The Greek Theory of the State
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Political thought begins with the Greeks. Its origin is connected with the calm and clear rationalism of the Greek mind. Instead of projecting themselves into the sphere of religion, like the peoples of India and Judea, instead of taking this world on trust and seeing it by faith, the Greeks took their stand in the realm of thought, and daring to wonder1 about things visible, they attempted to conceive of the universe in the light of reason. It is a natural instinct to acquiesce in the order of things presented in experience. It is easy to accept the physical world, and the world of man’s institutions, as alike inevitable, and to raise no question about the significance either of man’s relations to nature, or of the relations of the individual to institutions like the family or State. If any such questionings arise, they can readily be stifled by the answer out of the whirlwind: ‘Shall he that cavilleth contend with the Almighty?’ But such acquiescence, natural in all ages to the religious mind, was impossible to the Greek. He had not the faith which could content itself with the simple reference of all things to God. Whatever the reason (whether it was due to the disturbing effect of early migrations,2 or to a civic organization in many commonwealths, preventing the rise of one universal and majestic Church), the fact is indisputable, that the religious motive appealed little to the Greek. Nor had he, therefore, that sense of the littleness of human thought and endeavour, which might induce him to regard himself as a speck in the infinite. On the contrary, he attempted to conceive of himself as something apart and self-subsistent: he ventured to detach himself from his experience, and to set himself over against it in judgement. It may seem a little thing, and yet it is much, that this abstraction and antithesis should be made. It is the precedent condition of all political thought, that the antithesis of the individual and the State should be realized, as it is the task of every political thinker to reconcile and abolish the antithesis whose force he has realized. Without the realization of this antithesis none of the problems of political science – problems touching the basis of the State’s authority and the source of its laws – can have any meaning: without its reconciliation none of these problems can have their solution. It is in this way that the Sophists, who seized and enforced the antithesis, are the precursors and conditions of Plato and Aristotle, by whom it is abolished.
A sense of the value of the individual was thus the primary condition of the development of political thought in Greece. That sense had its manifestation as much in practice as in theory; and it issued into action in the shape of a practical conception of free citizenship of a self-governing community – a conception which forms the essence of the Greek city-state. Whatever may be said of the ‘sacrifice’ of the individual to the State in Greek politics or in Greek theory, the fact remains that in Greece, as contrasted with the rest of the ancient world, man was less sacrificed to the whole to which he belonged than he was elsewhere. The Greeks were never tired of telling themselves that while in their communities each man counted for what he was worth, and exercised his share of influence in the common life, in the depotisms of the East nothing counted but the despot, nor was there any common interest at all. The States of Greece cohered by law, and not by the personal tie of a common subjection to the capricious will of a single individual; they were fellowships or associations (κοινωνίαι) in a common substance of social opinion and social ethics, and not mere unions of masters and slaves devoid of a common interest. In States such as these, where men ‘like’, if not always ‘equal’, and pursuing a like object in common, were knit together in partnership, political thought found a natural soil. Here were individuals distinct from the State, and yet in their communion forming the State. What was the nature of the distinction, and what was the character of the communion? Was there any opposition between the natural instincts of the individual and the constant claims of the State? Did the individual naturally regard as just, something other than that which the State constantly enforced as such? If there was such a discrepancy, how had it arisen, and how had a community come to be formed which enforced a conception of justice different from that of the natural man? Such were the questions which, it seems, would naturally arise (and actually arose in Athens during the fifth century) as a result of the peculiar character of political life in Greece. The detachment of the individual from the State, which is theoretically a necessary condition of political science, had already been attained in practice in the life of the πόλις; and the Greek citizen, thoroughly as he was identified with his city, was yet sufficiently independent, and so far a separate moment in the action of the community, that he could think himself over against it, and so come by a philosophy of its value. In other words, the Greek city depended upon a principle, unrealized but implicit, of rational coherence; and just because that principle was already implicitly there, it was the more easy for conscious reason to apply itself to the solution of the problem of political association.
