Melissa Lane (Princeton): 3. The lawgiver's point of view in Plato and Aristotle

Professor Melissa Lane will deliver the Isaiah Berlin Lectures in Michaelmas Term 2024. Professor Lane is Class of 1943 Professor of Politics at Princeton University.  Her lectures will take place on the following Tuesdays at 5pm: 29th October, 5 November, 12 November, 19 November, 26 November and 3 December. The first lecture will be held at St Luke's Chapel and lectures two to six will be held in the L3 Lecture Room of the Andrew Wiles Building (Mathematical Institute).

12 Nov: The lawgiver's point of view in Plato and Aristotle

I argued in the preceding lecture that the making of new laws was not the key political function for ancient Athenians or their peers elsewhere in Greece—since a good polity would be shaped by the laws given by a great lawgiver, which could be modified by later citizens but should for civic flourishing be broadly preserved. While citizens in classical Athens often spoke about the role of the lawgiver, they did so primarily as interpreters: thinking their way into what the lawgiver intended, and seeking to act so as to sustain that telos. Their interpretative stance—which resonates in significant ways with that of modern legal philosopher Ronald Dworkin—in turn became central to the political philosophy of both Plato and Aristotle. Plato writes from the standpoint of what I have elsewhere called ‘discursive legislation’ from an early point in both the Republic and the Laws, while Aristotle frames his inquiry in in both the Nicomachean Ethics and the Politics in terms of what the good lawgiver would need to know and do. In this lecture, I evaluate the significance and distinctiveness of philosophising about politics from the standpoint of the lawgiver in these two ancient Greek philosophers.  I argue that the figure of the lawgiver, possessed of a techne of lawgiving, helped both Plato and Aristotle to navigate the nomos-phusis debate of their predecessors (as to whether laws are artificial or natural), and likewise, can help navigate later debates between positivism and natural law.