The Reverent City: Plato's "Laws" and the Politics of Ethical Authority
Bibliographic record
Abstract
As a virtue, reverence seems to have disappeared. People who speak highly of it are suspected of an obtuse fanaticism or of adherence to some eccentric New Age cult. If reverence lives on in mainstream culture, it does so either as a term of abuse or—more typically—through its antonym, whose merits are loudly broadcast. But what if reverence is a quality without which civilized life becomes impossible? Do societies like ours neglect reverence at their peril? Plato, at any rate, suggests they do. This study elucidates Plato’s reasons for thinking so. These appear in the seldom studied Laws, the most important treatment of reverence in the tradition of Western political philosophy. Building on exciting developments in classical studies and political theory, The Reverent City sheds new light on this long-neglected dialogue, and on its significance for our irreverent times. On my interpretation, Plato looks to reverence as the root of ethical learning in all-too-human citizens. Political life depends on such learning, but the Laws shows how powerful currents in human nature incline most of us away from it. To acquire and practice the virtues that are its fruit thus demands refusing the inclinations that are its bane, and it is reverence—the capacity to show due respect for what exceeds and circumscribes the human—that supplies the needed impetus on Plato’s account. I bring out the enduring relevance of this argument by highlighting the prescience of its warnings. He shows how the Laws anticipates with remarkable foresight the cynicism, apathy, and nativism to which democratic publics are increasingly prone in modern societies. By recovering a novel diagnosis for these trends in the neglect of a forgotten virtue, The Reverent City affords a richer understanding of our worrying politics, and blazes a promising path for future research.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.053 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".