In yet other ways did the existence of the city-state afford a basis for political thought. Unlike the States of the Oriental world, it was not stationary: it possessed a principle of growth, and had known a cycle of changes. Sparta was the one State of the Greek world which had maintained a steady tradition of unbroken continuity in its government: in other cities there had been a development which had almost everywhere followed the same order, from monarchy to aristocracy, from aristocracy to tyranny, from tyranny to democracy. These changes must have conduced in two ways to the growth of political thought. In the first place, they accumulated a number of data for inquiry. Instead of any single type of constitution, history presented a succession; and while speculation may be silent before a single type, a succession of types inevitably suggests comparison and discussion.1 But it may be suggested that the last of these types fostered the growth of political thought still more directly. Aristocracy had not given way to democracy without a struggle; and democracy had still to maintain itself against the claims of wealth and nobility. The nobles had lost their position of legal privilege, but they still retained the social privileges of birth and wealth. The economic development of Greece, which added to their wealth, added also to their prestige; the loss of legal rights was more than outweighed by the growth of social influence; and the Many, whatever their legal equality, had still to contend with the practical superiority which wealth, and birth, and culture gave to the Few. On the ground of theory, as well as in actual life, this struggle made itself felt. The Few found it easy to talk of the rights of property and of birth: the Many had to discover a philosophic answer. Metaphysics would not be necessary, it has been said, if it were not for the existence of bad metaphysics. Similarly, it may be suggested, political theory owed its existence in Greece to the need of correcting a theory already in vogue, and political thought began as soon as the Many attempted to answer by argument the claims of aristocratic prestige. From the beginning of the sixth century to the close of the fourth – from Solon and Theognis to Plato and Aristotle – the weighing of the claims of the wise and virtuous Few against those of the Many is a constant staple of Greek speculation. In a word, the struggle of the Few and the Many gave an impulse to the development of political theory in Greece in much the same way as popular revolts against monarchy have in modern times produced, or at any rate stimulated, political theories like that of the Social Contract. Finally, we have to remember that democracy, in itself, is government by discussion. It is government ‘by the word’; and all things are thrown for settlement into an arena in which ‘one shrewd thought devours another’. From the constant discussions of political detail the citizens of a Greek democracy naturally rose to the discussion of political principles, as the democratic soldiery of Cromwell’s army rose from discussing questions of pay and the details of the hour to discussion of the ‘fundamentals’ of political society. Democracy cannot exist on inherited and unexplained tradition. It lives in the free air of nimble thought, and the discussion of principles is as vital to its life as the discussion of policies. No reader of Thucydides can fail to be struck by the conscious grasp of principle which democratic speakers are made to show in his pages, whether it be Athenagoras at Syracuse, or Cleon at Athens, or the Athenian envoys at Melos.
But not only did the city-state offer a number of historical data for comparison and discussion. By its very nature the city-state was not one but many; and in Greece there were at any given time a number of different States, not only co-existent, but also in intimate contact. Men were forced to ask themselves questions about the real meaning of the State, when they saw so many different interpretations current. They were driven to ask themselves what a citizen really was, when Athens, Thebes, and Sparta imposed qualifications so various. Particularly would a question arise, which would almost seem to have had a peculiar charm for the Greek: What is the best State? which of existing forms is nearest to perfection? and by what degrees do other States successively recede from it? Just because the real was so manifold, the need of the conception of an ideal was vividly felt: the ideal State would serve as a standard, by which existing States might be classified and understood. And this search for the ideal was the more natural, as these different States exhibited not merely ‘constitutional’ differences, in the modern sense of that word, but deeper and more fundamental differences of moral aim and character.1 The very size of the city-state, and the consequent intimacy of its life, encouraged the rise of a local opinion of decency and propriety. Each of these small cities had its ‘tone’ (ἦθος): each had evolved in the course of its history a code of conduct peculiar to itself.2 Such a code found its sanction in the force of public opinion by which it had been created. Concentrated and intense, that opinion bore upon each individual with a weight which we can hardly imagine: where each knew his neighbour (and this is one of the conditions which Aristotle postulates for a proper city), and each was concerned about his neighbour’s behaviour, it would be hard for any man to go against the tone and habit of his city’s life. The city formed a moral being, with a set character of its own; and its members, as the funeral speech of Pericles shows, were conscious of the individuality of their city, and could contrast its character with that of others.3 A political consciousness had thus developed in the Greek States. Each was aware of itself as a rounded whole, possessed of a moral life created and sustained by itself; and it expressed this sense in the conception of the ‘self-sufficingness’ or αὐτάρκεια of each political unit. Because it was self-sufficing, each State claimed to be self-governing: αὐτονομία flowed inevitably from αὐτάρκεια. ‘Home-Rule and Self-Sufficiency are, in the traditional Greek view, almost convertible terms.’ No wonder, then, that men began to discuss the value of each of these distinct types, or that the political consciousness of a separate individuality issued in political reflection.
