The Discovery of Freedom in Ancient Greece
Title | The Discovery of Freedom in Ancient Greece PDF eBook |
Author | Kurt Raaflaub |
Publisher | University of Chicago Press |
Pages | 440 |
Release | 2004-02 |
Genre | History |
ISBN | 9780226701011 |
Although there is constant conflict over its meanings and limits, political freedom itself is considered a fundamental and universal value throughout the modern world. For most of human history, however, this was not the case. In this book, Kurt Raaflaub asks the essential question: when, why, and under what circumstances did the concept of freedom originate? To find out, Raaflaub analyses ancient Greek texts from Homer to Thucydides in their social and political contexts. Archaic Greece, he concludes, had little use for the idea of political freedom; the concept arose instead during the great confrontation between Greeks and Persians in the early fifth century BCE. Raaflaub then examines the relationship of freedom with other concepts, such as equality, citizenship, and law, and pursues subsequent uses of the idea—often, paradoxically, as a tool of domination, propaganda, and ideology. Raaflaub's book thus illuminates both the history of ancient Greek society and the evolution of one of humankind's most important values, and will be of great interest to anyone who wants to understand the conceptual fabric that still shapes our world views.
Origins of Democracy in Ancient Greece
Title | Origins of Democracy in Ancient Greece PDF eBook |
Author | Kurt A. Raaflaub |
Publisher | Univ of California Press |
Pages | 257 |
Release | 2007 |
Genre | History |
ISBN | 0520258096 |
"A balanced, high-quality analysis of the developing nature of Athenian political society and its relationship to 'democracy' as a timeless concept."—Mark Munn, author of The School of History
The Discovery of Freedom
Title | The Discovery of Freedom PDF eBook |
Author | Rose Wilder Lane |
Publisher | Laissez Faire Books |
Pages | 254 |
Release | 1943 |
Genre | Authority |
ISBN | 1621290115 |
Democracy’s Slaves
Title | Democracy’s Slaves PDF eBook |
Author | Paulin Ismard |
Publisher | Harvard University Press |
Pages | 201 |
Release | 2017-01-09 |
Genre | History |
ISBN | 0674660072 |
Genesis -- Servants of the city -- Strange slaves -- The democratic order of knowledge -- The mysteries of the Greek state
Geography and Ethnography
Title | Geography and Ethnography PDF eBook |
Author | Kurt A. Raaflaub |
Publisher | John Wiley & Sons |
Pages | 376 |
Release | 2009-12-17 |
Genre | History |
ISBN | 9781444315660 |
This fascinating volume brings together leading specialists, whohave analyzed the thoughts and records documenting the worldviewsof a wide range of pre-modern societies. Presents evidence from across the ages; from antiquity throughto the Age of Discovery Provides cross-cultural comparison of ancient societies aroundthe globe, from the Chinese to the Incas and Aztecs, from theGreeks and Romans to the peoples of ancient India Explores newly discovered medieval Islamic materials
Arbitrary Rule
Title | Arbitrary Rule PDF eBook |
Author | Mary Nyquist |
Publisher | University of Chicago Press |
Pages | 436 |
Release | 2013-05-10 |
Genre | Philosophy |
ISBN | 022601553X |
Slavery appears as a figurative construct during the English revolution of the mid-seventeenth century, and again in the American and French revolutions, when radicals represent their treatment as a form of political slavery. What, if anything, does figurative, political slavery have to do with transatlantic slavery? In Arbitrary Rule, Mary Nyquist explores connections between political and chattel slavery by excavating the tradition of Western political thought that justifies actively opposing tyranny. She argues that as powerful rhetorical and conceptual constructs, Greco-Roman political liberty and slavery reemerge at the time of early modern Eurocolonial expansion; they help to create racialized “free” national identities and their “unfree” counterparts in non-European nations represented as inhabiting an earlier, privative age. Arbitrary Rule is the first book to tackle political slavery’s discursive complexity, engaging Eurocolonialism, political philosophy, and literary studies, areas of study too often kept apart. Nyquist proceeds through analyses not only of texts that are canonical in political thought—by Aristotle, Cicero, Hobbes, and Locke—but also of literary works by Euripides, Buchanan, Vondel, Montaigne, and Milton, together with a variety of colonialist and political writings, with special emphasis on tracts written during the English revolution. She illustrates how “antityranny discourse,” which originated in democratic Athens, was adopted by republican Rome, and revived in early modern Western Europe, provided members of a “free” community with a means of protesting a threatened reduction of privileges or of consolidating a collective, political identity. Its semantic complexity, however, also enabled it to legitimize racialized enslavement and imperial expansion. Throughout, Nyquist demonstrates how principles relating to political slavery and tyranny are bound up with a Roman jurisprudential doctrine that sanctions the power of life and death held by the slaveholder over slaves and, by extension, the state, its representatives, or its laws over its citizenry.
Freedom
Title | Freedom PDF eBook |
Author | Annelien De Dijn |
Publisher | Harvard University Press |
Pages | 433 |
Release | 2020-08-25 |
Genre | Political Science |
ISBN | 0674245598 |
Winner of the PROSE Award An NRC Handelsblad Best Book of the Year “Ambitious and impressive...At a time when the very survival of both freedom and democracy seems uncertain, books like this are more important than ever.” —The Nation “Helps explain how partisans on both the right and the left can claim to be protectors of liberty, yet hold radically different understandings of its meaning...This deeply informed history of an idea has the potential to combat political polarization.” —Publishers Weekly “Ambitious and bold, this book will have an enormous impact on how we think about the place of freedom in the Western tradition.” —Samuel Moyn, author of Not Enough “Brings remarkable clarity to a big and messy subject...New insights and hard-hitting conclusions about the resistance to democracy make this essential reading for anyone interested in the roots of our current dilemmas.” —Lynn Hunt, author of History: Why It Matters For centuries people in the West identified freedom with the ability to exercise control over the way in which they were governed. The equation of liberty with restraints on state power—what most people today associate with freedom—was a deliberate and dramatic rupture with long-established ways of thinking. So what triggered this fateful reversal? In a masterful and surprising reappraisal of more than two thousand years of Western thinking about freedom, Annelien de Dijn argues that this was not the natural outcome of such secular trends as the growth of religious tolerance or the creation of market societies. Rather, it was propelled by an antidemocratic backlash following the French and American Revolutions. The notion that freedom is best preserved by shrinking the sphere of government was not invented by the revolutionaries who created our modern democracies—it was first conceived by their critics and opponents. De Dijn shows that far from following in the path of early American patriots, today’s critics of “big government” owe more to the counterrevolutionaries who tried to undo their work.