Laws
1979
Plato's final and longest dialogue offers no utopia. It offers something far more dangerous: a working blueprint for an actual city-state. The Athenian Stranger, a Spartan, and a Cretan engage in a walking debate that begins at Knossos and ends at the cave of Zeus, but their conversation maps something larger: the tension between what law should be and what it becomes when wielded by imperfect societies. Plato critiques systems that reduce virtue to military courage alone, arguing instead for legislation that cultivates the whole person. Here we find his most practical political thought: the treatment of families, property, crime, religion, and art in a healthy republic. The Laws stands as the essential counterweight to the Republic's idealism, a treatise on what happens when philosophy must compromise with power. For readers who want to understand not just理想 but the hard machinery of how societies actually function, this dialogue remains indispensable.
Editions
X-Ray
“The first and greatest victory is to conquer yourself; to be conquered by yourself is of all things most shameful and vile.””
— Plato
“Si vis pacem, para bellum””
— Plato
“Education certainly gives victory, although victory sometimes produces forgetfulness of education; for many have grown insolent from victory in war, and this insolence has engendered in them innumerable evils; and many a victory has been and will be suicidal to the victors; but education is never suicidal.””
— Plato
“... because if a human institution gets off to a good and careful start, there is a sort of divine guarantee that it will prosper.””
— Plato
“in a family there may be several brothers, and the bad may be a majority; and when the bad majority conquer the good minority, the family are worse than themselves.””
— Plato
“Self-love is the source of that ignorant conceit of knowledge which is always doing and never succeeding.””
— Plato
“there is simple ignorance, which is the source of lighter offences, and double ignorance, which is accompanied by a conceit of wisdom; and he who is under the influence of the latter fancies that he knows all about matters of which he knows nothing.””
— Plato
“Moreover, in fits of anger, in fears, in the disturbances that come over souls in bad fortune and the release from such things that comes with good fortune, in theexperiences brought by diseases and wars and poverty, and the experiences brought upon human beings by the opposite circumstances”
— Plato
“Ma spesso ci si deve accontentare se i corpi possono riacquistare vigore e salute con un dolore non eccessivo.””
— Plato
