Sheila Kassman Memorial Lecture: Situating the Roles of Lawgivers in Plato's 'Laws'

Speaker: Melissa Lane (Princeton University)

While the figuration of lawgivers in Plato’s Laws is multiple and various, it has been too little discussed in light of the broader discourses about Greek (and other) lawgivers before and in other fourth-century BCE texts. This lecture opens with reflections on the discursive figuration of lawgivers in that period; proceeds to a close reading of the genealogy of law and lawgivers in book 3 of the Laws; and concludes with reconsideration of the standpoint of ‘discursive legislation’ (as I have called it in previous work) adopted in the dialogue from the end of book 3 onward. While discussing some divergences between Plato’s treatment of lawgivers and the broader tradition, I focus on two shared features. The first is that a lawgiver’s characteristic generation of the content of the laws is an act of selection from among existing legal customs (with only occasional invention of new laws), based on some kind of special epistemic competence and using some kind of normative criterion for selection. The second is that a lawgiver’s characteristic speech act is that of ‘laying down’ the laws, as opposed to issuing commands in the way that a ruler would do (notwithstanding the ‘double theory of law’ as command prefaced by preamble offered by the dialogue). In other words, the lawgiver is not a ruler, and our understanding of the nature of (Platonic) political thought must change accordingly.