In my paper I have attempted to show how in the history of political philosophy certain anthropological standpoints influence the explicitly political conceptions of several authors. I focused on the works of Aristotle, Machiavelli, Kant, Hegel, Marx and Engels, Schmitt, Arendt and Rawls and distinguished between four different positions. These positions differ precisely according to the anthropological points that the authors make.
In this essay I have demonstrated how and to what extent different anthropological stands can impact the political thinking. In the first part I addressed the examples of Machiavelli and Schmitt whose "extreme" and "negative" view of human nature has led them to develop the political conceptions praising the strong state and focusing on the idea of conflict. Nonetheless, I maintained that their approaches point to the lack of ethics which I considered an apparent disadvantage. The second chapter was dedicated to another, in my opinion, "extreme" case, namely, theories of Kant and Rawls. Both of them adopt more "positive" conception of a human as a reasonable and rational being. I have tried to show that, although they convincingly bring together politics and ethics, their theories
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The cases of Aristotle and Arendt, in my opinion, clearly demonstrate that there can be a more "neutral" stance. Their approaches seem to acknowledge that human beings are neither "bad" or "good", but their main point is that being human means living in the complex political (and necessarily public) realm. The notion of zoon politikon is of a key importance here. The case of Hegel and Marx and Engels is, to some extent, more complex. In them, anthropological points appear to be derived from the larger frameworks which are grounded in the specific conceptions of historical development. This is what I meant by "immanentism" while treating their