It would thus appear that the political conditions of the city-state tended to produce a growth of political thought, first, because the city was a self-governing community whose relation to its members demanded investigation; secondly, because the city had gone through a process of growth which at once supplied the data, and, in its last stage, administered an impulse to thought; lastly, because the co-existence of different types of cities, each conscious of its own identity, suggested a comparison of types and the search for an ideal. But the political thought which deals with the city-state is inevitably coloured by the peculiar conditions of its subject. The πόλις was an ethical society; and political science, as the science of such society, became in the hands of the Greeks particularly and predominantly ethical. The constitution is to Aristotle the State; and the constitution is not only ‘an arrangement of offices’, but also ‘a manner of life’. It is more than a legal structure: it is also a moral spirit. This is indeed its inward essence and its vital meaning. In treating of the State, therefore, a thinker must approach his subject from an ethical point of view. He must speak of political science in terms not of jurisprudence, as a later generation, taught by Rome, attempted to do, but of moral philosophy.1 He must ask: What is the aim which a State ought to pursue, and what are the methods which it should use, in order to lead the right ‘manner of life’ and attain the true moral spirit? He must not ask whether political power should be concentrated or divided; he must not inquire into legal rights or the distribution of taxes: he must remember that he is concerned with a moral rather than a legal community, and he must discuss the various aspects of the moral life of such a community. Political science must be for him the ethics of a whole society, which coheres in virtue of a common moral purpose: it must determine the ‘good’ of such a society, the structure by which its ‘good’ will best be realized, the action by which it will best be secured. Between political science thus conceived and ethics, there is for Aristotle no essential difference. The good of the individual is ideally the same as the good of the society; his virtue is ideally the same as that of his State. Political science, as the science of a whole moral society pursuing the full good which can be only realized by common action, is for Aristotle the supreme ethics. It is the science of the whole duty of man – of man in his environment and the fulness of his actions and relations. Aristotle has no word for or conception of ethics as a separate science. If he writes a treatise on ethics, distinct from his treatise on politics, this does not mean that he is distinguishing a science of politics: it means only that he is differentiating virtue, as a static and psychological condition in the individual, from virtue as the dynamic energy of man in society.1 And thus, to Aristotle, there is a unity of political science with moral philosophy – and of both (it may be added) with jurisprudence; for the ethical code of the State is the same as law or right, nor is there any distinction between the theory of civil and that of moral law. Political science is a trilogy. It is the theory of the State; but it is also a theory of morals and a theory of law. It contains two subjects, which have since been removed from its scope and treated as separate spheres.
From this conception of political science there flow certain differences between Greek political thought and our modern ways of thinking. The conception of the State as an ethical association for the attainment of virtue involves a conception of the relations of the State to the individual different from most which are current today. Although, as has been said, the Greek thought of himself as one who counted for what he was worth in his community – although he regarded himself as a moment in determining its action – the fact remains that in the political thought of Greece the notion of the individual is not prominent, and the conception of rights seems hardly to have been attained. It was, perhaps, precisely because the individual felt himself an influence in the life of the whole, that he did not endeavour to assert any rights against the whole. Secure in his social value, he need not trouble about his individual ‘person’. And hence, starting from an ethical point of view, and from the conception of the State as a moral association, Greek thought always postulated a solidarity which is foreign to most modern thinking. The individual and the State were so much one in their moral purpose, that the State was expected and was able to exercise an amount of influence which seems to us strange. Both by Plato and by Aristotle, the positive furtherance of goodness is regarded as the mission of the State. They start from the whole, and look for the means by which its life and purpose may be impressed upon the individual. To the modern thinker the mission of the State is negative: its function is the removal of hindrances (rather than the application of a stimulus) to the moral life. We start from the individual: we regard him as possessed of rights (only too often of ‘natural’ rights independent of social recognition), and we expect the State to guarantee those rights and, by so doing, to secure the conditions of a spontaneous growth of character. We are anxious that the action of the State should not introduce too much automatism into the life of its members. Our motto is: Better the half of a good act done from within, than the whole enforced from without. The Greeks had little of this anxiety. They had little if any conception of the sanctity of rights. Plato indeed seems ready to abolish the most vital of them all, though Aristotle, here as elsewhere, is more conservative, and vindicates a right (just as in slavery he vindicates a wrong), if it can plead a prescriptive title.1 Accordingly the mark of Greek political thought is rather a desire for the action of the State, and an attempt to sketch the lines of its action, than any definition or limitation of the scope of its ‘interference’.
