The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics (17 page)

Soviet federalism designated a hierarchy of subunits from the centre: republics, given the ethnic name of the titular majority and with the official right to secede; autonomous republics, mainly in the Russian Federation, with an ethnic identity but without the right to secede; and autonomous regions, with some geographical or historical identity but without an ethnic basis.
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Self-government. The term may be applied both to the individual person and to a group or an institution. An autonomous person is, fundamentally, one able to act according to his or her own direction—the prerequisite for rational human action, according to
Kant
. An autonomous institution is one able to regulate its own affairs. The relation between the self-government of a group and individual autonomy is complicated by the need to distinguish between the collective self-government of a group and the self-direction of an individual member of that group, as
Rousseau's
writings illustrate. Ideas about individual autonomy are closely linked to conceptions of
freedom
. For example, to act according to my own direction may (on some views of freedom) require access to resources I presently lack, in which case to provide me with them would enhance both my liberty and my autonomy. Further, this problem is connected to notions of the constitution of the self. For example, it may be held that I am not truly ‘self’-governing if my action is driven by powerful phobias ‘I’ cannot regulate, any more than if my actions are determined by external circumstances beyond my control.
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.

 
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Averroës , Ibn Rushd
(Abu-l-Walid Muhammad ibn Ahmad ibn Muhammad
, 1126–98)

Better known in Europe as Averroës, he was the last and most famous of the Andalusian philosophers. Born in Cordova, he came from a prominent family of jurists. He studied theology, jurisprudence, mathematics, medicine, and philosophy. His lasting fame is due to his philosophical writings and his commentaries on the works of
Aristotle
, of which there are thirty-eight.
His translations of Aristotle into Arabic with accompanying commentaries were themselves first translated into Latin in Toledo, then a centre for such translation. They facilitated the interaction between the ideas of Aristotle and Church doctrine in the intellectual renaissance associated with thirteenth-century scholastic philosophy ( see also
medieval political thought
). They were widely translated and studied in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.
In contrast, the Church in the East had been permeated by the influence of Greek philosophers. When Islam burst upon the scene from the seventh century onward and Arabic became the lingua franca of the region, its intellectual heritage of Indian, Persian, and Greco-Alexandrian learning was taken up with astonishing enthusiasm. The translation of Greek, Syriac, Pahlavi, and Sanskrit texts into Arabic between the mid-eighth and early tenth centuries led to the flowering of Islamic philosophy between the ninth and thirteenth centuries. The Peripatetic school, which combined neo-Platonic and Aristotelian teachings, became known to the scholastic movement through Al-Kindi (801–66), Al-Farabi (870–950), and Ibn Sinna (
Avicenna
, 980–1037). None the less, it is Averroës, with his concentration on the works of Aristotle , whose influence was greatest in Europe. His translations contained only limited interjections of his theological frame of reference. He attempted faithfully to reproduce the ideas of Aristotle where they were clearly stated, and elaborated on those that were ambiguous. At this time, the little that was known of Aristotle's ideas was in the process of being shaped to conform to Christian theology. The objectivity of Averroës' translations and the cogency of his commentaries allowed European scholars, confident of the integrity of his translations, to examine the ideas of Aristotle in greater depth.
Averroës' political views are contained in his commentaries on
Plato's
Republic
and Aristotle's
Nicomachean Ethics
(he was not familiar with Aristotle's
Politics
). From the
Republic
he concluded that, in practice, political rule would require the ability of the ruler to communicate the virtues to the differing strata comprising the community: this required the ruler to be thoroughly grounded in understanding of the virtues. He believed that the
Nicomachean Ethics
would serve as a foundation for the practice of politics.
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