Eros and Power : Thucydides and Hobbes on Human Longing and Political Striving
This paper examines the awareness of and confrontation with mortality as presented in Thucydides' account of erotic political longing for greatness and glory, and contrasts that understanding with the radically different understanding of fully satisfiable human desire found in Thomas Hobbes' political philosophy. The first section investigates the philosophic foundations of modernity, as they are articulated in the thought of Hobbes, so as to consider whether he is correct in asserting that men have no erotic longing for the eternal - in asserting that what they, as mortal beings, cannot have, a summum bonum or finis ultimus that would complete their existence, is also of no fundamental concern to them. The paper turns then to consider the earlier attempt made by Pericles in his funeral oration to satisfy fully the longings of Athenian citizens, without having any need to appeal to the gods, by presenting the power of imperial Athens as the proper object of human erotic longing - an attempt the desirability, not to say possibility, of which Thucydides himself seems to call quietly into question. Finally, Thucydides' own understanding of human erotic longing is compared to Pericles' and Hobbes' in an effort to understand the potential insufficiency of any political attempt, modern or pre-modern, to fully satisfy man's longing for immortality born as it is of an awareness of his inescapably mortal nature
Year of publication: |
2011
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Authors: | Graham, Laurie |
Publisher: |
[2011]: [S.l.] : SSRN |
Description of contents: | Abstract [papers.ssrn.com] |
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