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SOURCES OF MODERN POLITICAL THOUGHT: FOUR CENTURIES OF ALTHUSIUS’ POLITICS
Tomislav Lamut
orcid.org/0000-0002-8037-1324
; HR-10000 Zagreb, Grahorova 16
Sažetak
The source of the four centuries of controversies surrounding Althusius’ Politics is not the work itself but its interpretations. The author argues that Althusius’ political teaching is not controversial; also, its methodicalness is highly conducive to a theoretical debate about the political/theoretical and cultural tradition of thought in general. In the first part, the author identifies the fundamental concepts of Althusius’ political thought, and the logic of his exposition in Politics. He shows that Althusius’ is a systematic – methodicaly presented – study of politics; politics is a way in which people unite in order to have a good life by means of the communicatio of things, services and right. Consequently, political science deals with the real or ideal ways of this association and its results. Althusius was the first author who explicitly said that only a people as a whole may be sovereign. He also created a theoretical concept of popular sovereignty. That part of his teaching is the greatest and largely undisputed Althusius’ contribution to political thought. In the second part, the debate about the interpretation of the “controversial” fundamental tenets of Althusius’ teaching is reviewed, the tenets that refer to the essence of human community and the character of its political organization. The author concludes that Althusius’ work is a sort of a junction of the then “defeated” but today increasingly popular ideas: communitarianism (versus individualism) and social solidarity (versus the onesided maximalization of individual benefit), a kind of a matrixal structure of social system (versus political-pyramidal), i.e. the autonomy of its parts (versus the monolith centralist-state system). In the dawn of a new era, the elements of those traditions that were soon to be (temporarily) defeated, were systematically depicted in Althusius’ epochal opus, whose internal potential is increasingly recognized as one of the most relevant provenances of modern political thought.
Ključne riječi
politics; association; simbiotic communities; popular sovereignty; contract; federalism; subsidiarity
Hrčak ID:
22927
URI
Datum izdavanja:
16.7.2004.
Posjeta: 1.994 *