Platonic Legislations is an essay in legal philosophy. The Platonic dialogues occupy the foreground, but its horizon is contemporary. The collapse of the Soviet Union ushered in a period of unprecedented ‘legal convergence’.2 There are signs that this period of post-Soviet convergence is passing—indeed, that we are witnessing the end of the post-war settlement in toto.3 It has also been argued that the late twentieth-century ‘legal state’ is being eclipsed by the steady rise of a twenty-first-century ‘security state’.4