2024.07.3 : View this Review Online | View Recent NDPR Reviews
André Laks, Plato’s Second Republic: An Essay on the Laws, Princeton University Press, 2022, 278 pp., $35.00 (hbk), ISBN 978691233130.
Reviewed by Rachana Kamtekar, Cornell University
Plato’s Laws is a wide-ranging and complex work of political philosophy, and recognition of its significance has been on the rise in recent decades. Matching it in richness, range, and complexity, André Laks’s Plato’s Second Republic: An Essay on the Laws guides the reader through the Laws’ thinking on the work’s overarching concerns. Chapter 1 provides an initial roadmap to the Laws. Chapters 2–3 argue that the relationship of the Republic’s best city and the best city of the Laws to the constitution finally elaborated in the Laws is a relationship of paradigm to approximations of the paradigm. What is to be approximated is the divine rule of reason (as Laks translates nous). It turns out that even very close approximations may not look very…
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