THE ANCIENT GREEK POLIS
The Invention of Politics
In his play, The Suppliant Women, Euripides interrupts the action with a short political debate between a herald from despotic Thebes and the legendary Athenian hero, Theseus. The Theban boasts that his city is ruled by only one man, not by a fickle mob, the mass of poor and common people who are unable to make sound political judgments because they cannot turn their minds away from labour. Theseus replies by singing the praises of democracy. In a truly free city, he insists, the laws are common to all, equal justice is available to rich and poor alike, anyone who has something useful to say has the right to speak before the public, and the labours of a free citizen are not wasted ‘merely to add to the tyrant’s substance by one’s toil’.
This brief dramatic interlude may do little to advance the action of the play, but it nicely sums up the issues at stake in Athenian political theory. It also tells us much about the polis and the social conditions that gave rise to political theory. Contained in the conception of freedom exalted by Theseus are certain basic principles that the Athenians, and other Greeks, regarded as uniquely theirs, defining the essence of their distinctive state. The Greek word for freedom, eleutheria, and, for that matter, even the more restricted and elitist Latin libertas – in reference to both individuals and states – have no precise equivalent in any ancient language of the Near East or Asia, for instance in Babylonian or classical Chinese; nor can the Greek and Roman notions of a ‘free man’ be translated into those languages.1 In Greek, these concepts appear again and again, in everything from historical writing to drama, as the defining characteristics of Athens.
So, for instance, when the historian Herodotus offers his explanation for the Athenian defeat of Persia, he attributes their strength to the fact that they had shaken off the yoke of tyranny. When they were living under tyrannical oppression, ‘they let themselves be beaten, since they worked for a master . . .’ 2 Now that they were free, they had become ‘the first of all’. Similarly, the tragedian, Aeschylus, in The Persians, tells us that – in contrast to subjects of the Persian king, Xerxes – to be an Athenian citizen is to be masterless, a servant to no mortal man.
It would, of course, be possible to attribute the Greeks’ clear delineation of ‘freedom’ to the prevalence of chattel slavery, which entailed an unusually sharp conceptual and legal distinction between freedom and bondage. The growth of slavery certainly did clarify and sharpen the distinction. But the distinctive Greek conception of autonomy and self-sufficiency owes its origin to something else, and the uncompromising definition of servitude is a consequence of that conception more than its cause.
The distinguished medieval historian, Rodney Hilton, once remarked that ‘the concept of the freeman, owing no obligation, not even deference, to an overlord is one of the most important if intangible legacies of medieval peasants to the modern world.’3 If Hilton was right to trace this concept to the peasantry, he was surely wrong not to give the credit for it to the ancient Greeks. It was the liberation of Greek peasants from any form of servitude or tribute to lord or state, unlike their counterparts elsewhere, that produced a new conception of freedom and the free man. This conception was increasingly associated with democracy – so much so that an anti-democrat like Plato (who, as we shall see, thought that anyone engaged in necessary labour should be legally or politically dependent) sought to subvert the concept of eleutheria by equating it with licence. At the same time, the liberation of the peasantry wiped out a whole spectrum of dependence and left behind the stark dichotomy of freedom and slavery, the one an attribute of citizens, the other a condition to which no citizen could be reduced.
Although a leisurely life was no doubt a cultural ideal, the Greek conception of eleutheria has at its heart a freedom from the necessity to work for another – not freedom from labour but the freedom of labour. This applies not only to the masterless individual but also to the polis governed by a citizen body and one that owes no tribute to another state. In its emphasis on autonomous labour and self-sufficiency, this concept of freedom reflects the unique reality of a state in which producers were citizens, a state in which a civic community that combined appropriating and producing classes ruled out relations of lordship and dependence between them, whether as masters and servants or as rulers and subjects. That civic community, which was most highly developed in democratic Athens, was the decisive condition for the emergence of Greek political theory.
In the previous chapter, we outlined some of the ways in which the polis, and especially the democracy, generated a new mode of thinking, a systematic application of critical reason to interrogate the very foundations of political right. This mode of thinking was, it was suggested, rooted in a new kind of practice, which had less to do with relations between rulers and subjects than with transactions and conflicts among citizens, united in their civic identity yet still divided by class. The self-governing civic community and the practice of politics – action in the public sphere of the polis, a community of citizens – reached its apogee in democratic Athens, which was also home to the classic tradition of Greek political theory.
The Rise of the Democracy
The evolution of the democracy can be traced by following the development of the civic or political principle, the notion of citizenship and the gradual elevation of the polis, civic law and civic identity at the expense of traditional principles of kinship, household, birth and blood. To put it another way, the processes of politicization and democratization went hand in hand, and the most democratic polis was the one in which the political principle was most completely developed. The historic events commonly identified as the milestones in Athenian political development can all be understood in these terms. In each case, the strengthening of the political principle at the same time represented an advance in popular power and a reconfiguration of relations between classes.
Archaeology and the decipherment of Linear B, the script that preceded the Greek alphabet, have revealed much about the states that existed in Greece before the emergence of the polis. They were, as has already been suggested, analogous to other ancient states, albeit on a smaller scale, in which a bureaucratic power at the centre controlled land and labour, appropriating tax or tribute from subordinate peasant communities. Little is known about how this state-form disappeared or what intervened between its demise and the rise of the polis. Much of what is known about Greek society on the eve of the polis depends on the Homeric epics, which certainly do not describe the Mycenean civilization that is supposed to be their theme. Invoking myths and legends from an earlier time, they depict a social structure and social values of a later age. The Homeric poems may not exactly describe any society that ever existed in Greece; but, in general outline, they remain our best source of information about the aristocratic society that preceded the polis, a society already coming to an end when the poet(s) memorialized it. The epics at least allow us some access to the social and political arrangements that gave way to the polis.
The principal social and economic unit of ‘Homeric’ society is the oikos, the household, and especially the aristocratic household, dominated by a lord who is surrounded by his kin and retainers and supported by the labour of dependents. There is scarcely any ‘public’ sphere: duties and rights are primarily to household, kin and friends; and various social functions, such as the disposal of property and the punishment of crime, are dictated by the customary rules of kinship, while jurisdiction, such as it is, belongs exclusively to lords.
Yet when the epics were written, household and kinship ties were already being displaced by different principles. There were ties of territoriality, around an urban centre, while the bonds and conflicts of class were at work in relations between master and servant, or lord and peasant, and in the class alliances of lordship. ‘Homeric’ lords had become an aristocracy of property, bound together by common interests as appropriators, though often in vicious rivalry with one another, and increasingly isolated from their producing compatriots.
The aristocracy used its non-economic powers, especially its judicial functions, to appropriate the labour of subordinate producers. In that respect, it still had something in common with the ancient bureaucratic state, in which the state and state office were the principal means of appropriation. The status of lords may even have been a remnant of the old bureaucratic state and its system of state-controlled appropriation. But the critical difference is that there was, in post-Mycenean Greece, effectively no state, no powerful apparatus of rule to sustain the power of appropriators over producers. Property was held by individuals and households, and the aristocracy of property had to face its subordinates not as a well organized ruling force but as a fairly loose collection of such individuals and households, often engaged in fierce conflict with each other, and distinguished from their non-aristocratic compatriots less by superior power than by superior property and noble birth. Their relations with peasant producers were further complicated by the community’s growing military reliance on the peasantry.
By the time we reach the first relatively well-documented moment in the evolution of Athenian democracy, the reforms of Solon, the conflict between lords and peasants had decisively come to the fore. Although Aristotle, in his account of the Solonian reforms, is no doubt exaggerating when he says that, at the time, all the poor were serfs to the wealthy few, there can be little doubt that dependence of one kind or another was very common. There was widespread unrest, which the aristocracy was in no position to quell by sheer force. Instead, there was an effort to settle the conflict between peasants and lords by means of a new political dispensation.
Whatever Solon’s motivations may have been, the significant point for us here is how he sought to placate the unruly peasantry. He eliminated various forms of dependence which allowed Attic peasants to be exploited by their aristocratic compatriots. He abolished debt-bondage and prohibited loans on the security of the person, which could issue in slavery in case of default; and, by instituting his famous seisachtheia, the ‘shaking off of burdens’, he abolished the status of the hektemoroi, peasants whose land, and some portion of their labour, was held in bondage to landlords.4 In other words, he eliminated various forms of ‘extra-economic’ appropriation through the medium of political power or personal dependence.
The effects of these reforms, liberating the peasantry from dependence and extra-economic exploitation, were enhanced by strengthening the civic community, extending political rights and elevating the individual citizen at the expense of traditional principles of kinship, birth and blood. Although citizens would still be classified into stratified categories, the old division among artisans, farmers and the aristocracy of well-born clans would no longer be politically significant and would be replaced by more quantitative criteria of wealth, based on an already existing system of military classification. While the former governing council, the Areopagus, was still confined to the two richest classes, the third class was given access to a new Council of 400, to act as a counterweight. The poorest military category, the thetes, was apparently admitted for the first time to the assembly, which became increasingly important as the power of the aristocratic council declined.
Solon also reformed the judicial system, creating a new people’s court, to which all citizens had access. Any citizen could have his case transferred to this court, taking it out of the reach of aristocratic judgment and weakening the aristocracy’s monopoly of jurisdiction. Traditionally, kinship groups had always had the initiative in avenging crimes against their members, according to age-old customs of blood vengeance. Now, any citizen could bring charges against anyone else on behalf of any member of the community. Crime was now defined as a wrong committed against a member of the civic community, not necessarily a kinsman; and the individual Athenian had the initiative as citizen, while the civic community, in the form of citizens’ courts, had jurisdiction.
In various ways, then, Solon weakened the political role of noble birth and blood, kinship and clan, while strengthening the community of citizens. It is too much to say that his reforms were democratic; but they did have the effect of weakening the aristocracy, which was increasingly incorporated into the civic community and subject to the jurisdiction of the polis. Impersonal principles of law and citizenship were taking precedence over the personal rule of kings or lords. The new civic relationship between aristocracy and peasants, together with other labouring citizens, meant that the Athenians had moved decisively away from the old division between rulers and producers. The state, in the form of the polis, was becoming not a primary means of appropriation from direct producers but, on the contrary, a means of protecting citizen producers from appropriating classes.
The polis also created a new arena for aristocratic rivalries. Solon’s reforms certainly did not end the influence of noble families, nor did they diminish the ferocity of intra-class rivalry. Athens would long continue to be plagued by aristocratic infighting, even to the point of virtual civil war, sometimes with help from Sparta for one or another of the contenders. But it was becoming harder for landlords to contend for power just among themselves. They now had to conduct their competition within the community of citizens, and this meant that they could advance their positions by gaining support from the common people, the demos. The paradoxical effect was that the civic community and the political principle were further strengthened by aristocratic rivalry. Although there has been much dispute about the ‘tyrants’ who followed Solon, who they were and what they represented, the most likely explanation is that they were a product of just such competition among Athenian aristocrats;5 and the general tendency of their regime was, again, to strengthen the polis against traditional principles – for instance, building on what might be called ‘national’ as against local loyalties, by such means as a national coinage, festivals and cults, including the cult of the goddess Athena, patron of the polis.
After the expulsion of the last tyrant by Sparta, there followed, in 510–508 BC, a period of particularly violent struggle, in which the principal contenders were Isagoras and Cleisthenes, both representing noble families. When Cleisthenes prevailed, at least temporarily, he instituted reforms that would later be regarded as the true foundation of democracy. In a sense, he was simply following the logic established by Solon and the tyrants. His reforms, in 508(?) BC, further weakened the traditional authority of the aristocracy, their power over their own neighbourhoods and over smaller farmers in their area. Like his predecessors, he accomplished this by elevating the polis and the whole community of citizens over old forms of authority and old loyalties, submitting local and regional power to the all-embracing authority of the polis.
But what was most distinctive about this moment in the history of Athens was that the demos had become a truly central factor in the political struggle. By now, the people were a conscious and vocal political force. Cleisthenes did not create this force, but he had the strategic sense to mobilize it in his favour. Whether he was himself a true democrat or simply another scion of a noble clan seeking to enhance the position of his own aristocratic family, his appeal to the demos was direct and unambiguous. Herodotus writes that, when Cleisthenes found himself weaker than Isagoras, he made the demos his hetairoi – a word difficult to translate but suggesting comrades or partners. It also suggests the associations, friendship groups or clubs, the hetaireiai, which formed the power base of the aristocrat in Athens.6 The demos, in other words, had replaced friends and kin of aristocrats as the source of political power. When Cleisthenes’s enemy, Isagoras, drove him out, with the help of Sparta under its leader, Cleomenes, the demos rose in revolt, erupting into the political arena in an unprecedented way, as a conscious political force acting in its own right and in defence of its own interests.
Whatever his intentions, the result of Cleisthenes’s reforms was the establishment of an institutional framework that was to govern Athenian democracy from then on, with only a few modifications. He changed the whole organization of the polis by removing the political functions of the four tribes, dominated by the aristocracy, which had been the traditional basis of political organization – for instance, in the conduct of elections – and replaced them with ten new tribes based on complex and artificial geographic criteria. More significantly, he subdivided the tribes into demes, generally (but perhaps not always) based on existing villages, and made them the foundation of the democracy, its fundamental constituent unit and the locale of citizenship. The new divisions cut across tribal and class ties and elevated locality over kinship, establishing and strengthening new bonds, new loyalties specific to the polis, the community of citizens.
Cleisthenes also effected other major reforms, introducing measures designed to create some kind of counterbalance to institutions still dominated by the aristocracy, such as the Areopagus, which continued to have a monopoly of jurisdiction in crimes against the state and in controlling magistrates. In particular, he gave the Assembly a new legislative role. But it was the institution of the demes perhaps more than any other institutional reform that vested power in the demos. It was in the deme that the peasant-citizen was truly born. Democratic politics began in the deme, where ordinary citizens dealt with the immediate and local matters that most directly affected their daily lives, and the democratic polis at the centre was constructed on this foundation. It was here that the traditional barrier between producing peasant village and appropriating central state was most completely broken down; and the new relation between producing classes and the state extended to other labouring citizens too.
Nothing symbolizes more neatly the effect of Cleisthenes’s reforms than the fact that Athenian citizens were thereafter to be identified not by their patronymic or clan name but by their demotikon, the name of the deme in which their citizenship was rooted – an identification not surprisingly resisted by the aristocracy, which clung to the old identity of blood and noble birth. To be sure, the aristocracy continued to hold positions of power and influence, and Cleisthenes may or may not have intended to establish true popular sovereignty. But his reforms did advance the power of the people. Cleisthenes himself seems to have described the new political order as isonomia, literally equality of law, which had to do not simply with equal rights of citizenship but with a more even balance among the various organs of government, giving the popular assembly a more active legislative role than ever before. Although the demos, who elected magistrates, would not achieve full sovereign control as long as the Areopagus retained its dominant role in enforcing state decisions and holding magistrates to account, the new legislative role that Cleisthenes gave to the Assembly was a major enhancement of popular power.
There were also other more intangible effects of Cleisthenes’s reforms. We shall have more to say later about developments in the concepts of law, justice and equality; but it is worth mentioning here that Cleisthenes has been credited with a significant change in Greek political vocabulary, the application of the word nomos, instead of the traditional thesmos, to designate statutory law.7 What is significant about this change is that, while thesmos implies the imposition of law from above and has a distinctly religious flavour, nomos – a word that suggests something held in common, whether pasture or custom – implies a law to which there is common agreement, something that people who are subject to it themselves regard as a binding norm. The application of nomos to statute became common usage in Athens, which had thereby adopted ‘the most democratic word for “law” in any language.’8
Was the Democracy Democratic?
