What are the prospects for ambitious political reform in communities of traditional, passionate, and even self-righteous citizens? Can thoughtful legislators create a healthy society for citizens whose judgment is typically unsound? In this searching and provocative book, Ryan K. Balot addresses these timely, yet perennial, political questions by offering a novel interpretation of Plato's last and longest dialogue, the Laws. Turning to the ancient past is often essential to reinvigorating our contemporary understanding of these critical issues.

Previous scholars and writers have either celebrated the idealism in Plato's Laws or denounced its totalitarianism. Balot, by contrast, refuses to interpret the dialogue as a political blueprint, whether admirable or misguided. Instead, he shows that it constitutes Plato's greatest philosophical investigation of political life. In this transformative re-appraisal, Balot reveals that Plato's goal was to cultivate a tragic attitude toward our political passions, commitments, and aspirations. The result is a profound political inquiry with far-reaching consequences.

Ryan K. Balot's profile page

Ryan K. Balot is Professor of Political Science and Classics at the University of Toronto and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. He is the author of Greed and Injustice in Classical Athens and Courage in the Democratic Polis: Ideology and Critique in Classical Athens. He edited A Companion to Greek and Roman Political Thought and is co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of Thucydides.

"This is a wonderful book-our best guide to understanding Plato's Laws. Ryan K. Balot's reading is close and deep, moving through the text's surface to Plato's overall political philosophy and finally to the relationship between philosophic and political ways of life. Balot brings out tensions between them and several means of reconciling such tensions. The book culminates in a strikingly novel account of Plato's Nocturnal Council. The writing is clear throughout, dialectical in Plato's sense of conversational, celebrating and practicing the value of open-ended Platonic inquiry." --Stephen G. Salkever, Bryn Mawr College

"Original insights and important lessons about the limits of politics and philosophy abound in Ryan K. Balot's persuasive new reading of Plato's complex and challenging Laws. With keen attention to the nuances of the arguments and the dialogue's dramatic energy and a sensitivity to the rhetorical niceties necessitated by the Athenian Stranger's two audiences - especially the thumotic Kleinias and the sophisticated reader familiar with Plato's other writings- Balot practices the philanthropy he finds in the Athenian Stranger's efforts to educate his readers philosophically about politics." --Arlene W. Saxonhouse, University of Michigan

"Long and serious meditation, rooted in careful textual analysis and interpretation, has produced this original and illuminating reconsideration of Plato's most important work in political philosophy-the study of which will henceforth need to proceed by sustained reckoning with this book." --Thomas L. Pangle, University of Texas at Austin