Miłość i lęk: przyczynek do zagadnienia małego państwa

Abstract

In the tradition of political thought the matter of the scale of the state, namely its size and population, was a kind of pretext to consider the topics significantly different from the purely technical ones. In the article, we investigate these subtle considerations in the classical texts of Plato, Aristotle and St. Augustine, as well as Thomas More’s and Campanella’s utopian concepts of the state, Rousseau’s Social Contract, Montesquieu’s thoughts, or American opponents of the federal union. We propose a thesis that a metaphor of a small, territorially limited republic gave an insight into the significance of the character of community, unity and political stability, the issues of control and maintaining peace, but it generated as well an interesting story about human nature, which is torn by conflicting passions of fear and love.