Resumen de Civic piety: Plato and reverence for the rule of law

Nina Valiquette Moreau

• The Platonic dialogues provide a pronounced critique of the Athenian assembly, where public deliberation and contestation conditioned decision-making, and mass opinion acted as a basis for sound judgment. On this assessment, the very problem of political judgment thus arises from the coercion made possible by sustaining the conditions of political freedom. This article suggests, however, that whereas the assembly was the locus of Plato's democratic anxieties, he identified in the popular law-courts an alternative, non-deliberative and non-contestatory means of forming citizen judgment, through the inculcation of a civic piety predicated on a kind of agnostic reverence for the rule of law.