It could scarcely be otherwise with a theory which was the theory of a city-state. The city-state, it must always be remembered, knew no distinction between State and Church. Greek religion, except for the Mysteries, was a matter of ‘external public worship’. There was no separate priesthood in Greece, as there was at Rome. The worship of Delphic Apollo was indeed widespread, and in the early years of the sixth century it was influential in encouraging a certain tone of life, and in propagating the characteristic Greek notion of ‘nothing in excess’; but Delphic Apollo had only his priests at Delphi, and no organized church gathered round his cult elsewhere. Each city had a cult, or a number of cults, of its own; and the gist of each cult was outward ceremony. Greek religion in general was no spiritual influence directing an inward life: it was a matter of oblation and sacrifice. Each citizen owed to his city (one may almost say he owed to the city rather than to the gods) the piety (εὐσέβεια) which consisted in the due discharge of ceremonial rites; and impiety was simply the sin of omitting that discharge. A citizen might worship gods other than those received by the State: what he might not do was to omit to worship those whom it had received. In a word, external ritual, and the local character of that ritual, were the marks of the religious life of Greece. Each community cared for its own local ritual as much, and in much the same way, as it cared for its public affairs. Religion was an aspect of the political life of a political society: it was not another life, and it entailed no other society. The sphere of the Greek city was not limited by the existence of an association claiming to be its equal or superior. It could not leave to such an association the preaching of morality and the finding of sanctions for its truths: being itself both Church and State, it had both to repress original sin – a function to which medieval theory restricted the State – and to show the way to righteousness, a duty which medieval theory vindicated for the Church.
The theory of the city-state is therefore a theory which admits readily the full action of the State, and inquires particularly into the proper methods of its exercise. It is a theory of, and for, the legislator. The Greeks believed that the different tones and tempers of their States were due to the action of sages like Lycurgus or Solon, who had cast the moulds in which the lives of their fellows were ever afterwards shaped. Much of their belief is probably unhistorical. The story of the legislation of Lycurgus is perhaps an invention of the fourth century. Spartan law is a stern usage and tradition of the elders; and ‘such a law, which, like religion, is only written in the hearts of men, was made by no single person, but grew during the lives of generations’.1 Elsewhere, however, men were made of more pliant stuff, and the mobile temper of the Greeks sometimes lent itself readily, though perhaps not permanently, to the plastic activity of an ordering intelligence. Solon left his mark on Athens; and in some respects the work of Cleisthenes is still more striking than that of Solon. Of him, at any rate, the saying is true, that ‘their legislators work like architects by rule and compass’. He treated the problems of Attic life as it were on the metric system, and allotting ten tribes to the people, and ten months to the year, he gave them a solution mathematically definite.1 What is true of Athens is true also of many of the Greek colonies. Colonies were new grounds and fields for the experiments the Greeks loved to make; and when, as was often the case, a colony was composed of settlers of different stocks, some eirenicon had necessarily to be issued. It is little wonder therefore that the figure of the legislator seems to occupy the minds of political thinkers. They regard themselves as imaginary law-givers, drawing, as the first-born of their thought, the full plan of what should be, and sketching next the proper lines on which, if the ideal should prove unattainable, the given and actual may be rebuilt. If an actual legislator had thus made the past, why should not a philosopher make the present, moulding matter according to his will, as the legislator had done before? There is always this practical bent in Greek political thought. The treatises in which it issues are meant, like Machiavelli’s Prince, as manuals for the statesman. Particularly is this the case with Plato. True to the mind of his master Socrates, he ever made it the aim of his knowledge that it should issue in action; and he even attempted to translate his philosophy into action himself, and to induce a tyrant to realize the hopes of the Republic. Nor shall we do justice to Aristotle unless we remember that the Politics also is meant to guide the legislator and statesman, and to help them either to make, or to improve, or at any rate to preserve the States with which they have to deal.
