01-06-2010, 01:43 PM
Quote:I am totally facinated as to whom we actually owe the idea to?The Estates General; plus Marsilio Mainardini's Defensor Pacis (1325), which continues the idea of the "double truth" from Ibn Rushd. Here, we see the core ideas of European democracy for the first time: separation of powers, separation of church and state, representation. From here, we move on to the Calvinist ideas of the sixteenth century, to the rise of parliamentarian power, to Montesquieu's Esprit des lois, and ultimately to the European Revolutions: 1776 USA, 1785 Holland, 1789 France, and so on. They all looked back to acts and declarations that broke with Feudalism and gave power to the Estates. No one refers to Greece. It is only in the course of the nineteenth century, when Philhellenism became popular, that people started to realize that the system that had been created over the past centuries, might be labeled "democracy".
We must separate "take inspiration from" (something active) from "be influenced by" (something more powerful than oneself). Artists have taken inspiration from Greece, but western political thought was not influenced by ancient Greece.
