Abstract

Due to the influence of his Republic Plato has been labeled a totalitarian, too easily dismissive of privacy and especially the ties of conjugal and parental love in his zealous quest for an ideal state. But the Republic is not Plato's only major work of political philosophy. By carefully studying the "second-best" city described in Plato's Laws, and in particular the laws on marriage, this dissertation controverts the claim that Plato was ignorant of the strength and importance of familial bonds and challenges the view that Plato wrote his great political works with a view to political reform. This reading approaches the Laws not as a mute antiquity nor as a muddled product of Plato's decline but as a theoretical work of the highest order, one which offers trans-historical answers to these enduring questions: what is the relation between the family and the political community? what can we learn about the roots of family life from considering marriage and property? and what is the place of religious worship in the family? All three of these queries bear directly upon the overarching question of the inquiry: what can the Laws teach us about the natural roots and the political foundation of the family? Plato's account reflects with great delicacy and perspicacity the complex interaction of nature and convention in the institution of the family; it illuminates the natural human longings which goad us to marry and raise our own children while also instructing the reader in how these longings provoke and also restrain subsequent civic legislation. Finally, the Laws subtly but firmly indicates what part of these longings are reasonable, and what unreasonable, thereby in a Socratic fashion forcing the reader to reconsider his allegiance to what hitherto he has considered "his own."