But if this be the case, it may be asked, is not the political science of the Greeks an art, rather than a science? If its aim is to make, or at any rate to produce some alteration in the subject studied, can it be a science, seeing that science seeks merely to know the truth about a given subject of investigation? The answer to this difficulty lies in realizing that the sciences which treat of the operation of the human mind, whether in thought or in action, have a double aspect. Primarily, sciences such as logic, ethics, and politics attempt to determine the laws by which the mind acts in their several spheres. They analyse their material in order to determine the general propositions which can be laid down with respect to its nature. But to understand the laws, by which reason has been acting, is not merely to lay down laws in the sense of general propositions: it is also to lay down laws in the sense of regulations. The discovery of the process of reasoning by logic is also an act of legislation for the right methods of reasoning. It is easy to overrate the authority of the law thus promulgated, and to cramp the process of thought under the rules of a formal logic; and where this is done, a reaction is inevitable against the dictatorial aspect of the science of thought. But such an aspect it undoubtedly possesses; and such an aspect is also presented by the sciences of human action. The propositions which are true of the action of man in his political capacity are also rules for his action, because the subject of which these propositions are true is the healthy normal subject, just as the propositions of logic are true of normal and ‘regular’ thought. Accordingly, such propositions as that ‘the aim of the State is its citizens’ well-being’, or that ‘justice means the requital of good for good and evil for evil’, can be written in the imperative as well as in the indicative mood. A State ought to pursue the well-being of its citizens in the fullest and truest sense of the word: it ought not to make wealth, or power, or equality, its aim. A State ought to give honour and office to those who have given to it the virtue which furthers its aim: it ought not to put in authority the wealthy, merely because they are wealthy, or the poor, merely because they are poor. It is on this dictatorial aspect of science that the political thought of the Greeks chiefly concentrated itself.1 The Greeks wrote their political science in the imperative mood. But that does not mean that they had forgotten the indicative. To be able to know and to expound the truth is the aim of political science to Aristotle, even though he generally expresses himself in the imperative, and though – by dividing science into theoretical and practical, and classifying politics as practical – he emphasizes the value of the science of politics as a director of practice.
We have now seen what were the main peculiarities of the political thought which the city-state produced. It was a thought which conceived the State as a moral association, and, as a result, approached its subject from an ethical point of view. It was a thought which was so closely allied with practice that it always conceived itself as pre-eminently a practical study. One feature of Greek politics still presents itself as of vital importance in determining the course of Greek political thought, a feature of the pathology rather than the physiology of the State, but one which, just because political thought was practical and medicinal, had all the greater effects upon the line of its movement. The Greeks, to use Hegel’s terminology, never distinguished with sufficient clearness between ‘Society’ and ‘State’ – between the complex of economic classes, which by their different contributions form the social whole, but are themselves immersed in individual interests, and the neutral, impartial, and mediating authority of the sovereign, who corrects the individualism of society in the light of the common interest of which he is the incarnate representative. Much depends on keeping the State distinct from society, and preserving the mediatory and corrective authority pure and intact from the influence of the interests which it controls. To secure that distinction, and that integrity, is as much a concern of the modern State as it was of the ancient. There is still the danger that some social class, some economic interest, may infect the purity of the State, and, capturing the powers of the Government, direct them to its private advantage. On the other hand, there is always a danger that the State may harden into a repressive crust which prevents the free growth of society, as it may be said to have done in the later days of the Roman Empire, when such organs of society as the municipium or collegium were rigorously regimented and controlled. ‘State’ may be distinguished from ‘Society’ in another sense than that of Hegel: instead of conceiving society as a complex of competing economic classes, and the State as a majestic unity which transcends and blends their difference, we may regard society as the area of a varied voluntary co-operation, and the State as an organization which necessarily acts in the medium of a uniform compulsion.1 From this point of view it may be argued that the play of society ought to modify the action of government, and that the State ought to respond to new social developments. In a free political society like that of the Greeks, however, this modification or response came naturally. Society and the State interacted: on the one hand, the play of social opinion gave life and vigour to political action: on the other, the possibility of being expressed in political action gave reality to social opinion. In a word, the spirit of democracy was active; and, as must always be the case when that spirit is active, free social opinion and social groups could easily influence the life of the State.