After Cleisthenes, popular power continued to evolve, with the Areopagus losing its exclusive jurisdiction in political cases, with popular juries playing an ever greater role (pay for attendance was introduced in the 450s under Pericles), and the Assembly gaining strength (though pay for attendance was introduced only in the late 390s). Since much of what we might regard as political business was dealt with in Athens by means of judicial proceedings, the power of popular juries was particularly important, and Aristotle – or whoever wrote the Constitution of Athens commonly attributed to him – would later describe it as one of the three most democratic features of the Athenian polis. Athens’s victory over Persia in the Battle of Marathon in 490 BC or, more especially, the naval victory at Salamis in 480 ushered in the golden age of the democracy, a new age of democratic self-confidence. When the historian Thucydides a few decades later depicted the most famous democratic leader, Pericles, he was able to put into his mouth a glowing account of democracy in his famous Funeral Oration. For all its rose-tinted prose, this speech tells us much about the realities, and even more about the aspirations, of Athenian political life.
Pericles, himself an aristocrat, tells us that Athens is called a democracy
because its administration is in the hands, not of the few, but of the many; yet while as regards the law all men are on an equality for the settlement of their private disputes, yet . . . it is as each man is in any way distinguished that he is preferred to public honours, not because he belongs to a particular class, but because of personal merits; nor, again, on the ground of poverty is a man barred from a public career by obscurity of rank if he but has it in him to do the state a service . . . and we Athenians decide public questions for ourselves or at least endeavour to arrive at a sound understanding of them, in the belief that it is not debate that is a hindrance to action, but rather not to be instructed by debate before the time comes for action.9
And indeed the Assembly, which all citizens were entitled to attend, deliberated and decided on every kind of public question, while legal cases were commonly tried in popular courts. The council which set the agenda for the Assembly was now chosen by lot annually from among all citizens. Although election was regarded as an oligarchic practice, it was used for some positions, typically military and financial, which required a specialized skill. But in general public offices, which tended to be ad hoc, were not treated as specialized professional employments; and many officials were chosen by lot. In principle, then, and to a great extent in practice, all citizens could be involved in all government functions – executive, legislative and judicial. To be sure, aristocrats like Pericles (who reached his influential position in the democracy as a military leader chosen by the people) still enjoyed great influence, while wealthy and well-born citizens probably still had disproportionate weight in the assembly. Yet (as anti-democrats like Plato make very clear) we should not underestimate the day-to-day role of popular power in juries and assemblies, nor the significance of democratic practices like sortition (selection by lot) for various public positions.
Nevertheless, even taking into account the historically unprecedented, and in many ways still unequalled, power of the Athenian people, we must pause here to ask whether, or in what sense, it is appropriate to call the Athenian polis a democracy. After all, this was a society in which slavery played a major role, and in which women had no political rights. In fact, the evolution of democracy increased the role of slavery and in some ways diminished the status of women, especially in respect to the disposition of property. It can hardly be denied that the imperatives of preserving property had a great deal to do with restrictions on the freedom of women, and it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the position of smallholders, the peasant-citizens of Athens, generated particularly strong pressures for the conservation of family property. It is even more obvious that the liberation of the peasantry and its unavailability as dependent labour created new incentives for enslavement of non-Greeks. So, while slavery was relatively unimportant in the days of Solon, in the golden age of the democracy, according to some estimates, there may have been as many as 110,000 slaves out of a total Attic population of 310,000, of which 172,000 were free citizens and their families (the number of citizens with full political rights would then have been somewhere in the region of 30,000), with another 28,500 metics or resident aliens, free but without political rights.10
Athens was a democracy in the sense – and only in the sense – that the Greeks understood the term, which they themselves invented. It had to do with the power of the demos, not only as a political category but as a social one: the poor and common people. Aristotle defined democracy as a constitution in which ‘the free-born and poor control the government – being at the same time a majority’, and distinguished it from oligarchy, in which ‘the rich and better-born control the government – being at the same time a minority’. The social criteria – poverty in one case, wealth and high birth in the other – play a central role in these definitions and even in the end outweigh the numerical criterion. This notion of democracy as a form of class rule – rule by the poor – certainly reflected the views of those who opposed it, who may even have invented the word as a term of abuse; but supporters of the democracy, even moderates like Pericles, regarded the political position of the poor as essential to the definition of democracy.
The enemies of the democracy hated it above all because it gave political power to working people and the poor. It can even be said that the main issue dividing democrats from anti-democrats – as it divided Theseus and the Theban herald in The Suppliant Women – was whether the labouring multitude, the banausic or menial classes, should have political rights, whether such people are able to make political judgments. This is a recurring theme not only in ancient Greece, where it emerges very clearly in Plato’s philosophy, but in debates about democracy throughout most of Western history.
The question raised by critics of democracy is not only whether people who have to work for a living have time for political reflection, but also whether those who are bound to the necessity of working in order to survive can be free enough in mind and spirit to make political judgments. For Athenian democrats, the answer is, of course, in the affirmative. For them, one of the main principles of democracy, as we saw in Theseus’s speech, was the capacity and the right of such people to make political judgments and speak about them in public assemblies. The Athenians even had a word for it, isegoria, which means not just freedom of speech in the sense we understand it in modern democracies but rather equality of public speech. This may, in fact, be the most distinctive idea to come out of the democracy, and it has no parallel in our own political vocabulary. Freedom of speech as we know it has to do with the absence of interference with our right to speak. Equality of speech as the Athenians understood it had to do with the ideal of active political participation by poor and working people.
We can judge the significance of the Athenian definition only by comparing it to democracy as we understand it today. While we have to recognize the severe limitations of Athenian democracy, there are also ways in which it far exceeds our own. This is true of procedures such as sortition or direct democracy, with ordinary citizens, and not just representatives, making decisions in assemblies and juries. But even more important is the effect of democracy on relations between classes. It is true that modern democracy, like the ancient, is a system in which people are citizens regardless of status or class. But if class makes no (legal) difference to citizenship in either case, in modern democracy the reverse is also true: citizenship makes little difference to class. This was not and could not be so in ancient Greece, where political rights had far-reaching effects on the relations between rich and poor.
We have already encountered the peasant-citizen, whose political rights had wider implications. Peasants have been the predominant producing classes throughout much of history, and an essential feature of their condition has been the obligation to forfeit part of their labour to someone who wields superior force. Peasants have been in possession of land, either as owners or as tenants; but they have had to transfer surplus labour to landlords and states, in the form of labour services, rents or taxes. The appropriating classes which have made these claims on them have been able to do so because they have possessed not only land but privileged access to coercive military, political and judicial power. They have possessed what has been called ‘politically constituted property’.11 The military and political powers of lordship in feudal Europe, for instance, were at the same time the power to extract surpluses from peasants. If feudal lords and serfs had been politically and juridically equal, they would not, by definition, have been lords and serfs, and there would have been no feudalism.
This type of relationship, and even patronage (such as would exist in Rome), was absent in democratic Athens. Its absence certainly had the effect of encouraging the enslavement of non-Greeks. But it is, again, important to keep in mind that the majority of Athenian citizens worked for a living, mainly as farmers or craftsmen, and that citizenship in Athens precluded a whole range of legally and politically dependent conditions which throughout history have compelled direct producers to forfeit surplus labour to their masters and rulers. This is not to say that the rich in Athens had no advantages over the poor – though the gap between rich and poor was very much narrower in Athens than in ancient Rome. The point is rather that the possession of political rights made an enormous difference, because it affected how, and even whether, the rich could exploit the poor.
Here lies the great difference between ancient and modern democracy. Today, there is a system of appropriation that does not depend on legal inequalities or the inequality of political rights. It is the system we call capitalism, a system in which appropriating and producing classes can be free and equal under the law, where the relation between them is supposed to be a contractual agreement between free and equal individuals, and where even universal suffrage is possible without fundamentally affecting the economic powers of capital. The power of exploitation in capitalism can coexist with liberal democracy, which would have been impossible in any system where exploitation depended on a monopoly of political rights. The reason this is possible is that capitalism has created new, purely economic compulsions: the propertylessness of workers – or, more precisely, their lack of property in the means of production, the means of labour itself – which compels them to sell their labour power in exchange for a wage simply in order to gain access to the means of labour and to obtain the means of subsistence; and also the compulsions of the market, which regulate the economy and enforce certain imperatives of competition and profit-maximization.
So, both capital and labour can have democratic rights in the political sphere without completely transforming the relation between them in a separate economic sphere. In fact, it is only in capitalism that there is a separate economic sphere, with its own imperatives, and so it is only in capitalism that democracy can be confined to a separate political domain. It is also only in capitalism that so much of human life has been put outside the reach of democratic accountability, regulated instead by market imperatives and the requirements of profit, the commodification that affects all aspects of life, not just in the workplace but everywhere. Citizenship today, in the conditions of capitalism, may be more inclusive, but it simply cannot mean as much to ordinary citizens as it meant to Athenian peasants and craftsmen – even in the more benign forms of capitalism which have moderated the effects of market imperatives. Athenian democracy had many great short comings, but in this respect, it went beyond our own.
In one other respect, Athenian democracy was no less imperfect than is today’s most powerful democracy. The commitment to civic freedom and equality among citizens at home did not extend to relations with other states. Athens increasingly exploited its growing power to impose imperial hegemony on allied city-states, largely for the purpose of extracting tribute from them. The Athenian empire was, to be sure, shaped and limited by the democracy at home. Imperial expansion was not driven by the interests of a landed aristocracy, and the Athenians often displaced local oligarchies in dependent city-states, establishing democracies friendly to Athens. Nor, while commercial interests were certainly at work, was the Athenian empire a mercantile project. The imperial mission was, in the first instance, to compensate for domestic agricultural deficiencies in order to ensure the food supply by controlling sea routes for the import of grain. This project was certainly a costly one, requiring ever-increasing revenues from tribute to maintain the Athenian navy; but the social property relations underlying the democracy ensured that Athens never established a territorial empire, as the Romans would do. While Roman peasant soldiers, as we shall see, would be subject to years of service far away from home, leaving their properties vulnerable to expropriation by aristocratic landowners, Athenian military ventures were strictly limited by agricultural cycles and the needs of free peasant soldiers returning home to work their farms. Yet however limited their imperial objectives may have been, the Athenians could be spectacularly brutal in pursuit of their aims; and nothing in their democratic culture precluded such brutality.
The two faces of Athenian democracy would be eloquently captured by the historian, Thucydides, in two of the most famous passages in his History of the Peloponnesian War. In Pericles’s Funeral Oration, the historian puts in the mouth of the great democratic leader a speech extolling, among other things, the virtues of civic equality. In Athens, Pericles suggests, inequalities between rich and poor, the strong and the weak, are tempered by law and democratic citizenship. In the Melian Dialogue, the Athenians, in debate with a recalcitrant city-state that refuses the status of tributary ally, are made to express with unadorned ruthlessness the imperial principle that ‘right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.’
The Evolution of Political Theory
Political theory has been defined here as the systematic application of critical reason to interrogate political principles, raising questions not only about good and bad forms of government but even about the grounds on which we make such judgments. It asks the most fundamental questions about the source and justification of moral and political standards. Do standards of justice, for instance, exist by nature, or are they simply human conventions? In either case, what, if anything, makes them binding? Are the differences between rulers and subjects, masters and slaves, based on natural inequalities, or have human beings who are naturally equal become unequal as a result of human practices and customs? These moral and political questions have inevitably raised even more fundamental issues. In fact, the tradition of Western philosophy emerged in ancient Greece in large part out of debates that were in the first instance political. In Athens, political debate opened up a whole range of philosophical questions discussed ever since by Western philosophers: not only ethical questions about the standards of good and bad but questions about the nature and foundations of knowledge, about the relation between knowledge and morality, about human nature, and the relation between human beings and the natural order or the divine.
It is easy to take these forms of thought for granted as emerging more or less naturally out of the human condition and the perennial problems humanity faces in its efforts to cope with its social and natural universe. We seldom stop to consider the very specific historical preconditions, intellectual and social, that made it possible to think in these critical terms. But it is worth asking what kinds of intellectual assumptions we must make in order systematically to raise questions about the foundations of good government, standards of justice, or the obligation to obey authority; and it is also worth asking what social conditions have given rise to such assumptions.
In order to question existing arrangements, there must, at the minimum, be some belief in humanity’s ability to control its own circumstances, some sense of the separation of human beings from an unchangeable natural order, and of the social from the natural realm. There must be, to put it another way, a conception of human history instead of simply natural history or supernatural myth, an idea that history involves conscious human effort to solve human problems, that there is a possibility of deliberate change in accordance with conscious human goals, and that human reason is a formative, creative principle, to some extent capable of transcending the predetermined and inexorable cycle of natural necessity or divinely ordained destiny. Such a view of humanity’s place in the world tends to be associated with some direct experience of social change and mobility, some practical distance from the inexorable cycles of nature, which is most likely to come with urban civilization, a well-developed realm of human experience outside the cycles and necessities of nature.
These conditions were present in all the ‘high’ civilizations of the ancient world and gave rise to rich and varied cultural legacies. But nowhere else had the emphasis on human agency taken centre stage in intellectual life, as it would do in Greece. The two most characteristic products of that distinctive legacy are history as practised by the Greek historians, notably Herodotus and Thucydides, and political theory, in the sense intended here. What distinguished Greece, and especially democratic Athens, from other complex civilizations was the degree to which the prevailing order, especially traditional hierarchies, had been challenged in practice; and conflict or debate about social arrangements was a normal, even institutionalized, part of everyday life. It was in this context that Athenians were faced, in new and unprecedented ways, with moral and political responsibility for shaping their own circumstances. Debate was the operative principle of the Athenian state, and the citizen majority had a deep-seated interest in preserving it. This was so because, and to the extent that, politics in Athens was not about sustaining the rule of a dominant power but about managing the relation between ‘mass’ and ‘elite’, with the public institutions of the state acting less as an instrument of rule for the propertied elite than as a counterweight against it, and with the common people in the role of political actors, not simply the object of rule. Reflection on the state was from the start shaped by that relation and by the tensions it inevitably generated.
To get a sense of how Greek political theory came into being, it is useful, again, to consider it against the background of the Homeric epics, the last major expression of ostensibly unchallenged aristocratic rule, at the very moment of its passing. When the epics were written down, whether by Homer himself or by someone else recording an oral tradition, traditional modes of transmitting cultural knowledge and values were no longer adequate, and conditions were emerging that required other forms of discourse, placing new demands on writing. In that respect, Homer was a transitional figure, both in the development of Greek literacy, as a poet still obviously steeped in the oral tradition but whose work was set down in writing, and as the poet of a dying aristocracy, no longer safe in its dominance, no longer able to take obedience for granted, and increasingly beleaguered by a challenge from below. Perhaps the very act of writing down the epics acknowledges the passing of the social order they describe (or the passing of a social order something like the one they have invented) and the need to preserve its principles in a form less ephemeral than oral recitation; but there is no evidence in the substance of the epics, in which the lower classes are scarcely visible, that aristocratic values now require a more robust and systematic defence than songs in praise of hero-nobles.
