Plato’s Reverent City The Laws and the Politics of Authority

This book offers an original interpretation of Plato’s Laws and a new account of its enduring importance. Ballingall argues that the republican regime conceived in the Laws is built on "reverence," an archaic virtue governing emotions of self-assessment—particularly awe and shame. Ballingall demonstrates how learning to feel these emotions in the right way, at the right time, and for the right things is the necessary basis for the rule of law conceived in the dialogue. The Laws remains surprisingly neglected in the scholarly literature, although this is changing. The cynical populisms haunting liberal democracies are focusing new attention on the “characterological” basis of constitutional government and Plato’s Laws remains an indispensable resource on this question, especially when we attend to the theme of reverence at its core.

Chapter 1. Reverence and the Politics of Authority.- Chapter 2. Plato’s Laws and the Enigma of Godlikeness.- Chapter 3. Classical Utopianism in Plato’s Laws.- Chapter 4. The Athenian’s Rehabilitation of Tragedy.- Chapter 5. Reverence and the Disunity of Political Virtue.- Chapter 6. Epilogue.

Robert Ballingall is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Maine, USA. Previously, he was a postdoctoral fellow in the Program on Constitutional Government at Harvard University and Allan Bloom Memorial Postdoctoral Fellow for Research in Classical Political Thought at the University of Toronto, where he also earned his PhD.