Western Republicanism and the Oriental Prince

By Patricia Springborg

The East/West divide seems to be as old as history itself, theroots of Orientalism and anti-Semitism lying far beyond the originsof modern Western imperialism. The very project of Westernclassical republicanism had its darker side: to purloin the legacyof the Greeks, distancing them from Eastern systems deemed'despotic' and 'other'.

Western Republicanism and the Oriental Prince is a thoroughlyrevisionist book, challenging not only the comfortable view theWest has of its own political evolution, but the negativestereotypes of non-Western systems. Not only did these images serveto legitimate early modern European nation states struggling for anidentity, but they also served to justify slavery and other formsof domination over subject peoples.

Drawing upon archaeological and epigraphic evidence, Springborgdiscusses the Mesopotamian and ancient Egyptian contribution ofpolitical forms and cultic institutions to classical Graeco-Romancivilization, an Eastern legacy to the West long obscured forpolitical reasons. A different reading of the foundation myths ofAthens and Rome, certain texts of Plato, Aristotle, and thewritings of Herodotus, Isocrates, Plutarch and Diodorus Siculus, permits us to restore possible lines of filtration. Renaissancethought, long believed to have ushered in the Western classicalrepublican tradition, demonstrates a curious ambivalence towardspowerful Eastern system, objects of fascination as much as fear. Wedo not yet find sedimented the divide between Western Democracy andoriental despotism, in which post-Reformation thought as been setin stone.

This major new study will be of interest to students of politicalhistory, political theory, comparative politics and politicalarchaeology.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0745604080
• ISBN13: 9780745604084
• Release Date: July 1992
• Publisher: Polity Press
• Length: 344 Pages
• Weight: 1.55 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 6.0" x 9.0"