The Restoration of Civic Humanism

Abstract

The trajectory of the civic republican traditions from fourth-century Athens into Karl Marx. In this trajectory Hegel was the point of transition from Aristotle into Marx. Aristotle was a major spokesperson for the civic republican tradition. Fourth-century Athens was based upon an agrarian economy. In the Nicomachean Ethics and the Politics Aristotle defined civic republicanism as essentially composed of the following six principles: 1) the human species as a political animal, or motivated by an inherent instinct for associationism(Feuerbach); 2) the need to form societies based upon civility, or civil society; 3) civil society should function according to the ethical principles of mutual reciprocity, proportionate equality, distributive justice, social equivalence, and equity; 4) active citizenship participation in government; 5) the difference between civil society, constitution, government, and state; 6) the Master-Slave Dialogue. Marx absorbed all the principles and translated them into the discourse of the nineteenth-century industrial society in which the proletariat was the oppressed class.