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Abstract
This chapter explores the ways in which democratic Athens was pictured and criticised during the late Roman Republic (with a glance at one text written during the early Empire). I discuss Polybius, Cicero, Cornelius Nepos, Diodorus Siculus, Lucretius and Seneca. They echo and adapt Greek criticisms of democracy by Socrates, the ‘Old Oligarch’, Thucydides, Xenophon and Plato. At the same time, the Greek critics themselves do not escape correction and qualification. In their reception of Greek criticisms of democracy, the writers examined in this chapter draw attention to some important conditions for its flourishing. In this way, the reception of the debate over Athenian democracy in Rome continues to have value for those interested in understanding and preserving democracy.
Abstract
During the post-war period in France a fruitful cross-pollination took place between new approaches to ancient history and radical political theorisation. Cornelius Castoriadis and Jacques Rancière used the political culture and thought of classical Athens to explore the failings of modern societies and their democracies, while ancient historians such as Jean-Pierre Vernant, Pierre Vidal-Naquet and Nicole Loraux used the formers’ political analyses, along with other new approaches such as structuralist anthropology and psychoanalysis, to understand antiquity. Turning away from established Marxist approaches, they founded their critical analysis in ancient Greek texts, especially Plato, and the practices of Athenian direct democracy.
Abstract
This essay examines the role of histories of Greek democracy in contemporary attempts to conceptualize political alternatives and outsides to the democratic present. Focusing on historians such as Moses Finley, Paul Cartledge, and Josiah Ober, it foregrounds dēmokratia’s critical potential as formed in comparative juxtapositions, but also in what is described as relational perspectives, wherein visions of the Greek democratic past are overdetermined by crisscrossing legacies of different ages. These include a plural legacy of political modernity consisting of oppressive teleological narratives of ancient and modern European democracies, but also an ambiguous and often unruly notion of dēmokratia. The path to democracy’s critique appears here as neither a return to a distant past, nor a repudiation of dēmokratia’s futurity, but as a transformative movement and a troubling alterity, an outside to democracy that needs to be confronted, mediated, and re-appropriated into a porous and mobilised political present. This return to the Greek political legacy is no longer prophetic of a victorious future, but reflexive and ambivalent, holding on at once to the many sides, voices, and actors of stories of ancient and modern democracies.
Abstract
Ancient Greek culture and political ideas were pervasively present in early modern English education and elite culture, but in highly diffuse and mediated forms which make it difficult to trace distinctively Greek strands in early modern thought. Partly for this reason, the place of Greek thought in the English republican tradition in the seventeenth century remains contested. The chapter explores two constrasting case-studies in the republican thought of the English Revolution, looking at John Milton and James Harrington. Both authors argued for the importance of learning from the ancients, and referred to Greek political thought and constitutional ideas, but their concerns were often different. Milton’s often Aristotelian republican thought had an ethical emphasis which led both to an emphasis on individual and collective moral and political choice, and to a pervasive belief that the wise and virtuous should rule those who were less so. By contrast, Harrington drew on ancient constitutions, particularly Sparta, and developed a theory about the balance of property underpinning political power, concluding that only a democracy could be a perfect commonwealth. Both were ultimately committed to a politics of virtue resting on Greek thought; but the influence of Greek thought in this period was always complex.
Abstract
This chapter shows how the elaboration of the idea of freedom and its place in modern politics has been carried out in dialogue with ancient Greek political thought, by looking at three important, yet inadequately appreciated, texts of modern political reflection. The three texts are Leonardo Bruni’s ‘Of the republic of the Florentines’ (1439), Jean-Jacques Rousseau’ s Discourse on Political Economy (1755), and Benjamin Constant’s The Spirit of Conquest and Usurpation (1813). Despite their originality and incisive argumentation, the three sources have remained in the margins of scholarship and rhetoric on the canon of modern political thought. The paper draws attention to the texts as statements of political criticism, through which conceptions of freedom are articulated in response to the challenges of modern society.
Abstract
Aristotle’s careful treatment of diakoiosunē has continuously functioned as a natural reference point for theories of ‘justice’ the whole way down to Rawls. Hugo Grotius’s De jure belli ac pacis (1625; revised 1631) is nonetheless unusual in the explicitness with which it confronts the Greek theory. Where Aristotelian justice has reference to cultural facts, some of them not reducible to characteristics located in individuals, Grotius regards just action as a response to purely individual attributes that are derived from a God-given and pre-social order. He lacks Aristotle’s conviction that any rule-based order inevitably breaks down and must, in consequence, be modified by reference to epieikeia (equity or decency). He opens the way to the Hobbesian identification of justice with keeping of contracts and of ‘equity’ with an ethic for rights-holding contract-makers.
Abstract
The goal of this chapter is to reappraise the influence of the ancient Greek legacy on various Islamic theories about the origins of human society and political authority in the medieval and early modern periods. The endeavour to reconcile pagan learning and revealed knowledge generated diverse approaches to the evolution of human civilisation and the divine provenance of kingship. Islamic theories of social genesis are predicated on a distinct concept of social covenant that prevailed in the Islamic world long before the emergence of social contract theories in Western Europe. At the same time, it is tied to a proto-Weberian notion of charismatic leadership that stresses the ruler’s exceptional qualities and status as God’s deputy on earth that was nurtured by the teachings of Islam and coloured by the Greek and other traditions.