Legislative Innovation and Conservatism in Plato's Magnesia

Plato’s Laws provides an account of philosophically informed legislation for the best realizable regime. The dialogue’s chief protagonist, known as the Athenian Visitor (or Athenian Stranger), envisions such legislation as an artistic activity. He compares himself to a craftsman, a painter, and a tragic poet. In each case he emphasizes imitation as the quintessential activity of the artist. The artistic legislator is supposed to imitate the truth or the best way of life. Accordingly, we understand the “art of legislation” as a mediating activity - an activity in which philosophers adapt universal understandings of the natural order to particular, and rapidly evolving, political circumstances. In light of this vision of legislation, the Athenian Visitor renders explicit the problematic ambiguities associated with change and stability in Magnesia’s law-code. Is the city’s code to be fixed and immutable, as a correct artistic “translation” of eternal truths to the political world, or should it evolve continuously, as the product of philosophically informed judgment about context-bound particulars? By posing this question, Plato began to grapple with the fundamental tension confronting all legislators: laws must provide a reliable and stable framework of civic conduct, while also remaining sensitive to the ceaseless transformations characteristic of political life.Through a careful examination of the artistic legislator, the first part of this paper charts the Athenian Visitor’s ambivalent reactions to the question of stability and openness. On the one hand, the Visitor provides apparently fixed standards in his criminal and educational legislation. On the other hand, the Visitor’s emphasis on the wide-ranging prerogatives of the Nocturnal Council opens the door to continuous renewal, change, and evolution. What are readers to make of these tensions and paradoxes, which, superficially at least, threaten the stability of the text itself?The second section resolves any apparent paradoxes by appealing to the rhetorical and political texture of Plato’s dialogue. Careful examination reveals that the Athenian Visitor’s focus on fixed and determinate laws is a concession to political necessity - specifically, a rhetorical posture meant to alleviate the anxieties of ordinary citizens. Fixity, in short, is a political strategy designed to further the Visitor’s more radical and revolutionary aim of subordinating political authority to the applied theoretical work of the artistic, philosophical legislator. Paradoxically, only the flexible judgments of philosophers, unmoored from conventional opinion or custom or legal constraint, can produce the political stability so desirable for the Magnesian utopia.In exploring the tensions between the Visitor’s political strategies and his philosophical ambitions, we seek to understand whether, in Plato’s view, the legislative need for contextual judgment, and the political need for a public ideology, compromise political philosophy or help to perfect it. We thereby grapple with Plato’s most profound reflections upon the political necessities that shape the production and dissemination of philosophical knowledge. Having examined traditionalism and conservatism in Magnesia’s legislation, and keeping in mind other, subsequent approaches to the same question, notably those of Machiavelli and Rousseau, the paper concludes by assessing the prospects, or lack thereof, for a harmonious relationship between politics and philosophy, with particular reference to founding acts of legislation.

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