Contribution of historical and literary works to the understanding of political phenomena
Authors: Stanovcic Vojislav 
Published: November 2011

The paper presents a series of arguments which indicate that significant historiographic works describing and analyzing bygone political phenomena as well the literary works which picturesquely depict political situations and human destinies - with their specific approaches and methods - contribute to the better insight and understanding of the phenomena in the political life which philosophy and social sciences express by notions. Social and political life have their bright and dark sides. It is less arguable that political sciences - in the study of phenomena included in their topic -find great help in history, if it is - as Leopold von Ranke advised - oriented only to "show what really happened". Historical studies, specially the ones of the socalled great historians, present to us the images of the situation in a certain period or event with all significant details and contribute to the understanding of that phenomenon, helping to clarify its essence. Thus for example, Appian's Roman Civil Wars or Tacitus' descriptions in The Annals of the suffering of the innocent victims in the power struggle during civil wars and during the ferocious persecution of Christians -innocent, but accused of all possible crimes. What astonishes the reader is the grea similarity between the phenomena, processes, actions happening two millennia ago and in the 20th century. Philosopher and political thinkers (like Aristotle), but also some historians (like Thucydides) offer explanations why some patterns repeat and why they would "keep repeating". In Khalil Inalcik's work, we find detailed descriptions of brutal mutual killings among the sons of the majority of the Turkish sultans in the power struggle after their fathers' death. Generalizing on the basis of the material provided by history, we reach an entire string of general notions in political and social sciences. Great thinkers and writers, from the oldest Eastern and the greatest antique philosophers till the ones from the 20th century, used found inspiration and drew ideas and incentives or material from the sources with which they supplemented their theoretical categories, notions and explanations, including the images of political life. These sources are represented in the great literary works. Contradictory opinions about the character and significance of ail and literature are found in Plato's and Aristotle's writings. Aristotle, who analyzed this problem, presented arguments why literary insights - precisely because of the character of insights they offer - deserve to stand in the same pedestal with philosophy. He used the expression he himself introduced to mark one aspect of the effect of art and literature - and that is catharsis. Psychology facilitates our insights into the motives and consequences of the participants' behavior social psychology being particularly important, but also ethics. The means used to convey a certain truth is less important, its essence is more important. Several Greek philosophers (Parmenides, Empedocles, Xenophon) even the Roman ones (for example, Lucretius Cains) wrote their philosophical treatises in verse. Kant's famous words Sapere aude! with which he asks people to have courage to use their own mind and thus become enlightened originate from the Roman poet Horace, and Michel de Montaigne also used them. Plato and Aristotle referred not only to the available sources about preceding philosophical ideas and political systems, including the first Greek historians, but also to the tragedians, primarily Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, to the comedy writers (like Aristophanes), to the lyricists (Solon, Simonides, Archilochus). When Aristotle expounds one of the key categories of his political theory about man as a political animal (zoon politikon), he refers to Homer to confirm what he himself believes. Anica Savic-Rebac quotes Strabo's formulations about poetry as "the first philosophy", as well as about Homer's work as "poetic philosophy" and as a source of every kind of wisdom, even every kind of knowledge. With his ideas and images he presented in his literary works, Dostoyevsky influenced several philosophers (Nietzsche, Camus and others) and scientists (Freud, Adler and others). "The philosophy of existence" and its ethical orientation were presented not only in the philosophical, but also in the literary works (Kierkegaard, Sartre, Camus). The so called philosophy of the absurd and "the literature of the absurd" mutually merge and supplement. Not even the best 20th century theoretical treatise about the nature of power - like those by Charles Merriam, Bertrand Russell, Bertrand de Jouvenel or Harold Lass well can depict what man gets to know through the tragedies of Marlowe Shakespeare, Goethe, in which main participants are driven and urged by the yearning to achieve absolute power. "The Great Inquisitor", "The Iron Heel" "Dark at Noon", but also the personalities like Raskolnikov or Verhovensky from the novel The Possessed help us to understand many things. "Gulag" became a political notion because of the title of the novel Gulag. Literature-antiutopia pointed to the dangers of the closed mind and of the technological society before scientific studies had done that.