- Title Pages
- Preface
- Political Theologies
- Introduction
- The Gods of Politics in Early Greek Cities
- Church, State, Resistance
- Politics and Finitude: The Temporal Status of Augustine's Civitas Permixta
- The Scandal of Religion: Luther and Public Speech in the Reformation
- On the Names of God
- The Permanence of the Theologico-political?
- Violence in the State of Exception: Reflections on Theologico-Political Motifs in Benjamin and Schmitt
- Critique, Coercion, and Sacred Life in Benjamin's “Critique of Violence”
- From Rosenzweig to Levinas: Philosophy of War
- Levinas, Spinoza, and the Theologico-Political Meaning of Scripture
- On the Relations Between the Secular Liberal State and Religion
- Prepolitical Moral Foundations of a Free Republic
- Bush's God Talk
- Pluralism and Faith
- Subjects of Tolerance: Why We Are Civilized and They Are the Barbarians
- Religion, Liberal Democracy, and Citizenship
- Toleration Without Tolerance: Enlightenment and the Image of Reason
- Saint John: The Miracle of Secular Reason
- Reinhabiting Civil Disobedience
- Rogue Democracy and the Hidden God
- Intimate Publicities: Retreating the Theologico-Political in the Chávez Regime?
- The Figure of the Abducted Woman: The Citizen as Sexed
- How to Recognize a Muslim When You See One: Western Secularism and the Politics of Conversion
- Laïcité, or the Politics of Republican Secularism
- Trying to Understand French Secularism
- Pim Fortuyn, Theo van Gogh, and the Politics of Tolerance in the Netherlands
- Can a Minority Retain Its Identity in Law? The 2005 Multatuli Lecture
- Prophetic Justice in a Home Haunted by Strangers: Transgressive Solidarity and Trauma in the Work of an Israeli Rabbis' Group
- Mysticism and the Foundation of the Open Society: Bergsonian Politics
- The Agency of Assemblages and the North American Blackout
- Automatic Theologies Surrealism and the Politics of Equality
- Theoscopy: Transparency, Omnipotence, and Modernity
- Come On, Humans, One More Effort if You Want to Be Post-Christians!
- The Right Not to Use Rights: Human Rights and the Structure of Judgments
The Gods of Politics in Early Greek Cities
The Gods of Politics in Early Greek Cities
- Chapter:
- (p.91) The Gods of Politics in Early Greek Cities
- Source:
- Political Theologies
- Author(s):
Marcel Detienne
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
This chapter focuses on the role of gods in politics in the Greek city-state, the polis, starting out from the observation of concrete practices that, in the geographical, linguistic, historical, and ethnic diversity of ancient Greece and its legacy, constitute what it calls the political domain. One such constituent is the phenomenon of the assembly. These first experimentations in the early Greek cities, with the independence of the political, extended their deliberations even to the affairs of the gods. While the gods had their place in politics, politics was seen as originally and ultimately a matter of human autonomy, that is to say, of “law unto itself”. What the comparativist approach would invite us to see is, first of all, the elementary forms of a concrete “politico-religious configuration”, before taking, in all too abstract ways, the combination of politics and religion, or that of theology and politics, or even that of politics and ritual as some kind of universal standard.
Keywords: Greece, city-state, cities, gods, politics, assembly, religion, theology, ritual, autonomy
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- Title Pages
- Preface
- Political Theologies
- Introduction
- The Gods of Politics in Early Greek Cities
- Church, State, Resistance
- Politics and Finitude: The Temporal Status of Augustine's Civitas Permixta
- The Scandal of Religion: Luther and Public Speech in the Reformation
- On the Names of God
- The Permanence of the Theologico-political?
- Violence in the State of Exception: Reflections on Theologico-Political Motifs in Benjamin and Schmitt
- Critique, Coercion, and Sacred Life in Benjamin's “Critique of Violence”
- From Rosenzweig to Levinas: Philosophy of War
- Levinas, Spinoza, and the Theologico-Political Meaning of Scripture
- On the Relations Between the Secular Liberal State and Religion
- Prepolitical Moral Foundations of a Free Republic
- Bush's God Talk
- Pluralism and Faith
- Subjects of Tolerance: Why We Are Civilized and They Are the Barbarians
- Religion, Liberal Democracy, and Citizenship
- Toleration Without Tolerance: Enlightenment and the Image of Reason
- Saint John: The Miracle of Secular Reason
- Reinhabiting Civil Disobedience
- Rogue Democracy and the Hidden God
- Intimate Publicities: Retreating the Theologico-Political in the Chávez Regime?
- The Figure of the Abducted Woman: The Citizen as Sexed
- How to Recognize a Muslim When You See One: Western Secularism and the Politics of Conversion
- Laïcité, or the Politics of Republican Secularism
- Trying to Understand French Secularism
- Pim Fortuyn, Theo van Gogh, and the Politics of Tolerance in the Netherlands
- Can a Minority Retain Its Identity in Law? The 2005 Multatuli Lecture
- Prophetic Justice in a Home Haunted by Strangers: Transgressive Solidarity and Trauma in the Work of an Israeli Rabbis' Group
- Mysticism and the Foundation of the Open Society: Bergsonian Politics
- The Agency of Assemblages and the North American Blackout
- Automatic Theologies Surrealism and the Politics of Equality
- Theoscopy: Transparency, Omnipotence, and Modernity
- Come On, Humans, One More Effort if You Want to Be Post-Christians!
- The Right Not to Use Rights: Human Rights and the Structure of Judgments