What happens to the concept of dik
, the Greek word for justice, is a telling illustration. In Homer, there is no real conception of justice as an ethical norm. The word dik appears in The Odyssey several times but largely as a morally neutral term, describing a characteristic behaviour or disposition, or something like ‘the way of things’. So, for example, the dik of bodies in death is that flesh and bone no longer hold together, or the dik of a dog is that it fawns on its master, or a serf does best when his dik is to fear his lord. There are one or two usages that have a somewhat more normative connotation. On his return to Ithaca from the Trojan War, a still unrecognized Odysseus comes upon his father, Laertes, digging in the vineyard like a peasant or slave. Odysseus tells him that he looks more like a man of royal blood, the kind whose dik is to sleep on a soft bed after he has bathed and dined. This could simply refer to the typical lordly way of life, but dik here may also have about it the sense of a due right. Perhaps the closest Homer comes to a moral norm of justice appears in a passage suggesting that the gods do not like foul play but respect dik and upright deeds, the right way. Yet even here, dik does not refer to an ethical standard of justice so much as correct and proper behaviour, especially the behaviour of true nobles, in contrast to the intrusive rudeness of Penelope’s suitors who, in their confidence that her husband, Odysseus, will never return to punish them, are breaking all the rules of decency.
Homeric usage, then, idealizes a society in which the way of things has not been subjected to serious challenge. Dik does not appear as a standard of justice against which the prevailing order can and should be judged. But a very different meaning of dik already appears in the work of Homer’s near, if not exact, contemporary, Hesiod; and it is surely significant that the poet in this case is speaking not for nobles but for peasants. Himself a ‘middling’ farmer in Boeotia, Hesiod is no radical; yet his poem, Works and Days, is not only a compendium of farming information and moral advice but also a long poetic grumble about the lot of hard-working farmers and the injustices perpetrated against them by greedy lords. In this context, dik appears in the figure of a goddess who sits at the right hand of Zeus. Hesiod tells us that she watches and judges ‘gift-eating’ or ‘bribe-swallowing’ lords who use their judicial prerogatives to exploit the peasantry by means of ‘crooked’ judgments. Dik, Hesiod warns, will make sure that the crooked lords get their come-uppance. The poet, to be sure, is not calling for a peasant revolt, but he is certainly doing something of great conceptual significance. He is proposing a concept of justice that stands apart from the jurisdiction of the lords, a standard against which they and their judgments can and must themselves be judged. It could hardly be more different from Homer’s customary and unchallenged aristocratic way of things.
The difference between Homer and Hesiod is social no less than conceptual, the one idealizing an unchallenged dominant class whose values and judgments pass for universal norms, the other speaking for a divided community in which social norms, and the authority of dominant classes, are acknowledged objects of conflict. The issues raised here by poetry would become the subject of complex and abstract debates, for which writing would increasingly become the favoured medium, reaching fruition in the philosophical discourse of the fifth and fourth centuries BC, especially in democratic Athens. The kind of systematic enquiry that the Greeks had already applied to the natural order would be extended to moral rules and political arrangements. Dik would pass from the poetry of Homer and Hesiod to the elaborate philosophical speculations of Plato on justice or dikaiosune in The Republic, as opponents of the democracy (of which Plato was the most notable example) could no longer rely on tradition and were obliged to construct their defence of social hierarchy on a wholly new foundation.
The Culture of Democracy
To get a sense of how much the issues of political theory permeated the whole of Athenian culture, it is worth considering how moral and political questions arose not only in formal philosophy but also in other, more popular cultural forms, notably in drama. The plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides tell us a great deal about the atmosphere in which political philosophy emerged. We have already seen how political debate intruded into Euripides’s Suppliant Women. In Aeschylus, the first of the major tragedians, the questions of political theory are introduced with greater subtlety but are also more integral to the dramatic action. Aeschylus was particularly well placed to judge the importance of the changes that Athens had undergone. He grew up in an age of tyranny and war. Having fought at Marathon, he saw the democracy come into its own. With experience of the past and steeped in its traditions, he was nevertheless very much a part of the new climate, in which citizens were forced to confront new questions about the moral and political responsibility of ordinary humans who no longer looked upon themselves as simply playthings of the gods or obedient subjects of lords and kings.
His classic trilogy, The Oresteia, appeared in 458 not long after the murder of the democratic leader Ephialtes, who had deprived the Areopagus of its traditional functions, apart from its role as a homicide court. It is likely that Aeschylus was, among other things, conveying the message that this old aristocratic institution, while it still had a role to play in the democracy, had been rightly displaced by more democratic institutions. The trilogy has as its central theme a confrontation between two conflicting conceptions of justice, in the form of a contest between the endless cycle of traditional blood vengeance and new principles of judgment by judicial procedure. The first represents Destiny, the fury of uncontrollable fate; the other, human responsibility – an opposition that may also represent the antithesis of old aristocratic principles of kinship and blood rivalry as against the judicial procedures of a democratic civic order.
The murder of Agamemnon, king of Argos, by his wife, Clytemnestra, sets in train what could be an endless cycle of blood, as Orestes obeys an apparently natural law and avenges his father’s death by killing Clytemnestra and her lover, Aegisthus. The inexorable laws of revenge mean that Orestes, pursued by the Furies, must also become the victim of blood vengeance, and so the cycle will go on and on. There is also, in a confrontation between the Furies and the god Apollo, a clash between old principles of kinship – represented by the Furies – and Apollo’s commitment to patriarchal-aristocratic right, according to which the murder of a king is a crime in a way that matricide is not. The resolution comes in the last of the three plays with the establishment, on the instructions of Athena, of a court to hear the case of Orestes and end the matter once and for all. The jury will be manned not by gods or lords but by citizen jurors. Aeschylus still gives the gods a role, and fear will still play a part in enforcing the law – as the Furies become the more benign Eumenides. Nor does the tragedian repudiate the customs and traditions of the old Athens. But he is unambiguous about the importance of replacing the force and violence of the old order with new principles of reason, the rule of law and ‘Holy Persuasion’, the kind of order established by the polis and its civic principles – in particular, the democratic polis ruled by its citizens and not by kings or lords.
The attribution to Aeschylus of another play, Prometheus Bound, has been put in question, although his authorship was generally accepted in antiquity. Yet, whether or not it can be read as expressing his views, it tells us much about the culture of Athenian democracy, if we compare its telling of the Promethean myth to other versions of the story. The myth in what is probably its more conventional form appears in Hesiod. Prometheus steals fire from Zeus as a gift to humanity. In his anger, Zeus threatens to make humanity pay for this gift. There follows the story of Pandora’s ‘box’, a storage jar containing the threatened ‘gift’ from Zeus. Contrary to the advice of her brother-in-law Prometheus, she opens the jar and releases every evil, ending a golden age when the fruits of the earth were enjoyed without effort, and humanity was free of labour, sorrow and disease, although hope remains trapped inside. Hesiod combines this with another story about stages in the decline of humanity, which was once equal to the gods but is now a race that works and grieves unceasingly. For Hesiod, this is, in the main, a story about the pains of daily life and work. In Aeschylus’s recounting of the Prometheus story, as in other variations on the same themes in Sophocles, and in the Sophist Protagoras, it becomes a hymn in praise of human arts and those who practise them.
In this first and only surviving play of a trilogy, (pseudo?) Aeschylus’s Prometheus, being ruthlessly punished by Zeus for his pride, is presented as a benefactor to humanity. He has given them the various mental and manual skills that have made life possible and good, ending the condition of misery and confusion in which they had first been created. He also represents the love of freedom and justice, expressing contempt for Zeus’s autocracy and the servile humility of the god’s messenger, Hermes. As in The Oresteia, the tragedian is not here repudiating the gods or tradition, and there may be some right on both sides. But there is no mistaking the importance of the way he tells the Promethean story. Human arts, skills and crafts in his version betoken not the fall of humanity but, on the contrary, its greatest gift. The full political significance of this becomes evident not only when we contrast this view of the arts to the practices of Sparta, where the only ‘craft’ permitted to citizens was war, but also, as we shall see, if we compare it to Plato’s retelling of the myth, where labour is again presented as a symbol of decline, in the context of an argument designed to exclude practitioners of these ordinary human arts, the labouring classes, from the specialized ‘craft’ of politics.
In Sophocles’s Antigone, as in Aeschylus’s plays, there are also two opposing moral principles in tragic confrontation, and again there is right on both sides. Eteocles and Polyneices, sons of the late ruler, Oedipus, and brothers of Antigone, have killed each other in battle. The new king of Thebes, Creon, has decreed that Eteocles, who fought on the side of his city, will be buried with full military honours, while Polyneices, who fought against the Thebans, will be left unburied. Antigone insists that she will bury her traitorous brother, in defiance of the ruler’s decree and in obedience to immortal unwritten laws.
The play is sometimes represented as a clash between the individual conscience and the state, but it is more accurately described as an opposition between two conceptions of nomos, Antigone representing eternal unwritten laws, in the form of traditional, customary and religious obligations of kinship, and Creon speaking for the laws of a new political order. This is also a confrontation between two conflicting loyalties or forms of philia, a word inadequately conveyed by our notion of ‘friendship’ – a confrontation between, on the one hand, the ties of blood and personal friendship and, on the other, the public demands of the civic community, the polis, whose laws are supposed to be directed to the common good.
It cannot be said that Sophocles comes down decisively on one side or the other. It is true that we have great sympathy for Antigone, and increasingly less for the stubborn Creon; yet both the antagonists, Antigone and Creon, display excessive and uncompromising pride, for which they both will suffer. The tragedian here too clearly respects ‘unwritten laws’, but he also stresses the importance of human law and the civic order. Yet, for all of Sophocles’s even-handedness, it becomes clear that Creon’s chief offence is not that he insists on the supremacy of civic law but rather that he violates the very principles of civic order by treating his own autocratic decrees as if they were law.
In a dialogue with his son Haemon, Creon, having decreed Antigone’s punishment, maintains that her act of disobedience was wrong in itself. Haemon believes it would be wrong only if the act itself were also dishonourable, and, he says, the Theban people do not regard it so. ‘Since when,’ Creon objects, ‘do I take my orders from the people of Thebes?. . . I am king and responsible only to myself’ – in a manner reminiscent of Xerxes in Aeschylus’s Persians. ‘A one-man state?’ asks Haemon. ‘What kind of state is that?’ ‘Why, does not every state belong to its ruler?’ says the king, to which his son replies, ‘You’d be an excellent king – on a desert island.’
In an ode that interrupts the action, the Chorus sings the praises of the human arts, and the rule of law which is the indispensable condition for their successful practice. We can deduce from this interlude that Sophocles regards the civic order and its laws as a great benefit to humankind, the source of its progress and strength. Yet he is also very alive to the dangers of allowing the polis to be the ultimate, absolute standard, discarding all tradition. Among the chief benefits of the civic order is the possibility of governing human interactions by moderation and persuasion. Perhaps the polis is, ideally, the place where different ethics can be reconciled. But one thing is clear: the possibility of resolution by discussion and persuasion, rather than by coercion, is greatest in a democracy, where one man’s judgment cannot prevail simply by means of superior power.
There is also, in the ode, another indication of Sophocles’s commitment to Athenian democracy. Of all the wonders of the world, he writes, none is more wonderful than humankind. What distinguishes humanity are the various human arts, from agriculture and navigation to speech and statecraft. In this poetic interlude, as in Aeschylus’s Prometheus, human society is founded on the practical arts; and Sophocles here sums up the central values of the democracy: not only the centrality of human action and responsibility, but also the importance of a lawful civic order and the value of the arts, from the most elevated literary inventions to the most arduous manual labour. In the interweaving of these themes – the centrality of human action, the importance of the civic principle and the value of the arts – we can find the essence of Greek political theory, the terrain of struggle between democrats and those who seek to challenge them by overturning democratic principles.
Democracy and Philosophy: The Sophists
The plays of Aeschylus and Sophocles bespeak the rise of the civic community, citizenship and the rule of law, as against traditional principles of social organization. They reflect the evolution of the democracy with its new conceptions of law, equality and justice, a new confidence in human powers and creativity, and a celebration of practical arts, techniques and crafts, including the political art. But their tragedies also manifest the tensions of the democratic polis, the questions it inevitably raises about the nature and origin of political norms, moral values, and conceptions of good and evil.
The dramatists speak for a society which has certainly not rejected the notion of unwritten and eternal laws, universal principles of behaviour, or obligations to family, friends and gods. But it is also a society in which the very idea of universal and eternal values is open to question and nothing can be taken for granted. The experience of the democracy makes certain questions inescapable: what is the relation between eternal laws and man-made laws, between natural and positive law? It is all very well to connect the two by invoking some divinely inspired lawgiver (as the Spartans did, while the Athenians did not); but how do we account for the differences among various communities, which all have their own specific laws? And what happens when democratic politics encourages the view that one person’s opinion is as good as another’s? What happens then to universal and eternal laws or conceptions of justice? Are these just man-made conventions, based simply on expediency, human convenience, agreement among ordinary mortals and the arts of persuasion? If so, why can we not change them at will, or, for that matter, disobey them?
From the middle of the fifth century BC, these questions were increasingly raised in more systematic form, first by the so-called sophists and then by the self-styled philosophers. There already existed a tradition of natural philosophy, systematic reflection on nature and the material world; and among the natural philosophers, some had begun to extend their reflections to humankind and society – such as the great atomist Democritus, who devoted his life to both science and moral reflection. But the sophists can claim credit for making human nature, society and political arrangements primary subjects of philosophical enquiry.
The sophists were paid teachers and writers who travelled from polis to polis to teach the youth of prosperous families. They flourished in Athens thanks to a keen and growing interest in education, especially in the skills required in the courts and assemblies of the democracy, the arts of rhetoric and oratory. Athens, with its cultural and political vitality, attracted distinguished teachers from other parts of Greece: Prodicus of Ceos, a student of language; Hippias of Elis, whose interests were encyclopedic; the brilliant rhetorician, Gorgias of Leontini, who came to Athens not as a professional teacher but a diplomat; and above all, the earliest and greatest of the sophists, Protagoras of Abdera, friend and adviser to Pericles, about whom more in a moment. Among the other sophists were Thrasymachus, whom we shall encounter in our consideration of Plato’s Republic; and the second-generation sophists, such as Lycophron, who is credited with formulating an idea of the social contract; Critias, the uncle of Plato, who also appears in his nephew’s dialogues; the possibly fictional Callicles, whom Plato uses to represent the radical sophists’ idea that justice is the right of the strongest; the so-called ‘Anonymous Iamblichi’, who countered the radical sophists by arguing that the source of power is in community consensus; Antiphon, perhaps the first thinker to argue for the natural equality of all men, whether Greek or ‘barbarian’; and, much later, Alcidamas, who insisted on the natural freedom of humanity.
We should not be misled by the unflattering portraits of these intellectuals painted in particular by Aristophanes and Plato, for whom they represented the decline and corruption of Athens. It is impossible to judge the portrayal of the sophists by these critics without knowing something about the historical moment in which they were writing. During this phase of the democracy, even democratic aristocrats like Pericles were being displaced by new men such as the wealthy but ‘common’ Cleon. In Plato’s aristocratic circles, there was, not surprisingly, an atmosphere of disaffection and nostalgia for the good old days. Unfortunately, the aristocratic grumbles of a small minority have tended to colour views of Athenian democracy ever since, creating a myth of Athens in decline which has been very hard to shift.
Aristocratic disaffection did have more serious consequences, which left a deep mark on the democracy. There were two oligarchic revolutions: a brief episode in 411 but more particularly the coup in 404 which, with the help of Sparta, established the bloody rule of the Thirty (the Thirty Tyrants). With the support of a 700–man Spartan garrison on the Acropolis, the Thirty murdered and expelled large numbers of Athenians. Thousands fled the city, and only 3,000 Athenians – perhaps 10 per cent of the citizenry – retained full rights of citizenship. Yet, when the democracy was restored in the following year, it displayed remarkable restraint in dealing with the oligarchic opposition, instituting, at Sparta’s behest, an amnesty which ruled out the political persecution of the oligarchs and their supporters; and despite the catastrophes that brought the golden age to a close, the fourth century was to be the most stable period of the democracy, which enjoyed widespread support among the poor and even the rich. This was also a period in which the culture of Athens flourished and when it truly became what Pericles had earlier called ‘an education to Greece’. There was no further serious internal threat to the democratic regime, and it came to an end only when Athens effectively lost its independence altogether to the Macedonians in the last quarter of the century.
