Reflections on Year Three

For the readings of year one, I thought that the theme was 'challenge', as in the writers of the Great Books constantly challenged the way things were done.  Year two didn't have as clean a theme, I guess, though maybe it had a series of themes.  Year three?  It had quite a bit to do with power.  How power is granted, how it is seized and what the proper forms of government are.

• Prometheus is about a god that gave power from the 'gods' and gave it to people.
• Herodotus wrote about the Persians attempt to seize Greece.
• Thucydides wrote about the problems of balance of power and subsequent war in Greece.
• Plato wrote about legitimate forms of government.
• So did Aristotle.
• Tacitus wrote about the power struggles of 1st century Rome.  And it wasn't pretty.
• Aquinas wrote about the law and whether it is good or not.
• Shakespeare's Macbeth is a story about maniacal will to power.
• Milton's Paradise Lost is, in part, a story of how Satan refused to be ruled.
• Mill argued that representative government is the best form of all.

This is one of the themes of western thought, that through thought we can find a better way to organize and rule ourselves.