Drawing Rein: Shame and Reverence in Plato’s Law-Bound Polity and Ours

Abstract

Political commentators claim that the rule of law relies, in part, on those bound by law having a sense of shame. I elucidate shame’s underlying structure and its role in law’s rule through a study of aidōs in Plato’s Laws and Phaedrus. The Greek aidōs names a feeling in which one pulls back from violating a limit. It signifies shame, but also reverence, awe, and modesty. I argue that aidōs is an affect in which we pause before limits and are invited to a perception of the whole, whether it be our lives or the polity or the cosmos, which animates and is constituted by those limits. I then identify an implicit sense of aidōs in the Laws: reverence for the law-bound polity as a fragile whole. Such reverence shares shame’s bare structure, but offers affective support for law’s rule that is less vulnerable to shame’s moralizing and exclusionary effects.