The Legacy of Greek Political Thought
Legacies can be problematic. Some are welcome and productive of great good; others are rejected or disputed. People fall out over the will, reinvent themselves as heirs, usurp the inheritance. In the transmission of Greek political thought to subsequent societies, we cannot reconstruct an untroubled line of descent, but to posit only a series of contests may be equally invalid.
The point of departure for this new international network is to examine the connections that may be assumed, constructed, or rejected, between ancient Greek political thought and postclassical invocations of it. The timeliness of our questions is indicated by the agitation for constitutional change in several North African countries; even before the 'Arab Spring', some Western countries were themselves struggling with the definition of democracy. Debates about the balance between freedom and security have become more acute, and the very concept of the nation state is interrogated by globalisation. The notion of ancient Greece as a society which invented certain liberties, and of a tradition descending from it which guarantees them, has been repeatedly mobilized in the debates about the role of Western countries in a changing geopolitical context. But from other perspectives 'ancient Greece' offers a complex spectrum of different politics, and the 'tradition' that links it to the modern world is fraught with tensions. Our network seeks to foster interdisciplinary dialogue on these and related issues by bringing together scholars from several different fields of enquiry.
Among the questions that interest individual researchers in the network are:
- Did the ancient Greeks have a concept of human rights comparable to that which determines much modern legislation?
- Were Greek anti-democratic ideas more important than democratic ideas in shaping early modern republicanism?
- How have practising politicians mobilised their classical education?
- How have subsequent societies responded to Greek notions of equality and inequality?
- How have the Marxist and socialist traditions reused Greek political thought?
- How has Western political thinking been conditioned by the adoption of Greek categories?
We shall launch the network with a series of seminars held in the Department of Classics at the University of Reading, under the auspices both of the Department and of the Centre for Political Theory.