... ideas - philosophers have become rulers, until politics is subordinated to knowledge and wisdom, to what is understood as 'philosophy.' If a state is to succeed it must be just, and therefore an understanding of what constitutes 'justice' must necessarily be undertaken before Plato's goal can be reached. Thinkers previous to Plato had placed the concept of law, legitimate only through the common consent to be governed by it, as the basis for society. The secularisation of the universe by presocratic thinkers denied a place for "...the Homeric gods and their ailled divine forces. The world as a whole was physis, whatever is, and there was in physis no place for the gods." The phrase Hall uses to describe what was known as physis - whatever is - explains much concerning the assumptions Plato was attacking. "Whatever is" places base level politics; the interaction of people with people; the realities ...

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