On Law and Constitutionalism in Ancient Greek Thought

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

Political theorists in 4th century Athens were acutely interested in problems of constitutional renovation and reimagination, writing as they were against the backdrop of periods of civil strife, authoritarian oligarchy, and the encroaching Macedonian empire. Confronted with these various crises, authors such as Plato and Aristotle developed novel insights into the workings of the rule of law, the substantive ends of constitutional authority, and the nature of justice and its relationship with constitutional (dis)order that speak to dilemmas confronting contemporary democracies no less than those in classical Greece.

This panel brings together scholars of ancient Greek political thought from various stages of their careers who turn to the writings of Plato and Aristotle with an eye towards questions of constitutional corruption, distributive justice, institutional design, and the legal requirements of human flourishing. Employing a range of interpretive and argumentative approaches, these papers are attuned not only to the internal philosophic and theoretical logic underpinning Plato and Aristotle’s texts, but also to the historical contexts in which they wrote, as well as to the insights they offer for contemporary debates in constitutional thought.

In “When the Connection Fails,” Jiseob Yoon interrogates processes of constitutional corruption and tyrannical encroachment. Turning to Plato’s narrative of constitutional corruption in Republic VIII, Yoon homes in on the quality of law as an often-tenuous connective tissue linking the authority of various constitutions to the relative law-abidingness of their citizens. What emerges from this account is a complex portrait of the relationship between the activity of citizens and the broader legal order under which they act, offering a view into the internal dynamics that lead the lawful kallipolis into anarchic tyranny.

Building on her scholarship on Plato’s theory of rule and office, Melissa Lane, in “Ancient and Modern Constitutionalism on the Good of the Ruled” recuperates and deploys Plato’s constitutional theory as part of a critique of the constitutional project recently advocated by Adrien Vermeule. In counterposing what she terms Plato’s “good of the ruled constitutionalism” to Vermeule’s “common good constitutionalism” Lane exposes blind spots both in Vermeule’s account as well as in prevailing distributive conceptions of equality. What Plato offers, Lane suggests, is a relational conception of equality that holds together diverse good such as health and virtue—and, in particular, friendship and freedom—that are often conceived as disparate and which are, in Vermeule’s account, altogether excluded from consideration.

Thornton Lockwood aims in “Aristotle’s (Long Lost?) Dialogue on Justice” to demonstrate the novelty of Aristotle’s account of various constitutions’ ways of distributing rule, which spans Politics 3.6-18. While scholars have long assumed a straightforward connection between these chapters of Politics 3 and Aristotle’s treatment of distributive justice in Nicomachean Ethics 5.3, Lockwood illuminates the underappreciated sophistication of the Politics’ account. In elaborating the philosophic underpinnings of arguments for various ways of distributing rule, attributed to different segments of the city (e.g. the poor, the wealthy, and the virtuous), Aristotle reconstructs a dialogue on the competing claims of justice embodied in various constitutions. In the process Aristotle builds upon and in certain ways surpasses similar efforts found in the writings of Plato and Xenophon.

In “Rule Without Justice,” Jordan Jochim likewise turns to Aristotle’s theory of just distribution in recovering his reflections on Aristotle’s own moment in political history—caught between the obsolescence of monarchies and the efflorescence of democracies—with a view towards contextualizing Aristotle’s theory of tyrannical rule. In equal measures analytic and polemical, Aristotle’s theory of tyranny, Jochim argues, serves both to analyze the authoritarian requirements of potential 4th century monarchies and to highlight the tyrannical proclivities of extreme forms of 4th century democracy. In both cases, tyrannical monarchies and tyrannical democracies share the same problem: ruling over and defending their share of power from those who take such rule to be a distributive injustice.

As discussants for these papers, this panel brings together Ella Street and Matthew Landauer, scholars, respectively, of political judgment and the popular courts of classical Athens, and of the politics of accountability and the history of the mixed constitution in ancient Greek political thought.

Sub Unit

• Division 1: Political Thought and Philosophy

Individual Presentations

• When the Connection Fails: The Function of Law in Republic VIII - Jiseob Yoon, Princeton University

• Ancient and Modern Constitutionalism on the Good of the Ruled: Plato vs. Vermeule - Melissa Lane, Princeton University

• Politics 3.6-18: Aristotle’s (Long Lost?) Dialogue on Justice - Thornton Lockwood, Quinnipiac University

Chair

• Matthew Landauer University of Chicago

Discussants

• Matthew Landauer University of Chicago

• Ella Street University of Toronto