Law and economics: the Nomoi
The Nomoi (it is best to retain the Greek name because our meaning of ‘Laws’ is quite different) constitute Plato’s last and longest work. In dialogical form, the founding of a new state or a more or less independent colony is discussed, and an ideal or model constitution and laws, including detailed codification-like catalogues, is outlined.
The Nomoi are the logical place to look for law and economics principles, because they are immensely practical, as anyone who has ever been actively involved in law-making will observe. They offer motives and foundations as well as a systematical, finalized legal catalogue regulating phenomena that usually have to be regulated today as well, and in almost all important areas of modern legal order. They are also Plato’s most realistic work - not less so because it is a utopian book, but more so, as a utopia with realistic goals that are only communicated in specific ways.Nevertheless, according to Ryle (1967) no ‘modern statesman or political theorist would suggest remodelling Canada, say, or Russia or Ghana according to the prescriptions of the Laws - or even retrospectively, Macedon or Rome’. After all, the Nomoi are a ‘would-be practicable plan’ (Ryle, 1967: 332). The Nomoi, too, are, as Hans-Georg Gadamer says, ‘an immense utopia’ and like the Politeia, ‘an educational state’ (Gadamer, 1991a: 288-9; see passim). The Nomoi, in short, are Plato’s classical utopia, which has only been obscured by the long-lasting miscasting of the Politeia in that role. The key to understanding the Politeia, however, lies in Gadamer’s interpretation of the dialogue as a heuristic utopia, that is, as a utopia in the sense of the presentation of a non-existent ideal state which is never supposed to be realized; indeed, which should not even be approximated (Gadamer, 1934, 1991a; see also Drechsler, 1998, 2002a).1