The Laws Most Beautiful and Best

The Law Most Beautiful and Best: Medical Arguments and Magical Rhetoric in Plato’s Laws. Randall Baldwin Clark. Lexington Books, 2003.

The analogy of politics and medicine guides Randall Baldwin Clark’s book The Law Most Beautiful and Best: Medical Arguments and Magical Rhetoric in Plato’s Laws. In addressing the question of how citizens can be best persuaded to obey the laws, Clark looks at the metaphor of the physician, with his blend of rational skills and nonrational rhetoric, in prevailing upon his patients to submit to and comply with his treatment. For Clark, just as the physician’s bedside manner is as crucial as the cure itself, so is the statesman’s style of politics as important as the substance of his policies. This use of rhetoric and reason in the Laws (chapters 4–8) as well as the common conceptions and practices of magic and medicine in classical antiquity (chapters 2–3) are examined in great detail and with insight in this book.

In his first chapter, Clark lays out the problem before us: how can the philosophical-minded Athenian Stranger persuade the tradition-reverent Kleinias to depart from custom in setting new laws for the “second-best” regime? How can he relax the rigidity of age while maintaining respect for tradition? The answer, surprisingly, is not a sweeping away of ancient rituals and practices, but a continuance and modification of them. If the physician were analogous to the statesman, then onewould think that the curewould be the rational Hippocratic medicine, that is, philosophy. But for Clark, it is not. Instead, what is required for treatment is both the rational Hippocratic method and nonrational traditional therapies to persuade the lawgiver and the citizens to obey the law. Like in medicine, politics for the Athenian Stranger becomes less of a “science” and more of an “art.”

Throughout his book, Clark uses dichotomous analogies—philosophy and tradition, nature and convention, body and mind—to highlight the differences in laws and regimes (strangely, Clark glosses over the contextual dichotomy in the Laws: Athenian and Dorian). But he later reconciles these dichotomies, showing that politics requires both philosophy and tradition, nature and convention, body and soul. For example, after the Athenian Stranger convinces Kleinias about the need for philosophy, the life of the mind, to govern the polis, he does not, as one would suspect, erase the needs of the body from the city, but instead makes the case of how the “state of the city’s soul . . . is inextricably related to the health of its physical situation” (p. 102). For the Stranger, the needs of the body must not only be preserved but satisfied in order for the soul to flourish.

Since the city’s aims are inextricably tied to the physicality of the polis, Clark can place the Athenian Stranger’s regulations of meals and marriage, drink and sex, pregnancy and child-rearing in the philosophical context of the mutual dependency between body and soul or philosophy and tradition. The Athenian Stranger’s regulation of the private affairs of the body is no longer seen as totalitarian or arbitrary but as a necessary precondition for the health of the citizen’s philosophical soul. Contrary to Derrida’s interpretation of Plato, Clark’s account does not provide a Socratic “either-or” but one who embraces “both” the “most beautiful and best” in reality. The dichotomies between mind and body, philosophy and tradition, nature and convention become reconciled in the recognition that both aspects are required for good laws and a good polis.

But the Athenian Stranger can only convince the citizens to obey these laws if he employs both Hippocratic and non-Hippocratic remedies. Hence, the Athenian Stranger introduces utterances, enchantments, and other types of magic that instruct and admonish citizens as a prelude to the law. If the law is the rational account of regime, then the preludes are nonrational accounts, urging its citizens to voluntarily obey the laws. Appeals of logos are not enough to guarantee obedience and loyalty to the regime; beautiful myths, “noble lies,” and doxa are needed, too.

By transcending these dichotomous analogies, the Athenian Stranger not only lifts Kleinias toward philosophy but also restrains the philosophically minded reader in recognizing “his own debilities and thus restor[ing] his psychic health” (p. 113). Just as the old, fossilizing in their routine, require a prod toward philosophy, so does the youth, with their aspirations toward perfection, need to be reminded of corporeal limitations. This is Clark’s final point: the Laws is ultimately a didactic exercise for the philosophically minded young reader. It replaces his attachments of the familiar with those that are to the “most beautiful and best.” However, this replacement must not be radical but gradual, with the recognition of the mutual dependency between the soul and the body.

Clark’s metaphor of the physician is convincing and effectively connects the rhetoric and arguments of the Laws together. It would have been interesting if Clark would have expounded more on the prescribed cure, especially on the laws’ penalties instead of their preludes and the precise nature and role of philosophy in the Nocturnal Council. The question about the nature of philosophy is particularly pertinent in this book, with Clark’s suggestion that philosophy is the same as atheism (pp. 21, 71, 87, 91). Although Leo Strauss is not listed in the bibliography, Clark seems to be indebted to Strauss’s distinction between reason and revelation in his conception of what philosophy is and its relation to religion. Is religion, like beautiful myths and noble lies, a necessary, nonrational component for a well-governed polis? Is revelation required not only for the citizens’ obedience but also for the philosopher’s recognition of the limits of rational inquiry? Can there be such a phenomenon as a religious philosopher?

However, these questions do not detract from Clark’s overall argument. The Law Most Beautiful and Best provides a much-needed examination of Plato’s rhetoric as well as his arguments in the Laws. Clark’s positions are lucid, well-reasoned, and amply documented. His book provides us a unique perspective in clarifying our understanding of the power and limits of rationality in the realms of politics, education, and law.

This review was originally published in Political Theory 33: 5 (2005): 742-45.

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