Eco-republic: ancient thinking for a green age

Climate change and sustainability are the issues du jour, and they are not likely to go off the agenda any time soon. In this age of competing politics and policies, with limited resources and often limited will to make change, what can we learn from ancient wisdom and philosophy to humankind's benefit? Climate change and sustainability are not just technical problems or problems in applied ethics: they require a new political imagination, which this book illuminates. Professor Melissa Lane identifies key messages - on the role of the individual, the household, the nature of citizenship, and the significance of the imagination - which bring the wisdom of the past to bear on the challenges of the present. Using these resources, and building on these insights this book is a call to action from the past, to a present understanding of political thought and ethical wellbeing. Drawing on Plato's Republic as a model while also challenging aspects of Platonic politics, the book sets out the political and psychological challenges that we face in moving beyond the psycho-political settlement of modern commercial society. -- Publisher description.

pt. I. Inertia. Prologue to Chapter 1: Plato's Cave. -- Ch. 1: Introduction: Inertia as Failure of the Political Imagination. -- An Unconsciously Platonic Prologue to Chapter 2: Carbon Detox. -- Ch. 2: From Greed to Glory: Ancient to Modern Ethics and Back Again? -- Prologue to Chapter 3: Plato's Ring of Gyges. -- Ch. 3: Underpinning Inertia: The Idea of Negligibility. -- pt. II. Imagination. Prologue to Chapter 4: Post-Platonic Perspectives on the Republic. -- Ch. 4: Meet Plato's Republic. -- Prologue to Chapter 5: Plato on Why Virtue Matters. -- Ch. 5: The City and the Soul. -- Prologue to Chapter 6: Plato's Idea of the Good. -- Ch. 6: The Idea of the Good. -- pt. III. Initiative. -- Prologue to Chapter 7: Revisiting Plato's Cave. -- Ch. 7: Initiative and Individuals: A (Partly) Platonic Political Project.