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).
3 Dec: Are we all legislators now? Athens to Nietzsche
Calls to (re-)enact the role of the great lawgivers in the centuries between antiquity and today have been recurrent in many contexts, which this closing lecture can do no more than selectively survey. I begin by considering the Athenians’ institution of a new procedure for lawmaking in 403 BCE, which established a large body of ordinary citizens called nomothetai, inheriting the title of nomothetēs that had been accorded to Solon and Draco, but inverting their function: instead of framing the laws themselves as those individuals had done, the collective body instead vote on new laws proposed by others. Some eighty years later, Athens would witness Demetrius of Phalerum asserting himself as a new lawgiver, while in the meantime, both Plato and Aristotle had framed their philosophical reflections on politics in terms of the standpoint of the legislator, as argued in an earlier lecture. The effort to act as a lawgiver either in theory or in practice would be iterated throughout later centuries, in calls such as Friedrich Nietzsche’s for the emergence of ‘legislators of the future’, and in Richard Tuck’s observation that, as modern democratic theorists and citizens, ‘we are all legislators now’. By contrast, the very success attributed in antiquity to the great Greek lawgivers served to make subsequent lawgiving a far less salient part of ongoing political life than most accounts of ancient Greek politics have assumed. I close this series by reflecting on this paradox and its implications.
