European Political Thought Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

This example European Political Thought Essay is published for educational and informational purposes only. If you need a custom essay or research paper on this topic please use our writing services. EssayEmpire.com offers reliable custom essay writing services that can help you to receive high grades and impress your professors with the quality of each essay or research paper you hand in.

European political thought is the study of the contents, values, beliefs, and institutions of political thought, one of the most peculiar productions generated by European culture, in Europe. Accordingly, this article will provide the reader with a historical look at this phenomenon.

Ancient Foundations Of European Political Thought

From ancient Greek times (starting in approximately the fifth century BCE) to the present, European political thought has evolved around the problems of the divine, nature, man, society, and history. During this long period, European political thought has shifted from a static nature based on absolutes and eternally valid ideas to a dynamic outlook based on relativity and the notion of ideas constantly evolving and changing. In their appeal to nature, the Greeks sought both incorporeal and changeless forms (Platonism) and effects and purposes in the realm of sensible objects and of change (Aristotelianism). To the end, they created the ethos of reason. The Greek invention of the city-state and politics, which took the forms of monarchical, aristocratic, and democratic forms of government, drastically affected many European thinkers. In addition to this, Stoic philosophy, which embraced the priority of reason from the post-Socratic Greek thinkers and emphasized the virtuous life, shaped political thought in the Roman Empire until its end in 476 AD.

The Evolution Of European Political Thought In The Middle Ages And After

Medieval thought in Europe moderated Stoic thought and emphasized the role of the state in general and man’s soul in particular. During the Middle Ages, which covered roughly the period between the fifth century and the fifteenth century, there were two orders of power: the priesthood, culminating in the pope, and the lay government, culminating in the king and emperor. The first one—the spiritual power—and the second one—the temporal power—were unequal in dignity, the spiritual power being the superior. Especially after the thirteenth century the human community in Christian parts of the world was thought by the popes coextensive with the Church, with the pope being the head of this unity, the secular rulers serving as his agents in temporal matters, and the clergy serving as his agents in spiritual matters.

The spiritual authority over temporal matters maintained until the Renaissance and Reformation of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, during which a realist Machiavellian turn in political thought took place. Accordingly, the concern was no more about man’s soul but about both his acquisition and his retention of power. Thus real politics was born.

The Enlightenment and the scientific revolution of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries strengthened the belief in science, reason, and human progress. The individualism of social contract theorists, elaborated in John Locke’s notions of life, liberty, and property principles and Immanuel Kant’s concept of individual autonomy, also became prevalent. Both classical liberalism’s emphasis on individual liberty and modern republicanism’s emphasis on equality and civic friendship found its embodiment in the French Revolution (1789–1799) and its stress on liberty, equality, fraternity, and human rights.

Out of resistance to the ideas of universal enlightenment and individualism came the romantic counter enlightenment. Thinkers of this movement, such as Jean Jacques Rousseau and Johann G. Herder stressed the value of community over the individual, emphasized the local rather than the general, and promoted the notions of a multitude of traditional ways of life as opposed to the Enlightenment’s embrace of the moral demand of universal reason. In England, however, utilitarianism, claiming that morally right actions are those that maximize utility, became the mainstream ideology.

Expansion Of Political Ideas Through The Industrial Revolution

The Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth century drastically changed the empirical grounds of European political thought and introduced the notion of the division of labor, the working class, the industrial bourgeoisie, and mass migrations of people to towns. Urbanization, the increase in literacy through compulsory education, and the impact of improved literacy on mass media contributed to the distillation of modern European thought.

Nineteenth-century Europe also witnessed some communitarian thinkers. Karl Marx and Friederich Engels’s historical materialism and communist ideology, which advocated a class and property-free society, and Mikhail Bakunin and Pierre Joseph Proudhon’s anarchism, which called for the destruction of all institutions, including the state, aimed at an egalitarian postindustrial society and broadened the spectrum of European political thought to the left.

European Political Thought Since The Twentieth Century

European political thought in the twentieth century took different forms in different countries. In Germany, Max Weber stressed the bureaucratization and rationalization of daily life in modern societies. Furthermore, the Frankfurt school chastised the narrative of the Enlightenment and criticized the dominance of instrumental reason that created technology dominant life spheres in late modern societies. In the same line of thinking the German thinker Jurgen Habermas elaborated democratic theory and communication in constitutional democracies. Many thinkers and politicians incorporated and accepted these ideas for constructing the future of the European Union.

In France, however, European political thought, thanks to the enormous theoretical contribution of Jean-Paul Sartre, was first shaped by an existentialist emphasis on the subjectivity of the individual based on freedom. Later, this construction of the individual was challenged by an idea of dissolution of man by structuralism, which was elaborated in the works of such thinkers as Claude Levi-Strauss, Louis Althusser, and Jacques Lacan.

The French poststructuralist Michel Foucault challenged the conventional idea of power (juridical power) accumulated in the state with a more ubiquitous and omnipresent understanding of power (disciplinary power) continuously created and recreated within such social and institutional structures as family, school, prison, and the military.

In Italy, Antonio Gramsci theorized a new Marxist concept emphasizing the role of the party working with intellectuals to create a counter hegemony among the masses against the bourgeoisie in civil society and finally initiate a revolutionary assault on the state.

In England, apart from other ideologies, especially liberalism, conservatism—historically powerful, historically against precipitous change, and skeptical about the possibilities of political knowledge, preferring instead the purported political wisdom—also gained strength in the twentieth century.

Today, in the early twenty-first century, the postmodern emphasis on identity and difference deeply affects many thinkers and schools of thought in Europe. As the result of this phenomenon, contemporary European political thought is demanding more elaborate understandings of the individual, of civil society, and of the state.

Bibliography:

Beetham, D. “Mosca, Pareto and Weber: A Historical Comparison.” In Max Weber and His Contemporaries, edited by W. Mommsen and J. Osterhammel, 139–158. London: Unwin Hyman, 1987.
Bellamy, R. Modern Italian Social Theory: Ideology and Politics from Pareto to the Present. Cambridge, UK: Polity, 1987.
Collini, S., D.Winch, and J. Burrows. That Noble Science of Politics: A Study of Nineteenth Century Intellectual History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983.
Dunn, John. The History of Political Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
Gaus, Gerald F., and Chandran Kukathas, eds. Handbook of Political Theory. London: Sage, 2004.
Guthrie,W. K. C. A History of Greek Philosophy. Vol. 3, The Fifth Century Enlightenment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969.
Habermas, J. Between Facts and Norms: Contribution to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy. Translated by W. Rehg. Cambridge, UK: Polity, 1990. See esp. pp. 491–515.
Hooker, Richard. Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity. Edited by Arthur Stephen McGrade. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.
Jennings J. “The Clash of Ideas: Political Thought, Intellectuals and the Meanings of ‘France.’” In French History since Napoleon, edited by M. Alexander, 203–221. London: Arnold, 1999.
Skinner, Quentin. Foundations of Modern Political Thought. 2 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978.