... politics is a field that is constantly permeated by currents of politicization and depoliticization, of family and city. Among these opposing polarities, divided but also closely connected, the tension ... is unsolvable.
Classical Greece is perhaps the place where this tension found for a moment an uncertain, temporary balance. In the course of subsequent political history in the West, the tendency for the city to be depoliticized and transformed into a home or a family governed by blood relations and purely economic functions will alternate with diametrically opposite phases, where everything apolitical must be mobilized and politicized. Depending on whether one or the other tendency prevails, the function, shift, and form of civil war also change; however, it is likely that as long as the words "family" and "city," "private" and "public," "economy" and "politics" have some, even fluid meaning, civil war will not be able to disappear from the political scene of the West.