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The Statesman as Thinker addresses the role of the thoughtful statesman in sustaining free and lawful political communities. It aims to restore fundamental distinctions--between the noble statesman, the run-of-the mill politician, and the despot who subverts freedom and civilization--that have largely been lost in contemporary political thought and discourse. Reducing politics to the mere "struggle for power," to a barely concealed cynicism and nihilism, tells us little about the true nature of political life. This book provides thoughtful and elegant portraits of, and reflections on, a series of statesmen who struggled to preserve civilized freedom during times of crisis: Solon overcoming insidious class conflict in ancient Athens; Cicero using all the powers of rhetoric and statesmanship to preserve republican liberty in Rome against Caesar's encroaching despotism; Burke defending ordered liberty against Jacobin tyranny and ideological fanaticism in revolutionary France; Lincoln preserving the American republic and putting an end to the evil of chattel slavery; Churchill eloquently defending liberty and law and opposing Nazi and Communist despotism with all his might; de Gaulle defending the honor of France during World War II; Havel fighting Communist totalitarianism through artful and courageous dissidence before 1989, and then leading the Czech Republic with dignity and grace until his retirement in 2005. There are also collateral treatments of Washington, Pyotr Stolypin (the last great leader of Russia before the revolutions of 1917), Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and Nelson Mandela. This book explores the writing and rhetoric of statesman who were also political thinkers of the first order--particularly Cicero, Burke, Lincoln, Churchill, de Gaulle, and Havel. It attempts to make sense of the mixture of magnanimity (greatness of soul, as Aristotle called it) and moderation or self-restraint that defines the statesman as thinker at his or her best. That admirable mixture of greatness, courage, and moderation owes much to classical and Christian wisdom and to the noble desire to protect the inheritance of civilization against rapacious and destructive despotic regimes and ideologies.
The question of life, Michael Naas argues, though rarely foregrounded by Plato, runs through and structures his thought. By characterizing being in terms of life, Plato in many of his later dialogues, including the Statesman, begins to discover—or, better, to invent—a notion of true or real life that would be opposed to all merely biological or animal life, a form of life that would be more valuable than everything we call life and every life that can actually be lived. This emphasis on life in the Platonic dialogues illuminates the structural relationship between many of Plato’s most time-honored distinctions, such as being and becoming, soul and body. At the same time, it helps to explain the enormous power and authority that Plato’s thought has exercised, for good or ill, over our entire philosophical and religious tradition. Lucid yet sophisticated, Naas’s account offers a fundamental rereading of what the concept of life entails, one that inflects a range of contemporary conversations, from biopolitics, to the new materialisms, to the place of the human within the living world.
For those who don’t believe in an afterlife, the wisdom of the ages offers four great consolations for mortality: that death is benign and good; that mortal life provides its own kind of immortality; that true immortality would be awful; and that we experience the kinds of losses in life that we will eventually face in death. Can any of these consolations honestly reconcile us to our inevitable demise? In this timely book, Andrew Stark tests the psychological truth of these consolations and searches our collective literary, philosophical, and cultural traditions for answers to the question of how we, in the twenty-first century, might accept our mortal condition. Ranging from Epicurus and Heidegger to bucket lists, the flaming out of rock stars, and the retiring of sports jerseys, Stark’s poignant and learned exploration shows how these consolations, taken together, reveal death as a blessing no matter how much we may love life.
Robert Dankoff has culled passages from Evliya Çelebi's Book of Travels that deal directly with the life and times of Çelebi's patron, Melek Ahmed Pasha, an outstanding seventeenth-century military and administrative leader. Çelebi's account is sensitive to all the currents of his age and reflects them in his narrative. His wry comments and observations extend from the intimate details of daily life, and the attitudes of the lower classes, to the deeds of the mighty, the ideals of the age, and the fate of the empire. He concentrates on the later phase of Pasha's career, beginning with his appointment as Grand Vizier in 1650. Because Çelebi was Pasha's confidant as well as his protege, there is a level of intimacy, almost a psychological portrait, quite unusual in Ottoman and Islamic literature. The narrative highlights the private side of this public figure -- his weaknesses as well as his heroics; his religious life and domestic affairs -- in particular, his relations with his two successive wives, both sultanas or princesses.
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