Echoes of the caliphate in Al-Farabi's reconceptualization of Plato's decline of the regimes

• Autores: R. L'Arrivee
• Localización: History of political thought, ISSN 0143-781X, Vol. 40, Nº 2, 2019, págs. 175-195
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • Scholarship on al-Farabi interprets his theoretical analysis of politics apart from its historical context, which results in a failure to understand how his political philosophy is useful for understanding Islamic politics. This paper brings al-Farabi's theory of the regimes into dialogue with Islamic political history. Al-Farabi modifies the political thought of Plato and Aristotle to illuminate the rise and decline of the caliphate according to Islamic principles. For al-Farabi, the mechanism of the decline of the caliphate rests in excessive material desire satisfaction and the misuse of wealth for the aggrandizement of political elites.