Abstract

This dissertation provides a new interpretation of Plato's teaching concerning the goals of wise legislation in the first three books of the Laws. Moreover, it argues that this teaching shows that the early modern critique of classical political philosophy is not so decisive as it is commonly believed to be. For it provides the authentic interpretation, which is also a qualification, of the allegedly utopian classical thesis that virtue is the proper goal of political life. According to it, politics at its best cannot promote genuine human virtue, but merely a kind of crude approximation of it; and efforts to promote this must be combined with and to some extent compromised by the pursuit of other reasonable political goals, e.g., civil peace and national security. Finally, the dissertation argues that this part of the Laws helps clarify the theoretical foundations of classical political philosophy. It contends that in order to supply a truly scientific foundation for its account of human life and the world, classical political philosophy attempted to prove the unreality of divine revelation. And it finds in the first part of the Laws an indication of how it attempted to do so: namely, by demonstrating that the belief in revelation rests on an unnatural condition, on a lack of clarity about moral political subjects. The dissertation does not settle the question of whether or not it succeeded, nor the question of how the Biblical revelations affect its results. But it suggests that Plato's approach to the problem of revelation is superior to that of the philosophers of the Enlightenment