From the city invented by the ancient Greeks, to the Roman Empire, and back to Ethnostates

In a review in Chronicles of Pierre Manent's ideas, Jack Trotter describes Manent's idea of the city in ancient Greece as originally becoming the place where the many are persuaded to submit to, while at the same time being given a share in, the values of the descendants of Homer's aristocratic warriors---and in this discovery of the “common thing” the city is born. This may be understood as the domestication of war through the discovery of political justice, justice meaning the standard of value in the quest for the common good. The later Roman expansion into empire was not so much the abandonment of this form of the city as its “monstrous distention.” Then Cicero extended the bonds of fellowship to the whole human race at the service of a universal morality.

Earlier Aristotle had thought of the civic bonds as developed “in a community that is real...that can be seen, named and touched." Later Montaigne advised men to be guided by “our natural condition,”since he believed that finding the best form of society was only an “altercation fit for the exercise of the mind.”

If we put these various thinkers together, (a) the development of the common thing from the struggle between the many and the few, (b) the community as seen and touched of Aristotle, and (c) the natural condition described by Montaigne, they point toward definitions of human nature which have been gradually revived by sociobiology. That is, a human nature affirmed throughout human history as being kin-centered, gender defined, age-graded, heterosexual marriage-making, hierarchical, ethnocentric, even xenophobic, and religious-making, among many other things, with group-selection as the primary unit of selection. This can in fact suggest ethnopluralism as the “best” form of society, developed within nations or within old fading empires, with each small ethnostate protected in their independence by a light federalism. We can go from the city invented by the ancient Greeks, to the Roman Empire (or the American Empire), and back to, at least, virtual ethnostates. It so happens that real evolution has usually worked best with such variety, so this form of society can also define progressive change within conservative protection.