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).
26 Nov: Moses and Greek lawgivers in Philo, Josephus and Rousseau
Emerging from the Greek-speaking Jewish community discussed in the previous lecture, Philo of Alexandria would argue (in Greek) that the act of writing was key to the extraordinary success of ethical habituation in Jewish law and thereby in Jewish history, both in terms of externally written law and the law that could on its basis be inscribed within the soul. The Jewish general Josephus, who would move from Jerusalem to Rome in the course of an eventful life navigating complex political tensions, would later similarly argue (also in Greek) that the Jewish people were superlatively successful in their mode of studying and internalising their laws. In contrast to those early rabbis who insisted that Moses was merely the transmitter of divinely ordained laws, these authors treated Moses as a lawgiver, but one who excelled his pagan Greek predecessors, in part, according to Philo, by combining the roles of priest, prophet, king and lawgiver. These ancient comparisons of Moses to Greek lawgivers can shed light on early modern invocations of all of these figures, including Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s appeal to Moses, Lycurgus and others in formulating the theoretical role of his ‘great Legislator’. I argue that Rousseau’s invocation of this figure was in certain respects deeply faithful to ancient Greek understandings of their own lawgivers: figures who drew on their wisdom to shape bodies of law that succeeded in impressing a civic identity on a given polity. While Rousseau’s invocation of a general will as necessary to make those laws legitimate drew on conceptual sources alien to the Greeks, I explore its similarities and differences to the acceptance of and identification with the laws by ancient Greek citizens that I discussed in earlier lectures.