The notion that the late democracy was a period of moral decay is largely a product of class prejudice. To be sure, there were serious problems, especially economic ones; and the Athenians had paid a heavy price in the Peloponnesian War, to say nothing of the plague. But the myth of democratic decadence has more to do with the social changes that marked the decline of the old aristocracy, which were accompanied by political changes in both leadership and style, a new kind of popular politics that brought to maturity the strategy adopted by Cleisthenes at the beginning of the democracy, when he made the people his hetairoi. Critics described these changes as the triumph of vulgarity, materialism, amoral egoism, and ‘demagogic’ trickery designed to lead the ignorant demos astray. What is most striking about the attacks on a leader like Cleon – by figures as diverse as Thucydides, Aristophanes and Aristotle – is that they invariably suggest objections of style more than substance. Aristotle, for instance, can think of nothing worse to complain about than Cleon’s vulgar manner, the way he shouted in the Assembly and spoke with his cloak not girt about him, when others conducted themselves with proper decorum.
For critics like Aristophanes and Plato, the sophists became the intellectual expression of this alleged moral decadence and were made to stand for the decline of traditional values. They were portrayed as representing a polis where even young aristocrats had given up the high moral standards of their ancestors, a polis in which all standards of right and wrong had been abandoned, and even those who knew the difference were likely to prefer wrong to right. The rhetorical strategies perfected by the sophists, and the lawyer’s adversarial principle that there are two sides to every question, were interpreted by critics as simply a way of ‘making the worse cause seem the better’. But, while some sophists may indeed have been unprincipled opportunists, among them were thinkers who made substantial and innovative contributions to Greek culture and the traditions emanating from it. Even while their ideas have come down to us only in fragments or in second-hand accounts, especially in the dialogues of a generally hostile Plato, enough remains to justify the claim that the sophists, and Protagoras in particular, effectively invented political theory and set the agenda of Western philosophy in general.
The sophists varied in their philosophical ideas no less than in their politics. What they generally had in common was a preoccupation with the distinction between physis (nature) and nomos (law, custom or convention). In a climate in which laws, customs, ethical principles, and social and political arrangements were no longer taken for granted as part of some unchangeable natural order, and the relation between written and unwritten law was a very live practical issue, the antithesis between nomos and physis became the central intellectual problem. The very immediate political force of this issue is dramatically illustrated by the fact that, with the restoration of the democracy, magistrates were prohibited from invoking ‘unwritten law’, an idea that now had powerfully antidemocratic associations.
The sophists in general agreed that there is an essential difference between things that exist by nature and things that exist by custom, convention or law. But there were disagreements among them about which is better, the way of nature or the way of nomos, and, indeed, about what the way of nature is. In either case, their arguments could be mobilized in defence of democracy or against it. Some, in support of oligarchy, might argue that there is a natural division between rulers and ruled and that natural hierarchy should be reflected in political arrangements. Others, in defence of democracy, might argue that no such clear division exists by nature, that men are naturally equal, and that it is wrong to create an artificial hierarchy, a hierarchy by nomos as against physis. But other permutations were possible too: a democrat could argue that a political equality created by nomos has the advantage of moderating natural inequalities and permitting men to live in harmony. Or it could be argued that, however similar men may be by nature, life in society requires differentiation, a division of labour, and hence some kind of inequality by nomos.
If sophists could be either oligarchs or democrats, it was democracy itself that had brought such issues into sharp relief. In the context of civic equality, the seemingly self-evident observation that, as Thucydides put it in the Melian Dialogue, ‘the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must’ could no longer simply be taken for granted and was up for discussion in unprecedented ways. There were now indeed two sides (at least) to the question. The juxtaposition in practice of civic equality and ‘natural’ inequality, the inequality of strength and weakness, produced particularly fruitful tensions in theory, which found expression both in Thucydides’s history and in philosophy.
It is not as easy as Plato would have us believe to distinguish between the intellectual activities of the sophists and true ‘philosophy’, or love of wisdom, as practised by Plato himself and the man more commonly credited with its invention, Socrates. To be sure, Socrates was not a paid teacher, though he could always rely on the largesse of his almost uniformly wealthy and well-born friends and acolytes – such as his greatest pupil, the aristocratic Plato. But both Socrates and Plato conducted their philosophic enterprise on the same terrain as the sophists. Not only were the ‘philosphers’ also concerned primarily with human nature, society, knowledge and morality, but they also proceeded in their own ways from the distinction between nomos and physis, between things that exist by law or convention and those that exist by nature. They certainly transformed this distinction, in a way that no sophist did, into a philosophical exploration of true knowledge. Unlike the sophists, who tended towards moral relativism or pluralism and never strayed far outside the sphere of empirical reality, Socrates and Plato were concerned with a different kind of ‘nature’, a deeper or higher reality which was the object of true knowledge. The empirical world was for them, and more particularly for Plato, a world of mere appearances, the object of imperfect conventional wisdom, at best (more or less) right opinion but not real knowledge. The philosophers drew a distinction between learning and persuasion, suggesting that the sophists, like lawyers, were not really interested in learning the truth but only in making a case and persuading others of it. Yet even if, for instance, Plato’s conception of the division between rulers and ruled is grounded in this hierarchy of knowledge and not on a simple test of brute strength or noble birth, we can still see the connections between the philosopher and those sophists who opposed the democracy on the grounds that it created an artificial equality in defiance of natural hierarchy. More particularly, we can see that the sophists, especially the democratic ones and Protagoras in particular, set the questions the philosophers felt obliged to answer.
Socrates and Protagoras
Socrates, probably the ancient Athenian most revered in later centuries, is also in many ways the most mysterious. He left none of his ideas in writing, and we have to rely on his pupils, especially Plato but also Xenophon, for accounts of his views. Although the differences between Plato’s and Xenophon’s Socrates have often been vastly exaggerated, it is certainly true that each of these two very different witnesses, the philosopher and the rather more down-to-earth and unphilosophical general, brings something of his own disposition to the portrait of his teacher. There has been heated debate about the ‘real’, ‘historical’ Socrates; about the degree to which Plato’s philosophy represents an extension of Socratic teachings or a clear departure of his own; and, not least, about Socrates’s attitude to the democracy.
The trial and death of Socrates have presented enormous problems of their own. While commentators seem, on the whole, to agree that the death sentence was a grave injustice, they differ on what it tells us about the democracy. On the one hand, there are those who see only an injustice perpetrated by a repressive democracy against a man of conscience, the model of the courageous intellectual who follows his reason wherever it takes him in defiance of all opposition and threats. On the other hand, some commentators see not only an injustice but also a beleaguered democracy, which had just come through a period of oligarchic terror and mass murder after a coup against the democratic regime; and they see in Socrates not only a philosopher of courage and principle but also a man whose friends, associates and pupils were among the leading oligarchs – a man who, as democrats fled the city, remained safely in Athens among his oligarchic friends, with every indication that they were confident of his support.
This is not the place to rehearse all these debates.12We can confine ourselves to a few less controversial facts about Socrates, his life and work, and then proceed to an analysis of those ideas that had the greatest consequences for the development of political theory. All we can confidently say about his life is that he was an Athenian citizen of the deme of Alopeke, born around 470 BC, son of Sophroniscus and Phaenarete; that he participated in some military campaigns, most likely as a hoplite (which required enough wealth to arm oneself and support a retainer) during the Peloponnesian War; that he took part as a member of the Council in the trial of the generals of 406 BC; and that he was tried and condemned to death in 399. There is little evidence to support the tradition that his father was a sculptor or stonemason (he may have owned slaves employed as craftsmen, as did the fathers of Isocrates and Cleon) and his mother a midwife, and even less that Socrates followed in his father’s footsteps. There is some evidence that he was a man of comfortable means, though certainly not among the very wealthiest. His friends and associates, however, were almost uniformly wealthy and well born; and the picture of Socrates regularly holding philosophical discussions with artisans around the streets and markets of Athens should be taken with a grain of salt.
During the oligarchic coup and the regime of the Thirty, Socrates stayed safely in Athens, as one of the privileged 3,000 citizens. Some time after the democracy was restored, a charge was brought against him for not duly recognizing the gods of Athens, introducing new gods and corrupting the youth. It seems likely that these accusations were, at least in part, a substitute for more overtly political charges ruled out by the amnesty; but, in any case, there can be no doubt that Athenians looked upon the philosopher with suspicion because of his association with the enemies of the democracy. This does not detract from his dignity and courage; and the main reason given for his refusal to escape with the help of his friends – that he must honour the laws of his polis – testifies to his principled commitment to the rule of law. In this respect, he was quite different from many of his oligarchic friends. But nor do his courage, dignity and loyalty to principle make him a supporter of the democracy.
The question then is whether the suspicions aroused by his associations are supported by what we know of his ideas. Here, again, we have little to go on. What we know with some degree of certainty is that he adopted a particular method of inquiry: engaging in dialogue with one or more interlocutors, he begins with a very general question about the nature of knowledge or the meaning of a concept such as virtue or justice, proceeding by a painstaking series of questions and answers to enumerate the manifold particular instances of ‘virtuous’ or ‘just’ actions; and, with his characteristic irony, he searches out the inconsistencies and contradictions in his interlocutor’s definitions. Although he typically professes ignorance and an inability to teach, it becomes clear that, by seeking the common qualities of all the specific instances of ‘virtuous’ or ‘just’ actions, he attempts to find a ‘real’ definition of virtue or justice – not a rule-of-thumb characterization of specific acts in the empirical world but a definition that expresses an underlying, universal and absolute principle of virtue or justice. The object of the philosophic exercise is to elevate the soul, or psyche, the immortal and divine element in human nature to which the flesh should be subordinate. Applied to politics, the object of philosophy is to fulfill the higher moral purpose of the polis.
In itself, neither the Socratic method nor even the conception of absolute knowledge associated with it has any necessary political implications. But Socrates’s most famous paradox, that virtue is knowledge, is altogether more problematic. On the face of it, this principle simply implies that people act immorally out of ignorance and never voluntarily; and, whatever we may think of this as a description of reality, it seems at least benevolent in its intent, displaying a tolerance and humanity towards those who do wrong which appears to rule out retribution. Nor is there anything political in the admirable first principle of Socrates’s moral teaching: that it is better to suffer wrong than to inflict it. But there is more to the identification of virtue with knowledge, which has far-reaching consequences, not least political and antidemocratic implications. The combined effect of this identification and the moral purpose he attributes to the state is, for all practical purposes, to rule out democracy and even to make ‘democratic knowledge’ an oxymoron.
The implications of Socrates’s formulation become most visible in the confrontation with the sophist Protagoras, depicted in Plato’s dialogue, Protagoras. If we can rely on Plato’s reconstruction of the sophist’s argument, he seems to have laid out a systematic case for democracy; and it is based on conceptions of knowledge, virtue and the purpose of the polis opposed to those of Socrates. What we know from Plato’s portrayal and from the very few genuine surviving fragments of the sophist’s writings is that Protagoras was an agnostic, who argued that we cannot really know whether the gods exist; that we can rely only on human judgment; and that, since there is no certain arbiter of truth beyond human judgment, we cannot assume the existence of any absolute standards of truth and falsehood or of right and wrong. Human beings, indeed every individual, must be the final judges – an idea famously summed up in his best-known aphorism, ‘Man is the measure of all things, of things that are that they are and of things that are not that they are not.’
Such ideas were significant enough. But in Plato’s Protagoras, there is a discussion between Socrates and Protagoras which effectively sets the agenda for the whole of Plato’s mature philosophical work and the intellectual tradition that follows from it. Although this dialogue is no longer commonly regarded as among the earliest of Plato’s works, it has been described as the last of his ‘Socratic’ dialogues, after which he strikes out on his own, developing his ideas more elaborately and independently of his teacher. Protagoras opens up the questions to which the philosopher will devote the rest of his working life and which will, through him, shape the whole of Western philosophy.
What is most immediately striking about the dialogue is that the pivotal question is a political one. Socrates presents Protagoras with a conundrum: like others of his kind, the sophist purports to teach the art of politics, promising to make men good citizens. This surely implies, argues Socrates, that virtue, the qualities of a good citizen, can be taught. Yet political practice in Athens suggests otherwise. When Athenians meet in the Assembly to decide on matters such as construction or shipbuilding projects, they call for architects or naval designers, experts in specialized crafts, and dismiss the views of non-specialists, however wealthy or well born. This is how people normally behave in matters regarded as technical, involving the kind of craft or skill that can and must be taught by an expert. But when the Assembly is discussing something to do with the government of the polis, Athenians behave very differently:
. . . the man who gets up to advise them may be a builder or equally well a blacksmith or a shoemaker, merchant or shipowner, rich or poor, of good family or none. No one brings it up against any of these, as against those I have just mentioned, that he is a man who without any technical qualifications, unable to point to anybody as his teacher, is yet trying to give advice. The reason must be that they do not think this is a subject that can be taught.13
Protagoras gives a subtle and fascinating answer, introduced by yet another story about Prometheus. He sets out to show that Athenians ‘act reasonably in accepting the advice of smith and shoemaker on political matters’.14 There is no inconsistency, he says, between the claim that virtue can be taught and the assumption that civic virtue, or the capacity to make political judgments, is a universal quality, belonging to all adult citizens regardless of status or wealth. His argument turns out to be less a case for his claims as a teacher of the political art than a defence of Athenian democratic practice, insisting on the capacity of ordinary, labouring citizens to make political judgments.
Although there is a brief defence of democracy in Herodotus (III.80), Protagoras’s speech is the only substantive and systematic argument for the democracy to survive from ancient Greece. It is true that we have to rely on Plato to convey the sophist’s views, and we have no way of knowing how much of it Protagoras actually said. But, in contrast to Plato’s attacks on other sophists, Protagoras emerges as a fairly sympathetic and deeply intelligent figure, and Socrates somewhat less so than is usual in Plato’s dialogues. In any case, whether or not these are the authentic ideas of Protagoras, they certainly express a coherent democratic view; and Plato spends the rest of his career trying to counter it. Much of his philosophy thereafter, including his epistemology, seeks to demonstrate that virtue is a rare and lofty quality and the political art a specialized craft that can be practised only by a very select few, because it requires a special and elevated kind of philosophic knowledge.
It is not always clear that Plato regards natural inequalities among human beings as great enough in themselves to justify the division between rulers and ruled. But there is no ambiguity in his belief that there is an absolute and universal hierarchy of knowledge, which must be reflected in the organization of the polis. Whatever the innate qualities of human beings and their natural capacities to acquire knowledge, it is impossible, in the real world, for the majority to achieve the kind of philosophic knowledge required to make sound political judgments. In particular, the practioners of ordinary and necessary crafts – Protagoras’s shoemakers and smiths – are politically incapacitated not only by their lack of time and leisure to acquire philosophic knowledge, but even more by their bondage to labour and material need, their life ‘among the multiplicity of things’. True knowledge requires liberation from the world of appearance and necessity.
