Politische Theorie

Abstract

This introduction presents the argumentative strategy used by the classics of political thought to justify their perspective on the shaping of the political order. It brings together the figures of argumentation and presents them in their respective epoch-making, important heuristic function. The thinkers covered range from Homer, Thucydides, Polybius, Plato, Aristotle and Cicero (in antiquity) to Augustine and Thomas Aquinas (in the Middle Ages), Machiavelli, Morus, Bodin, Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau (in the pre-modern era) and representatives of the modern era such as Kant, Hegel, Weber, Schmitt and more recent authors such as Rawls, Etzioni and Habermas.