Indeed, arête is impossible without political life in Aristotle’s political thought. Humanity’s perfection, for Aristotle, emanated from humanity’s political (or social) nature which leads to the formation of political community and fulfilled life therein consummated through arête and phronesis. man, when perfected, is the best of animals, but when separated from law and justice, he is the worst of all.” As Giorgio Agamben aptly summarized, “The Greeks had no single word to express what we mean by the word ‘life.’” The differentiation between fulfilled life and bare life in the realm of the political is visible from Plato’s most famous student, Aristotle, who wrote that the emergence of the state comes from the “bare needs of life.
Greek philosophy held a distinction between bios and zoē between fulfilled life and bare life. This is the fundamental question that Plato examines in the dialogue. The trial of Socrates, therefore, is also the trial to determine where sovereign power lay: the state or the person. More precisely, through the conversations between Crito and Socrates and Socrates’ imagined discourse with the Laws the dialogue deals with an examination of the nature of life and sovereignty which are intertwined with law, community, and the human person. Yet the heart of the dialogue, the discourse on the Laws, concerns itself with the relationship of the person (Socrates) to the sovereign nature of law in political life. The common reading of the Crito asserts that the dialogue examines the nature of just and unjust laws with contingent concerns for how a person should respond to the laws they find themselves subject to.
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