Platos Reverent City: The Laws and the Politics of Authority

This book offers an original interpretation of Platos Laws and a new account of its enduring importance. Ballingall argues that the republican regime conceived in the Laws is built on reverence, an archaic virtue governing emotions of self-assessmentparticularly awe and shame. Ballingall demonstrates how learning to feel these emotions in the right way, at the right time, and for the right things is the necessary basis for the rule of law conceived in the dialogue. The Laws remains surprisingly neglected in the scholarly literature, although this is changing. The cynical populisms haunting liberal democracies are focusing new attention on the characterological basis of constitutional government and Platos Laws remains an indispensable resource on this question, especially when we attend to the theme of reverence at its core.