Drechsler, Wolfgang --- "Plato (c. 427–349 BC)" [2005] ELECD 174; in Backhaus, G. Jürgen (ed), "The Elgar Companion to Law and Economics, Second Edition" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2005)

Book Title: The Elgar Companion to Law and Economics, Second Edition

Editor(s): Backhaus, G. Jürgen

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9781845420321

Section: Chapter 50

Section Title: Plato (c. 427–349 BC)

Author(s): Drechsler, Wolfgang

Number of pages: 7

Extract:

50 Plato (c. 427­349 BC)
Wolfgang Drechsler


Introduction
To let law and economics begin, not in the late 1950s in Chicago, but some
2300 years earlier in Athens (Athens, Greece, that is), and with Plato in
particular, runs the risk of attracting a certain amount of derision. First, it
seems to cater to the cliché of letting everything begin with the ancient
Greeks (`Already Aristotle has said ...'), as an educated-bourgeois equivalent
to the late Soviet praxis of having everything begin with Marx or Lenin.
Second, Plato of all thinkers seems to be an odd choice as the founding father
of the decidedly realist approach of law and economics, because it is his
student Aristotle who is universally regarded as the first economist (after all,
he first coined the term in his Politika) as well as the original realist. Plato, in
contrast, has the image of an aristocratic abstract theorist, dwelling in a world
of ideas.
However, the mental framework within which Western (and, to a certain
extent, global) civilization in the late twentieth century operates is indeed
based on and still substantially determined by the ancient Greek one. Plato's
thought (as well as Platonism, although that is another matter) provides us
with an original structure with which (rather than about which) we invariably
still think. Second, the `real world' as such, as well as its legal systems and its
economies, are arguably actually Aristotelian, and there is good reason for
recognizing in Plato the master of theory ...