Protagoras’s argument proceeds, first, by way of an allegory. Human beings, he recounts, at first had no means of providing for themselves as other animals did. Prometheus found them ‘naked, unshod, unbedded, and unarmed.’15 So he gave them the gifts of fire and skill in the arts. But, while they now had the resources to keep themselves alive, they were unable to benefit from the arts they had acquired, because they lacked political wisdom. They had speech and the means to make houses, clothes, shoes, and bedding, and to get food from the earth; but, unable to live together and cooperate for their mutual benefit, they scattered and were devoured by wild beasts. Zeus instructed his messenger, Hermes, to give humanity the qualities of respect for others (aidos) and a sense of justice (dik), to create a bond of friendship and union among them, so they could live together in civilized communities. Hermes asked Zeus whether these qualities should be distributed just to a few, on the grounds that only one trained specialist is enough for many laymen – as one doctor is enough to care for many untrained people – or should they be given to all alike. Zeus replied that all should have their share, because there could never be cities or civilized life if only a few had these virtues.
Protagoras’s allegory from the outset entails a conception of the state’s purpose quite different from that of Socrates. The polis exists not to achieve some higher moral purpose but to serve ordinary human interests by providing conditions in which human beings can live reasonably peaceful and comfortable lives. The allegory is intended to demonstrate that political society, without which humanity cannot benefit from the arts and skills that are its only distinctive gift, cannot survive unless the civic virtue that qualifies people for citizenship is a universal (male?) quality. He then goes on to show how virtue can be a universal quality that nonetheless must and can be taught – and here the argument moves from allegory to what might be called anthropology.
The necessary qualities are not, he argues, the kinds of characteristics that are given by nature or chance. They require instruction and learning. Yet the required instruction is available to all. Everyone who lives in a civilized community, especially a polis, is from birth exposed to the learning process that imparts civic virtue, in the home, in school, through admonition and punishment, and above all through the city’s customs and laws, its nomoi. In a remarkable passage, Protagoras illustrates his point by insisting that no rational man would inflict punishment for a crime simply to avenge the offence, which in any case cannot be undone. Because we believe that civic virtue can be taught, punishment looks not to the past but to the future, either to prevent the same person from repeating the offence or to teach by example to others.
No man, argues Protagoras, can be a layman in civic virtue if the state is to exist at all, and any civilized community has the means to ensure that all its members can obtain the necessary virtue. Life in a civilized and humane community, which has courts of justice and the rule of law, as well as education, is the school of civic virtue; and the community’s customs and laws are the most effective teachers. Civic virtue is both learned and universal in much the same way as one’s mother tongue, which is taught and learned in the normal transactions of everyday life. The sophist who, like Protagoras himself, claims to teach virtue can only perfect this continuous and universal process, and a man can possess the qualities of good citizenship without the benefit of the sophist’s expert instruction. Again, the object here is not to defend the claims of expert teachers but, above all, to give credit for virtue and civilized life to the nomoi generated especially by a democratic community.
Protagoras’s emphasis on the universality of virtue is, of course, critical to his defence of democracy. But equally important is his conception of the process by which moral and political knowledge is transmitted. Virtue is certainly taught, but the model of learning is not so much scholarship as apprenticeship. Apprenticeship, in so-called ‘traditional’ societies, is more than a means of learning technical skills. It is also the means by which the values of the community are passed from one generation to another. There is no better way of characterizing the learning process described by Protagoras, the mechanism by which the community of citizens passes on its collective wisdom, its customary practices, values and expectations.
It is not quite so easy to interpret the argument of Socrates. He begins the discussion apparently suggesting that virtue cannot be taught and mischievously concludes at the end of the dialogue that he and Protagoras seem to have changed sides on the question. But he is being somewhat disingenuous. It is, after all, not Socrates himself who begins with the view that virtue is not teachable and that it is effectively a universal quality. He is, with a fair degree of irony, suggesting that the Athenians themselves behave as if this were so. The essence of his argument is not that virtue is unteachable, or requires no teaching, but rather that it is inconsistent to argue both that virtue is teachable and that it is a universal quality.
The point, of course, is that Socrates and Protagoras, from the beginning, have different conceptions of knowledge. Although Socrates does not here lay out a systematic argument, he is certainly moving in the direction of identifying virtue – the condition for enjoying political rights – with philosophic wisdom, the knowledge of a universal and absolute good. Protagoras, as we saw, is talking about a different and more mundane kind of knowledge, as the condition of a more mundane kind of political virtue and to serve the mundane purposes of the polis. His position on virtue and how it is acquired never changes throughout the discussion. What Socrates mischievously presents as a contradiction in Protagoras’s argument is simply his refusal to accept the identification of virtue with philosophic wisdom. Socrates, too, remains consistent; and, while he never quite answers the question about political virtue himself, he already hints at an answer, to be developed by Plato, which effectively repudiates Athenian democratic practice: virtue can and must be taught (though Plato makes it clear that the final perception of the Good, after painstaking guidance by the teacher, is not something that is directly taught but occurs as an almost mystical illumination); but if virtue is taught and learned, it is as a rare and highly specialized knowledge, a knowledge that only a few can acquire. The dialogue ends with a tantalizing suggestion that the discussion of virtue will be left for another occasion. In fact, Plato will devote much of his life to it.
The principle invoked by Socrates against Protagoras – at this stage, still rather tentatively and unsystematically – is the principle that virtue is knowledge; that is, philosophic knowledge, the knowledge of one single good that underlies the appearances of many particular goods. This is the kind of knowledge that allows its practitioner not only to display this or that specific ordinary virtue but to grasp the fundamental and all-encompassing principle of virtue as a single entity, which underlies all the qualities we associate with various multiple virtues. The principle that virtue is knowledge was to become the basis of Plato’s attack on democracy, especially in The Statesman and The Republic. In Plato’s hands, it represents the replacement of Protagoras’s moral and political apprenticeship in the community’s values and norms with a more exalted conception of virtue as philosophic knowledge – not the conventional assimilation of the community’s customs and values but a privileged access to higher universal and absolute truths, which are unavailable to the majority who remain tied to the world of appearance and material necessity.
So the political question posed by Socrates opens up much larger questions about the nature of knowledge and morality. Epistemological and moral relativism, as Protagoras formulates it, has, and is intended to have, democratic implications. Plato responds to this political challenge by opposing Protagoras’s relativism with a new kind of universalism. In the democracy, in the atmosphere of public deliberation and debate, there could be no ruling ideas, no individual or social group whose unchallenged dominance allowed it to claim universality for its own values and impose them on others. The only effective way of challenging the conventional wisdom of shoemakers and blacksmiths, and their ability to participate in public speech and deliberation, was to trump conventional wisdom altogether with some higher form of knowledge, a knowledge not of mundane empirical realities but of absolute and universal truths.
Platonic universalism is of a very special kind, and it is perhaps only in relation to this philosophical universalism that Protagoras’s ideas can be called morally relativist at all. He certainly did reject the notion that there are higher moral truths accessible only to philosophic knowledge, but he put in its place what might be called a practical universalism, rooted in a conception of human nature and the conditions of human well-being. His argument presupposes a conviction not only that men are in general capable of making political judgments, and that their well-being depends on participation in a civic order, but also that they are entitled to the benefits of civic life. It is true that, in his view, the specific requirements of well-being will vary in the infinite diversity of the human condition in different places and times, and social values will vary accordingly. But the underlying human substratum remains the same, and the well-being of humanity does provide a kind of universal moral standard by which to judge social and political arrangements or to assess the relative value of opposing opinions, not on the grounds that some are truer than others but that they are better, as Protagoras is made to formulate it in Plato’s dialogue, Theaetetus.
In these respects, Protagoras and Plato are poles apart both politically and philosophically, and the differences between them are traceable to their very different attitudes towards democracy. Nevertheless, there is one respect in which they proceed from a common starting point, and both of them are equally rooted in the democracy. Plato too draws on the common experience of democratic Athens, appealing to the familiar experience and values of the labouring citizen by invoking the ethic of craftsmanship, techn, and seeking to meet the democratic argument on its own terrain by constructing his definition of political virtue and justice on the analogy of the practical arts. Only this time, the emphasis is not on universality or the organic transmission of conventional knowledge from one generation to another, but on specialization, expertise and exclusiveness. Just as the best shoes are made by the trained and expert shoemaker, so the art of politics should be practised only by those who specialize in it. No more shoemakers and smiths in the Assembly. The essence of justice in the state is the principle that the cobbler should stick to his last. Only the few who are not obliged to work for a living, whether in farming, craftsmanship or trade, can have the qualities required to rule.
Both Protagoras and Plato, then, place the cultural values of techn, the practical arts of the labouring citizen, at the heart of their political arguments, though to antithetical purposes. Much of what follows in the whole tradition of Western philosophy proceeds from this starting point. It is not only Western political philosophy that owes its origins to this conflict over the political role of shoemakers and smiths. For Plato the division between those who rule and those who labour, between those who work with their minds and those who work with their bodies, between those who rule and are fed and those who produce food and are ruled, is not simply the basic principle of politics. The division of labour between rulers and producers, which is the essence of justice in the Republic, is also the essence of Plato’s theory of knowledge. The radical and hierarchical opposition between the sensible and the intelligible worlds, and between their corresponding forms of cognition, is grounded by Plato in an analogy with the social division of labour which excludes the producer from politics.16
Plato: The Republic
After the Protagoras, Plato would never again directly confront a democratic argument. He certainly continued his debate with the sophists; and every attack on them was in a sense an attack on democracy, since, even when they were antidemocratic, he often treated them as products or expressions of democracy (which, of course, in a sense they were) on the grounds that they reflected and encouraged the moral and intellectual decadence of a polis in which one man’s opinion was as good as another’s. In the Gorgias, for instance, we are given to understand that the amoral, unprincipled Callicles, with his contention that justice is the right of the strongest, is the logical outcome of the democratic attitude, even when the idea that might makes right is invoked in support of oligarchy. Yet, while Plato conducted his case against democracy without ever directly engaging a serious argument in its favour, Protagoras remained his primary, if nameless, adversary.
Protagoras, as we have seen, presented the practical arts as the foundation of society. The ‘argument from the arts’, which lies at the heart of Plato’s political theory, is intended to turn Protagoras’s principle against itself. It uses the ethic of craftsmanship, which was so much a part of Athens’s democratic culture, to argue against the democracy. We can understand the full significance of this argument for Plato only if we consider its relation to the culture of the Athenian aristocracy and its disposition at that historical moment.
Plato, born in 427, belonged on both his parents’ sides to the most distinguished of Athenian families, perhaps not among the very wealthiest – though his wealth was not inconsiderable – but certainly among the most noble in pedigree. There can be little doubt about the generally antidemocratic feeling among his associates, and his close relatives were leaders of the oligarchic coup that established the reign of the Thirty Tyrants. Plato himself, if we are to believe the Seventh Epistle, had political ambitions in his youth and had great hopes for the regeneration of Athens by the oligarchic revolution.17 But he was, to his credit, unable to accept the excesses of the regime established by his friends and relations, refusing to join them as he was expected to do. When the Thirty were overthrown, his political ambitions were briefly renewed, only to subside again with the restoration of the democracy. Plato praised the moderation of the returning democrats, who generally treated their enemies with great restraint, especially in contrast to the bloody excesses of the oligarchs; and this remained his judgment despite the trial and death of Socrates. Yet the restored democracy seemed to him to signal the moral corruption of Athens, which ‘was no longer ruled by the manners and institutions of our forefathers’, and where ‘the whole fabric of law and custom was going from bad to worse at an alarming rate’.18
After the death of Socrates, Plato embarked on an extended journey, not only to expand his own education but offering his wisdom to the royal court of Syracuse in Sicily. He visited Syracuse both under Dionysius I and his successor, Dionysius II, with whom the philosopher fell out. In about 385 BC Plato founded the Academy, about a mile outside the city walls, to teach subjects such as mathematics, astronomy, harmonics, and philosophy, both natural and political. His own political ambitions were never again revived and, given his associations, were in any case unlikely ever to succeed. But the political purposes of the Academy are unmistakable. Its students – the sons of wealthy Athenians and foreign families – were educated in Platonic politics and sent forth as consultants to rulers and cities throughout the Mediterranean world.
At home in Athens, disaffected aristocrats were withdrawing from politics, and Plato’s philosophical enterprise developed in this climate of disaffection and withdrawal. There would still be aristocratic leaders even in the late third century, notably Lycurgus; but politics was no longer the favoured career it had once been. The historical moment of popular politics and aristocratic estrangement, when well-born and educated men turned their backs on the polis, posed itself for Plato as a philosophical problem: the separation of thought and action. He set himself the task of reuniting them. Wisdom as he conceives it is in its very essence related to practice and especially to politics. We cannot hope to understand how he envisaged his philosophical task if we abstract it from the political problem as he perceived it. His philosophical project was never divorced from Athenian political realities, and his search for absolute and universal truths was never dissociated from the mission to regenerate Athens. Plato cannot be dismissed as simply an ideologue of the aristocratic-oligarchic faction in Athenian politics, nor is his conception of philosophic virtue reducible to the values of aristocratic culture. But his political philosophy leaves little doubt that his hopes of moral and political regeneration required the reconciliation of aristocracy and politics. Nor is this a simple matter of replacing one political form with another. The separation of thought and action has very specific social conditions, and to reunite them will require a social transformation.
The democracy, as we saw, had evolved in tandem with the civic principle; and the estrangement of the aristocracy from politics was the culmination of that historical process. The establishment of the Athenian polis as the dominant principle of association, the civic community with its laws and the new identity of citizenship, had at the same time been a consolidation of popular power, in opposition to aristocratic dominance. Civic identity, the jurisdiction of the polis and the rule of nomos in Athens all tended towards a kind of equality, set against aristocratic principles of rule and hierarchy. Plato’s task was to reclaim the polis for the aristocracy. This required breaking the bond between politics and democracy and making hierarchy, not equality, the essence of the polis. The polis, in other words, had to replace the hierarchical oikos, the lordly household of the Homeric epics, as the natural terrain of aristocracy. So Plato had to devise a conception of the polis in which the essential political relation would no longer be interaction among citizens but, again, the division between rulers and subjects, even rulers and producers. He also needed to elaborate a conception of justice that would reverse the increasingly close association, in the democracy, between the concept of dik and the notion of isonomia. In his great classic, the Republic, Plato constructed a conception of dikaiosune which identified it with inequality and the social division of labour between rulers and producers.
The dialogue begins with an exchange between Socrates and his interlocutors concerning three conventional conceptions of justice: first, the simple morality of the honest businessman whose basic rules of right conduct are that one should always tell the truth, never cheat anyone, and pay one’s debts; second, the traditional maxim of helping one’s friends and harming one’s enemies; and finally, the observation that justice is defined by the interest of the strongest. Plato, in the person of Socrates, quickly dismisses the first, on the grounds that specific actions, such as returning something borrowed, may be good and just in some circumstances but not in others. Polemarchus tries to deal with this by proposing, first, that justice is giving every man his due. But that, of course, raises questions about what is due to whom, and here Plato already introduces the analogy of the arts which will be the core of his whole argument: to judge what is due to someone is akin to the expert judgment made by the practitioner of a specialized art, techn, about what good practice is in any particular circumstances; and this requires knowledge about the purpose of the art involved, the ends it is meant to achieve. Just as doctors, builders or shoemakers must have specific knowledge about the ends and means appropriate to their arts, so a man can live a good and just life only if he knows the true purpose of life and how to achieve it. Polemarchus then specifies that justice means doing good to friends and harm to enemies. This, too, is found wanting, since it cannot be just, for instance, to do harm to enemies who are themselves good. Polemarchus is forced to concede that what he means is that we should do good to friends who are good and harm to enemies who are bad. But this simply opens him to the objection that it surely cannot be just to harm others, especially since the only real harm we can do them is to make them worse than they are. How can it be just to make someone less good? So we must still seek out the underlying principle of justice that stands apart from any specific example and allows us to judge any particular action by a universal standard that applies to all cases.
