POTH5105 Political Thoughts — Unit 1: Classical Greek and Roman Political Thinkers

Unit 1: Classical Greek and Roman Political Thinkers

Syllabus coverage in this unit
1.1 General Introduction to Political Thought and their Relation to Law · 1.2 Plato: Justice and Ideal State · 1.3 Aristotle: State, Classification of Government and Citizenship · 1.4 Cicero: Concept of Law

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1.1 General Introduction to Political Thought and its Relation to Law

What political thought is: the systematic reflection on political life — the state, power, authority, liberty, equality, justice, rights, obedience and revolution — across time. Political theory systematises it; political ideology weaponises it (your Political Theory course’s distinction).

Why law students must study it (the relation to law — the syllabus’s own question):

1. Every legal order embodies a political theory. A constitution is applied political philosophy: who is sovereign (Hobbes/Rousseau), why rights exist (Locke), what the state may do (Mill), whom the law serves (Marx — Jurisprudence Unit 3’s six schools each answer politically).
2. Every political theory produces a theory of law: Plato’s philosopher-lawgiver, Aristotle’s rule of law, Cicero’s natural law, the contractarians’ legislated order, Mill’s liberty-limitation principle, Marx’s superstructure — this course and Jurisprudence are one story told twice.
3. Legal argument’s deepest vocabulary — justice, consent, sovereignty, representation, liberty — was minted here; lawyers argue with these thinkers’ coins daily.
4. Nepal’s own constitutional debates (sovereignty of the people, inclusion, secularism, socialism-oriented economy) are the syllabus’s East-West debate in Nepali dress.

The map of the course: classical (this unit) → contractarians (U2) → moderns (U3) → Eastern thinkers (U4) → socialism, including its Nepali career (U5).

1.2 Plato (427–347 BC): Justice and the Ideal State

Setting: Socrates’ execution by democratic Athens (399 BC) — the wound behind the Republic: what state would make philosophy, not force, sovereign?

Justice in the individual (the Republic‘s answer, built in three waves): the soul has three parts — reason, spirit, appetite; justice is each part doing its own work (harmony): reason ruling, spirit enforcing, appetite obeying. Injustice = civil war within the soul.

Justice in the state (the ideal state — the soul written large):

Class	Soul’s part	Virtue	Work
Philosopher-rulers	reason	wisdom	governing by knowledge of the Good
Auxiliaries (soldiers)	spirit	courage	defending the city
Producers (farmers, artisans)	appetite	moderation	providing life’s goods

Justice = each class doing its own and not meddling — the “one man, one work” principle; the state as an organism. (Note the craft-argument: ruling is a craft like medicine; the sick need doctors, the polis needs knowers.)

The state’s distinctive institutions: community of property, wives and children for the guardian classes (to kill faction); education as the state’s supreme instrument (the long curriculum culminating in dialectic); the noble lie (the myth of metals — a political fiction for social cohesion); the philosopher-king — “until philosophers rule… cities will have no rest from evils” (brief, the famous line); the Rule of Law alternative in the Statesman/Laws: if the ideal philosopher-king is unavailable, the second-best state is government of laws — “law is the golden cord of reason,” the origin of the rule-of-law lineage.

Critique of democracy: Plato ranks it near the bottom (freedom degenerating into licence; the ship of state commanded by the crew’s vote rather than the navigator’s skill); the demagogue as democracy’s natural product. Assessment (write both sides): the founder of political philosophy — and of the totalitarian temptation (Popper’s Open Society charge: holism, engineered society, the noble lie as propaganda). His real legacy for law: justice as order and harmony; law as reason embodied; the demand that power justify itself by knowledge — questions every constitution still must answer.

1.3 Aristotle (384–322 BC): State, Classification of Government, Citizenship

The state: man is by nature a political animal (zoon politikon) — language, morality and reason mature only in the polis; the state exists by nature and is prior to the individual (as the whole is prior to the part): not a contract but the completion of human association (household → village → polis). The state’s end is not mere life but the good life.

Law before the ruler: “law is reason free from passion” — Aristotle’s preference for the rule of law over even the best man (the second-best, perfected): collective wisdom, stability, impartiality; even the best ruler needs law as a trainer’s regimen. The ancestral contribution to constitutionalism (echoing Plato’s Laws, refining it).

