Arlene Saxonhouse - Academia.edu (original) (raw)
Papers by Arlene Saxonhouse
Hypatia reviews online, 2018
University of Chicago Press eBooks, 1995
The Comedy and Tragedy of Machiavelli, 2017
Political Theory, 2018
Peter Euben's California license plate read "KALON," Greek for "the beautiful." It was a choice t... more Peter Euben's California license plate read "KALON," Greek for "the beautiful." It was a choice that captured much about Euben. On the one hand, there was his mocking self-parody, for while Euben was many things, as a slightly balding, slightly rotund middle-aged man of middling height he would never have claimed the classic beauty of the Greek sculptures adorning the acropolis. But a license plate emblazoned with KALON also captured Euben's enchantment with the ancient Greek world whose authors elegantly offered their audiences and readers tragic insights into human potential and the limits of human knowledge that Euben worked to communicate to his students and to the readers of his books and articles. And the word captured a goal toward which we might aim through our everyday interactions as democratic citizens striving together for some sort of collective knowledge to guide us.
Polis: The Journal for Ancient Greek Political Thought, 2017
This essay initially distinguishes Athenian democracy from what I call ‘hyphenated-democracies’, ... more This essay initially distinguishes Athenian democracy from what I call ‘hyphenated-democracies’, each of which adds a conceptual framework developed in early modern Europe to the language of democracy: representative-democracy, liberal-democracy, constitutional-democracy, republican-democracy. These hyphenated-democracies emphasize the restraints placed on the power of political authorities. In contrast, Athenian democracy with the people ruling over themselves rested on the fundamental principle of equality rather than the limitations placed on that rule. However, equality as the defining normative principle of democracy raises its own problems, namely: How do we – of limited vision – identify who is equal, and what injustices attend the criteria used to establish who is equal? Consideration of several ancient tragedies illustrates how the Athenian playwrights explored these questions and how they identified the challenges faced by those who understand democracy as grounded on egal...
Free Speech and Democracy in Ancient Athens
Oxford Handbooks Online, 2017
In the Archaeology of his History, Thucydides traces those factors that led to the rise of the ci... more In the Archaeology of his History, Thucydides traces those factors that led to the rise of the cities that face one another in the war that he records. Foremost among them is the navy. I contend that this focus on the navy as the basis of political power captures for Thucydides the connection between movement and power: possession of power is not a static condition but always entails the unending search for more power, allowing the cities who possess navies/power no respite from constant motion. In contrast to what I call the “power trap” that ultimately leads to the destruction of the city engaged in the constant motion of pursuing power after power stands the permanence of the speech, the logoi, of the historian who can offer an “everlasting possession” such as eludes the political leaders of cities such as Athens caught up as they are in the power trap.
The Cambridge Companion to Ancient Greek Political Thought
The characters who inhabit ancient tragedy continue to burn themselves into our consciousness. Oe... more The characters who inhabit ancient tragedy continue to burn themselves into our consciousness. Oedipus, Antigone, Clytemnestra, and Electra all offer us visions of heroes and villains, personalities and psychologies caught in the labyrinthine consequences of their own characters and of fate. Yet, ancient tragedy goes well beyond the portrayal of the actions and choices of these commanding figures. Through the presentation of an Antigone or an Oedipus or an Orestes, it explores as well the challenges entailed in the founding of political communities. Today, whether we turn to the newly democratizing states or the issues surrounding the creation of a political union in Europe, our understanding of political beginnings and communal life often resides in the process of constitution making, the creation of institutions, and legal safeguards intended to provide for the security and protection of individual freedom. The ancient Athenians, writing long before the legalistic language of constitutions came to define political foundings, grappled with a range of issues that force us to reflect on the beginnings of political communities and to take those concerns well beyond the abstract legalistic focus that dominates the contemporary process. The tragedians recognize the myths, the gender-laden choices, the exclusions at the base of assertions of political order.
Perspectives on Political Science, 2011
Abstract This “Homeric” appreciation of Catherine Zuckert's Plato's Philosophers focuses ... more Abstract This “Homeric” appreciation of Catherine Zuckert's Plato's Philosophers focuses on the significance of the revised chronology for reading the Platonic dialogues and how this changes the conventional understanding of the relation between Plato and Socrates: Plato become Socrates' biographer, not his replacement.
