peace Jim Davis Ozark Bioregion, USA, Planet Gaia check out my books at: http://stores.lulu.com/store.php?fAcctID=141735
--- On Sun, 5/22/11, Chuck Grimes <c123grimes at att.net> wrote:
From: Chuck Grimes <c123grimes at att.net> Subject: [lbo-talk] the Constitution To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org Date: Sunday, May 22, 2011, 3:39 PM
It was a very well written and thought out piece. It also taught me something in terms of pov, history, and class.
I just started Ellen-Meiksins Wood's Peasant-citizen and Slave. It sets up Athens as primarily populated with men who worked either the land or in towns and Athens as shopkeeps, trades crafts, merchants and so forth. This picture is over and against the evolved western history picture of wealthy idle citizens, who were the primary participants in the direct democratic process.
I think there is a simple reason for the latter view. Until modern histories were better informed by a more direct evidence of archeaology, closer studies in anthopology, previous historians like Hegel simply read the greek classics and did a textural study to draw their picture of life in ancient Athens. You can find all sorts of mistaken history in Hegel's lectures on history. Still, they are interesting to study mostly for their reflection of thought in the 19thC.
The importance of this change of view has to do with how the US and Europe set up their republican governmental systems. The reason is they drew on political philosophies build on this idealized (and ideological) view of how ancient republics were constructed and who filled their positions.
So returning the Seth Ackerman's piece, Madison and rest studied the works in european philosophy in general and the english philosophy and legal history. The founding crew were pretty snobby about most people below their class, echoing the general elite thought about the lesser masses.
This is an interesting passage, since I never read anything on the right, except its philosophical level:
``A true fanatic and weirdo, Skousen believed the Founding Fathers were inspired by the example of the ancient Anglo-Saxons, who in turn were inspired by the Biblical Israelites. All adhered to the divinely sanctioned principles of limited government, a system under which America made more progress in its first century than the world had made in the previous 5,000''
This idea the US republic is descended from the OT, isn't quite as half baked as it sounds. This general line was part of Spinoza's Theological-Political Treatise. He assumed that the OT was a mytho-historical text. Then he tried to derive a secular republican form of government from it. The derived governance structure mostly mirrored Spinoza's time under the Dutch republic of Jan de Witt.
This general idea of the derivation of governance from the OT accounts for a lot of theoretical-political similaries between Zionism and the academic neoconservatives. The former at least in the 1920s tended to sourcde the OT, like the early Strauss, while the latter sourced the ancient greeks, as Strauss did in his later work.
Anyway that the Tea Party have a degraded bollixed up far right biblically source version is hilarious.
We've been through this experiment before. It's about the Mormons and their political-theocratic system under Brigham Young they called Theodemocracy:
``The American public was alarmed by the semi-theocratic dominance of the Utah Territory under Brigham Young. While the Mormons believed in some of the principles of the American Constitution, Mormon political thought was strongly influenced by a concept dubbed "Theodemocracy." They associated it with their belief in the imminence of Christ's Second Coming. Although Mormons supported republican processes to elect ecclesiastical leaders into positions of secular power their beliefs required subservience of civil government to church decree.''
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_War#Theodemocracy
Well if you can stand to read this shuff.
CG ___________________________________ http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk