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Athens

Introduction The Greek polis and the Roman civitas represent some of the most distinctive forms of political and social organization in history. Yet, they are often misunderstood when examined through the lens of the modern state. Modern conceptions of the state—centralized, bureaucratic, and sovereign—emerged from the intellectual revolutions of the Renaissance and Enlightenment. Thinkers like …

The importance of Strauss for many in the present is in his exceptional classical scholarship and his recognition that in liberalism lay a deep relativism that would exhaust into permissive nihilism. The collapse of moral norms would divide society which was unified by the force of the law under the social contract. With no more …