The argument with Thrasymachus and his definition of justice as the interest of the stronger is the most revealing and significant. He begins with a descriptive observation that, in any given situation, the interest of the stronger or ruling elements will be defined as just. This is not, at first, intended as a moral judgment. At this stage, Thrasymachus is expressing the kind of anthropological insight we might expect from a serious sophist, with which even Protagoras could agree. It is a simple proposition about the conventional foundations of morality, with the added observation that the ideas of ruling groups, for better or worse, have tended to be the ruling ideas of their societies. But Plato creates a trap for the sophist, which allows the philosopher not only to mobilize and elaborate the arts analogy but also to transform a reasonable sophistic insight into an objectionable amorality.
Socrates responds to Thrasymachus’s original observation with the objection that rulers can be wrong about their interests and leads the sophist to the conclusion that a ruler is only a ruler insofar as he makes no mistakes – a conclusion that leads easily to the proposition that ruling is a specialized art. Thrasymachus shifts his position, moving away from his purely empirical observation and boldly asserting the moral principle that ‘might makes right’. As is typical of Plato’s dialogues, Socrates’s interlocutor has conveniently been pushed to a conclusion that need not follow from his first premise. There is no logical reason why Thrasymachus’s anthropological insight is more consistent with the moral judgment that might makes right than with Protagoras’s principle that justice is something like the greatest good of the greatest number. But Plato’s strategy, as a prelude to his own exploration of justice, is not to grapple with the useful insights of the sophists so much as to undermine even the reasoned arguments of Protagoras through a kind of guilt by association, while also establishing the principle that government is a specialized art. He goes on to suggest that justice is the specific virtue of the soul which allows the soul to perform its special function most effectively. That function is to live well, and Plato here also establishes a principle that will prove crucial to his argument: that among the basic functions of the soul essential to the truly good life, functions that only the soul can perform, are actions such as ‘deliberating or taking charge and exercising control’. We begin to understand that justice has something to do with a proper balance among various functions, with reason in control.
It is striking that, in seeking a definition of justice, Plato never engages a conception that expresses the principles of the democracy. He never, for instance, directly confronts an argument that justice has something to do with equality, that dikaiosune has something to do with isonomia. If anything, apart from the first definition canvassed in the Republic, which he lightly dismisses, he conducts a debate with conventional principles that were fundamental to the old aristocratic ethic. Here, the division between friends and enemies, as well as between rulers and subjects, had a special meaning, deriving from a society in which aristocratic power was rooted in a network of friendship groups, the hetaireiai, and the values of a ruling class were meant to be a universal standard. Plato challenges these principles not on behalf of democratic values but rather in the conviction that conventional aristocratic principles are far too vulnerable in the democracy. In democratic Athens, the main political arena is not hetaireia but polis; and the demos, not the aristocracy, can be regarded as the strongest or the ruling element. What is needed is a new aristocratic ethic, which is less dependent on convention and tradition, far more universalist and absolute, and yet rooted in the polis.
Plato then sets out to replace the conventional wisdom of the oligarchic faction with a philosophical defence of inequality. One distinguished classicist has even suggested that Plato’s doctrine of Ideas is ‘directly descended’ from the old aristocratic ethic of hero-models, as in Homer. But now the paradeigma or example for imitation, which was so central to the old aristocratic code, is translated into, as Plato himself defines the Ideas, ‘patterns established in the realm of Being’.19 His argument depends on situating justice within the realm of absolute Ideas, the ultimate reality to which only philosophical reason has access, beyond the sphere of everyday life, the world of appearances and ‘the multiplicity of things’.
The stated objective of the dialogue is to find a conception of justice that is not merely conventional, nor merely concerned with appearances, rewards and punishments. The task is to discover an absolute and universal idea of justice as something that is good in itself. Socrates suggests that, although he hopes to identify the qualities of the just man, it is easier first to seek out justice in the larger model of the state. Some commentators have taken this to mean that the Republic is not essentially a political work and that Plato’s fictional state appears in it simply as a means of defining justice in the soul by analogy. But as the argument proceeds, it becomes increasingly clear that the philosopher is laying out some essential principles of politics, which are never secondary to, and are always served by, the analogy of the soul.
Socrates proposes to follow a state in imagination as it comes into being and develops from a simple form to a more prosperous society of luxury, so that we can observe the point at which justice enters the picture. The very first essential principle laid down in this imaginary reconstruction is that the state is based on a division of labour. This means that the state is not simply a conventional creation but is based on the natural principle of human interdependence, the inability of any single human being to perform all the functions necessary for survival, and the variety of innate abilities which fit different people for different occupations. As Socrates builds his imaginary state, it begins to emerge that justice will have something to do with this division of labour, the proper balance among the constituent elements.
We should here take note of the fact that there is nothing in the social division of labour as such that makes it intrinsically hierarchical. Yet Plato requires a hierarchical division of labour in which some elements control or rule over others, and establishing this hierarchical principle may be the most important step in his argument. It is at this point that we can appreciate the function of the analogy between individual soul and the state.
We might expect the typical Athenian citizen to dispute the notion that there is a natural division between those who rule and those who must be ruled. He would, at any rate, object to the application of this notion to himself and other Athenians. But he might more readily accept the principle that a healthy soul, the one more conducive to a morally good life, is one in which reason commands the ‘lower’ appetites. We need not assume that the notion of a two-part soul was conventional wisdom in Athens; but at least such a principle would not violate the fundamental values of the democratic culture, and the citizen would probably have little difficulty in appreciating the distinction between reason and the appetites. Now, analogy can be a persuasive tool of argumentation only if there is some basic agreement about one of its terms, which can then be extended – by analogy – to support a more contentious proposition. To an Athenian audience, the political principle in Plato’s argument is undoubtedly the controversial one, and it would be pointless to invoke it in support of some other allegedly analogous proposition. Despite what the philosopher tells us about his primary intention to elucidate the nature of the soul and the just individual, his strategy makes far more sense if we understand that the object of his argument is to defend a deeply controversial political principle, by drawing on a less contentious notion of the soul. In any case, in spite of what Socrates tells us about the order of argumentation, he has already introduced the notion of a balance between the controlling, rational element of the soul and the lower appetites before he embarks on his reconstruction of the state, and he freely draws on the analogy as he proceeds.
It is worth noting, too, that to make the critical move in his argument, establishing the natural division between ruler and ruled, Plato invokes only two parts of the soul, ‘better’ and ‘worse’, or reason and the appetites, although he will go on to propose a tripartite soul. The tripartite soul, which appears only sporadically in Plato’s work, has its own, more specific political purpose in devising a kind of tripartite state – or rather, a bipartite state with a ruling class exercising two distinct functions. But the more fundamental division between rulers and ruled is supported by a two-part soul. In his other major political work, the Laws, he again requires only a division between reason, the ‘natural sovereign’, and the passions, appetites or lower functions of the soul; and even in the Republic the essential division is between the sovereign reason and the baser elements, just as the primary division in the state is between rulers and producers. The tripartite soul, in which a ‘spirited’ element ideally assists deliberative reason, simply allows him to delineate the two distinct functions of a ruling class, deliberative and military, as against the ‘lower’ functions of the farming classes and the practitioners of other practical arts. At every stage of his argument, in every aspect of the analogy between the soul and the state, it is difficult to mistake the direction of argumentation: the doctrine of the soul serves the theory of the state.
As Plato spells out the qualities of the good soul, he is also elaborating the qualities appropriate to a ruling class and those characteristics that must consign men to political subjection. What is particularly striking about his delineation of the ‘philosophic nature’, the qualities of the soul appropriate to rule, is the extent to which the philosophic virtues correspond to more conventional aristocratic traits. It is impossible to detach moral qualities from social status in Plato’s doctrine, in much the same way that the English concept of ‘nobility’ implies both a moral attribute and a social position; and like other aristocratic critics of democracy, the philosopher attaches great importance to style and deportment as reflections of some deeper moral virtue. More particularly, the realization of the philosophic nature depends on the life conditions of a leisured aristocracy, able to appropriate the labour of others and free from the need to engage in productive work.
Plato’s argument here is significant for several reasons. It means that social conditions are more decisive than innate differences in determining the qualities of soul that divide human beings into rulers and ruled. To be sure, people are born with varying abilities – which is, again, why the division of labour is a natural principle. Yet the differences among them are not enough to account for the vast and permanent division between rulers and ruled. Even the differences between ‘gold’ or ‘silver’ souls, on the one hand, and ‘iron’ or ‘brass’, on the other, turn out, in the main, to be socially determined. The unbridgeable gulf between the few who are by nature qualified to rule and those who must be ruled is grounded in more profound differences in the conditions of life which divide the privileged classes from the labourers, craftsmen, merchants and farmers tied to the world of material necessity. Each condition of life has its own specific virtue, the qualities best fitted to fulfil its proper role. But the majority engaged in base and menial occupations can never rise above the relative virtues of their station, and it soon emerges that the highest virtue of these classes is voluntary submission to their betters. True virtue requires liberation from the ‘multiplicity of things’. The conditions for the realization of true virtue, however, are not simply the social circumstances of the individual. A polis governed by the lower appetites – that is, a polis in which ‘banausic’ classes dominate – will inevitably corrupt the most admirable soul. The life of the virtuous soul can be achieved only in a polis that allows the necessary social conditions to flourish and is governed by rulers who personify the soul’s higher elements. At the very least, it requires a philosopher king who embodies the necessary virtues and rules the polis absolutely according to his philosophic wisdom, unfettered by law.
When Plato goes on to trace the stages in the decline of the polis, he confirms the dependence of virtue on social conditions. The watershed in the decline is the fall of the second-best form, timocracy, a warrior state like Sparta, which is motivated by the love of honour, and its replacement by oligarchy, which is driven by the love of money. Oligarchy is rule not just by the wealthy but specifically by those in possession of alienable property, not a landed aristocracy but moneyed men; and the transition from timocracy to oligarchy marks the beginning of rule by the lower parts of the soul, as the ‘spirited’ element gives way to baser appetites. Nothing could be clearer than the close association in Plato’s moral doctrine between qualities of soul and social conditions. Even the prevailing form of property is decisive in shaping the moral disposition of the polis. A change from aristocratic and hereditary property to moneyed wealth crosses the critical dividing line between, on the one hand, a society in which the ruling class – in timocracy, the fighting class – ‘will abstain from any form of business, farming, or handicrafts’, and on the other hand, a society in which the leading elements are men who have scraped together a fortune by earning their living.
The fact that the ruling class in the ideal polis of the Republic has no property at all, while subordinate classes apparently do, should not mislead us about the aristocratic values that permeate the dialogue. References to Plato’s ‘communism’ – in relation to the communal property, and the community of wives and children associated with it – are particularly misguided. What is important for Plato in his conception of property is that the rulers belong to a group that can live on the labour of others and are free of material necessity, the most fundamental distraction from pure intellection. In the real world, the closest approximation to his ideal – a ruling class that can ‘abstain from any form of business, farming, or handicrafts’ – is a hereditary landed class, secure in its possession of largely immobile and inalienable property, commanding the labour of others and never reduced to sordid commercial dealings. In the Laws, Plato will make explicit this connection between the ideal and the ‘second-best’ polis.
It is significant, too, that when Plato blames ‘bad upbringing’ for the corruption of promising individuals, what he has in mind is not the ill-effect of the wrong kind of family life or a poor education but rather, above all, the corrupting influence of the mob. Here, Plato again turns Protagoras against himself. He adopts the sophist’s view that the community, and not any individual instructor, is the most effective teacher, best able to transmit its values and promote the character traits it most prizes. But while Protagoras regarded the democratic polis, with its customs and laws, as the surest source of virtue, for Plato it is the breeding ground of vice. The demos is capable only of a relative virtue specific to its lowly station, but its corruption is more absolute. The vice of the banausic multitude is not only its specific class attribute but the source of the corruption infecting other classes too – as it infected, Plato tells us in the Gorgias, even its greatest leader, Pericles.
The possession of true virtue and the ‘philosophic nature’, then, depends both on the individual’s social position and on the quality of the polis as a whole, in particular the social character of the people who dominate it. The importance Plato assigns to the social conditions of virtue must inevitably affect how we understand his theory of knowledge and the practice of philosophy. It is clear that for Plato true knowledge, which Socrates has identified with virtue, requires not only epistemological liberation from the material world of appearances but also social liberation from material necessity in everyday life. We already know that freedom from material necessity is a requirement for those who practise the ‘Royal Art’ of politics or statesmanship; and, as Plato explains the process of acquiring true knowledge, he makes it clear that the essential qualification for the Royal Art is knowledge of the ‘Human Good’, the true purpose or telos of humanity, which is not mere pleasure, power, or material wealth but the fulfilment of the human essence as a rational being. The social condition Plato requires of his ruling class, in other words, is also the minimal condition of true knowledge.
As Plato lays out the programme of the philosophic education, freedom from material necessity begins to appear not simply as a precondition but an integral step in the process of acquiring knowledge of the Good. The object of Plato’s education is to lead the student to a knowledge of goodness in itself, the ultimate Idea or Form of the Good as a single, unchanging essence beyond all specific instances of goodness. This, in his view, requires understanding of a greater cosmic order, the expression of a higher Reason. Plato never offers us a definition of the Good, because its apprehension is a kind of revelation, even a mystical experience. But the process that leads the student to the point of revelation is spelled out in great detail, as Plato enumerates the various forms of cognition, together with their proper objects, in ascending order. The essential dividing line is between the world of appearances and the intelligible world, and each of these is subdivided into lower and higher forms: the form of cognition most tied to appearances is imagining, the object of which is images, and above that is belief or opinion, which concerns visible things. We cross the line to the intelligible world in the process of thinking about mathematical objects, and from there we rise to intelligence or knowledge of the Forms. This takes us finally to the threshold of the Good.
The process of education is a gradual progression in detaching the soul from ‘the multiplicity of things’ and mere appearances; and the freedom of body and soul from material necessity is no less a part of that progression than is the hierarchy of cognition. The practical liberation from everyday material necessity is the first and essential moment of the soul’s epistemological liberation from the world of appearances.
The Statesman and the Laws
We shall return to Plato’s theory of knowledge as laid out in the Republic to consider how, or even whether, our judgment of his whole philosophical system – not only his political philosophy but also his epistemology – should be affected by its material presuppositions and ideological implications. For the moment, a brief consideration of his two other important political works, the Statesman and the Laws, will help to clarify the political assumptions that permeate his philosophic project.
It can be misleading to look upon the progression from Republic to Statesman to Laws as simply a two-stage descent from the ideal. It is certainly true that the Laws is explicitly presented as a ‘second-best’ polis, and it is also true that the Statesman provides a conceptual transition to the later work. But it is important to acknowledge that all three dialogues express the same fundamental principles, which Plato elaborates from different vantage points. The Republic undoubtedly displays a greater allegiance to philosophic principles than to aristocratic politics, and it certainly reflects his disillusionment with the attempt to establish an Athenian oligarchy. In the Laws, Plato will spell out in great detail a constitution that does not depend so much on rule by philosophic wisdom as on carefully crafted institutions and laws designed to imitate as much as possible the effects of philosophic rule. Although this polis is at best an imitation of the ideal, adapted to the harsh realities of material and social life, there is a sense in which it is even more revolutionary than the Republic. If the Republic represents a kind of thought experiment, not intended as a model for the ideal polis but rather as statement, in poetic or metaphorical style, of certain fundamental principles – the Laws, however utopian it may be, converts those principles into an institutional blueprint. It proposes a complete transformation of political and social relations as they are in the Athens of Plato’s day, a radical departure from everything essential in Athenian political practice and its social underpinnings, down to the most basic conditions of property and labour. The polis of the Laws makes Plato’s political commitments even clearer than the ideal state in the Republic. The Statesman, while it presents no blueprint for an ideal or even second-best constitution, elaborates political principles introduced in the Republic and develops them to lay a foundation for the revolution of the Laws.
