Political Philosophy of the European City

<P>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 book’s 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. </P><P></P>