Klasik İktidar Tipinin Meşruiyet Argümanları ve İnsan Anlayışının Sorgulanması
Questioning the Arguments of Legitimacy of the Classical Political Power and its Understanding of Human Beings

Summary/Abstract: This study (i) analyzes the legitimation arguments and individual conceptions of classical political power and (ii) evaluates them in terms of modern political thought. The aim of the study is (iii) to question the relationship between the legitimacy arguments of power and the design of the individual in terms of the power-value problem. In this context, the dominant legitimation arguments of the classical conception of rulership, such as power, conquest, paternalism, and theocracy, are analyzed to determine how they relate to a hierarchical society and an unequal understanding of the individual. The study argues that Platonic and Aristotelian thought, which explains political power in terms of virtue, is fundamentally inequitable and provides a logistics for the classical sovereignty arguments of the Middle Ages. On the other hand, the doctrines of natural law, which provided a transition between medieval and modern political thought, despite their inspiring qualities, did not prioritize the questioning of the classical type of power. In contrast, a radical reaction against the classical conception of power seems to have been possible from the seventeenth century onward with the theories of the social contract, beginning with Thomas Hobbes and developing its terminology with John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. In the first part of the study, the objections of the contractarian approach to the classical legitimacy arguments of power and the design of the individual are discussed together with their justifications. The final section questions the relationship between the transformation of political legitimacy arguments and the conception of the individual.

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