Week 1: Greek Legacy

Ebenstein & Ebenstein, Roots of Western Political Thought, pp. 1-4
20th century is a western century on a worldwide basis
Birthplace in Mediterranean: Greece, Palestine, and Italy; spreading
into Europe and Middle East
o Egypt was a Christian country before Islam
o Greco-Judeo-Christian civilization in Europe
 Transplant of Europe to other continents
o Spain and Portugal in South and Central
America
o England in North America and Australia
o French in Quebec
Western civilization is often a veneer over non-western civilization
 Spain in Latin America
 British in India and Africa
 Dutch in Indonesia
 Japan with forced westernization in 1865
United States is the center (economics, politics, culture, and military)
 Athens, Jerusalem, Rome were leading points
 Dark Ages: Byzantium (cultural, literary, and
administrative)
 17th and 18th century: Paris
 19th century: London
 20th century: New York (artistic, scientific, intellectual)
 Next century: Tokyo
Western civilization has geographical mobility → adaptable,
dynamic, enduring
 Universal ideas > core of racial or ethnic links like
traditional Chinese
 Not all European nations have western outlook
o Renunciation by Nazi Germany
Asian and African societies gain independence by western methods
 Condition of colonials was worse before colonialism
Communism is western in origin
 Lenin from Marx:
o Economic ideas from British
o Political ideas from French
o Philosophy from German
 Appears to be quickest way → modernization and
westernization
Principles where the ethical, legal, economic, social, and political
structures of western civilization are founded
1. Belief in reason; Greeks
 Peaked in 17th and 18th century French during Age of
Reason/Enlightenment
 Invented in 6th BC Greece
o Orientals influenced Greek
o Greek civilization is original
 Rationalism was and is core political concept
 Supreme: think clearly
 Thought and life in sympathy and friendship
o Aristotle: basis of social and political
organizations
o Love: Plato’s Symposium
 Lower level: fierce demon →
mad
2. Belief in one God (monotheism); Jews
 Ethical precepts of greatest political significance
o Brotherhood of mankind
o One world ruled by higher law
 Jews were first to build their whole life in monotheism
 Reflected in moral code as the foundation of western
law and ethics
 Supreme: act justly
 Classical Jewish: compassion and charity
3. Conception of love; Christians
 Incorporated Greek rationalism and Jewish monotheistic
ethics
 Love as basis for relation with God and each other;
unconditional and universal; life itself
Roots of western life is encompassing
All three derives contradictory political and philosophical systems
 Conceptions have never been fully lived up to in western
o Merely ideals with lagging practice
 Not completely complementary; tension
o Greeks: Jews were fanatical puritan; strict code
o Jews: Greeks were ethical barbarian
o Christians is not a merger but attempt to
transcend: burning pagan Greek and Roman
books and persecution of Jews
Greco-Judeo-Christian harmonized through Albert Schweitzer
 Scholar-philosopher-artist
 Conviction of moral belief in action with no allegiance
other than God
 Work on poorest places
Week 2: Greek Legacy (Plato)
Ebensten and Ebenstein, Plato, pp. 18-29
Greeks → western civilization lies in taming of man and nature
through reason
Pre-Greek: practical knowledge associated with demons and myths,
fears and hopes, punishment and rewards
 Independent reasoning for a higher end like supernatural
system (religion)
o Polytheism → difficult for Greeks for basic
oneness of mankind
 Religious pluralism → inability to
transcend intellectually and
institutionally
o Bible was opposed to slavery on principle and
has protective rules
 Greek inventiveness lay in the discovery of scientific study
First work to be called political science is Plato’s Republic
 Systematic reasoning and critical inquiry to political
institutions
 Main assumptions: right kind of government and politics
can be legitimate object of rigorous, rational analysis >
muddling through fear and faith
 Socio-political issues can be clarified by argument rather
than force and dogma
Socrates is the chief figure in the Republic
 First Social Democrat
 Endless searching through argument behind accepted
ideas
 Totalitarians usurped Plato as first intellectual ancestor
Intellect can discover the nature of good life by attaining it by
philosophical inquiry
Plato never starts out with hypothesis of homo politicus
 No theory of politics can be sound unless based on the
study of man
Healthy society cannot be composed by those haunted by fear and
insecurity
Plato is not aware of individual vs state
 City-state was spiritual and religious material wants
through principle of division of labor
 Glaucon: community of pigs
 Expansion and refinement by luxury → wars

Guardians or rulers
 Pick and train auxiliaries
 Quality: wisdom
 Socialism is authoritarian service rather than sharing of