The real danger of the Greek world was less that the State should stifle society, than that the State should be corrupted by sinister social interests. Such corruption is the plague of politics. It may attack great modern States, just because their size and immensity make it easy for a ‘machine’ to use its organization all the more secretly and effectively. But it was a disease to which the city-state would seem to have been especially exposed. A city where the government has for its subjects acquaintances, whose interests and passions it knows and can at pleasure thwart or forward, can hardly expect a neutral government. Limited in its area, the πόλις could not develop a remote and majestic government, above the play of social motives: it could not specialize a political organ, full of the zeal of its own mission.2 Society must be one with the State, because there was no room for differentiation. The very theory of ‘distributive justice’ illustrates the point; for this theory presupposes that political power must be awarded, either to each of the social classes, in proportion to their several contribution, or to one, in virtue of its pre-eminent services. Thus, while the political theory of the Greeks realized the conception of a common good as the aim of every political group, it never attained a full conception of the right organ for securing that common good. It was always groping its way to such a conception: the very evils which the want of it produced were a sufficient stimulus. Those evils were very real. If, in theory, men sought for a just distribution of office among the different classes, in practice they tended to make political authority the prize of the strongest class, and to use the prize, when it had been won, in the interest of the class which had conquered. Hence, at any rate by the fourth century, politics had become a struggle, a στάσις; and political power became an apple of discord, for which the rich vied with the poor. Accordingly, political thought was occupied with the problem of producing a concordia ordinum, just as, in the ‘pre-Adamite’ days of the Mercantile System, political economy was concerned with the problem of discovering a scheme, by which the different factors of production might work harmoniously, and manufacture and agriculture might both be protected, without any detriment resulting to either from the preference shown to the other. Such a concordia ordinum Plato sought to attain in the Republic by the creation of a specialized class of governors detached from society by a system of communism – an attempt at once to differentiate ‘State7 from ‘society’ and to discover an organ for the realization of the common good. The same aim was pursued by Aristotle also, but by different means. In opposition to Plato, who sought to institute a human sovereign, Aristotle turned to the conception of neutral and dispassionate law as the true sovereign of the State. Realizing, however, the need of human agency to enforce law, and alive to the truth that laws are what men make them by the manner of their enforcing, he sought in the ‘middle class’ the mediator and arbitrator between contending factions. If neither extreme rules, but the middle class, which shares in the interest of both, is supreme, then in its supremacy the concordia ordinum is established, and the common good has found the organ of its realization.1
So far we have regarded the city-state, and the general conditions of its life, as the material with which political thought was occupied, and to which it adjusted its conclusions. But it should be noticed, in conclusion, that there were two States in particular which occupied the attention, and helped to determine the theory, of both Plato and Aristotle. The two were Athens and Sparta – pre-eminently and particularly Athens. In Athens, Plato and Aristotle spent the best part of their lives; and Athenian conditions were those which they naturally observed. But it was not merely facts like these which made their political philosophy a philosophy of Athens: it was the fact that in Athens there was a highly developed political life, with its appropriate and regular organs, which had attained to full self-consciousness. Whether or no philosophers admired the development, here was a full and perfect specimen of its kind for their study: whether or no they agreed with its theory, here they had a theory to examine. Freedom was here claimed as a birthright; and by freedom, men understood the right of ‘living as one liked’ in social matters, and the sovereignty of the majority in political affairs. Equality was a watchword; and equality meant ‘Isonomy, or equality of law for all; Isotimy, or equal regard paid to all; and Isagoria, or equal freedom of speech’. Culture was not forgotten: Athens prided herself on being a Kulturstaat, and opposed the many-sided and versatile play of her interests to the close devotion to war which characterized Sparta. None the less, Sparta had a great attraction for the philosopher, because, almost alone of Greek States, she enforced a ‘training’ (ἀγωγή) which preserves the ‘tone’ of her constitution, and because, by this means, she was able to teach each individual Spartan to regard himself as a part of the body politic. Here there was a principle carried to its conclusion with what seemed a thorough and remorseless logic; and the philosopher could not but admire the philosophic State. Here the sense of ‘limit’, which meant so much to the Greek, was a living and active thing: if Athens boasted of εὐτραπελία, Sparta could boast of her εὐνομία; while the stability of a constitution which had stood secure for hundreds of years was something to which the versatile Athenian was entirely strange. No wonder therefore that the Republic is, to some extent, a ‘Laconizing’ pamphlet – a critique of Athens, and a laudation of Spartan logic, Spartan training, and Spartan subjugation of the individual to the State. Athens had sinned, in Plato’s eyes, in the want of training for politics which disfigured her politicians: she had sinned still more because the spirit of self had invaded her politics, and the individual, in his claim for a false freedom and a false equality, had set himself up in arms against the State. Her salvation, and that of Greece, was to be found in following Spartan example, so far at any rate as to train the citizen for his work and to inculcate upon him his duty to the State. But Sparta too had her faults, of which Plato is not unaware, and which Aristotle trenchantly exposes. The principle she had adopted was of the narrowest: she had made success in war the end and aim of her existence. Her training produced only a limited and stunted type of character; and underneath a fair show of ascetic loyalty to the State, there lurked not a little self-indulgence. The width of Athenian, and the concentration of Spartan character, needed to be blended to form the ideal Greek; and the ideal city must reconcile the expression which the individual attained in Athens with the order and the unity which the State enforced in Sparta.
