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    A Study Guide for Political Theories for Students: REPUBLICANISM
    A Study Guide for Political Theories for Students: REPUBLICANISM
    A Study Guide for Political Theories for Students: REPUBLICANISM
    Ebook64 pages54 minutes

    A Study Guide for Political Theories for Students: REPUBLICANISM

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    Designed with busy students in mind, this concise study guide examines major political theories and is organized into the following easily digestible sections: overview, history, theory in depth, theory in action, analysis and critical response, topics for further study, and bibliography.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateJan 27, 2015
    ISBN9781535831185
    A Study Guide for Political Theories for Students: REPUBLICANISM

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      A Study Guide for Political Theories for Students - Gale

      1787.

      HISTORY

      The history of republics and republicanism begins in ancient Greece, whose very geography, featuring fertile plains separated by mountains, seemed to lend itself to small, independent, and distinctive political communities. The polis (poleis plural), as the Greeks called the kind of community in question, began to take shape between 1100 and 800 B.C. During that period, the nobles, an exclusive group of leading families, wrested political power from the kings. Thereafter, men who acquired wealth and importance through commerce rather than noble birth demanded and gained a share of political power. In addition, military change widened the circle of citizenship. Between 700 and 600 B.C., infantry warfare began its development into the military tactic of choice in Greece. The equipment necessary for the infantry warrior, or hoplite, was much less expensive than that required for the chariot or cavalry warrior. Consequently, a broader (though still limited) section of the population came to contribute heavily to warfare and to be in a position to demand a political role. The controversy over whether citizenship and political power should belong to the multitude, as in a democracy, or the few, as in an oligarchy, often led to violence and contributed heavily to wars within and between poleis throughout classical Greek history. The controversy would continue to divide republican leaders, citizens, and theorists long after the polis had disappeared.

      The polis

      Many poleis had fewer than 5,000 citizens, fewer than modern-day Harvard University has undergraduates. Only three poleis had more than 20,000 citizens. Even the adult male citizen population of Athens in the late fifth century B.C., which was immense by Greek standards, did not exceed 45,000, far fewer people, for example, than the 57,545 who turn up for a sold–out New York Yankees game. The smallness of the Greek polis meant its citizens could live together with an intensity and immediacy that citizens of modern states can imagine only with difficulty. To envision life as a citizen in Athens, for example, one must envision knowing one's fellow citizens and being known by them. One must envision participating in politics not by voting for representatives but by attending the Assembly personally and deliberating with one's fellow citizens about the most important public matters, such as whether to go to war or sue for peace, or whether or not to punish a general. One must imagine participating in the administration of justice, not only by serving frequently on juries, which consisted not of twelve but between 101 and 1,000 citizens, but also by serving as one's own prosecutor or defense attorney. One must imagine seeing the plays of great tragedians and comic writers not in a darkened theater with a few friends and many anonymous strangers but in the open air, as part of a public festival. Athens was by no means atypical.

      Nonetheless, the tiny and consequently fragile polis, threatened with destruction by external enemies or civil war, did not exist merely to offer its citizens the opportunity to participate politically. It was a community of fighters that required extraordinary devotion and unity. Where citizens were the army, and wars frequent, communities had to be bound as soldiers are. To accomplish this task, legislators and statesmen appealed not only to the reason and interest of citizens but above all to tradition, to myths of common ancestry, and to the gods of the polis. While all the Greeks worshipped the Olympian gods such as Zeus and Hera, each polis had its own mode of worship and its own local gods. In the Greek world, patriotism was, as historian Paul Rahe put it in Republics: Ancient and Modern, a religion of blood and soil. The need of the polis for solidarity and a set of beliefs to support it in the face of danger helps explain why even in Athens, renowned for its liberality, Socrates (c. 470–399 B.C.), arguably the founder of Western philosophy, could be prosecuted and put to death for impiety and corrupting the young.

      Aristotle

      Though the all–encompassing character of polis life was born of necessity, the Greeks also considered the polis superior to other forms of association. Aristotle (384–322 B.C.) observed in the Politics that although the polis came into being for the sake of mere life, it existed for the sake of a good life. Aristotle knew human associations could be larger than the polis. Familiar with empires, he knew such associations were not necessarily as closely knit and demanding as was the polis. He rejected associations in which people united merely for the sake of mutual defense and economic exchange.

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