The Argument and the Action of Plato's Laws [antikvár]

ForewordProfessor Strauss completed this study, his last major work, in the autumn of 1971, two years before his death. He wrote it with a lifetime of reflection on Plato behind him, and with a particular interest in the Laws that cannot have become intense more recently than the winter of 1959, when he gave a seminar on the dialogue at the University of Chicago. As the reader will perceive, this book acquires much of its inner character from its being the work of a scholar whose acquaintance with the Platonic corpus had ripened to familiarity, just as it acquires much of its external character from its being a commentary that follows its text with persistent fidelity. Coming after its author's long and serious meditation on Plato, the book will engage the attention of those who continue to entertain the question whether the Laws is not a sweeping recantation that expresses Plato's senescent disenchantment with Perfection. The epigraph to this volume suggests rather that the Laws differs from the Republic not in its sovereign conception but in its decisive if tacit theme.The account of the dialogue that is offered in the following pages has three conspicuous characteristics. First, the commentary has to a high degree the appearance of a mere retelling of the discourse. This appearance will be dispelled by comparison of the commentary with the text. In the second place, the commentary emulates faithfully the reticence of the text while striving nevertheless to elucidate Plato's thought. Finally, the language of the commentary is not always prepossessing but, on the contrary, sometimes grates. Characteristically, the reason for this is that the retelling of the discourse incorporates literal renditions of the speeches. Abruptness, some inelegance, occasional ambiguity in the commentary can be traced typically through the act of translation. The transliteration of names, except where the name of a man has been given to a dialogue, ad-vii