Some Remarks on the History of Political Theory in Antiquity

Laurens Winkel

doi:10.14712/2464689x.2021.29

Abstract

With the help of some texts of Greek philosophers the ambivalent history of natural law philosophy is illustrated with its consequences for the rising notion of political theory and international law. Universalism and Stoic philosophy form the intellectual background for the rising Roman empire. Special attention is paid to the history of the textual transmission of some important philosophical texts, an aspect which is very often neglected.

Highlights

With the help of some texts of Greek philosophers the ambivalent history of natural law philosophy is illustrated with its consequences for the rising notion of political theory and international law
It is a commonplace that Greek moral philosophy before Socrates consists in a form of natural law philosophy, where one of the main questions is essentially an epistemological one: what does nature teach us? This question is for example visible in treatises on the well-known opposition between νόμος and φύσις, nomos-physis, more or less to be translated as: human custom-nature, and it plays a role in nearly every aspect of the philosophy at that time, the Ionian philosophy of nature.[1]
This applies to the part of philosophy which we are accustomed to call political philosophy nowadays

Summary

See on Gorgias

The text continues with a kind of sociological analysis of society and praises people with moderate wealth, not extremely rich and not extremely poor as the cornerstones of the political human society, just in accordance with the Theory of the Mean explained elsewhere, most clearly in the second book of the Nicomachean Ethics (EN II, 15 1106 b 37 – 1108 b 6) Another interesting phenomenon in Aristotle’s Politics is a kind of “prefiguration” of the separation of power, expounded in more modern times in a well-known text of Montesquieu, De l’ esprit des Lois, XI 6:. In the developed Roman Empire we find a variety of commercial treaties and a hierarchy of “foreign” city states: there are civitates foederatae, there were civitates immunae atque liberae, civitates sine suffragio, civitates stipendiariae and coloniae.[39]

Conclusions

34 Cicero XVI

40 Further reading