<i>Of Rule and Office: Plato’s Ideas of the Political</i>

Plato can easily appear to be a theorist untouched by anything like an “ideal of limited constitutional government” (5), one interested not in the institutional limitation of those in political power but simply in whether those in political power have the appropriate political expertise. Melissa Lane’s book Of Rule and Office shows just how deeply this appearance risks distorting our perspective: Lane’s Plato is deeply concerned with what she calls “the Juvenal conundrum” (6)—that is, how to ensure that roles of rule are appropriately delimited, filled, and controlled so as to foster the good of the ruled—and while Plato’s preferred solution to this conundrum does indeed involve entrusting the city to unaccountable expert rulers (what Lane calls “safeguarding rulers” [218]), he nonetheless recognizes the need for and importance of legally regulated accountable offices, not only in the second-best, nonideal city (of the Laws) but even in the ideal city (of the Republic); moreover, in Lane’s view, even the safeguarding rulers, while not accountable, still occupy legally delimited roles designed to help keep them trained on the good of the ruled. Plato, in short, is much more of an institutionalist than one might have thought.Lane builds up this picture in four parts.The first part is introductory, initiating us into the project (chap. 1) and providing the required conceptual, linguistic, cultural, and methodological background (chap. 2). It is here that Lane introduces and develops two distinctions that figure extensively in her study. First, she takes archē (and cognates) to be systematically ambiguous between a generic sense (“rule”) and a specific sense (“office”): while any epitactic or order-giving role counts as rule, only such roles as are rendered (sufficiently) accountable through a set of appropriate limits or parameters (paradigmatically in the form of procedural audits) count as offices. Second, Lane distinguishes between what she calls the taxis and telos of rule: the telos is the end toward which ruling is oriented—ultimately, on Plato’s view, the good of the ruled—while the taxis is the way rule is organized so as to contribute to this telos.The second part traces Plato’s constructive treatment of rule and office—the telos and taxis of rule and office as they should be exemplified—in the political theory of the Laws (chap. 3), Statesman (chap. 4), and Republic (chaps. 5–7). The Laws turns out to be quite traditional in its configuration of offices, more notable for the seriousness with which Plato takes the goal of the cultivation of virtue than for its relatively minor institutional innovations (90). Perhaps most surprising in Lane’s account is that the members of her Nocturnal Council are neither officeholders nor (mere) rulers: lacking any epitactic powers, they act merely as “guardians of the spirit of the laws” (111), a kind of collective constitutional conscience. The thesis is highly intriguing, though it does force some strained readings (e.g., of 968a1–4 and 968a7 [113]).By contrast to the council of the Laws, Lane takes the eponymous figure of the Statesman to exercise a kind of constitutional guardianship that, while not an office, is a genuine role of rule. The most original feature of her discussion is likely the (confessedly speculative) suggestion that the statesman leaves mechanisms such as election for the selection of officeholders intact, playing only an indirect role in selection by “set[ting] up background conditions for the activity of others” (135).Lane sees the basic pattern drawn in the Statesman—of a safeguarding, nonofficeholding ruler who maintains the orientation of the system of offices toward the good of the ruled—realized in detail in the Republic: the philosopher kings and queens of the Republic are nonofficeholding rulers whose function does not displace that of officeholders but is primarily focused on maintaining the educational system and the selection of who will be promoted to offices and to their own ranks. According to Lane, the Republic recognizes roles subordinate to that of the philosopher kings and queens as offices, since they are subject to parameters such as a definite process of selection, eligibility requirements, and limited powers (215). These are the roles held by the cohort of guardians aged thirty-five to fifty (217). More provocatively, Lane also suggests that the philosopher kings and queens are ultimately not so different from these officeholding subordinates: “While not officeholders,” she says, they “are nevertheless distinguished by limits that serve some of the same functions as those typically found in Greek offices” (222).The third part of the book describes Plato’s theory of what happens when rule and office fail to be appropriately configured, as we find it in the twin and parallel narratives of the degeneration of city (chap. 8) and soul (chap. 9) in the Republic. Perhaps the most significant thesis to emerge from her treatment of these narratives is that the two principles that drive the degeneration of the city, what she calls the Predominance principle and the Disunity principle, concern specifically offices and officeholders, rather than rulers generally. Lane takes the text introducing the Disunity principle to explicitly make this restriction—notwithstanding that it creates difficulties for herself, since she thinks the rulers in Kallipolis are not officeholders (271–72). In Lane’s view, this surprising restriction is at least partially explained by the fact that in the degenerate