[MaFLa] book_launch_ 12_April_2022_Ferenc_Hörcher

[Béla Mester]

Dear Colleagues,

the Department of History of Philosophy and Intellectual History of
the Institute of Philosophy of Research Centre for the Humanities
invites all interested to the book launch of Ferenc Hörcher’s recently
published monograph, The Political Philosophy of the European City.
>From Polis, through City-State to Megalopolis? (Lexington Books,
2021), with invited contributions by Tony Spanakos (Montclair State
University) and Nathan Pinkoski (Zephyr Institute)

Date: Tuesday, 12 April 2022, 16h CET
You can join the event by clicking on the link below:
https://us06web.zoom.us/j/3612246778?pwd=dXRHZ0I3YWw5bjA0elpSS3pYQzgrZz09
Meeting ID: 361 224 6778

The Political Philosophy of the European City is a courageous and
wide-ranging panorama of the political life and thought of the
European city. Its novel hypothesis is that modern Western political
thought, since the time of Hobbes and Locke, underestimated the
political significance and value of the community of urban citizens,
called ‘civitas’, united by local customs, or even a formal or
informal urban constitution at a certain location, which had a
recognisable countenance, with natural and man-made, architectural
marks, called ‘urbs’. Recalling the golden age of the European city in
ancient Greece and Rome, and offering a detailed description of its
turbulent life in the Renaissance Italian city-states, it makes a case
for the city not only as a hotbed of modern democracy, but also as a
remedy for some of the distortions of political life in the alienated
contemporary, centralised, Weberian bureaucratic state. Overcoming the
north-south divide, or the core and periphery partition, the book’s
material is particularly rich in Central European case studies. All in
all, it is an enjoyable read which offers sound arguments to revisit
the offer of the small and middle-sized European town, in search of a
more sustainable future for Europe.

The book is available at the home-page of the publisher:
https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781793610829/The-Political-Philosophy-of-the-European-City-From-Polis-through-City-State-to-Megalopolis

Yours sincerely,
Béla Mester
Institute of Philosophy,
Research Centre for the Humanities