790: 371, The Western Political Tradition (I)

From Moses to Movable Type

[a.k.a. “From God to Gutenberg”]

(d.b.a. “From Plato to Machiavelli”)

 

Fall Semester, 2007          G. Schochet

Monday and Thursday, 9:50-11:10 a.m.

College Avenue Campus — Frelinghuysen A-5

 

Wherever people are more or less permanently associated, there will be governance: rules, structures, power, and at least the pretense of public authority. But authority, unlike power, is inherently contestable – all the more so if it is public – and the history of political thought is the account of those contestations as they have occurred over time. Political theory is a kind of intellectual or conceptual response to or a reflection on governance and its attendant “problems”: it can take the form of mere assertion or self-conscious planning; it can be justification and defense or objections and calls for resistance; it is found at all levels of discourse and behavior, from the anthropologically-discoverable and psychologically deducible ideology that undergirds acceptance and acquiescence, to overt political tracts and literary and religious works (that may seem to be about something other than politics), through intentional political philosophy that argues from “first principles” to conclusions about the political order. All these materials go into the construction of the history of political thought, but it is sustained and intentional writings on the subject that are of central concern.

 

Although it is seldom regarded as a source of political thinking, the Hebrew Bible (or Old Testament) is one of the oldest of such sustained reflections on politics in the West. It  is where the course will start. The aim will be to disentangle and determine the relationships between secular and theological bases of authority and obedience and then to move, as it were, from Jerusalem to Athens, asking, with Tertullian, what do they have to do with each other: are “theology” and “philosophy” incompatible?

 

The core Greek political concern, however, was not so much about this question, as it was about the “good” – indeed, the “ best”  – state and the relations of the “virtuous” polity to our ultimate ends as human beings. Greek political thought – generally presuming a relatively homogeneous polity in which religion, ethics, and politics were inseparable – dealt with the individual versus society and conventional versus natural morality and political ethics. The primary texts to be analyzed are Plato’s Republic and Aristotle’s Politics, both of which rooted politics in a deep conception of philosophy, especially metaphysics and epistemology. The extent to which those foundations underlay Greek politics and political practice, however, is perhaps another matter.

 

From the presumed homogeneity of ancient Greece (viz., Athens), the course will turn to the more heterogeneous world of the Roman empire and its self-conscious use of the law and legal institutions to hold diverse polities together. Readings will be drawn from Cicero and the Roman law.

 

Monotheistic religion and issues of divine law return in the form of Christianity, with selections from the New Testament and St. Augustine. After examinations of early Muslim thought and representative writings of Moses Maimonides, we will return to Christianity with St. Thomas Aquinas and the medieval sources of natural law and modern rights theory, ending with the prelude to the Reformation in conciliar calls for Church reform and the earliest use of movable type in Europe.

 

Assigned Works and Preliminary Outline (required books have been ordered at the College Avenue / Ferren Deck Bookstore; where no edition is specified, assignments will be available via the internet)

 

Hebrew Bible (selections)

 

Tertullian, De praescriptione haereticorum (On the Prescription of Heretics), ch. 7

 

Plato, The Republic, trans. F. M. Cornford (Oxford University Press, ISBN-10: 0195003640)

 

Aristotle, Politics, trans. Ernest  Barker (Oxford University Press, ISBN-10: 0192833936)

 

Aristotle, selections from the Ethics, books 1 & 5

 

Cicero, On the Commonwealth [i.e., De Republica] and On the Laws, ed. James E. G. Zetzel (Cambridge University Press, ISBN-10: 0521459591)

 

Cicero, selections from De Officiis

 

Origins and early development of natural law

 

New Testament (selections)

 

St. Augustine, selections from City of God, ed., R. W. Dyson (Cambridge University Press, ISBN-10: 0521468434)

 

St. Augustine, selections from Confessions and other works

 

Al Farabi, selections

 

Maimonides, selections

 

Thomas Aquinas, selections from Summa Theologica and other writings: Political Writings, ed. R. W. Dyson (Cambridge University Press, ISBN-10: 0521375959)

 

Marsilius of Padua and/or selected conciliar writers

 

 

In addition, the following “recommended” books have been ordered in limited numbers

 

The New Oxford Annotated Bible with the Apocrypha, 3rd ed., College Edition, ed., Michael D. Coogan (Oxford University Press, ISBN-10: 0195284852)

 

The Jewish Study Bible, College Edition, ed. Adele Berlin and Marc Zvi Brettler (Oxford University Press, ISBN-10: 0195297547)

 

The Cambridge History of Greek and Roman Political Thought, ed. Christopher Rowe (Cambridge University Press, ISBN-10: 0521616697)

 

Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics, trans. David Ross, J. L. Ackrill and J. O. Urmson (Oxford University Press, ISBN-10: 019283407X)

 

Cicero, On Duties, ed. M. T. Griffin (Cambridge University Press, ISBN-10: 0521348358)

 

A.P d’Entreves, Natural Law (Transaction ISBN: 1560006730)

 

     Francis Oakley, Natural Law, Laws of Nature, Natural Rights: Continuity And Discontinuity in the History of Ideas (Continuum, ISBN-10: 0826417655)

 

Augustine, Political Writings, ed. E. M. Atkins (Cambridge University Press, ISBN-10: 052144697X)

 

J. H. Burns, ed., Conciliarism and Papalism (Cambridge University Press, ISBN-10: 0521476747)