regimes, all rulers are mere officeholders at best (270). This claim, however, is somewhat surprising, as it seems to ignore what Aristotle calls “indefinite office,” the sort of position held by the democratic assemblyman (Pol. 3.1, 1275a26–33). This problem is obscured by Lane’s concession that Plato means to include those eligible for office, as well as those currently holding office, in the Disunity principle, since in Plato’s democracy (unlike the real Athens) everyone is eligible for office (270). This gets the right answer extensionally, but remains unsatisfying: surely disunity in the assembly as such—that is, not merely qua collection of potential officeholders—is relevant to explaining degeneration, yet the role of rule exercised by assemblymen as such is passed over by Lane’s Disunity principle. One worries that Lane here is clinging more tenaciously to her rule of thumb that archai (in the plural) means “offices” (43) than the text will bear.The book’s fourth and final part defends two general theses about rule and office. One of these concerns the source of the important social goods of civic freedom and friendship for Plato: according to Lane, these rest on a general willingness to obey rulers, in turn grounded in a general cooperativeness, that is often (but not necessarily) the result of a constitutional order of law and office (chap. 10). The other concerns Plato’s attitude toward anarchy as a political ideal: Lane’s Plato views external or political rule as necessary and good precisely to the extent that souls are unable to rule themselves, so that, while he holds out as an ideal the philosopher who does not need to be politically ruled, he embraces the necessity and goodness of political rule in a world in which not all are philosophers (chap. 11). Unfortunately, Lane only really defends half of this very interesting thesis: While she makes clear why a lack of self-rule creates a need for external rule, she does not make clear why there is no need for external rule for the well-ordered soul. (One would have thought that even a city of philosophers would need to solve coordination problems.)As this highly compressed and selective conspectus indicates, Lane’s study covers an impressive amount of ground. This scope is often a strength—but it is also sometimes a weakness. For example, Lane follows the degeneration of both city and soul in exceedingly close detail, following Plato’s narrative minutely and in order (or reverse order, in the case of the soul), rather than allowing her original theses to organize and constrain her treatment. The result is a certain lack of focus, as issues peripheral to Lane’s own main concerns and contentions crowd in and receive lengthier treatment than they perhaps deserve. The effects of this somewhat unfocused approach are exacerbated by a general lack of tightness in Lane’s prose that sometimes makes her discussion unnecessarily drawn out and difficult to follow.A more substantive issue is that the analytical machinery Lane deploys is in some respects underdeveloped. For example, it can be difficult to pin down exactly what Lane means by taxis, notwithstanding its status as her own term of art (27). Most usually, it refers to the order of a constitutional system as a whole: Lane introduces it as “an ordered set of roles and relationships … through which the telos might be achieved” (18). But immediately before this description, it appears to describe the order belonging to a given particular role of ruling: Rule, she says, is “a relationship between a ruler and one or more persons ruled, which can be characterized in terms of two dimensions: a telos … and a taxis” (17–18). This makes it seem as though any given relationship of rule is partially defined by the taxis of that relationship. Again, while typically used with reference to the institutional design of roles of rule, it sometimes seems to describe any sort of order in ruling, even if entirely self-imposed (123–24, 243). And, while usually the order that defines particular roles (or systems of roles), it is sometimes the order that belongs to rule as such (123–24). Finally, Lane sometimes uses taxis to describe not the order that delimits the ruler’s role but the order that the ruler imposes (44, 49, 52, 170). Such instability threatens to undermine the purpose of introducing terms of art in the first place.Similarly, there seems to have been a missed opportunity to develop a vocabulary that would have allowed for a more precise categorization and understanding of the different kinds of limits on rule. For example, one thing that emerges gradually from Lane’s discussion is that, although (at least in some moods) she is willing to countenance any sort of constitutional limitation on rule as conferring (some) accountability (5, 14), limits enforceable by an independent agent carry a special weight, since it turns out to be the lack of such enforceability that explains why safeguarding rulers are not officeholders (222, 231). But while we get considerable piecemeal discussion of various limits on rule, there is little discussion about what is distinctive of enforceable limits and the different ways and degrees in which a limit might be enforceable. Developing such a finer-grained analysis would have helped clarify the force and significance of the contrast between office and (mere) rule.Notwithstanding these shortcomings, Lane’s book remains a major contribution to our understanding of Plato’s political thought, whose fresh perspective has the potential to give new and exciting directions to Platonic scholarship for years to come.