DownloadThe Portobello Bookshop Gift Guide 2024

A Journey Into Platonic Politics

Plato's Laws

Albert Keith Whitaker author

Format:Paperback

Publisher:University Press of America

Published:29th Apr '04

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

A Journey Into Platonic Politics cover

"One should not take up the Laws as a plan for a new society nor as a means to critique one's own nation and its customs. Indeed, the Laws benefits most those readers who are comfortable in their lover for and allegiance to the standards and institutions of their time and place. Perhaps this claim sounds surprising. But it should surprise only those who believe that love and loyalty are deep set obstacles to thought and reflections. In contrast, such attachments, and not their facile critique, are precisely what lead us to take a healthy interest in and reflect fruitfully upon other people's ways. The characters of the Laws recognize this truth as well. They recommend that the highest body of the new city, a council of thinkers and legislators, young and old, should regularly send spies to other nations, to search out the "beauties" in their foreign habits, beauties that might—or might not—be able to be transplanted back to the council's city. The following study of the Laws attempts to do something of the same thing, to read Plato's dialogue as, in effect, a foreign country, through which readers are led as if they were on a mission for our own Nocturnal Council." —Albert Keith Whitaker, from the Introduction

What the reader will find in A Journey into Platonic Politics is an outstanding example of philosophical exposition…One could hardly ask for a better, more straightforward elucidation of Plato's final dialogue and I foresee this text becoming an essential guide for any who study the Laws. -- Kenneth Royce Moore, University of Edinburgh * Polis *

ISBN: 9780761826897

Dimensions: 215mm x 163mm x 21mm

Weight: 318g

254 pages