In Chapter 4, I offer a new theory of citizen power. Every adult male citizen would have been free, but this also made him kurios, or empowered, as opposed to ceding his power to a slave master. When substantivized, kurios indicated a male citizen’s institutionalized role as the head of a household. The lens of the household kurios generates an understanding of citizen power that encompasses both private and public domains. Not simply power as domination, kurios also indicated a shared power to act. As a conceptual metaphor, kurios was applied to the political sphere and structured thought across these different domains. Thus, qualities of the term kurios in its original domain, the household, corresponded systemically in the applied domain, the city. The laws and the corporate citizen body, too, were understood as kurioi. While there may be competing claims to power, the identification of the citizen as sharing in power with and through the laws and the dēmos is distinct from the modern conception of the individual versus the state. The negotiation of power in this way has repercussions for debates regarding sovereignty and the rule of law.

Chapter 5 seeks to orient the ordinary and legal concepts of hate speech. Section 5.2 uncovers various ways in which the ordinary and legal concepts of hate speech come together, including in terms of the kinds of speech they both count as hate speech. In Section 5.3, however, we turn to consider the potential sources of divergence between the ordinary and legal concepts of hate speech including the differing social functions or purposes played by the two concepts. Section 5.4 addresses the nature of the relationship and interaction between the ordinary and legal concepts of hate speech. Finally, in Section 5.5 we try to show why theoretical disagreements about the relationship between the ordinary and legal concepts of hate speech matter. In particular, we argue that uncovering these deeper disagreements can help to explain both the source of some academic controversies about the legitimacy of hate speech laws and the source of some wider public debates about the rights and wrongs of social media platform content policies on hate speech.

Multilevel multicomponent complex adaptive systems are not reducible to the sum of the causal effects of independent variables. Causal inference, which has a privileged place in contemporary IR (and many other social sciences) cannot address systems effects, which arise from interdependent elements and operations (not the impact of independent variables on dependent variables). Systems effects explanations explain why by showing how. They identify mechanisms and processes of causation. They thus are able to establish causal efficacy; that is, show how processes produce – actually cause – outcomes (rather than merely identify some elements that are part of an unspecified causal process). Such an understanding leads us away from a “laws and theories” conception of science, which remains popular in Physics and Chemistry, towards a “models and mechanisms” understanding, which predominates in the life sciences (which, on their face, seem a much better model for the social sciences).

For Aristotle, the main thing to grasp about a child is what it is not – a creature that has not yet reached the age of reason: childish. But Heraclitus had exploited that ‘deficit’ view of childhood to create characteristic paradoxes in which he exhibits children as however also wiser and sharper than adults. In one of his most enigmatic aphorisms (Fr. 52), he represents the dynamism that propels and sustains us right through life as that of a child at play. After analysis of that paradox and other Heraclitean sayings about children, the chapter turns to Plato’s interest in children and their play, and to his no less paradoxical thesis in the Laws that what, if anything, is truly serious in human life is playful activity, conceived as participation in the ordered play of the gods. We see here an anticipation of Huizinga’s thesis (in Homo Ludens) that in application of the concept of play lies the route to understanding not only children’s games and the place of sport in the lives of adults, but all of what may be regarded as the higher forms of culture, not least law and religious ritual.

This volume offers perspectives on examples of key ingredients in Plato’s writing: particularly of argument, allegory, images, and myth, of intertextuality, and of paradox, but also his characterization of speakers he portrays in dialogue, now through narration, now direct dramatic presentation, and his assumed readerships. All the essays included were prompted by perception of something problematic: either in a passage within a dialogue itself, or in the way scholarship had tackled or failed to tackle a topic. First come three approaching the corpus as a whole, three different vantage points. The next group of three focus on arguments and disputants within the overall argumentative structure of three very different dialogues: Gorgias, Cratylus, and Parmenides. A third group contains two studies of celebrated imaginative fictions – the Noble Lie and the Cave – that perform key but unstraightforward roles in the philosophical strategy of the Republic. The final six chapters discuss the Laws. They explore further literary and philosophical dimensions of Plato’s writing in the last and longest of his dialogues, nowadays yielding up more philosophical rewards than was once the case.

Two intimately related topics are explored here. First is a focus on the different addresses Plato conceives of in writing the Laws. The limitations in understanding of his ‘naïve’ audiences are what are most strongly emphasized: in the first instance the elderly and insular interlocutors Cleinias and Megillus, but by implication the citizens of the community Cleinias is imagined as helping to construct, and first time readers of the dialogue itself. Those limitations will be registered by more ‘practised’ readers. For that more practised readership, some more challenging passages of writing are supplied, with sufficiently indicative reminiscences of more intellectually demanding treatments of subject matter and styles of argument familiar elsewhere in the dialogues. Second is the dominant religious framework within which the Laws mostly operates, which acts as prime vehicle for its philosophical limitation. I illustrate this principally by examination of a passage in Book 4 which includes a myth about the primeval god Cronos, but also by discussion of the strenuously argued cosmic theology of Book 10.

