info@woodslane.com.au
Contact us on (02) 8445 2300
For all customer service and order enquiries

WOODSLANE

Popular Subjects

Woodslane Online Catalogues

9781793610829 Add to Cart Academic Inspection Copy

The Political Philosophy of the European City

From Polis, through City-State, to Megalopolis?
Description
Author
Biography
Table of
Contents
Reviews
Google
Preview
The Political Philosophy of the European City is a courageous and wide-ranging panorama of the political life and thought of the European city. Its novel hypothesis is that modern Western political thought, since the time of Hobbes and Locke, underestimated the political significance and value of the community of urban citizens, called 'civitas', united by local customs, or even a formal or informal urban constitution at a certain location, which had a recognizable countenance, with natural and man-made, architectural marks, called 'urbs'. Recalling the golden age of the European city in ancient Greece and Rome, and offering a detailed description of its turbulent life in the Renaissance Italian city-states, it makes a case for the city not only as a hotbed of modern democracy, but also as a remedy for some of the distortions of political life in the alienated contemporary, centralized, Weberian bureaucratic state. Overcoming the north-south divide, or the core and periphery partition, the book's material is particularly rich in Central European case studies. All in all, it is an enjoyable read which offers sound arguments to revisit the offer of the small and middle-sized European town, in search of a more sustainable future for Europe.
Ferenc Hoercher is research professor and head of the Research Institute of Politics of the University of Public Service in Budapest.
Preface and Acknowledgements Introduction Chapter 1. From the "Reason of the City" to the "Practical Wisdom of the City" Chapter 2. The City of The Italian Renaissance and the German City Chapter 3. The City of Ancient Greece and Christian Europe Chapter 4. From the Megalopolis to the City of Human Scale Conclusion: The City as a Work of Art
"Through a skilled analysis of a very rich amount of sources and literature, from the ancient classics to contemporary writers and scholars, Ferenc Hoercher claims that because of the variety of the strong roots of the European cities they could return to be sustainable self-governing communities." -- Mario Ascheri, Roma Tre University
Google Preview content