The Statesman is above all an elaboration of the argument from the arts, which already played a major role in the Republic; and it redefines the rule of law, which will be given concrete form in the Laws. In effect, it creates a bridge between the rule of philosophy and a philosophic rule of law. The first premise, again, is that politics is a specialized art, requiring refined expertise – though here, more than in the Republic, Plato stresses the differences between statesmanship and more conventional arts, in order to emphasize the incompatibility between the art of politics and ordinary occupations. The emphasis, as ever, is on expertise and the exclusiveness of specialized arts, and perhaps the most critical point is that the true expert must have free rein in the practice of his art. This principle, which absolves the statesman from obedience to law, will set the stage for redefining the rule of law.
But first, Plato seeks the best analogy for the art of statesmanship. He begins by suggesting that the art of politics is essentially one with the arts of household management. We should hardly need reminding how significant it would have been in Plato’s Athens to treat the polis as an oikos writ large, with everything this implies about its hierarchical structure; and Plato is especially provocative in identifying the statesman with the household lord, even the slave-master, the despotes. Yet this is not enough to characterize the political art, so Plato ventures further afield. Here, he introduces the myth of the cosmic cycle, which we encountered in our discussion of the Promethean story. Human beings in the philosopher’s own time are living in the Age of Zeus, the bottom of the cosmic cycle, with all its pains and labours and bereft of divine guidance or assistance, in sharp contrast to the Age of Kronos, when the herd of humanity was governed and physically nurtured by the divine shepherd. This suggests the possibility of an analogy between statesman and shepherd; but, although Plato acknowledges certain affinities, he cannot unequivocally accept this analogy. To be sure, it has the advantage of emphasizing that the art of politics is about rule and not citizenship; but, for reasons that will soon become apparent, he is unwilling to accept that the political art, like the art of tending sheep, entails the physical nurture of its subjects.
The art that most resembles statesmanship, Plato finds, is weaving. The art of weaving selects appropriate materials, rejects others, and joins a multiplicity of different strands into a variegated but unified fabric. The art of politics is similar to weaving because its object is to create a social fabric out of various human types. The statesman supervises the selection and rejection of materials and creates the web of state out of the warp and woof of humanity. He must weave together the strands that truly belong to the web of state, while ‘enfolding’ in it other elements, not integral parts of the state but necessary for its maintenance. Plato distinguishes between the art of weaving itself and other, ancillary arts: those that are ‘subordinate’ to weaving but part of the process, such as carding and spinning, and those that are merely ‘contributory’, in the sense that they do not belong to the process of weaving but simply produce the necessary tools, such as shuttles. Analogously, there are subordinate and contributory arts in the realm of politics. In particular, those who practise the contributory arts can have no share in the royal art of politics – and these politically excluded arts turn out to embrace everything that produces the community’s physical requirements: its food, tools, clothing, shelter, conveyances, and other materials used to maintain existence and health, provide amusement, or give protection. Aristotle, who joined the Academy in 367 when Plato’s Statesman was taking shape, would later make a distinction with similar political effect, between the ‘parts’ and the ‘conditions’ of the polis: those that have a share in politics and those who simply create the conditions that make it possible.
Having established the nature and purpose of the royal art, Plato is able to redefine the rule of law accordingly. His first premise is that law, at least as it is commonly understood in democratic Athens, is incompatible with art. Nomos and techn are antithetical, because the rule of law restricts the free play of the craftsman’s art and because non-experts are effectively dictating to experts. Doctors, for instance, cannot be told what to do by those who are ignorant of medical arts. They must be free to respond creatively to each situation as their knowledge and skill best instruct them. The rule of law as understood by the Athenians violates that principle of art and ties the hands of those who govern them. Nomos acts as a check on leaders no less than on those who are led; and (as we saw earlier in considering the contrast between nomos and thesmos as two very different conceptions of law) it is an expression of the people’s role – the role of non-experts – in determining their common life.
Yet Plato finds a way of reappropriating the law by redefining its function. The rule of law, in his new definition, should imitate, not thwart, the political art. Its object should be to create and maintain a certain kind of social fabric, not to introduce an element of civil equality into the polis but, on the contrary, to embody inequality, in particular to fix in place the hierarchical relation between those who practise the political art and those who simply ‘contribute’ by serving the needs of the polis.
Plato goes on to classify the types of constitution, adopting the traditional distinctions among rule by one man, rule by the few and rule by the many, but dividing each into law-abiding and lawless forms. Just as one-man rule can be a lawful monarchy or a lawless tyranny, rule by the few can take the form of aristocracy or oligarchy, which are distinguished not on the grounds that one is rule by the ‘best’ and the other simply rule by the rich but rather on the basis that one form of rule by the rich abides by the law and the other does not. Here, Plato makes a grudging concession to democracy, suggesting that, among the evil constitutions, the lawless form of democracy is easiest to bear – not because it is more virtuous than others but simply because it is weaker and can do less harm. Yet the most revealing point is his suggestion that among the law-abiding constitutions, democracy is the worst, the most distant from the art of politics and its objectives.
Plato puts these principles into practice in the Laws, which delineates in great detail a polis governed by a system of laws designed to imitate the art of politics. As the Statesman has led us to expect, the rule of law is here conceived as a way of rigidly structuring social behaviour by means of a legally fixed separation of human types. Its principal objective is to divide the inhabitants of the polis permanently into predetermined social positions or classes, even castes, to prohibit any confusion among them, and especially to separate those who are suited to citizenship from those engaged in occupations that corrupt the soul and disqualify their practitioners from political participation. This will be accomplished by establishing a sharp and legally defined distinction between landowners, who are free of necessary labour, and non-landowning labourers, who will perform all necessary labour. Land will be carefully allotted to prospective citizens and made entirely inalienable. The landed class produced by this means will have access to the labour of others and will hence be qualified for citizenship. Although the citizen class contains people of modest means (in movable property), as well as those of more substantial wealth, Plato has effectively restored the rule of a hereditary agrarian aristocracy, except that now the polis, not the oikos, is its principal platform. The remaining landless inhabitants, ranging from slaves and farm labourers to craftsmen and merchants, will have no political rights. Indeed, anyone performing necessary labour will be scarcely distinguishable from slaves in dependence and servility.
It soon becomes clear that Plato has very consciously set out to subvert the Athenian constitution, deliberately replacing its democratic principles with antithetical aristocratic standards. He even signals his intention by ostensibly adopting certain Athenian institutions – like the Solonian division into classes of wealth and Cleisthenes’s division of the population into tribes – and adapting them to his antidemocratic purposes. The classes of Solon, for instance, become not a means of conferring a political identity even on the poorest classes but rather a reinforcement of their exclusion. The new classification simply subdivides the ruling class itself into four sections based on the amount of their movable wealth, and the rest of the population are defined by their complete omission.
This legally fixed class structure is designed to make the polis less dependent on the judgment of wise rulers. In separating good from bad, as little as possible will be left to chance, to guard against the danger that virtue will be contaminated by a confusion of noble and banausic. Yet if much of philosophy’s work will be done in advance by a rigid system of law, philosophy will still play a major role in the daily life of the polis. Nowhere, in fact, are the political intentions of Plato’s philosophy more evident than in his account of the Nocturnal Council, which will oversee the laws. With a striking resemblance to Plato’s Academy, engaging in philosophical studies with an emphasis on mathematics, astronomy and theology, the Council is nonetheless an overtly political institution, with a central role in governance, like the unreformed Areopagus in Athens. It will act as a supreme court to interpret the laws, a continuous constitutional convention to revise them when necessary, a school for public officials and a moral censor; and as guardian of the law, its principal function will be to protect the rigid class system which for Plato is the essence of lawfulness. In the Laws, it is even harder than in the Republic to avoid the political implications of his philosophic system.
Philosophy and Ideology
Let us, then, return to the Republic and the question of how we should judge the philosophy of Plato if we accept that knowledge and virtue as he conceives them have a clear and forceful ideological meaning. Considering this question in relation to Plato, at this founding moment in the development of Western philosophy, may also shed light on our whole historical enterprise and the implications of a ‘social history’ for our appreciation of political theory.
Even if we interpret the Republic as above all a discussion of the individual soul, a dialogue on the attainment of knowledge rather than an essentially political work, there is no escaping the social conditions of true knowledge as Plato conceives it. Even if the polis appears only for the purpose of analogy, it remains significant that he defines knowledge in these terms. Plato’s philosophical idealism turns out to be remarkably materialist: true knowledge, the knowledge of Ideas or Forms, has very concrete material conditions. Again, the material freedom of the person is an irreducible condition of true knowledge not only in the sense that the long and arduous process of education leading to knowledge of the ultimate Good requires leisure time but, more particularly, because a life of necessary labour damages the soul and makes it unfit for philosophy. Philosophy is inevitably dishonoured when it is illegitimately pursued by those ‘whose souls a life of drudgery has warped and maimed no less surely than their sedentary crafts have disfigured their bodies.’20
What does all this mean for our appreciation of Plato’s philosophical project? If we acknowledge its social and political meaning, even its ideological motivations, are we obliged to disparage his philosophy? Is it still possible, for instance, to derive profound epistemological or moral insights from the Republic even while we recognize its anti-democratic purpose? These are the kinds of questions we inevitably confront with every great thinker who is also politically engaged – as all the political theorists of the Western canon were, in one way or another.
The simple answer is that no amount of disagreement with their ideological propensities obliges or permits us to dismiss the theoretical merits of their ideas or to suspend our intellectual judgment. The historicity of an idea or even its partisanship does not preclude significance and fruitfulness beyond its time and place or outside the politics of its originator. The object of a contextual reading, in the sense intended here, is not to discredit or to validate ideas by their ideological origins or purposes but rather to understand them better by identifying the salient issues that confronted the theorist and the terms in which those issues were being contested. This kind of reading has the added advantage of enabling a critical distance from our own unexamined assumptions. Our assessment of ideas cannot end with recognition of their historicity, but that is certainly a useful place to start. To appreciate the philosophers’ answers, we need to understand the questions they are addressing, and those questions are historically constituted, however much the theorist may be looking for a universal answer.
The notion of universality itself has a history of changing meanings rooted in specific social conditions and steeped in ideology. Plato’s idea of universal truths, for example, is something very different from the universalism of the Enlightenment; and the differences in philosophical substance are grounded not only in different historical conditions but also in divergent social and political motivations. The characteristically Greek identification of universal truth and philosophic reason grew out of a distinctive social and political experience. While Plato was addressing questions already raised by thinkers before him about the existence of universals and whether, or how, it is possible to know them, these questions posed themselves to him not only as philosophical but also as practical, political problems. We need not insist that Plato’s motivation was solely political in order to acknowledge the ways in which his conception of reason and universal truth grew out of an engagement with the politics of the democracy. He was nothing if not clear about the practical intentions of his philosophy and about the central role of politics in achieving the good life, which was the object of the philosophic quest. So the problem of reason and truth was for him immediately and essentially political.
The nature of truth and human access to it had a particular meaning in the democratic culture, which ascribed to human reason an unprecedented role in determining the fate of humanity and in judging, indeed creating, authority. Plato’s philosophical mission was driven not only by his engagement with thinkers like Pythagoras or Parmenides but by a confrontation with the politics of the democracy, its conception of authority and its apparently indiscriminate attention to all kinds of opinion, whatever their source. His solution, while directed against the democratic conception of reason and truth, was still characteristically Greek. He did not deny the power of reason. If anything, reason, as the guide to higher universal truths, became still more powerful. But he redefined its appropriate object, and in so doing placed true rationality for all practical purposes outside the reach of ordinary people. Yet, for all his antidemocratic motivations, who can deny that his struggle with the culture of democracy was exceptionally fruitful, or that debate on the nature of knowledge was immeasurably advanced by his attempt to find a truth beyond the transience and mutability of empirical reality?
We cannot go far wrong if we begin by acknowledging that passionate engagement, while it can often overwhelm the critical faculties, can also be the surest source of human creativity. It is, indeed, difficult to think of any lasting contribution to the culture of humanity, from the arts to science and philosophy, that has not been driven by some kind of passion. In the case of political theory, it seems reasonable to suppose that the relevant engagement is political; perhaps a passion for social justice, however defined, or even something less exalted, like a fear of losing power or a drive to guard the interests of one’s class. We shall hardly do justice to the philosophers if we simply point out the political commitments secreted even in their most ostensibly abstract, disinterested and universalistic ideas. But neither will we give them their due if we evade the issue altogether by assuming that any idea that claims to be disinterested or universalistic cannot also serve partisan interests.
At the same time, we should also acknowledge the complexities of the relation between ideas and contexts. Even if we were inclined to judge Plato’s philosophy on primarily political criteria, we would have to recognize its inextricable connection with Athenian democracy. Although – or, more precisely, because – his elaboration of Greek rationalism and his particular brand of universalism were in deliberate opposition to the prevailing democratic culture, his philosophical approach was determined as much by the democracy as by his own aristocratic inclinations.
Aristotle
It has been said – most notably by Samuel Taylor Coleridge – that ‘one is born either a Platonist or an Aristotelian’. This observation may have more to do with temperament than philosophy, but there are also differences in philosophic style. In some respects, indeed, the two philosophers do seem to represent polar opposites: Plato’s abstract idealism against Aristotle’s materialism, or at least his abiding interest in the material world; Plato’s Socratic ‘dialogical’ method against Aristotle’s ‘technical’ approach; Plato’s eyes fixed on the heavens and pure, disembodied Forms, seeking the kind of knowledge captured by astronomy and mathematics, against Aristotle’s grounding in the physical world of animate and inanimate bodies, the world of physics and biology; Plato’s insistence on the primacy of absolute, eternal and universal truths, against Aristotle’s preoccupation with motion and change, his sympathy for conventional opinion and his pragmatism; Plato’s insistence that virtue is knowledge, against Aristotle’s less demanding acceptance of ordinary, unphilosophical virtues, gentlemanly behaviour and the golden mean. Seen from a slightly different angle, the more down-to-earth Aristotle seems the more disinterested scholar, a cool logician and a man of scientific temperament, as against Plato, whose literary style suggests an artist’s disposition, while his political passions are present at every level of philosophy, beginning with epistemology.
However we look at them, these two philosophers present a host of striking contrasts. We shall consider some of these at least briefly in what follows, but it may be necessary to acknowledge at the outset the challenge they may seem to pose to the social history of political theory advocated in this book. It will be argued here that whatever else may divide these two philosophical giants, their social values and political commitments are, for all intents and purposes, the same. They are both opposed to the Athenian democracy, from the standpoint of aristocratic values. Might it not be possible, then, to object that, if the connection between politics and philosophy is as close as we say it is for these great political thinkers, the same political commitments and social ideologies should produce essentially the same philosophies? Or, at the very least, are we not entitled to question the usefulness of this social-historical approach if the connections between politics or social attitudes and philosophy is so variable, so lacking in what might be called predictive value?
