Plato's Laws, his longest and most comprehensive work on politics, is a conversation about the purposes and limits of legislation among three old men: an Athenian Stranger, Megillus, a Spartan, and Kleinias, a Cretan. The three speak while ascending to the cave-shrine of Zeus where Kleinias hopes to receive the blessing of the god for his appointed task of drawing up a law code to govern a new colony. Until recently, the Laws was very little read, and there is still relatively little useful secondary literature on it, especially when compared to the ocean of scholarly treatments available on the far better known Republic.

Albert Keith Whitaker and Randall Baldwin Clark write from similar perspectives but with very different purposes. Whitaker's book is primarily a contribution to pedagogy: a guide to Plato's longest and most comprehensive work for beginning undergraduates. Clark's is primarily a contribution to scholarship: Clark puts Plato's arguments about persuasion and compulsion in the context of Greek medical, magical, and rhetorical writings. Both books approach Plato's Laws with an orientation determined by Leo Strauss (The Argument and the Action of Plato's Laws, 1975) and Strauss's student Thomas Pangle (The Laws of Plato, 1980). Both writers interpret not only the arguments of the principal interlocutor of the Laws, the Athenian Stranger, but also take note of the way those arguments are shaped to respond to the Athenian's two elderly conversants. For both writers, Plato is not a political idealist, neither in the Laws, with its second-best regime of private families, private property, and the rule of law, nor even in the Republic, in which Socrates propounds a best regime of communism of the family and property ruled over by philosopher-kings. For both Whitaker and Clark, as for Strauss, Plato is a critic of the thoroughgoing application of ideals to politics. Yet both of these books dissent from the rationalist ethics upheld by Strauss and (more explicitly) Pangle. Whitaker's and Clark's Plato is not only a critic of the aspiration to rationalize political life; he is also a critic of the individual's aspiration to rationalize his or her own life.

Whitaker's handbook is organized according to the 12 books of Plato's Laws, with highly valuable study questions and an outline appended. The result is not Cliff's Notes: Whitaker does not aspire to give his readers a readily digestible big picture, but he does the more useful work of pointing the committed student to the major turning points of Plato's argument. Whitaker's work would make it possible to teach the Laws to first-semester undergraduates, though the book is priced about triple the cost of the usual such supplementary text.

Despite its form as a commentary, A Journey into Platonic Poetics does present an overarching argument. Whitaker begins by repudiating reason as the sole or principal guide to human life; reason, in his view, can do no more than assist us in sifting the traditions that we have inherited from our fathers and mothers (pp. ix–x, cf. 193–95). Thomas Paine and Ronald Reagan notwithstanding, we do not have it in our power to begin the world all over again. Whitaker accepts the initial and fundamental claim of Plato's Laws that the rule of law requires religious sanction and the proper regulation of religious life. He is committed either to the notion that theocentric politics is possible for us—or even less plausibly, that there is no major difference between Plato's speakers' quest for a divinely supported law and our contemporaries' quest for a law authorized by some combination of secular naturalistic reason and popular consent.

Whitaker therefore rejects the rationalist Plato of Strauss and Pangle and their acceptance of the Socratic “paradox” that virtue is knowledge and vice, ignorance. This is not unrelated to Whitaker's other principal departure from Strauss and Pangle: His claim that the philosopher—the one who would subject every aspect of his or her life to rational criticism—is required in virtue of his or her activity as a philosopher to seek to better the community in which he or she lives (pp. 150–51). Strauss and Pangle, for their part, contend that the philosopher seeks primarily to better his own life, and acts to reform the community only insofar as is necessary to secure or improve the conditions for philosophizing. As Whitaker puts it: “If a philosopher believed that all men pursue only their self-interest [as they understand it] … then his desire to ‘cure’ his fellows—beyond his wish to avoid harm from them—would make no sense” (p. 159).

