: finally, surveying his laws, he will establish guardians of all laws—some of these guardians will be guided by good sense while others proceed through true opinion—so that Intellect, having bound all these things together, will reveal them as subservient to justice and moderation and not to wealth and ambition. (Many laws can reasonably be suspected of being in the service of wealth and ambition.)

The Athenian seems to have given a comprehensive if extremely succinct summary of the task of the legislator. Yet he did not mention the two highest themes: the gods and the regime (politeia). As for the latter, one might say that the regime which he has in mind is not, as all other regimes are, the rule of any particular kind of men or of any man, but the rule of law; the human rulers are only the executors of the law. As for the gods, the divine goods are the human virtues (cf. 626c6), but they are ordered toward the Leader Intellect. Yet the Athenian calls death the end of the whole polity (politeia): what is deathless transcends politics. From this we understand that the whole legal order must, according to the Athenian, be subservient to justice and moderation, i.e., not to good sense, let alone Intellect. Good sense and Intellect must be effective in legislation and to some extent even in the execution of the laws, but they are not that to which legislation is ordered. In legislation the higher is in the service of the lower, and this is strictly speaking against nature. This is a fundamental crux of the city. The Athenian avoids in his summary the term “education” (paideia). Above all, he is silent on piety or the divine things proper in his summary of the natural order of the laws.

He concludes his summary by expressing the wish that his interlocutors set forth how all things that he has mentioned are contained and arranged in the laws, said to be of Zeus and the Pythian Apollon, which Minos and Lykourgos have given: the old Dorians must know this in one way or another; for “us others” it is in no way clear. The Dorians must show, beginning with courage, that every kind of virtue is properly provided for by the two codes. This suggestion does not entirely agree with that transmitted through the Athenian’s summary, for the latter did not, surely not clearly, begin with courage. The Athenian returns from what he has presented as the natural order to the order most intelligible to the Dorians, who must, in the spirit of their laws, begin with courage, i.e., ascend from it. Megillos proposes that the Athenian should examine Kleinias first, but having thus come into the open he is exposed to the Athenian’s attempt to make him, and thus Sparta, the prime subject of his examination. At any rate the Athenian frames his next question, addressed to both interlocutors, in such a manner that Megillos has no difficulty in answering it. He has no difficulty in enumerating five Spartan institutions invented by the legislator with a view to war or to the promotion of endurance to pain, toil, and heat. All this implies, but only implies, a certain understanding of courage: Megillos had not mentioned courage nor even the fighting against fear. After having tacitly corrected this deficiency, the Athenian asks him whether courage is nothing but the fighting against pains and fears but not also the fighting against longings and pleasures. Megillos replies in the affirmative, i.e., he tacitly admits that courage rightly understood includes moderation; courage is the praiseworthy habitual posture not only toward the evils (“the left”) which assail men from within but also toward the goods (“the right”) of the same kind (cf. 634d1–2 with Aristotle, Metaphysics 986a22–26). Courage then includes moderation; it has ceased to be the lowest virtue and has become the second highest. Then the Athenian reminds Megillos that, as the Cretan had stated formerly, one is blamed for being inferior to oneself, which means, as the Cretan now makes clear, for being overcome by pleasure rather than by pain. The two divinely inspired lawgivers must have provided for courage in the two respects. Which institutions then did they establish in order to make the citizens taste pleasures and prove themselves masters of them? The Dorians are embarrassed for an answer.

The Athenian seems now to be compelled to question the adequacy, the goodness of the Dorian laws without using any subterfuge, and thus to hurt the feelings of his interlocutors. He therefore proceeds with special circumspection. Everyone, including the Athenian himself, especially if he is an old man, must listen with gentleness to criticism of the laws of his community if such criticism is brought forward by someone who wishes to see both the truth and the best (the truth about the laws of the city in question and the best which may differ from those laws). When Kleinias approves of this sentiment, the Athenian addresses him for the first time by name. Leaving it open whether the Dorian regimes are correctly blamed by anyone, everyone must admit that one of their finest laws is the one which forbids the young to criticize any of their institutions but stipulates that all should say with one voice that all their laws are fine since they were given by gods, and should not tolerate dissent on this point; yet one of their old men may make speeches of this sort when speaking to a ruler and men of his own age, provided no one young is present. We see here that the answers given by the two Dorians at the very beginning were “most just” in the precise sense of being legal or in full agreement with the Dorian laws. We see above all that the Athenian speaks now of what he had previously only done—that he makes explicit the principle on which he had previously only acted, namely, the questionable premise of the divine origin of the Dorian laws, which allegedly makes certain the goodness of those laws. After this has been understood, he can safely continue to speak from time to time in the old manner.

Kleinias praises the Athenian more highly than ever before, comparing him to a soothsayer who has correctly divined what went on in the mind of the legislator of the remote past—he compares him as it were to the Cretan soothsayer Epimenides, who was famous for prophesying not about future things but about things which had happened yet were immanifest (cf. Aristotle, Rhetoric 1418a24–26). He admits, in other words, that Minos himself ascribed his laws to Zeus in order to protect them against hasty blame. The Athenian’s retrospective prophecy is not surprising since his thought extended much beyond Minos to the natural order itself.

The Athenian’s high praise and deep understanding of the Dorian law of laws is bound to mitigate the displeasure which he can no longer avoid causing to his interlocutors. He first makes sure that the strictly private conversation of the three old men—from which no corruption of the young can be apprehended—about the Dorian laws is unobjectionable in the legislator’s view; while being a stranger he regards himself as subject to the Dorian law of laws and even authorized by it to examine the other Dorian laws. He thus gives a legal (as distinguished from a rational or philosophic) justification for his criticism of those laws. Encouraged by the Cretan, he expresses his perplexity about the fact that the Dorians’ legislator has commanded them to abstain from tasting the greatest pleasures and kinds of play, while in the case of pains and fears the legislator knew very well that only by being exposed to them from childhood can one learn to ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Contents
• Foreword
• The Argument and the Action of Plato’s Laws
• Book One
• Book Two
• Book Three
• Book Four
• Book Five
• Book Six
• Book Seven
• Book Eight
• Book Nine
• Book Ten
• Book Eleven
• Book Twelve
• Note