No political philosophy can be detached from its environment in history; and most of the great works of political thinkers, the Prince of Machiavelli, the Leviathan of Hobbes, the Contrat Social of Rousseau, are something in the nature of political pamphlets addressed to the conditions of their times. Plato and Aristotle show this tendency all the more strongly, because they had a conception of political science as a practical and remedial thing. Their philosophy is of the Greek, and for the Greek; nor was it until the city-state was being absorbed in the empire of Macedon that a new type of experience, more analogous to our own, suggested to the Cynics and Stoics a political theory with which a modern mind can more easily sympathize. On the other hand, we must not exaggerate unduly the relativity of the political theory of Plato and Aristotle. Their theory was, it is true, intended for the Greek world, and, as we shall see, it exerted a practical influence on the Greek world. But it is also true that in some respects it fell short of the actual facts of that world, and that in others, again, it transcended the limits of Greek experience. Both Plato and Aristotle conceived of the State as an educational institution, something after the pattern of the philosophic schools in which they taught, and neither did justice to the wider and richer sweep of the political ideal which Athens had sought to pursue in the days of Pericles. Both again (and Aristotle perhaps still more than Plato) failed to comprehend the tendency of the Greek world to a larger unit of politics than the πόλις – a tendency which had been shown in the Athenian Empire, and again in the Beotian federation; and, in this sense, both may be said to have failed to transcend the limits of the πόλις. On the other hand, Plato at any rate could imagine in the Republic an ideal, which goes beyond the limits of his time and even perhaps of all ages; and Aristotle himself, in the more sober and realistic pages of the Politics, could depict a development of the citizen’s body and mind under the fostering care of the State, which soars beyond the bounds of Greek experience. The political theory of the Greeks, after all, was not altogether conditioned by the experience of their own times. It is made of the stuff of general humanity, and the ideals which it attained will always remain ideals for humanity at large. Nor is it alien to us, even in its more peculiar and individual aspects. It is true that political theory varies with the variations of the State. Aristotle’s theory of the self-sufficient πόλις differs from Dante’s theory of the universal Empire, and Dante’s theory of the Empire from Hobbes’ theory of the national State. Yet, through all its mutations, political theory has a fundamental unity. It is always occupied with the same problem – the problem of the relations of man to the State in which he lives. Even if Greek philosophy is a philosophy of the Greek and for the Greek, yet the Greek was a man, and his city was a State; and the theory of the Greek and his πόλις is, in all its essentials, a theory of man and the State – a theory which is always true. The setting may be old-fashioned: the stone itself remains the same. We do not therefore come to the study of the philosophy of the city-state as to a subject of historical interest: we come to the study of something in which we still move and live. The city-state was different from the nation-state of today; but it was different only in the sense that it was a more vital and intense form of the same thing. In it, the individual might realize himself more easily and clearly as a part of the State, because its size permitted, and its system of primary government encouraged, such realization. In studying it, we are studying the ideal of our modern States: we are studying a thing which is as much of today as of yesterday, because it is, in its essentials, for ever.
All history, it has been said, is contemporary history. When we study history, we are trying to understand ourselves, and, in order to gain that understanding, we are seeking to discover the pit from which we have been dug and the rock from which we have been hewn. No history matters more to us, and none is more really contemporary, than that of the Greeks. We are what we are, in a very large measure, because they were what they were. In many ways the paradox is true that the history of Athens in the fifth century B.C. is more modern than that of Europe in the eighteenth century A.D. An Englishman feels more affinity with the funeral speech of Pericles than with the memoirs of Frederick the Great. The problems of Greek citizenship touch us today because they are ours; and they are ours because the experience of the Greeks has passed into our substance and merged into our being.
‘They are largely the stuff of which our present selves and our present world are made. Not merely … in the sense that then were the foundations of both laid, not merely in the sense that we are heirs to the labours of our ancestors. We are the Greeks … made what we now are by their thoughts and deeds and experiences, our world their world, at a later stage of an evolution never interrupted, but always one and single.’1
1 It is a famous saying of Plato that philosophy is the child of wonder. It was the gift of the Greeks that they were prone to wonder; and they naturally turned to inquire into the things which excited their wonder. They inquired rationally into the properties of speech, and so they produced the science of logic; they inquired rationally into the spatial properties of matter, and so they produced Euclidean geometry – perhaps the most typical expression of their genius. In the same spirit they inquired rationally into the composition and properties of the State. There is no speech of ‘divine right’ or supernatural sanctions in Greek political theory, except, perhaps, in some of the speculations of the later Pythagoreans.
2 This effect must have been especially marked among the Ionians who migrated from Greece to found new cities in Asia Minor. ‘Faith had lost its natural foundations: its objects, the Gods, had become only the more fitted for the play of imagination; but men’s hearts desired something essentially new. At this price … the Ionians bought not only science, but also … the Epos’ (Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Staat und Gesellschaft der Griechen, p. 20).