happiness and enjoyment
Fighters and auxiliaries
 Internal unrest → special class of fighters that require
training and instilling principles that make the city worth
defending
 Quality: courage from understanding
Life of guardians and auxiliaries excludes individual interests
 Communal life: armies, monastic orders, clergy of
churches
 Purpose of politics in Republic: realization of a
predetermined social ideal of justice
 Absolute sharing is not socialism
o Outlook of socialism is hedonistic
o Maximum happiness for maximum number of
people
Working population
Quality: appetite
First city is a product of unconscious growth
Second city of the Republic is a product of rational direction
Planned sector is only guardians and auxiliaries
Republic is opposed to democracy
1. More obvious explicit level
 Rests on threefold division of population: rulers,
fighters, and producers (4/5 of population; 80-90% of
the second city)
 Extension to the principle of the division of labor
 Ruling and defending state is a specialized craft
 Objection: nature of ruling and administering is a
specialized craft → simply add these crafts to the first
city
 Principle of division → more specialized crafts but not
to a class system based on hierarchical values
 Ruler-philosophers: political wisdom; human
problems; values and ideas
 Producers: technical knowledge; not phenomena of
nature and society
1. Material of philosopher is mankind and cosmos;
material of craftsman is limited and finite
2. Knowledge of the craftsman never attains the
height of wisdom and understanding that the
philosopher reaches in his study of ultimate
values, intrinsic forms, and cosmic law
 Democratic theory of politics: Plato assumes that the
capacity to govern is possessed by only a small class
o Can be transmitted by selective breeding
 Democratic view of man: wisdom and understanding
may be found in the most unexpected places
2. Less obvious implicit level: fundamental and irreconcilable
Plato: truth is eternal, unchanging and unchangeable;
accessible to few by training
 Preparation of rulers begins before they are born
 Highest physical and mental qualities of offspring
 Training is mere preparation for ascent to the vision of
Goodness; final stage partakes the nature of revelation →
mystical and socially incommunicable experience
o Bases the rule of people on a personal and
unique innermost experience
o Contemplate realities themselves
o Philosophy and vision of good are highest form
of human activity
o Ruled do not hope to attain but can only believe
 Recommends use of “medicinal lie” and censorship
 Upbringing and fighter classes
 Misleading by ruled is an offense; fatal and subversive in a
state
 Fable of the origins of class system: gold, silver, iron/brass
 Relates to the root of inequality of threefold class system
 Adhering to creed of certainty
 Plato is hostile against artists
 Feeling and passion < reason and intellect
o Poets should only further training of rulers, not
present gods humanly, must stress elements in
stories → moral education
o Below shoemaker and smith
 Sets vicious form of government; imaginative literature can
be more dangerous than facts and analyses
Threefold division of society = division of individual soul
1. Rational: highest, duty to keep two in line
2. Spirited: follow and assert claims of reason
3. Appetitive: harbor desire and emotion
20th century books against totalitarian government
1. Arthur Koestler - Darkness at Noon
2. George Orwell – 1984
3. Boris Pasternak - Dr. Zhivago
4. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn - One Day in the Life of Ivan
Denisovich
Truth
Modern philosophers: experience; engless procress, made and
remade; relative, empirical, social-cooperative
Plato: absolute and individual-aristocratic
Freud: human mind has three components
1. Id: undirected and unconscious instinctual drives
2. Ego: conscious level of mind
3. Superego: civilized rational conscience
They are coordinated
Mental health and stability depends on balance
Degeneration into progressively lower types of constitution
1. Timocracy: ambition and love of honor and war (Crete,
Sparta)
2. Oligarchy and plutocracy: rule of wealthy
3. Democracy: rule of people
4. Despotism: anarchy of democratic state
 Glory of democracy is buoyant diversity and creative
pluralism but a path to dissolution and disintegration when
members forget their duties
 If Plato makes democrats more keenly conscious how
difficult the life of freedom and fellowship is, then it is
benefit of democracy
Republic
Socrates: narrator and chief figure
Starts in house of Cephalus, retired wealthy businessman
With Polemarchus (Cephalus’s son), Glaucon and Adeimantus
(elder brothers), and Thrasymachus (sophist)
What is justice?
 Cephalus: honesty and rendering what is due to gods and
men
 Polemarchus: helping friends and harming enemies
 Thrasymachus: just and right is nothing, what is to the
interest of the stronger party