History Of Political Thought From Plato To Marx Pdf [PATCHED] Download

History Of Political Thought From Plato To Marx Pdf Download

he also invokes the anthropological link between freedom and the freedom to act, a link that becomes even more acute in modern times: modern political freedom rests on the possibility of collective action and its consequent transformations in the realm of the world. finally, marx is the first to argue that political freedom requires the full political recognition of the humanity of the group of actors and of their persons, and their socio-political status as free citizens, which, in turn, in turn requires first a political community that defines the terms of political recognition and then collective freedom.

marx’s most important influence was not on the political left but, rather, on the political right, as the architect of the german historical school and its followers. among its most important exponents is the italian philosopher and political theorist, niccolo machiavelli, a member of the florentine merchant class that benefited from the pax romana and thus became a member of the aristocratic realm of civic authority. machiavelli, unlike marx, was not a political exile and thus he did not experience exile and its consequences. after the second civil war of 1551-1559, machiavelli fought for the republican regime of the medici and expanded the italian mercantile republics of the future. machiavelli combined the classical republican theory of civic virtue with the civic humanism of cosimo de’ medici’s tuscan academy. he attributed civic virtue to the common people and to the common people only. for machiavelli, public virtue is always civic virtue, which means that the higher and lower classes can display the same virtue but in different ways. for him, the traditional virtues of knighthood, compassion, fidelity, and honour no longer make up a full ethical system. the modern republican virtù, on the other hand, was concerned not only with military virtues but also with moral/political virtues and even a little with what we would today call the scientific virtues. machiavelli’s opera is concerned with the political efficacy of these virtues, but he wants them to be recognized by the people and not to be privileges of the enlightened few.

the question of what makes a radical political position is therefore one of the most difficult matters to broach. it is without doubt one of the most difficult matters in the whole of social thought. the study of ideology, as differentiated from the study of political thought itself and the study of political ideas as such, is a reflection of post-establishment consensus. the very categories of radical political theory are ideologically driven and, therefore, the political outlooks of those who label themselves as radicals are also implicit ideologues. a radicalism in the name of empirical evidence and demands for action is (to use ralph miliband’s sympathetic description) ‘an ideology’. the problem of the radicalisation of politics is not so much that we have become dissatisfied with the situation but that we lack a concept that presents the politics of reform as insufficient. we lack a concept of a politics of social transformation. 13 ideological theories arise in connection with the attempt to make them meaningful as a whole. this is not to say that there is no such thing as a study of political ideology. in fact, there are ample studies to be found, 14 e.g. hollis, 16 alarcón, 17 friedman, or mannheim. none of them accords a preeminent place to the question of what a political system would consist of in the wake of political radicalism. of course, while many of the classical thinkers of radicalism lack an explicit and systematic approach to this question, they are nevertheless contributing to it and, indirectly, to the knowledge of ideology in general.
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