Homer and the History of Political Philosophy: Encounters with Plato, Machiavelli, Nietzsche, and the Bible
A book-length study of Homer and the history of political philosophy.
I seek support for a book on Homer and the history of political philosophy, a book for which I have received an advanced contract from Cambridge University Press. This book provides something that does not exist in the scholarly literature on Homer or on the history of political philosophy: a compact, focused, and accessible study of Homer as a philosophic thinker in conjunction with Plato, Machiavelli, Nietzsche, and the Bible and an account of the history of political philosophy that begins, not with Plato, but with Homer. My book seeks to demonstrate Homer's crucial importance as a philosophic thinker by explaining the critical role he plays in the thought of Plato, the founder of classical political philosophy; Machiavelli, the founder of modern political philosophy; and Nietzsche, the principal philosophic source of postmodernism. This book will also shed important light on the relation between rationalism and religion in the history of political philosophy by comparing and contrasting Homer and the Bible with respect to their presentations of the divine and their understanding of human excellence.