Free Speech and Democracy in Ancient Athens, 2005
Polity, 1988
The search for the paradigm has haunted political science since its inception. The political scie... more The search for the paradigm has haunted political science since its inception. The political scientist dreams of the model that can explain all, encompass with simplicity and precision the power relations that define how Wve live and how we ought to live together in communities larger than the family. The paradigm explains how the parts fit and move together.' Originally, paradigm or paradeigma in the Greek was the architect's model, the plan according to which the building would be constructed. With the development of idealist philosophy in such Platonic dialogues as the Republic, the paradeigmata resided in the world of forms, that level of perfection toward which actual cities, or actual men and women of flesh and bones and passions, could only aspire. These paradeigmata retained not only explanatory force, but were primarily normative models, models of how the generic man or the generic political community ought to behave and work. Happy was the man or woman who caught a noetic glance of the paradeigmata laid up in heaven. But few there were who could do so. And thus we find ourselves living not in the world of unified perfection, attaining neither the perfection within ourselves nor observing the simple governing principles of the political universe. We dwell in a world of diversity where political systems are many, where values are diverse across time and space, and where the paradigms we seek seem to flash before us all too briefly prior to our realization of their inadequacies. Plato's Republic with its polis as the individual writ large presents us with the first paradigm of the political world, but already in Aristotle's Politics the paradigm that encompasses all yields to the pursuit of understanding the particular. In the final books of the Politics, Aristotle tries to identify the best regime, but the attempt fades off into discussions of musical education. As insightful as these books may be, they do
Polis: The Journal for Ancient Greek Political Thought, 1983
The Heythrop Journal, 2010
The American Historical Review, 1995
ANU Press eBooks, Sep 1, 2012
Journal of the History of Philosophy, 1997
The Review of Politics
Aristophanes in his comedy the Acharnians educates the crowd that he creates as a character on st... more Aristophanes in his comedy the Acharnians educates the crowd that he creates as a character on stage, as well as the crowd gathered to watch his comedy, about what is truly in their interest: the peace that allows them to be happy by satisfying their longings for good food and frequent sex. I suggest, invoking the medieval language of vox populi vox dei, that Aristophanes (like the politicians and demagogues of today) competes to become the one who gives the people their voice. His comedy imagines that both the crowd in the play and the audience in the theater learn through the action of the comedy the value of peace for private happiness. The crowd so educated will give voice to Aristophanes's wisdom when they vote in their democratic assemblies about what seems best to the people.
Contemporary Political Theory, 2020
Almost two years on, it is still unfathomable to me that Peter Euben (1939-2018) is no longer on ... more Almost two years on, it is still unfathomable to me that Peter Euben (1939-2018) is no longer on this earth. He was not my teacher or colleague, although I learned from him every day of my life, and the best of what I am as an academic I owe to him (he should not, however, be held responsible for the rest). He was my father. And the loss of a parent is the loss of a world. So I am indebted to Jill Frank as editor and contributor, as well as to the other contributors to this Critical Exchange, for their ability to capture different parts of him in words, to testify to what he leaves behind in us, and to evoke, by example and argument, his insistence that we reflect critically upon the kind of lives we lead. In both his life and work, my father found solace in what could be brought into being when we gather together to commemorate a person's life, commitments, and deeds. He wrote that, in Homer's Iliad, 'the gods sometimes stand aloof from human life, looking down on mortals as creatures of a day, as leaves that bloom for a moment and then fall to earth unremembered and unmourned. But mortals are not like leaves. For they can achieve immortality in the stories told about them after their death; stories of what they did, how they lived and loved, whom they cared for, what they valued most' (Euben, 1985). In recounting an event, sharing a memory, or honoring an intellectual and political legacy, humans have a second life on the lips of their loved ones and comrades, as well as friends and colleagues. I would like to end with a quotation from a work my father treasured, Thucydides's Peloponnesian War, and to which he turned when memorializing his sister, who died too young. It is a hymn of praise to those with the capacity to live life with energy and intensity and love of the world. Such people, Thucydides writes, 'have the whole earth for their tomb; and in lands and times far from their own, where the column with its epitaph declares it, there is enshrined in every breath a record unwritten, with no tablet to preserve it, except that of the human heart' (1982, p. 43). So in remembering Peter Euben here, we not only commemorate him. We also conjure him so that, in a sense, we enable him to live on.
