| Summary: | The struggle from Plato onward, in every political theory and in every actual political system, has been the attempt to deal with the notion of public purpose, generally expressed as the public interest. The struggle has been to make sense out of the relationship between a concept of public interest on the one hand, and a concept of private interests on the other. This same struggle is the central theme of Tussman's theory of obligation, and in his attempt to come to terms with the problem, I have been struck by how Platonic a stance he is finally forced to adopt even though he seems to be initially writing out of a different tradition: the democratic tradition.
I want, then, to trace a pervasive influence of Platonic notions on Tussman's political theory; specifically, I want to argue that it is the Platonic view of the self and its relationship to a special theory of freedom which has direct bearing upon three areas of Tussman's argument in Obligation and the Body Politic. I want to argue that these Platonic notions directly inform his view of the public interest, his theory of representation, and finally, flowing out of these first two, Tussman's distinctive theory of education. === Arts, Faculty of === Philosophy, Department of === Graduate
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