Robert Ballingall’s Plato’s Reverent City, which unearths the key elements of Plato’s teaching in the Laws on the virtue of reverence and its use for the political art, is a book elegant in both presentation and argumentation. It should benefit a variety of readers, from students of Platonic political philosophy to those reflecting on political leadership more generally. Ballingall opens by interpreting this virtue’s opposite quality: we live in an order that celebrates the vice of irreverence and has neglected, or forgotten, the proper place of shame in healthy politics. But reverence, “the virtue of ethical learners,” is needed insofar as it regulates shame and awe in ways conducive to political virtue. “When felt appropriately, these passions bring home to us our own imperfection, our need of improvement, and the necessity of looking beyond ourselves for the leadership and discipline on which our improvement depends” (6). Ballingall’s study therefore speaks to the nature of authority and its function in leadership for good ends, a theme especially pertinent to readers today. Although it may be democratic regimes in which effective leadership is most badly needed, it is amidst more pervasively egalitarian conditions, emblematic of democracies, where the fixed hierarchy of leadership raises an eyebrow most of all. How to inspire citizens to follow those with the vision to see farther and more lucidly than they do, when the governing assumption of political society is equality? Yet as Ballingall asserts, the virtue of reverence, which buttresses authority, benefits us by stabilizing political leadership: “Authority thus presupposes something like reverence, a prosthesis for moderation disposing the ruled to suppress the envy that the more admirable naturally awaken” (9). In short, this book identifies our liberal disquiet with reverence as one underlying reason why we may feel a crisis of confidence in leaders, and makes a sound case for how Plato’s ancient teaching accounts for the structure of political life generally, transcending the world of the polis and speaking to our modern experience.

Building on Paul Woodruff’s pathbreaking work on reverence, on one hand, and Straussian interpretations of Plato, on the other, Ballingall develops his argument tightly through some of the most illuminating themes in the Laws. These include the Athenian Stranger’s insistence that we humans touch godlikeness, paradoxically, by respecting human limits and refusing to act like a god (44, 152); the question of utopianism in Plato’s final dialogue, through which the author presents an ingenious commentary on Plato’s views of the relationship between various “best regimes” and real politics (79, 99–102); Plato’s qualified “rehabilitation” of tragedy due to its effectiveness in inculcating reverence within the audience (112); and the manner in which greater attention to reverence enlarges our concept of the relationship between political virtue and philosophic virtue (184–85). This last theme contains, to my mind, one of two significantly novel claims in the book. Reverence, Ballingall argues, is not only essential to grasping Plato’s views on how philosophy and politics are related; it is—stated more strongly and contra arguments by Straussian interpreters like Arthur Melzer—also that in “reverence … philosophy and politics, theory and practice, display a surprising kinship” (197; see also 25, 209). While it is true that the author remains sensitive to Socratic arguments, especially in the context of his discussion of the critique of tragedy in the Republic (111–17), still it would be illuminating to hear more from Ballingall about whether one might apply Plato’s teaching on reverence in the Laws to the Platonic corpus more widely. After all, is Socrates not the quintessential figure who embodied the way of life implied by the phrase “question authority,” having gotten in trouble in Athens precisely for his irreverent questioning?

The other significantly novel argument, to my mind, is that Plato’s Laws shows that reverence should operate as the pre-eminent political virtue, rather than courage, which is the virtue identified by many other interpreters of the dialogue as central. To Ballingall, however, the necessities of good politics demand that political “courage must be built on top of ethical humility” (22). The Athenian Stranger, for his part, famously calls the “the founding of cities … the most perfect of all tests of manly virtue (ἀρετὴν ἀνδρῶν)” (708d), suggesting the importance of courage for lawgiving and pointing the way toward another set of questions to raise for the author to consider. What can Plato’s Laws tell us about where a healthy attitude of reverence comes from in the first place? Relatedly, how do we regain a general attitude of reverence in political society once it has been lost? For Ballingall asserts that, as “a virtue, reverence seems to have disappeared” (1). Speaking to contemporary political conditions, the assertion implies that this vanishing virtue had been there before, to some extent or another, and somewhat recently. One problem for us, grappling with our political condition, is that irreverence has been baked into modernity by the conscious design of its forebears, such as in Machiavelli’s bold promotion of irreverence with respect to the absolute value of moral truths, as well as in Hobbes’s teaching on the human good, and others. Another is that the Athenian Stranger indicates throughout the dialogue just how hard it is to reform people who have become set in their ways. Ballingall’s discussion of drinking parties and drunkenness in chapter 5 (160–85) is especially interesting on these questions, and it speaks to Plato’s thinking on the matter of political reform in his final dialogue. We readers would benefit to discover what political education adapted to the paradigm of a drinking party looks like more completely, whether a kind of drunkenness can bring citizens to—or back to—reverence, and whether the condition of drunkenness can be achieved through means other than the symposiarch’s diluted wine. Given the formidable strengths of Plato’s Reverent City, one may easily assume that Ballingall’s answers to such questions would be highly illuminating.