Description
Book SynopsisAn original work of political theory, The Iroquois and the Athenians relocates the problem of political foundations and origins, removing it from the dead logic of the social contract and grafting it onto a juxtaposed representation of the historical practices of the pre-contact Iroquois and the pre-classical Greeks.
Trade Review“This is a work as grand in its scope, as bold in its ambitions, and as successful in its execution as Hardt and Negri’s Empire or Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus. But in the end there is nothing quite like Brian Seitz and Thomas Thorp’s The Iroquois and the Athenians. It is a unique experiment in comparative politology that reads the social, political, and economic organization of the Iroquois in North America against the backdrop of ancient Greek society. Along the way, all our assumptions about the nature of myth, mourning, law, language, kinship, war, political authority, rights, sexual difference, private property, and political foundations get called into question. Seitz and Thorp deploy all the resources of contemporary European Philosophy to create a distinctly ‘American’ politology.” -- Michael Naas, DePaul University
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments Chapter 1: Prior Principles: The History of a Necessary Error Chapter 2: Going on the Road: Visiting the Iroquois Longhouse Chapter 3: Disinterring Democracy: The Constitution of the Constitution Chapter 4: Therapeutic Reveries: The Withdrawal of the Origin Notes Bibliography
