Ancient and Modern Constitutionalism on the Good of the Ruled: Plato vs. Vermeule

• In Event: On Law and Constitutionalism in Ancient Greek Thought

Abstract

This paper further elaborates the critique of Adrian Vermeule’s “common good constitutionalism” which I sketched in Of Rule and Office: Plato’s Ideas of the Political (2023) on the basis of the rival “good of the ruled constitutionalism” (to coin a phrase here) which Plato identified. In this paper, I build on the interrogative account of the Platonic good articulated by Sarah Broadie in Plato’s Sun-Like Good: Dialectic in the Republic, 2021), to work out how the good of the ruled for Plato rests on dialectical moves that reject the opposites of health, virtue, freedom, and friendship as ones which interlocutors would refrain from choosing. I then focus on freedom and friendship in particular, noting that neither features among the “central goods at which constitutionalism should aim” according to Vermeule (Common Good Constitutionalism, 2022, 7), and explain why these relational goods cannot be fully captured by Vermeule’s “common good” approach—analogous to the ways in which relational conceptions of equality cannot be fully captured by distributive conceptions. Indeed, it is startling that Vermeule does not mention freedom at all in his list of central goods, given its centrality to Cicero and Roman law, as well as, I argue (against many misconceptions), to Plato. Finally, I connect freedom and friendship back to law, showing how good rule can be fostered through laws which enable citizens to develop and sustain the trust, motivation, and understanding necessary to enjoy these goods.

Author

• Melissa Lane, Princeton University