The Political Philosophy of the European City: From Polis, through City-State, to Megalopolis

(Hardback)

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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 books 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.

Reviews

Through a skilled analysis of a very rich amount of sources and literature, from the ancient classics to contemporary writers and scholars, Ferenc Hrcher claims that because of the variety of the strong roots of the European cities they could return to be sustainable self-governing communities.

Author Bio

Ferenc Hrcher is research professor and head of the Research Institute of Politics of the University of Public Service in Budapest.