Classification of government (the six-fold — the exam’s core): by who rules (one / few / many) crossed with whose good is served:

Number	True form (common good)	Perverted form (rulers’ good)
One	Monarchy/Kingship	Tyranny
Few	Aristocracy (rule of the best)	Oligarchy (rule of the rich)
Many	Polity (the mixed many)	Democracy (Aristotle’s term for mob rule of the poor)

Note: “democracy” is the perverted form in his vocabulary — a fact examiners love; the good form of the many he calls polity, a mixed constitution blending oligarchic and democratic elements (with a large middle class as ballast — his material precondition of stability). This six-fold map organises political classification to this day (Nepal’s debates: loktantra as the good-many form).

Citizenship: the citizen is one who shares in the judicial functions and in office (politics III) — “a juror and a member of the ecclesia”; citizenship as participation in ruling and being ruled in turn, not mere residence or legal protection. Aristotle’s exclusions (women, slaves, labourers — the artisan too “vulgar” to be leisured) are the modern critique’s target; his core definition — the citizen as office-sharer — survives in the electorate and jury of every republic.

1.4 Cicero (106–43 BC): Concept of Law

The Roman frame: orator, consul, philosopher; the De Republica, De Legibus, De Officiis; his career (and murder) spanning the republic’s death-agony — the thinker of civic virtue against dictatorship.

The res publica: the commonwealth is the people’s affair (res populi) — a people united by agreement on justice and common interest; the state a moral partnership, not a property. Civic duty (the officium of De Officiis — through Pufendorf into modern constitutional ethics) binds citizen and statesman alike.

The concept of law (the natural-law doctrine — Jurisprudence Unit 3.1’s Roman chapter):

1. True law is right reason in agreement with nature — universal, unchangeable, everlasting; it cannot be repealed by senate or people; it “summons to duty by its commands… and thwarts the wicked.” There is one law, eternal and unchangeable, for all nations and all times — one master and ruler, God.
2. Human law’s validity derives from this: statutes that conflict with natural law are not binding — “the wicked command of a tyrant” is no law; corruption of custom does not corrupt the measure.
3. Law’s unity with justice: law is “the distinction between just and unjust,” the bond of the commonwealth — an unjust “law” names nothing (De Legibus‘ argument — the lex injusta tradition’s fountainhead).
   The statesman: Scipio’s Dream (De Republica‘s close) — the ruler’s true glory is the citizen’s safety; government’s forms are instruments; the mixed constitution (Rome’s own: consuls/senate/tribunes) recommended against the six-fold’s instabilities — the model Montesquieu would copy.
   Legacy for law: natural law enters jurisprudence through Cicero (the Stoics’ pupil, Aquinas’s quarry); “right reason” becomes the international law of Grotius; and every constitutional court striking down “unjust” statute speaks, knowingly or not, his sentence.

Unit close (one comparative paragraph — memorise)

Plato gives law its philosopher (knowledge must rule), Aristotle its scientist (classification, the rule of law, the citizen as office-sharer), Cicero its moralist (law as right reason binding the state itself): the Greek-Roman inheritance is the DNA of the legal world — including its Nepali branch, where ” loktantrik “, federal republic and fundamental rights are these three thinkers’s grandchildren naturalised.

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Model Questions

Short-answer questions

1. Why does the syllabus begin with Greek political thought for law students?
2. State Plato’s three classes and their corresponding virtues.
3. What is Aristotle’s six-fold classification? Why is polity the good “many” form?
4. Define citizenship per Aristotle and note his exclusions.
5. Quote (briefly) and explain Cicero’s definition of true law.

Long-answer questions

1. “Constitutions are applied political philosophy.” Discuss the relation of political thought to law with Nepali illustrations.
2. “Justice is each part doing its own.” Explain Plato’s justice — individual and state — and evaluate the ideal state and its critics.
3. “The state exists by nature, and law should rule rather than men.” Explain Aristotle’s state, classification of governments and citizenship.
4. “Law is the bond of the commonwealth.” Discuss Cicero’s concept of law and its jurisprudential legacy.

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📚 Get the complete notes: Download the full Political Thoughts PDF (all units) — Law Info Nepal Original Notes Series.