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Contains 35 articles devoted to different aspects of the Greek polis and is intended not only as a present for Mogens Herman Hansen on his sixtieth birthday, but also as a way of thanking him for his significant contributions to the field of Greek history over the past three decades.
From antiquity until the nineteenth century, there have been two types of state: macro-states, each dotted with a number of cities, and regions broken up into city-states, each consisting of an urban centre and its hinterland. A region settled with interacting city-states constituted a city-state culture and Polis opens with a description of the concepts of city, state, city-state, and city-state culture, and a survey of the 37 city-state cultures so far identified. Mogens Herman Hansen provides a thoroughly accessible introduction to the polis (plural: poleis), or ancient Greek city-state, which represents by far the largest of all city-state cultures. He addresses such topics as the emergence of the polis, its size and population, and its political organization, ranging from famous poleis such as Athens and Sparta through more than 1,000 known examples.
Eros and Polis examines how and why Greek theorists treated political passions as erotic. Because of the tiny size of ancient Greek cities, contemporary theory and ideology could conceive of entire communities based on desire. A recurrent aspiration was to transform the polity into one great household that would bind the citizens together through ties of mutual affection. In this study, Paul Ludwig evaluates sexuality, love and civic friendship as sources of political attachment and as bonds of political association. Studying the ancient view of eros recovers a way of looking at political phenomena that provides a bridge, missing in modern thought, between the private and public spheres, between erotic love and civic commitment. Ludwig's study thus has important implications for the theoretical foundations of community.
The Greek Polis and the Invention of Democracy presents a series of essays that trace the Greeks’ path to democracy and examine the connection between the Greek polis as a citizen state and democracy as well as the interaction between democracy and various forms of cultural expression from a comparative historical perspective and with special attention to the place of Greek democracy in political thought and debates about democracy throughout the centuries. Presents an original combination of a close synchronic and long diachronic examination of the Greek polis - city-states that gave rise to the first democratic system of government Offers a detailed study of the close interactionbetween democracy, society, and the arts in ancient Greece Places the invention of democracy in fifth-century bce Athens both in its broad social and cultural context and in the context of the re-emergence of democracy in the modern world Reveals the role Greek democracy played in the political and intellectual traditions that shaped modern democracy, and in the debates about democracy in modern social, political, and philosophical thought Written collaboratively by an international team of leading scholars in classics, ancient history, sociology, and political science
Realism, the dominant theory of international relations, particularly regarding security, seems compelling in part because of its claim to embody so much of Western political thought from the ancient Greeks to the present. Its main challenger, liberalism, looks to Kant and nineteenth-century economists. Despite their many insights, neither realism nor liberalism gives us adequate tools to grapple with security globalization, the liberal ascent, and the American role in their development. In reality, both realism and liberalism and their main insights were largely invented by republicans writing about republics. The main ideas of realism and liberalism are but fragments of republican security theory, whose primary claim is that security entails the simultaneous avoidance of the extremes of anarchy and hierarchy, and that the size of the space within which this is necessary has expanded due to technological change. In Daniel Deudney's reading, there is one main security tradition and its fragmentary descendants. This theory began in classical antiquity, and its pivotal early modern and Enlightenment culmination was the founding of the United States. Moving into the industrial and nuclear eras, this line of thinking becomes the basis for the claim that mutually restraining world government is now necessary for security and that political liberty cannot survive without new types of global unions. Unique in scope, depth, and timeliness, Bounding Power offers an international political theory for our fractious and perilous global village.
Beyond the historical development of the Greek polis, the authors ask questions about the civic institutions of ancient Greece as a whole, and their relationships to each other.
Despite John Stuart Mill's widely respected contributions to philosophy and political economy, his work on political philosophy has received a much more mixed response. Some critics have even charged that Mill's liberalism was part of a political project to restrain, rather than foster, democracy. Redirecting attention to Mill as a political thinker, Nadia Urbinati argues that this claim misrepresents Mill's thinking. Although he did not elaborate a theory of democracy, Mill did devise new avenues of democratic participation in government that could absorb the transformation of politics engendered by the institution of representation. More generally, Urbinati assesses Mill's contribution to modern democratic theory by critiquing the dominant "two liberties" narrative that has shaped Mill scholarship over the last several decades. As Urbinati shows, neither Isaiah Berlin's theory of negative and positive freedom nor Quentin Skinner's theory of liberty as freedom from domination adequately captures Mill's notion of political theory. Drawing on Mill's often overlooked writings on ancient Greece, Urbinati shows that Mill saw the ideal representative government as a "polis of the moderns," a metamorphosis of the unique features of the Athenian polis: the deliberative character of its institutions and politics; the Socratic ethos; and the cooperative implications of political agonism and dissent. The ancient Greeks, Urbinati shows, and Athenians in particular, are the key to understanding Mill's contribution to modern democratic theory and the theory of political liberty. Urbinati concludes by demonstrating the importance of Mill's deliberative model of politics to the contemporary debate on liberal and republican views of liberty. Her fresh and persuasive approach not only clarifies Mill's political ideas but also illustrates how they can help enrich our contemporary understanding of democracy.
A collection of 12 essays that explore the identity of Ancient Greece as a nation of very different communities. The volume begins with a study of the continuity of Greek culture and society as shown by the ease with which Greeks identified their local deities with those in Hesiod and Homer. Other topics include: the relationship between population size and political strength in the Arkadian Poleis; the reasons for the shifting location of the city of Miletos; whether Ancient Sparta was a Polis; the political organisation of East Locris in the Classical period; the Chalcidic Peninsula and Thrace; the use of the word `Polis' in the works of Xenophon, historians, Attic orators, inscriptions and in other Archaic and Classical sources. This useful history concludes with an index of literary sources, inscriptions and names.
A fourth collection of Papers from the Copenhagen Polis Centre, a collective whose "ulimate aim is to present a new analysis of the Archaic and Classical Greek polis ", through various wide-ranging and thematically specific investigations. This volume and the others in the series are released in advance of the publication of a general synthesis of findings, hence the thematic incoherence of the titles contained herein: Polis as the Generic Term for State, Hekataios' Use of the Word Polis in His Periegesis , and A Typology of Dependent Poleis (Mogens Herman Hansen) ; A Survey of the Major Urban Settlements in the Kimmerian Bosphoros (With a Discussion of Their Status as Poleis ) (Gocha R. Tsetskhladze) ; Emporion . A Study of the Use and Meaning of the Term in the Archaic and Classical Periods (Mogens Herman Hansen) ; Colonies and Ports-of-Tradee on the Northern Shores of the Black Sea: Borysthenes, Kremnoi and the "Other Pontic Emporia in Herodotos (John Hind) ; Some Problems in Polis Identification in the Chalkidic Peninsula (Pernille Flensted-Jensen) ; Triphylia . An Experiment in Ethnic Construction adn Political Organisation (Thomas Heine Nielsen) ; The Polis of Asea. A Case-Study of How Archaeology Can expand Our Knowlege of the History of a Polis (Jeanette Fors�n and Bj�rn Fors�n) .
