/lit/ - Literature

Don't start with the Greeks. Start with the Moderns, and read backwards.

Political theory, as we understand it today, is a discipline that emerges as a consequence of the development of the bourgeois revolution and subsequent industrialization. The bourgeois revolution - modernity - completely ruptured all prior social existences, and redefined those relations through its own self understanding of its coming-into-being. The development of politics and society CAN ONLY BE UNDERSTOOD through the coming to existence of bourgeois civilization. The industrial revolution placed this understanding into crisis, by subordinating freedom - the perfectibility of the individual - to capital.

To summarize this development: For Rousseau, the development of savagery to barbarism to civilization (reinterpreted by Engels via Morgen as 'modes of production') is oriented by how we relate to ourselves as savages (individuals endowed with natural liberty) and barbarians (decadents subsumed under the bondage of oppressive and obsolescent social relations) to civilization (freedom of the individual through the social contract). For Marx to grapple history as a succession of modes of production was only ever possible in the epoch of advanced industrial production, where the supposed restoration of natural liberty - savagery - instead of enshrining the individual, subordinates his perfectibility - his freedom - (via the division of labor) to the external impulses of the expansion of capital.

Because we can only ever understand our present though the inheritance of the past, this restoration of natural liberty through the erection of modern civil government necessarily appears as a survival of backwardness, of a new barbarism rather than the advent of a new epoch of freedom. The problem is that the past we evoke is completely lost to us, and can only be understood through our own bourgeois conditions of life - of our freedom as subjects of bourgeois modernity - which means therefore that this 'barbarism' is distinctly modern. In other words, freedom becoming and creating its opposite. However, we can only rely on our memories of the past, which means we must simultaneously understand our ideas in the terms of the old, in spite of the fact that the conditions in which these ideas emerge from are actually new.

Both the medieval and early modern thinkers understood themselves through an interpretation of ancient philosophy. However, with the early modern period, we have a rupture of all medieval conditions of existence and their supersession by bourgeois social relations, so that the rebirth/restoration/renaissance of antiquity (both in the terms of philosophy and religion) was actually a fundamental reinterpretation that actually redefined the very terms in which the ancients could be understood. However, they nonetheless understood this transformation in the formal terms, albeit with novel contents, of the very past that they were liquidating.

I'm looking for introductions to the Greek philosophers and their philosophies. I'm not looking for large volumes that lay everything out but rather short introductory works that give me some ground work before I dive into the primary writings.