Category: Political Thought

The folk and its law. The period of the church Fathers, extending down to the sixth or seventh century, still belongs to antiquity. Despite the vast changes -social, economic, and political-which occurred in the first six Christian centuries, Seneca and St. Gregory were still both Romans. Both men lived within the circle of Roman political…

Seneca and the fathers of the church. In one respect-the belief in human equality-the idea of a common race, as it was developed by the jurists, broke sharply with the scale of values which prevailed in the city-state. In another respect, however, the two were quite continuous. For Cicero as for Plato, to found or…

Cicero and the roman lawyers. By the beginning of the first century before Christ the political processes which began with Alexander’s conquest of the East had in a large measure completed themselves. The whole Mediterranean world had been cast into the melting pot and had become in no small degree a single community. The city-state…

The law of nature in the history of political philosophy the death of Aristotle in 322 marks the close of an era, as the life of his great pupil, who died the year before him, marks the beginning of a new era in politics and the history of European civilization. The failure of the city-state…

The Twilight of the City State. The political philosophy of Plato and Aristotle was singularly devoid of immediate influence both of a practical and a theoretical kind. In fact, if it were judged by the part that it played in the two centuries following Aristotle’s death, it could only be described as a magnificent failure….

Aristotle Political Ideals. About the time when Plato was asked by Dion to undertake the venture in Syracuse for the education of the young Dionysus and the improvement of Syracusan government, the greatest of Plato’s students joined the Academy. Aristotle was not an Athenian but a native of Stagira in Thrace, where he was born…

The later form of Plato’s political philosophy, contained in Plato the Statesman and the Laws, belongs a good many years after that contained in the Republic. The two later works show a resemblance and the theory which they contain is in marked contrast with that of the Republic; together they present the final results of…

Plato the Republic. The imperial ambitions of Athens perished with her defeat in the Peloponnese War, but through her role was changed, her influence upon Greece, and ultimately upon the whole of the ancient world, was by no means diminished. After the loss of her empire, she became more and more the educational center of…

Political thought before Plato. The great age of Athenian public life fell in the third quarter of the fifth-century B.C., while the great age of political philosophy came only after the downfall of Athens in her struggle with Sparta. Here, as in so many cases in history, reflection followed achievement, and principles were abstractly stated…

The Invention of Political Philosophy. It is important to stress that Greece was peripheral to Egypt and Mesopotamia but not isolated from them. India, by contrast, was substantially more isolated and China nearly wholly separated. Although they started later, the Chinese seem to have, in many respects, moving through stages of development similar to that…