The Political Theory of Classical Greece

Frank, Jill

doi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199548439.003.0009

Cited by 5 publications

(2 citation statements)

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“…This reinterpretation recasts 'tension and contradiction', as Jill Frank puts it in a different context, 'not as stymying the possibilities for political action nor as making moot frameworks of falsity and truth, but rather as opening the way to less binary ways of thinking about age-old problems and dilemmas'. 15 In her analysis of thinking in The Life of the Mind, Arendt describes Socratic dialogues, inquiring into key concepts of political vocabulary, as aporetic for two reasons. First, they are aporetic as they are centred on perplexities arising from our conventional assumptions about ordinary concepts.…”

Section: Aporetic Thinking: Methodological Orientations Of Arendt's Critiquementioning

confidence: 99%

‘Perplexities of the rights of man’: Arendt on the aporias of human rights

Gündoğdu

2011

European Journal of Political Theory

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This article provides a new interpretation of Hannah Arendt's critical analysis of the 'perplexities of the Rights of Man' by drawing attention to its overlooked methodological orientations, especially its 'aporetic' nature. Arendt's critique is aporetic as it centres on the paradoxes of human rights and analyses them by putting into practice a mode of inquiry that she associates with Socrates. The article challenges the conventional understanding of aporia as a paralysing impasse and suggests that aporetic thinking can create possibilities of rethinking key concepts especially in times of crises. To make this point, I respond to Jacques Rancière's criticism that the paradoxes introduced by Arendt paralyse thinking and doom human rights to an inevitable destiny of failure. I argue that, precisely because of its aporetic nature, Arendt's critique attends to possibilities of rethinking and reinventing human rights, as can be seen in her articulation of 'a right to have rights'.

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Section: Aporetic Thinking: Methodological Orientations Of Arendt's Critiquementioning

confidence: 99%

‘Perplexities of the rights of man’: Arendt on the aporias of human rights

Gündoğdu

2011

European Journal of Political Theory

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“…1. For two programmatic statements of this reorientation in scholarly practice, as well as bibliographies, see Frank (2006) and Salkever (2009). For a contextualization of these statements and a reflection upon their impact, see Landauer (2016), 34-9.…”

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confidence: 99%

Heroic Democracy in High Relief: Political Legitimacy and Monumental Imagery in Fifth-Century Athens

Fisher

2021

Ramus

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In recent decades, political theorists have significantly revised their understanding of Athenian democratic thinking. By opening up the canon, shifting their focus from abstract principles to democratic practices, and employing an increasingly diverse range of interpretive approaches, they have collectively reconstructed a more robust and multi-faceted account of the Athenian democratic public sphere. Despite its ecumenical ambitions and manifest successes, however, this project has been fettered by a singular focus on language as the medium of democratic politics. As can be seen in the gloss of one of its contributors, this body of work effectively limits the democratic public sphere to ‘the domain in which judgments and public opinion are shaped and formed through speech’. This logocentric demarcation of democratic practice does not harmonize well with our own experience of modern politics, however, where public monuments, political imagery, and civic spaces play a critical role in the formation of political understanding and judgment, as well as starting points for discussion, debate, and disagreement. It seems similarly out of tune with what we know about the ancient Greeks, who demonstrated a readiness to move between visual and verbal content in reflecting on political and ethical life, and who developed the very idea of theôria out of an extension of the process of seeing. If, as political theorists, we can temper our habitual logocentrism and learn to attend more closely to the visual culture of Athenian democracy, we stand to add new dimensions to our collective reconstruction of the democratic public sphere and, in turn, to enhance our understanding of those texts that have long preoccupied our attention.

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Democratic Theory and the Athenian Public Sphere

Landauer

2016

Polis

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Classical Athens has left to political theorists a dual legacy: a crucial historical case of democratic practice, and a rich tradition of political reflection. A growing number of scholars have placed the relationship between these two legacies at the center of their research. I argue that these scholars collectively offer us a model of a broad, engaged, Athenian public sphere. Yet I also caution that we should avoid overly harmonizing pictures of what that public sphere was like. I focus in particular on two prominent claims in the literature: that Socratic philosophy can be read as an expansion of Athenian accountability practices, and that ancient dramatists, philosophers, and historians were alike engaged in a project to educate citizen judgment. I argue that both claims threaten to obscure arguments over the appropriate role of the judgment of the demos in democratic politics.

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The Political Theory of Classical Greece

Cited by 5 publications

References 10 publications

‘Perplexities of the rights of man’: Arendt on the aporias of human rights

‘Perplexities of the rights of man’: Arendt on the aporias of human rights

Heroic Democracy in High Relief: Political Legitimacy and Monumental Imagery in Fifth-Century Athens

Democratic Theory and the Athenian Public Sphere

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