Key Arguments

• First ‘rub out the picture’ of current laws and manners to obtain a clean tablet before inscribing new laws.
• Legislators must repeatedly compare ‘absolute justice and beauty and temperance’ with the ‘human copy’ to guide design.
• They ‘mingle and temper’ life’s elements to the right image and ‘erase’ or ‘put in’ features to align human ways with divine order.
• This distinguishes them from ordinary lawgivers and justifies entrusting them with the city.

Source Quotes

But how will they draw out the plan of which you are speaking? They will begin by taking the State and the manners of men, from which, as from a tablet, they will rub out the picture, and leave a clean surface. This is no easy task.

This is no easy task. But whether easy or not, herein will lie the difference between them and every other legislator,—they will have nothing to do either with individual or State, and will inscribe no laws, until they have either found, or themselves made, a clean surface. They will be very right, he said.

No doubt. And when they are filling in the work, as I conceive, they will often turn their eyes upwards and downwards: I mean that they will first look at absolute justice and beauty and temperance, and again at the human copy; and will mingle and temper the various elements of life into the image of a man; and this they will conceive according to that other image, which, when existing among men, Homer calls the form and likeness of God. Very true, he said.

Very true, he said. And one feature they will erase, and another they will put in, until they have made the ways of men, as far as possible, agreeable to the ways of God? Indeed, he said, in no way could they make a fairer picture.

Indeed, he said, in no way could they make a fairer picture. And now, I said, are we beginning to persuade those whom you described as rushing at us with might and main, that the painter of constitutions is such an one as we are praising; at whom they were so very indignant because to his hands we committed the State; and are they growing a little calmer at what they have just heard? Much calmer, if there is any sense in them.

Key Concepts

• they will rub out the picture, and leave a clean surface
• will inscribe no laws, until they have either found, or themselves made, a clean surface
• they will first look at absolute justice and beauty and temperance, and again at the human copy
• mingle and temper the various elements of life into the image of a man
• one feature they will erase, and another they will put in, until they have made the ways of men, as far as possible, agreeable to the ways of God
• the painter of constitutions

Context

Concludes with a constructive, form-guided method for founding and reforming constitutions.

Perspectives

Plato

This is paradigmatic legislation: the city is crafted by measured imitation of the Forms.

Socrates

Stresses methodological discipline—erase distortions, then design by continual reference to the intelligible model.