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Sovereignty
In Our Time: Philosophy
The Three Pillars of Political Theory
There has to really be a sovereign underneath what seems to be a divided arrangement of power. In Rome in particular, and anticipated in some Greek thought, there was the idea that perhaps you could have a mixed regime. It's like they go before a horse to market here,. Let's go back to Athens. What could you get an encapsulation of an idea of something like sovereignty that might have come out of the Athenian experience? I think it is the idea that the demos, the people are curious in the state... They're not accountable to anyone else.
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Speaker 4
And also the Greeks set out the first, you tell me if I'm wrong, it might be the seventh, I don't know. Anyway, I set out the first division that there was a monarchy, monarchical system, aristocratic system, and a democratic system, the three systems that could be intermingled, they could intertwine, they could overlap, but these three were the three pillars of political theory. Yes,
Speaker 3
that's right, and then in Rome in particular, and anticipated in some Greek thought, there was the idea that perhaps you could have a mixed regime, which actually combined elements of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy, so we see that in the Roman Republic, and there it's very interesting where sovereignty resides, because we find in the Roman historians, sometimes the people are described as having miasstas as one term for sovereignty, sometimes it's the senate, and that would lead Bo Dan and Hobbes to think that actually in these mixed regimes it's a kind of fiction. There has to really be a sovereign underneath what seems to be a divided arrangement of power. It's like
Speaker 4
they go before a horse to market here, let's go back to Athens. What could you get an encapsulation of an idea of something like sovereignty that might have come out of the Athenian experience? I think it is the idea that the demos, the people
Speaker 3
are curious in the state, so they are in control, they are the masters of the political regime, and that means precisely that their supreme, no one can overrule them, they're not accountable to anyone else, and those ideas of not being accountable, not being beholden to anyone else, I think are really at the center of that idea of the people as in a sense sovereign.
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