1 The problem of a classification of constitutions, which inevitably involves comparison, already occupies the attention of Herodotus (III. c. 80–2), and is henceforth a staple of Greek inquiry.
1 To Aristotle these differences would be constitutional, since the constitution represents the moral aim of the State, and is a manner of life (βίος τις).
2 The uniqueness of each State was also shown in material things. Each πόλις has ‘her own tricks for shaping and colouring pots, her own peculiarities of dress and shoes, her own traditional dishes and drinks, her own “school” of arts and crafts, just as she has her own dialect and way of writing it, and her own gods and constitution’ (Zirnmern, Greek Commonwealth, p. 219).
3 ‘Our government is not copied from those of our neighbours…. Our military training, too, is different from that of our opponents…. So, too, with education…. We differ from other states in regarding the man who holds aloof from public life not as “quiet”, but as useless; we decide or debate, carefully and in person, all questions of policy…. We are noted for being at once most adventurous in action and most reflective beforehand.… In doing good, too, we are the exact opposite of the rest of mankind. We secure our friends not by accepting favours but by doing them…. No other city of the present day goes out to her ordeal greater than ever men dreamed’ (Thucydides, II. 37. The translation is that of Zimrnern, op. cit., pp. 197–200).
1 Political science, it may be said, has always had to borrow its vocabulary from other studies – ethics, jurisprudence, or biology. Greek political science always spoke in terms of ethics.
1 At the same time it must be admitted that Books IV–VI of the Politics contain a realistic treatment of politics, divorced from ethics.
1 That Plato, and still more Aristotle, had some conception of ‘rights’, is by no means denied. Such a conception, as we shall see, was involved in their teleological view of the world.
1 Some of the critics of the original form of this book objected to a suggestion there made, that the Greek conception of the legislator owed something to ‘a natural and universal instinct to refer what has been the slow process of a people’s mind to the fiat of the greatest of its sons’. Students of English history are familiar with the alchemy of legend, which has made Alfred the universal parent of English institutions like shire and jury. But I was wrong in minimizing the importance of the νομοθέτης in Greek history, and I have altered the text. On the other hand, the passage quoted above (from Wilamowitz, op. cit., p. 80) lends some countenance to what I said; and I still incline to believe of the Greeks that ‘their artistic temper demanded that institutions should appear as the rounded product of a single chisel’. I may add that we depend for our knowledge of the legislators on later authorities, in whom the instinct chercher l’homme may have been active. The one ‘legislator’ of modern times, Jeremy Bentham, had little fruit of his labours. ‘The Emperor, Alexander I, requested Bentham’s assistance in reforming the Russian Code. Bentham proffered assistance in a similar undertaking to the King of Bavaria. At a later date he addressed a denunciation of monarchy to the Greek insurgents, and tendered the draft of a constitution to Mehemet Ali. It would be hard to say what was the positive result of this interchange of civilities’ (Montague, Preface to Bentham’s Fragment of Government, p. 11).
1 Wilamowitz suspects Pythagorean influence, cf. infra, p. 53. But it is to be noticed that the early German tribes were almost equally mathematical. The German pagus was a unit of 1,000 men: the centena a subdivision of roo. The ‘Tribal Hidage’ of Anglo-Saxon times shows the same mathematical trend; and the early tables of weregilds are like exercises in arithmetic. One need not go to Pythagoras, or to ‘the Greek liking for order and symmetry’, to explain an instinct for neat round numbers, which is natural in a certain stage of political development – and probably, by the way, only fitted actual life very loosely, like an ill-made coat.
1 Greek philosophy in general, Professor Burnet writes (Greek Philosophy, p. 12), was ‘an effort to satisfy what we call the religious instinct’. It issued in ‘a way of life’, which the philosopher felt bound to communicate ‘sometimes to a circle of disciples, sometimes to the whole human race’. The philosopher sought social influence rather than the life of contemplation or the life of personal virtue.
1 Hegel’s distinction, it may be said, leads to State Socialism: the other distinction, if it is pressed, leads to Guild Socialism.
2 Much of this criticism of the πόλις must be modified, when it is applied to Sparta, as Sparta was in her great epoch.
1 In Aristotle’s ideal State the method pursued is different. Impartiality is to be sought and gained by the enlistment of all the citizens (who, however, are only a select aristocracy) in the work of government. The method described in the text belongs to the sub-ideal State, or ‘polity’.
1 Professor J. A. Smith (based on Benedetto Croce) in The Uninity of Western Civilization, p. 72.