Kieran Keohane
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Carmen Kuhling
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Pleonexic tyranny in Plato’s Republic and in the Irish republic
in The domestic, moral and political economies of post-Celtic Tiger Ireland
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Plato's Republic can be read as a treatise on the social pathologies of contemporary civilization in general and the contemporary state of the Irish republic in particular. In the diseased city questions of justice and the good society are undermined by the recurrence of pleonexia. Republic is Plato's political science, political economy, political psychology and political anthropology. Always latent, pleonexia emerges and becomes de-contained when laws are weakened and virtues cannot be formed. Pleonexia is amplified and intensified in the wake of crises. Pleonexic greed is therefore most decidedly not 'good', as neoliberalism proclaims it to be, but a social pathology of civilization, pathogenic to social and bodies politic, and with a corresponding idea-typical pleonexic subject. A system built predominantly upon unrestrained greed, anger, envy and pride will not, by definition, be virtuous, but degenerative, unstable and ultimately self-destructive, if not put down by its victims first.

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