What Plato could teach Just Stop Oil

Just Stop Oil is complaining about laws preventing their particular form of antisocial protests. It is all part of a feeling that our world is sinking under the weight of legal rulings. Even Plato had doubts about what laws were for.

In his perfect state, Plato made education the key to everything. Its purpose, he claimed, should be to inculcate habits appropriate to age that would last a lifetime, e.g. as small children, being silent in the presence of their elders, giving up their seats to them, keeping themselves looking neat and tidy. But the last thing that was needed was to make laws about them.

So too when it came to business: honest dealing in fulfilling contracts, paying dues and so on should be ingrained. Otherwise, people would spend all their time correcting or expanding laws in an effort to achieve perfection, behaving like invalids who tried every new cure going, when it was their lifestyle which was causing the problems.

Then consider politicians, who ‘legislate for all affairs, imagining they can put an end to all the breaches of the law that they create, not knowing that the operation is about as useful as cutting off a Hydra’s head’ (a mythical many-headed monster: cut off one of its heads and two would replace it).

So too the Romans. Their earliest laws (451 bc, adapted from Athenian law) were known as the X Tables. But it took only a couple of years before they became the revered XII Tables. The historian Livy proudly commented: ‘Even in today’s world, when laws are piled on laws in jumbled heaps, they still form the source of all public and private legislation.’ Tacitus, commenting on the collapse of the republic, picked up the theme. Laws, he said, were being passed ‘not for the common interest but against particular individuals’, adding: ‘When the state was most corrupt, laws were most abundant.