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September 25, 2023

1-1C. Early Society as a Fundamental Democracy; the Impotent Character of Early Kingship, the Reduction of all Primitive Regime Forms to “Totalitarian Democracy”

25 minutes

Philosophy, as Strauss notes, can only be born once the concept of nature appears. But it appears that the concept of nature itself can only appear after the rather late institutions of sacral and divine kingship exist

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nature-- the “source” simultaneously of both philosophy and tyranny, as argued in this thesis--really appears not as a rational concept, or by rational analogy to abstractions, but rather as a manifestation or, one could go so far as to say, a revelation. Its appearance, it must be emphasized, is late, it is rare, and only follows the emergence of a certain kind of early kingship and indeed the emergence of a certain kind of aristocracy that, unlike the early sacral king, manages to free itself entirely from the absolute “rule of the ancestral.”

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