Visions of Statesmanship: A Statesman's Imagination and Autonomy

Abstract

My dissertation constitutes a comparative and diachronic study of the complex ways in which imagination, statesmanship and autonomy are explored in the works of three thinkers/authors who lived in different periods of the discontinuous Greek past (Plato, Cornelius Castoriadis, and General Ioannes Makrygiannēs) and the relevant conceptual and discursive links between them. Despite major differences in terms of historical, sociopolitical, and discursive contexts, the works of these important three authors illustrate fundamental aspects of the ways in which imagination, statesmanship and autonomy are interwoven in political theory and practice. This is a discursive interplay of major theoretical, methodological, and scholarly implications in several research areas, including political theory, critical, history of ideas, literary and cultural theory. In my dissertation I engaged critically with Castoriadis’ influential political philosophy and employed it as a broader theoretical framework for the study of Plato's and Makrygiannēs’ ideas on imagination, statesmanship and autonomy.