Books > History > World history > BCE to 500 CE
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A Defense of Rule - Origins of Political Thought in Greece and India (Hardcover)
Loot Price: R2,396
Discovery Miles 23 960
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A Defense of Rule - Origins of Political Thought in Greece and India (Hardcover)
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Donate to Against Period Poverty
Total price: R2,416
Discovery Miles: 24 160
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At its core, politics is all about relations of rule. Accordingly
one of the central preoccupations of political theory is what it
means for human beings to rule over one another or share in a
process of ruling. While political theorists tend to regard rule as
a necessary evil, this book aims to explain how rule need not be
understood as anathema to political life. Rather, by looking at
some of the earliest traditions of political thought we can rethink
rule in ways that evoke stewardship rather than domination. Stuart
Gray argues that hierarchical ideas about rule coevolved with
political divisions between the human and non-human in western
theory. The earliest discernible Greek thought advanced an
instrumental relationship between humans and their environment, a
position that has persisted into our current age. While this seems
a defensible position, Gray points out that such instrumental
understandings of the nonhuman world have gotten us into serious
trouble, including problems of deforestation, global warming,
rising sea levels, species loss, and peak oil. To rethink the
concept of rule, A Defense of Rule turns to early Indian political
thought that suggests that rule is a relationship predicated on
stewardship. The book compares these two traditions of thought in
order to suggest that we have a normative duty to the environment,
and thus to act in a way that takes the interests of non-human
nature into account. Basing his argument on his own original
translations of primary sources in ancient Greek and Sanskrit, Gray
shows when and how early concepts of rule evolved to justify
divisions between the human and nonhuman. In doing so, he argues
for a reconsideration of our duties toward the nonhuman natural
world.
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