Perhaps the most striking bit in Whitaker's commentary is when he contrasts the Athenian Stranger's three accounts of education (pp. 24–30). Is education learning to live with one's fellow citizens in the best way possible, learning to love and hate the pleasures and pains that ought to be loved and hated, or learning to delight in or be pained at that which our law teaches ought to be delighted in or ought to be pained at? He attempts to harmonize the three accounts by positing the possibility of a best law under which one could be a perfect citizen (p. 29). Yet in the light of the critiques of the rule of law in Plato's Statesman and Laws, one wonders if in order to appreciate fully the seeming differences between these accounts, one must be both less sanguine about the possibilities of law and more sanguine about the possibilities of reason than is Whitaker.

For Clark in The Law Most Beautiful and Best, the Laws is not a defense of adhering to the wisdom of the fathers but a dialogue with the old, intended to be overheard by the young (pp. 8–9), in which the rightful authority of the paternal, of the aged, of the revered, is shown to be much less than the old would believe. In speaking to the old, the Athenian Stranger adopts the language of therapy, Clark shows, not only the rationalistic language of Hippocratic medicine but also the magical language of apotropaic wizardry, and the priestly language of prayer and sacrifice for the sake of bodily or mental cures. Plato's Athenian Stranger sophisticates the rationalist prescriptions of the Hippocratics with the charming language of witches, root-gatherers, priests, and Gorgianic orators. Plato thereby indicates the need to supplement the rational inquiry into the nature of human bodies and the natural forces that impinge on them with the dubious arts of wizardry or rhetoric in order to secure compliance with law. As Clark puts it, speaking in terms of the Athenian Stranger's therapeutic analogue to politics: “Because the sick are resistant to force but incapable of reason, they can only be healed by doctors whose words resemble reason even as they partake of force” (p. 133). Coercive law is needed, Clark's Plato shows, insofar as human beings are incapable of appreciating or accepting the reasons behind the law. Yet since law as such must be general, willing the sacrifice of some for the good of others, and occasionally sacrificing the good of some for the sake of a general and unchangeable legal formula, one must keep in mind the disanalogy between legislators who look out for the whole citizenry and physicians whose concern is solely for the well-being of their individual patient (see my “Plato's Eleatic and Athenian Sciences of Politics,” Review of Politics 61 [1999]: 57–84, esp. 79–80). For Clark, the rational inquiry into nature requires the assistance of magic, drugs, and rhetoric to stabilize politics because the soul, on which speech impinges, is not natural but other than, and potentially defiant of, nature, even as Socrates' prescriptions for communism of the family and of property in the Republic are not natural but prescriptions for the freedom of the rational soul to impose rational order on nature (pp. 90–91, 93).

While both books engage with a fair range of scholarship (Clark's more formally and fully than Whitaker's, in keeping with their distinct aims), neither makes reference to the massive and complex work on the Laws by another of Strauss's students, the late classicist Seth Benardete (Plato's Laws: The Discovery of Being, 2000). Nor does either book make real use of the most valuable recent work on the Laws outside of the Straussian orientation, the series of papers by André Laks (including “The Laws” in the Cambridge History of Greek and Roman Political Thought, 2000; and “Legislation and Demiurgy: On the Relationship Between Plato's Republic and Laws,” Classical Antiquity 9 [1990]: 209–29). Nonetheless, both books, like the text they exposit, open the reader up to fundamental philosophical questions about the relation between soul and body and the place of human beings in the natural order. Both discuss the ways these questions erupt into our life together in the interaction or conflict between social norms and the “erotic necessities” of sexuality (homo- as well as hetero-). Whitaker, in addition, shows how for Plato, political life must not only contain within it a view of the divine; at its highest, it makes possible the rational inquiry into the divine, or divine science. It is the very distance between that understanding and our own that threatens, despite the efforts of Whitaker and Clark and the labors of those scholars who preceded them, to make reading the Laws, for all the book's manifest difficulties and hidden beauties, no more than antiquarian tourism.