"Subjection for the sake of virtue": voluntary slavery in Plato's Symposium and the Laws

Thesis

What is to be made of Plato’s provocative and perplexing claim in the Laws that both Athenian citizens and citizens of Magnesia, Plato’s second-best city, should be thought of as “voluntary slaves to the laws”? How is it possible that ordinary citizens attain virtue by mimicking the subordination of those who lack the capacity for knowledge and independent reasoning? How can a state of dependence and subordination to legal authority be compatible with the acquisition of ordinary civic virtue? Approaching the Laws via the Symposium, I propose to elucidate the paradox of voluntary slavery by examining the striking but overlooked use of a similar phrase –“voluntary slavishness”– in Pausanias’s speech in Plato’s Symposium. In this novel reading of the Laws, I propose that understanding the citizens’ voluntary slavery to the laws in parallel with the beloved’s willing slavery to the lover reveals that Plato envisions ordinary citizens of Magnesia as passive beloveds. Like the beloved in Pausanias’s speech, who is permanently subjected to the training and guardianship by the lover despite being a fully-grown man, I suggest that the ordinary citizens of Magnesia are attributed a permanent status of minority and slavishness with relation to the laws because they are incapable of achieving or sustaining independent virtue. I argue that ordinary citizens of Magnesia have a status that parallels that of minors and slaves vis-à-vis the legal authority. Based on this analogy between the beloved in Pausanian paiderastia and the ordinary citizen in the Laws, I cast doubt on the idea that the Laws embodies a ‘democratic turn’ in Plato’s political thought. In contrast to much recent scholarship, I suggest that the Laws preserves, not undermines, the divide between philosophic rulers and non-philosophic ordinary citizens found in the Republic.

Authors: Lee, E

• DOI: 10.5287/ora-zg9jq7r4m
• Type of award: MPhil
• Level of award: Masters
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Keywords: Laws; virtue; Symposium; education; Plato; paiderastia; voluntary slavery
• Subjects: Philosophy, Ancient; Political science--Philosophy