The democratic ethical grounding of law in Plato's Laws
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Abstract
In this article, we propose to offer a different reading from the traditional reading of Plato's political theory, which maintains that politics and law find their grounding in the knowledge of the philosopher king. For this, we take the Laws that, according to our view, provide a political theory that challenges this traditional interpretation. According to our vision, in this work Plato establishes that law and the political regime find their bases in the dógma póleos koinón (I 644d1-4) or public opinion. Thus, from reading the Laws, we can establish that: the law is conceptualized as a dógma or a system of common beliefs, the dógma is an expression of social practices and opinions and, therefore, conclude that the dógma bases the law on the people's convention. The law, then, has an ascending grounding that comes from the people, which is who grants it legitimacy through acceptance and public discussion of the legal regime.
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