Hypatia reviews online, 2018
University of Chicago Press eBooks, 1995
The Comedy and Tragedy of Machiavelli, 2017
Political Theory, 2018
Peter Euben's California license plate read "KALON," Greek for "the beautiful." It was a choice t... more Peter Euben's California license plate read "KALON," Greek for "the beautiful." It was a choice that captured much about Euben. On the one hand, there was his mocking self-parody, for while Euben was many things, as a slightly balding, slightly rotund middle-aged man of middling height he would never have claimed the classic beauty of the Greek sculptures adorning the acropolis. But a license plate emblazoned with KALON also captured Euben's enchantment with the ancient Greek world whose authors elegantly offered their audiences and readers tragic insights into human potential and the limits of human knowledge that Euben worked to communicate to his students and to the readers of his books and articles. And the word captured a goal toward which we might aim through our everyday interactions as democratic citizens striving together for some sort of collective knowledge to guide us.
Polis: The Journal for Ancient Greek Political Thought, 2017
This essay initially distinguishes Athenian democracy from what I call ‘hyphenated-democracies’, ... more This essay initially distinguishes Athenian democracy from what I call ‘hyphenated-democracies’, each of which adds a conceptual framework developed in early modern Europe to the language of democracy: representative-democracy, liberal-democracy, constitutional-democracy, republican-democracy. These hyphenated-democracies emphasize the restraints placed on the power of political authorities. In contrast, Athenian democracy with the people ruling over themselves rested on the fundamental principle of equality rather than the limitations placed on that rule. However, equality as the defining normative principle of democracy raises its own problems, namely: How do we – of limited vision – identify who is equal, and what injustices attend the criteria used to establish who is equal? Consideration of several ancient tragedies illustrates how the Athenian playwrights explored these questions and how they identified the challenges faced by those who understand democracy as grounded on egal...
Free Speech and Democracy in Ancient Athens
Oxford Handbooks Online, 2017
In the Archaeology of his History, Thucydides traces those factors that led to the rise of the ci... more In the Archaeology of his History, Thucydides traces those factors that led to the rise of the cities that face one another in the war that he records. Foremost among them is the navy. I contend that this focus on the navy as the basis of political power captures for Thucydides the connection between movement and power: possession of power is not a static condition but always entails the unending search for more power, allowing the cities who possess navies/power no respite from constant motion. In contrast to what I call the “power trap” that ultimately leads to the destruction of the city engaged in the constant motion of pursuing power after power stands the permanence of the speech, the logoi, of the historian who can offer an “everlasting possession” such as eludes the political leaders of cities such as Athens caught up as they are in the power trap.
The Cambridge Companion to Ancient Greek Political Thought
The characters who inhabit ancient tragedy continue to burn themselves into our consciousness. Oe... more The characters who inhabit ancient tragedy continue to burn themselves into our consciousness. Oedipus, Antigone, Clytemnestra, and Electra all offer us visions of heroes and villains, personalities and psychologies caught in the labyrinthine consequences of their own characters and of fate. Yet, ancient tragedy goes well beyond the portrayal of the actions and choices of these commanding figures. Through the presentation of an Antigone or an Oedipus or an Orestes, it explores as well the challenges entailed in the founding of political communities. Today, whether we turn to the newly democratizing states or the issues surrounding the creation of a political union in Europe, our understanding of political beginnings and communal life often resides in the process of constitution making, the creation of institutions, and legal safeguards intended to provide for the security and protection of individual freedom. The ancient Athenians, writing long before the legalistic language of constitutions came to define political foundings, grappled with a range of issues that force us to reflect on the beginnings of political communities and to take those concerns well beyond the abstract legalistic focus that dominates the contemporary process. The tragedians recognize the myths, the gender-laden choices, the exclusions at the base of assertions of political order.
Perspectives on Political Science, 2011
Abstract This “Homeric” appreciation of Catherine Zuckert's Plato's Philosophers focuses ... more Abstract This “Homeric” appreciation of Catherine Zuckert's Plato's Philosophers focuses on the significance of the revised chronology for reading the Platonic dialogues and how this changes the conventional understanding of the relation between Plato and Socrates: Plato become Socrates' biographer, not his replacement.
