SİYASAL DÜŞÜNCE - Deneme Sınavı - 10

Various views of the Ancient Greek philosophers have been the ground for modern political thinking for a long time. They have double effect on political thinking: First, their ways of approaching the concepts and issues provided the tools for succeeding philosophers, who attempted to handle pervasive problems of politics. Second, the Ancient Greek philosophers drew the dominant framework and determined the themes of political thinking to a great extent.

In ancient Rome, the elderly and the prominent members of the society, most of who were actual members of the Senate were thought to have auctoritas. The term implied that their words were to be trusted and they should be respected. The word authority comes from auctoritas and can be defined as legitimate power.

Weber is considered as one of the founders of sociology, with Emile Durkheim and Karl Marx. Among his other contributions, his way of classifying ideal types of authorities under three categories, as charismatic, traditional, and legal, was a seminal work.

Legitimacy can be defined as rightfulness. It should not be limited to being legal, or in accordance with the laws, despite rightfulness to a great extent stems from the legal framework.

In abstract terms, ideology refers to the production of meanings, symbols, and ideas to be drawn on whilst interpreting various dimensions of the social reality. The interpretation of social reality rests on forms of thought that are not necessarily compatible with each other. Yet again, the apparent incompatibility is not an obstacle against the use of contradictory meanings and symbols by a particular ideology.

The origin of the terms left and right that refer to particular political perspectives and stances can be found in the French Revolution, in which Tiers état (the third estate referring to the people in general, who were neither aristocrat nor members of clergy) overthrew the monarchy and paved the ground for the First French Republic. Representatives of the third estate named Jacobins generally sat to the left side of the Estates General during the National Convention Period (1792-1795), while those who were supportive of the traditional institutions of the ancien régime, i.e. Girondins, sat to the right, and representatives from various streams sat at the centre (Plaine) (Ağaoğulları et al, 2015, p. 605). In the 19th century France, the terms left and right were used to delineate the supporters of the Republic vis-á-vis the supporters of the monarchy. Traditionally, the left came to be associated with social change and progress, while the right came to be associated with order and preservation of the prevailing and dominant social values.

It is said that “the recent re-birth of normative political philosophy began with the publication of John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice in 1971”. Rawls is one of the greatest philosophers of the political philosophy in the 20th Century.

As it can be seen clearly, the liberal understanding of society narrows the role of the state and prescribes limited intervention. Indeed, the logical implication of a methodologically individualist understanding would be ignoring the common good. On the other hand, a republican or statist understanding in which the state is burdened with dealing with the ills of the society, the scope of state intervention is much larger.

For Strauss, studying political thought is “primarily and in a way chiefly... listening to conversations between the great philosophers... the greatest minds, and therefore... studying the great books.” It consists of a desire to have wisdom and rests on an inquiry to answer questions regarding what the good life is and how a good social order can be built up.

Free riding is a concept of economics and not political thought.

The members of the Polis, in other words citystate, consist of polites, namely the citizens; and the citizens of the polis consist of free Greek men among which foreigners, women, and slaves are not included. The citizenship status was not given to those who were foreigners, women, and slaves in ancient polis of Greece.

Agora, gymnasium, and theatre all together were institutions of ideological re-production of the society since they served for helping people to realise that they lived in a society.

The stratum of Perioikos was more crowded than the stratum composed by Spartans. They were living at the outside lands of Sparta. They were entitled to hold their own lands but had to pay a fee for that. They did not have a political right for joining in administrative duties of the state. They were sometimes used as soldiers, but as a separate unit of army from the Spartans.

Free population of Athens had four strata: Eupatrides, geomores, demiurgus, and thetes –the nobles, small farmers, craftsmen, and poor peasants, respectively. Both inter-class and intra-class struggles between these groups had led to different types of administrations such as Aristocracy, oligarchy, plutocracy, and democracy.

One of the main separations of Sophists from the traditional Greek philosophy was the aim of their investigation. Till to Sophists, the Greek philosophy was a search for the objective reality. However, the aim of the Sophists was not contemplative, but practical. Hence, they became an educational movement in Greek polis. They were teaching the art of life and how to control it to the youth.

It can be noticed that this philosophy had nothing to do with society. It was a kind of internal transcendentalism and a form of monkhood. However, it is still a crucial cornerstone in terms of development of the modern egalitarian political thoughts. This is because of the fact that human beings first time in the course of human history demonstrated a collective uprising with the Cynics achievement of raising awareness against to the non-egalitarian life style.

Plato’s general philosophy can be considered as an introduction for his political thoughts. It always should be kept in mind that the Platonic philosophy is based on a non-egalitarian belief. His philosophy usually starts with underlining the importance of reason (logos). Therefore, he splits the being into object (material) and idea (thought). The human being has material and ideal sides. The ideal side .should govern the material side, namely the body

It has to be kept in mind that ideal state of Plato is not a historical one. It has not become concrete in any period of history. It is timeless. Four elements affect the degeneration of the states: disappearance of internal harmony of society, violation of division of labour within the society, emergence of economical class conflicts, and finally, moral corruption and destruction of unity of the rulers.

"A) The need of mass for social knowledge" is one of the reasons for the birth of sophist thought in Athens.

Since the formation can be understood as a material form gaining process, we can comprehend a formation through influencing factors: material causes, formal causes, effective causes, and target oriented causes. Aristotle said that target-oriented (teleological) causes were the ones that provide a competent form to the formation. Thus, if we reveal the targets of formations, then we can achieve a true comprehension. That is to say, in order to understand the things, one should consider the form, rather than the material. For instance, target of an acorn is to be an oak tree.

For Aristotle, stability of the regimes should be ensured. He was against to the revolutionary movements. He considered revolutions as a disease. Then, the disease should be cured.