Aristotle complained that though the original intention of the Laws was to institute a form of political system ‘more common’ to cities (presumably ‘more capable of being shared in’ by political communities generally), the social and political system Plato actually worked out in the dialogue turned out in the end not very different from the ideal articulated in the Republic. This chapter agrees with Aristotle’s identification of two projects in the Laws. But it argues that Plato makes it clear that the dialogue needs to develop (in relatively idealizing mode) a scheme for producing a citizenry educated for virtue as its primary aim, but that as a subordinate task it must also provide a constitutional framework that has sound empirical and historical credentials and a system of law providing for coercion as well as persuasion. There is just not much supply of persons eager to be as good as possible as fast as possible, and for the ‘tough eggs’ among them an elaborate penal system has to be devised. How Plato delivers on these two projects is then explored in some detail. The chapter concludes by sketching in summary the way both are fitted into a single plan.

This chapter takes a fresh look at the marionette image introduced by Plato in a famous passage of Book 1 of the Laws, as he undertakes to explain the bearing of self-rule upon virtue (644b–645e). I argue that the reader of the passage is first offered a cognitive model of a unitary self, presided over by reasoning – which prompts bafflement in the Athenian Visitor’s interlocutors. The marionette image then in effect undermines that model, by portraying humans as passive subjects of contrary controlling impulses determining their behaviour. Finally the image is complicated and in the end transcended by reintroduction of reasoning as a special kind of divinely inspired impulse, with which one must actively cooperate if animal impulses are to be mastered. I examine the way Plato’s reference at this point to law (where there is a key translation problem) should be understood to bear upon the nature of the reasoning in question. In conclusion, I comment on what light is thrown by the marionette passage on self-rule, as we have been promised.

The Laws makes clear its commitment to a form of Socratic paradox: no one who is unjust is so voluntarily. I show first how its protagonist – the Athenian Visitor – maintains this position, without resorting to the Socratic thesis that knowingly acting against one's beliefs about what is best is some sort of impossibility, and indeed recognizing the phenomenon of cognitive dissonance. My main concern, however, is with the Athenian's treatment – near the outset of the penology of Book 9 – of what is presented as a serious threat posed by the paradox to any viable theory of criminal behaviour and its punishment; or as he puts it, to the distinction drawn 'in every city and by every legialator there has ever been between two sorts of wrongdoing (adikêmata), voluntary and involuntary'. The Athenian's strategy for resisting the threat (as most commentators note) relies on distinguishing between volutarily harming someone, which requires compensation and often purification, and involuntary commission of injustice, which merits punishment, reconceptualized however as treatment for psychic disease. How far this distinction is successful in defusing the problem is then explored.

In 2005, voters in Zimbabwe performed their civic duty in the seventh election since 1980. The preceding three years were crucial to understanding the 2005 election. Many sources of violence existed in this intervening time, influenced by the referendum vendetta, the continuing land reform process, and the apparent bitterness engendered by the 2000 and 2002 election outcomes. It was crystal clear that Zanu PF’s first weapon of choice in elections was stick rather than carrot. Zanu PF viewed MDC voters as minors and Western stooges and its own supporters as adults of unquestionable loyalty and obedience. State patronage and state-sponsored violence had always taken centre stage before, during and after elections. The violent May 2005 Operation Murambatsvina was a largely state-sponsored campaign (with support from some businesses) to stifle dissent and independent economic and political activity in the country’s urban areas. The main victims of Murambatsvina were younger and unemployed, whom state security agents saw as potential recruits for social unrest. The extent of Zimbabwe’s poor human rights record was exposed by new information technology and increased reporting. As Zimbabwe prepared for the 31 March 2005 parliamentary election, Zanu PF’s campaign was decidedly violent and anti-Western.

On 29 March 2008, Zimbabwe’s ninth poll took place. Zanu PF felt insecure being in power, legitimised by only 47 and 19.5 per cent in the 2005 parliamentary and senate election, respectively. Following changes to the Constitution of Zimbabwe in September 2007, the electorate was asked to vote for a set of four political representatives for: president, parliament, senate and local government council. The 2008 socio-economic contexts showed that the electoral playing field and election processes and outcomes echoed excesses of previous flawed elections. The 29 March and 27 June 2008 elections were critical watershed moments in that while the March elections were the most peaceful (and even enjoyable) since the genesis of Zimbabwe’s mega-crisis in 2000, the June run-off will go down in history as the bloodiest since independence. The pre-poll arena for the harmonised elections had hallmarks of a rigged election, especially the use of state-financed patronage, poor voter education, the decrepit state of the voters’ roll and the violent pronouncements by members of the military-security sector, all of which skewed the playing field in favour of the incumbent regime.

This chapter turns from France to Scotland and from natural philosophy to moral philosophy. Through an examination of a number of leading Scots moral philosophers, we examine the impact of experimental philosophy on the project of the science of man in the Scotland of the eighteenth century. While it is incorrect to speak a movement of experimental moral philosophy in eighteenth-century Scotland, the impact of this new approach to natural philosophy is evident in its critique of speculation and hypotheses, in the roles that moral philosophers accorded to experiment and observation, in the rudimentary philosophy of experiment found in the writings of David Hume, and in the attempts by Scottish moral philosophers, such as George Turnbull, to apply the method of natural history and to incorporate analogues of physical laws in their theories. This chapter provides us with ample evidence for the claim that experimental philosophy had a decisive impact on the development of Scottish moral philosophy of the eighteenth century.