Free Speech and Democracy in Ancient Athens, 2005
Polity, 1988
The search for the paradigm has haunted political science since its inception. The political scie... more The search for the paradigm has haunted political science since its inception. The political scientist dreams of the model that can explain all, encompass with simplicity and precision the power relations that define how Wve live and how we ought to live together in communities larger than the family. The paradigm explains how the parts fit and move together.' Originally, paradigm or paradeigma in the Greek was the architect's model, the plan according to which the building would be constructed. With the development of idealist philosophy in such Platonic dialogues as the Republic, the paradeigmata resided in the world of forms, that level of perfection toward which actual cities, or actual men and women of flesh and bones and passions, could only aspire. These paradeigmata retained not only explanatory force, but were primarily normative models, models of how the generic man or the generic political community ought to behave and work. Happy was the man or woman who caught a noetic glance of the paradeigmata laid up in heaven. But few there were who could do so. And thus we find ourselves living not in the world of unified perfection, attaining neither the perfection within ourselves nor observing the simple governing principles of the political universe. We dwell in a world of diversity where political systems are many, where values are diverse across time and space, and where the paradigms we seek seem to flash before us all too briefly prior to our realization of their inadequacies. Plato's Republic with its polis as the individual writ large presents us with the first paradigm of the political world, but already in Aristotle's Politics the paradigm that encompasses all yields to the pursuit of understanding the particular. In the final books of the Politics, Aristotle tries to identify the best regime, but the attempt fades off into discussions of musical education. As insightful as these books may be, they do
Polis: The Journal for Ancient Greek Political Thought, 1983
The Heythrop Journal, 2010
The American Historical Review, 1995
ANU Press eBooks, Sep 1, 2012
Journal of the History of Philosophy, 1997
The Review of Politics
Aristophanes in his comedy the Acharnians educates the crowd that he creates as a character on st... more Aristophanes in his comedy the Acharnians educates the crowd that he creates as a character on stage, as well as the crowd gathered to watch his comedy, about what is truly in their interest: the peace that allows them to be happy by satisfying their longings for good food and frequent sex. I suggest, invoking the medieval language of vox populi vox dei, that Aristophanes (like the politicians and demagogues of today) competes to become the one who gives the people their voice. His comedy imagines that both the crowd in the play and the audience in the theater learn through the action of the comedy the value of peace for private happiness. The crowd so educated will give voice to Aristophanes's wisdom when they vote in their democratic assemblies about what seems best to the people.
Contemporary Political Theory, 2020
Almost two years on, it is still unfathomable to me that Peter Euben (1939-2018) is no longer on ... more Almost two years on, it is still unfathomable to me that Peter Euben (1939-2018) is no longer on this earth. He was not my teacher or colleague, although I learned from him every day of my life, and the best of what I am as an academic I owe to him (he should not, however, be held responsible for the rest). He was my father. And the loss of a parent is the loss of a world. So I am indebted to Jill Frank as editor and contributor, as well as to the other contributors to this Critical Exchange, for their ability to capture different parts of him in words, to testify to what he leaves behind in us, and to evoke, by example and argument, his insistence that we reflect critically upon the kind of lives we lead. In both his life and work, my father found solace in what could be brought into being when we gather together to commemorate a person's life, commitments, and deeds. He wrote that, in Homer's Iliad, 'the gods sometimes stand aloof from human life, looking down on mortals as creatures of a day, as leaves that bloom for a moment and then fall to earth unremembered and unmourned. But mortals are not like leaves. For they can achieve immortality in the stories told about them after their death; stories of what they did, how they lived and loved, whom they cared for, what they valued most' (Euben, 1985). In recounting an event, sharing a memory, or honoring an intellectual and political legacy, humans have a second life on the lips of their loved ones and comrades, as well as friends and colleagues. I would like to end with a quotation from a work my father treasured, Thucydides's Peloponnesian War, and to which he turned when memorializing his sister, who died too young. It is a hymn of praise to those with the capacity to live life with energy and intensity and love of the world. Such people, Thucydides writes, 'have the whole earth for their tomb; and in lands and times far from their own, where the column with its epitaph declares it, there is enshrined in every breath a record unwritten, with no tablet to preserve it, except that of the human heart' (1982, p. 43). So in remembering Peter Euben here, we not only commemorate him. We also conjure him so that, in a sense, we enable him to live on.