Citizens to Lords: A Social History of Western Political Thought from Antiquity to the Late Middle Ages
Language: English
Pages: 256
ISBN: 1844677060
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
In this groundbreaking work, Ellen Meiksins Wood rewrites the history of political theory. She traces the development of the Western tradition from classical antiquity through to the Middle Ages in the perspective of social history—a significant departure not only from the standard abstract history of ideas but also from other contextual methods.
Treating canonical thinkers as passionately engaged human beings, Wood examines their ideas not simply in the context of political languages but as creative responses to the social relations and conflicts of their time and place. She identifies a distinctive relation between property and state in Western history and shows how the canon, while largely the work of members or clients of dominant classes, was shaped by complex interactions among proprietors, labourers and states. Western political theory, Wood argues, owes much of its vigour, and also many ambiguities, to these complex and often contradictory relations.
From the Ancient Greek polis of Plato, Aristotle, Aeschylus and Sophocles, through the Roman Republic of Cicero and the Empire of St Paul and St Augustine, to the medieval world of Averroes, Thomas Aquinas and William of Ockham, Citizens to Lords offers a rich, dynamic exploration of thinkers and ideas that have indelibly stamped our modern world.
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Spectacularly brutal in pursuit of their aims; and nothing in their democratic culture precluded such brutality. The two faces of Athenian democracy would be eloquently captured by the historian, Thucydides, in two of the most famous passages in his History of the Peloponnesian War. In Pericles’s Funeral Oration, the historian puts in the mouth of the great democratic leader a speech extolling, among other things, the virtues of civic equality. In Athens, Pericles suggests, inequalities between.
And those who produce food and are ruled, is not simply the basic principle of politics. The division of labour between rulers and producers, which is the essence of justice in the Republic, is also the essence of Plato’s theory of knowledge. The radical and hierarchical opposition between the sensible and the intelligible worlds, and between their corresponding forms of cognition, is grounded by Plato in an analogy with the social division of labour which excludes the producer from politics.16.
Found in his work, especially On Duties, a whole range of congenial ideas, some of which have led commentators to credit Cicero with an implausible modernity, despite his firm roots in antiquity. These ideas have been summed up as follows: . . . the principles of natural law and justice and of universal moral equality; a patriotic and dedicated republicanism; a vigorous advocacy of liberty, impassioned rejection of tyranny, and persuasive justification of tyrannicide; a firm belief in.
The peculiar blend that is Christian theology could hardly have been born anywhere else, amalgamating Judaic monotheism, Greco-Roman paganism, the Greek philosophical tradition, the legacy of Hellenistic kingship (and Alexander’s self-deification) in the Roman imperial idea, together with Rome’s universalistic aspirations and the Roman law. The emergence of the specifically Roman Christianity that would from then on shape the tradition of Western political theory can be best understood by.
Was responsible for entrenching certain fundamentally Augustinian doctrines in Western Christianity, and in so doing, bringing about the final schism between East and West. This is not the place to canvass the debate on the arcane question of the ‘filioque’ clause (discussed in the previous chapter); nor can we judge to what extent the Frankish insistence on including this clause in the Nicene Creed was, as is often suggested, simply an opportunistic move in the struggle between the Franks and.