Nothing argued here so far would justify a simplistic reading of what is entailed or promised by a contextual analysis of political theory, even one that attaches great importance to the political and social dispositions of the theorist. But it may be worth emphasizing a few points. While it should be fairly obvious that any ideology can be sustained by a wide variety of theoretical strategies, even this is not the crucial issue. The point is rather that, for the truly great and creative theorists, historical contexts and political commitments present themselves not as ready-made answers but as complex questions. A historical and political reading of the classics can never predict the thinker’s theoretical solutions. It can only illuminate them after the fact – and this is surely no small benefit – by shedding light on the questions to which the theorist was seeking an answer, questions that were posed and contested in historically specific forms.
At the same time, it should also be obvious that no two contexts are ever the same, however close in time and space they are, to say nothing of differences in temperament and personal experience, family background, and education. Plato was an Athenian citizen, Aristotle a metic in Athens, a resident alien from Stagira in Macedonia. For that matter, Plato’s philosophy already belonged to the historical context in which Aristotle conceived his ideas. There is also a critical difference between the political moment in which Plato was writing, after the golden age of Periclean democracy but at a moment of declining aristocracy, and, by contrast, the period of Macedonian hegemony, which was Aristotle’s context and very present in his mind as he thought about the polis. The Macedonian conquest of Greece effectively marked the end of the polis as an independent political form, but Aristotle saw new possibilities for it within the imperial embrace. While Plato’s aristocratic authoritarianism was fairly hopeless and nostalgic, at a time when a rampant democracy seemed to have triumphed, only a few years later Aristotle could imagine a political dispensation more congenial than Athenian democracy, watched over and enforced by a Macedonian garrison.
Aristotle was born in 384 BC, the son of a distinguished family. His father was physician to Amyntas III, King of Macedonia, and the philosopher was probably brought up in the royal household, beginning his lifelong friendship with the king’s son, two years his junior, who would become Philip II, conqueror of Greece. The political environment in which Aristotle grew up – both the oligarchy of Stagira and the tribal kingdom of Macedonia – was very different from democratic Athens; and Aristotle’s first exposure to Athenian democracy came through the antidemocratic medium of Plato’s Academy, where he came to study in 367, escaping the bloody dynastic struggle following the death of Amyntas. He remained as a teacher apparently until 348, the year before Plato’s death, perhaps compelled to flee by the growing anti-Macedonian sentiment in Athens. Although evidence is scanty, according to tradition he served from 343 or 342 to 340 as tutor to Philip’s son, the future Alexander the Great. It is likely that he also undertook other missions for Philip, such as negotiations with various poleis before the final conquest of Greece in 338.
The philosopher returned to Athens in 335, after Philip’s assassination and Alexander’s suppression of various revolts, including one in Athens. This time, Aristotle came as a member of the Macedonian establishment, with the support of local aristocratic-oligarchic factions; and he lived under the protection of his close friend and patron, Antipater, Alexander’s autocratic viceroy in Greece. The philosopher would live and teach in Athens for another dozen years; and, although the famous Lyceum was technically founded by his friend and student, Theophrastus, it was essentially Aristotle’s intellectual creation, as the Academy was Plato’s. On Alexander’s death, Aristotle was forced yet again to leave Athens. When, the following year, he died in Chalcis, a wealthy man with an estate far larger than Plato’s, the executor of his last will and testament was Antipater. A few years later, the new ruler of Athens, Demetrios of Phaleron – an Athenian of the pro-Macedonian aristocratic-oligarchic faction, student of Theophrastus and possibly of Aristotle, and something like a philosopher king who apparently lectured at the Lyceum himself – introduced political reforms in the spirit of Aristotle and his philosophic predecessors.
Aristotle, then, was probably more directly engaged in the politics of his day than Plato had been. Although he never directly took part in everyday politics, he was certainly closer to power. But his engagement expressed itself in his philosophy in rather different ways. We have seen how Plato attacked the very foundations of the democratic culture; how, with his epistemology and the principle that virtue is knowledge, he set out to uproot the conceptions of knowledge and virtue that justified democracy. His higher reality of absolute and universal Forms, accessible only to philosophic wisdom, was intended to displace the world of change and flux that was the object of conventional opinion, a world in which there was no higher good than the ordinary virtues of the common citizen. Aristotle challenged Plato’s conception of truth and the process of knowing, rejecting the notion of Forms as a separate reality, while placing high value on conventional morality and practical wisdom, accessible without some special philosophic vision. In this, he seems closer to Protagoras. To be sure, he concurred with Plato in rejecting epistemological and moral relativism, of the kind proposed by sophists; but he was very critical of Plato’s failure to confront the realities of change and motion, regarding the Platonic theory of Forms as particularly unhelpful. Although the natural state of things was rest, according to Aristotle, and everything tended towards a motionless state, the world was constantly in motion. There was, in his view, a critical need for a form of knowledge capable of dealing with the problem of motion and change; and Plato’s theory of immutable Forms, which seem to have an independent existence separate from the changing world of particulars and sensible experience, could contribute little to that kind of knowledge.
For Aristotle, every substance is a complex of matter and form, which are conceptually distinguishable but always exist, and must be studied, together. He agrees with Plato that form, which persists through change, is the proper object of knowledge, and that we can distinguish universal forms from concrete particulars; but for Aristotle this means that the primary objective of knowledge is not to abandon the natural world for a higher, immutable reality but rather to discover the order of nature, that which is permanent and unchanging in a world of change. Instead of escaping the world of particulars to contemplate the Universal Forms, we acquire knowledge by proceeding from particular to general, investigating generality by studying particulars, the mutable world we inhabit, which is best known to us. This conception of knowledge attaches importance not only to observed facts but also to commonly held opinions, and in that respect could hardly be more different from Plato’s counterposition of empirical fact and opinion, on the one hand, to knowledge and truth, on the other. Since that counterposition lies at the very heart of Plato’s moral and political philosophy, in particular his challenge to democracy, we might expect to see a commensurate difference in ethics and political theory.
Aristotle, like Plato, denies that standards of right and wrong are mere conventions; but, he argues, we have no way of discovering rigorous absolute rules. There is no single Form of the Good, no single definition that applies to all cases; and even if there were, the kind of knowledge that could apprehend it would be of little use in understanding particular goods as they apply to us in our everyday lives. That kind of knowledge could not make someone a better craftsman or doctor; nor could it ensure a morally good life. Morality is more a matter of habituation than of philosophic learning. Aristotle certainly distinguishes between intellectual and ethical virtues or virtues of character; and, having also distinguished between two intellectual virtues, theoretical and practical wisdom, he identifies contemplation or theoria as the highest virtue. But ethics, like medicine, is a practical, not a theoretical discipline, whose aim is action, not just understanding. In determining the good, we can only proceed from what is given in experience, with all its confusions and uncertainties, and try to reach some kind of reasoned universal judgment. This means that we must consider conventional opinion and adopt as much as possible of popular morality. To be sure, the practical intelligence that guides us to the good life is an intellectual as well as a practical quality; and the best and most complete life, the fulfilment of humanity’s true nature, includes not only bodily goods but goods of the soul, the contemplative life, the life of reason. But moral virtue is not knowledge, in the Platonic sense. It is something closer to what Plato might call right opinion.
The most general and universal feature that defines Aristotle’s virtues is adherence to the mean in every quality. Every practice, every temperament, has its excess as well as its inadequacy; and the morally good person is the one who consistently displays a disposition to that golden mean – as (there is here a certain circularity in Aristotle’s argument) the man of practical intelligence would define it. His moral principles are more like universal rules of thumb than abstract absolutes. Yet he tells us enough about the qualities of the virtuous man to make it clear how closely tied the virtues are to aristocracy. The four most important ethical virtues – generosity; magnificence; the nameless mean between ambition and its absence; and, ‘the crown of the virtues’, great-souledness or high-mindedness (megalopsychia) – are qualities available only to the wellborn and wealthy. The great-souled man in particular is by definition an aristocrat, whose qualities include a (justified) feeling of superiority, pride, self-confidence and even haughtiness. He can concern himself with ‘great and lofty matters’ because he (like Plato’s philosophic nature) is free of the petty and vulgar preoccupations that come with having to work for a living. ‘A high-minded person’, the philosopher writes in a passage that could have come from a handbook of aristocratic manners,
is justified in looking down upon others for he has the right opinion of them, but the common run of people do so without rhyme or reason. . . . He will show his stature with men of eminence and fortune, but will be unassuming toward those of moderate means. For to be superior to the former is difficult and dignified, but superiority over the latter is easy. Furthermore, there is nothing ignoble in asserting one’s dignity among the great, but to do so among the lower classes is just as crude as to assert one’s strength against an invalid. He will not go in for pursuits that the common people value. . . . He cannot adjust his life to another, except a friend, for to do so is slavish. That is why . . . all flatterers are servile and people from the lower classes are flatterers. . . . He is a person who will rather possess beautiful and priceless objects than objects which are profitable and useful, for they mark him more as self-sufficient.21
The philosopher then goes on to list the elements of style – the slow gait, low voice and deliberate manner of speaking, the absence of hurry and excitement that mark the great-souled man. Readers may remember that Aristotle (if he was indeed the author), in The Constitution of Athens, singles out the lack of just such gentlemanly style as the principal defect of the democratic leader, Cleon. Vulgarity, it seems, is a serious breach of morality.
Aristotle’s Politics
The moral conventions that Aristotle respects clearly have more to do with aristocratic codes than with popular morality. And yet, the fact remains that, far more than Plato, he is prepared to give consideration to conventional opinion, not only in the aristocracy but even among the ‘middling’ sort. This is reflected in his politics not in the sense that his attitude to democracy and his preference for aristocratic oligarchy are any less pronounced than Plato’s, but rather in the sense that he raises questions which Plato never bothers to confront – at least in part, perhaps, because the younger philosopher has more hope of seeing his principles put into practice. Just as in his approach to the sciences and metaphysics Aristotle grapples with the material world of change and motion, instead of turning his gaze immediately to a world beyond mundane reality, in his political theory he looks not only for the ideal state but for the sources of motion and unrest in the polis as it is, with a view to correcting them.
Aristotle enumerates several different forms of polis, based on the numbers who rule – monarchy, aristocracy, polity, and their perversions, tyranny, oligarchy and democracy. This classification is accompanied by another, which plays a smaller part in his own political theory but which would, as we shall see in subsequent chapters, figure more prominently in medieval philosophy: the distinction among different forms of authority – despotic, economic, regal and political. But in his attempts to identify the principal causes of civil strife, he is mainly concerned with the two principal types of the Greek state, democracy and oligarchy, not only to judge them against some abstract ideal but to investigate what kinds of safeguards are needed to preserve each actually existing form by reducing the strains that engender conflict and civic disorder, or stasis.
To understand the vantage point from which Aristotle constructs his theory of politics, we can consider it in light of what has been said here, earlier in this chapter and in Chapter One, about the distinctive development of the polis, especially in Athens, and the very particular problems it posed for the maintenance of social order in general and the position of propertied classes in particular. Here is a particularly striking illustration of how historically specific questions, posed by specific social conditions, have set the agenda for philosophy and shaped the template on which a system of ideas has been constructed.
Two essential and related features of the polis stand out: the absence of a clear demarcation between rulers and producers, in a civic community combining landlords and peasants, together with other producing classes; and the lack of a powerful state apparatus to act on behalf of propertied classes in maintaining order and their dominance over producers. In other precapitalist societies, appropriators have been directly organized in the state, as in the ancient bureaucratic kingdoms, or have been able to rely on state power to maintain their positions of dominance and to suppress unrest among subordinate producers. There have been some cases, notably in the feudal West, in which dominant classes have, for a time, managed without a strong central state; but even a strongly militarized dominant class could not stave off the threat of disorder forever. Feudal lords were under great pressure to create a unified power to defend them, to counter the centrifugal forces generated by their intraclass conflicts; and the ‘parcellized sovereignty’ of feudalism gave way to a process of state centralization. While the modern European state was certainly marked by tensions between monarchs and propertied classes, it was the best available protection of property and class domination and was accepted as such, with varying degrees of reluctance, by Europe’s ruling classes.
In ancient Greece, as we have seen, a loosely organized propertied class never had such a state at its disposal. The polis presents a rare, even unique, case in precapitalist history in which a propertied class for various historic reasons had neither the military nor the political predominance required to sustain its property and powers of appropriation. Instead, post-Homeric landlords were compelled to rely on various political accommodations to maintain social order and protect their property. The reforms of Solon and Cleisthenes illustrate how the distinctive class relations of ancient Attica were managed in the absence of a clear class dominance, in a civic order where appropriators and producers confronted one another directly as individuals and as classes, as landlords and peasants, not primarily as rulers and subjects. Without assuming that these reformers were driven by democratic sympathies, we can recognize how the configuration of social power in the ancient polis obliged them to reach accommodations with the demos if civic order was to be maintained and, indeed, if the rich and well born were to protect their own positions.
Aristotle’s political theory can be situated in this long political tradition. Just as early modern European political theory would be shaped by the three-way relationship among landlords, peasants and monarchical states, so Aristotle’s theory responded to the specific questions thrown up by the polis and its own very particular disposition of social power. He made it very clear that his preference, like Plato’s, would have been for a clear division between rulers and producers. But in the actually existing social order, with its distinctive class configuration, he felt obliged, like Athens’s legendary reformers, to consider what kind of civic accommodation could save the polis from the social conflicts that threatened to destroy it. We can better understand him if we keep in mind that his conception of political order, as it is possible in the real world, is always informed by his conviction that ruling and production are best kept apart. In the states he clearly favours, such as Egypt or, in Greece, Crete, something like this division exists, for instance in the separation of military and farming classes; and in his outline of the ideal polis (to which we shall return), he proposes just such a division.22 But in dealing with realities in which the ideal is impossible, he compromises this principle, while always keeping it in view.
Aristotle, then, argues that the general cause of stasis in both the two principal forms of polis, especially in recent times, is inequality, specifically the conflict between the rich and well born on one side and the common people on the other. These social conflicts are expressed politically in different conceptions of justice, a democratic conception which demands equality and an oligarchic one which insists on inequality, or, to put it another way, two opposing conceptions of equality: ‘numerical’ and ‘proportionate’, or arithmetic and geometric. It is true, the philosopher argues, that there should be political equality among men who are equal, and also that unequal men should have unequal political rights. But both democratic and oligarchic conceptions are incomplete, because they ignore the proper criteria of equality and inequality, the qualities that properly dictate what is, in true justice, due to each man. The democrat assumes, in effect, that all free-born men are equal, while the oligarch treats wealth as the measure of inequality. But true justice requires that political rights and offices should vary according to the contribution men make to the fulfilment of the state’s essential purpose. That purpose is not mere life, material prosperity or even safety and security. Although the state does serve all these ends, its essential purpose is the truly good life; so honours and offices should, in true justice, be distributed according to a principle of civic excellence apart from wealth or free birth. Nevertheless, if both oligarchic and democratic notions are imperfect, the oligarchic commitment to proportionate equality is the best of the incomplete conceptions of justice, the one that more closely approximates the perfect form, while the democratic idea of justice as numerical equality is certainly the worst.
Yet, since the rich and the poor will always exist, there will always be conflicting conceptions of justice in both democracy and oligarchy; and means must be found to contain the conflicts generated by this inescapable reality. In oligarchies there are also the problems posed by conflicts within the ruling oligarchic class itself. At the same time, the rich and well born are, as we know, uniquely equipped to pursue the good life in ways denied to those whose bodies and minds are bound to the necessities of work. This means that preserving, or even advancing, the well born and wealthy minority, with its natural superiority and its critical role in any kind of state, is for Aristotle an essential objective in both cases. The measures intended to eliminate stasis must never go beyond the minimum necessary to avoid instability. His general prescription is a judicious combination of oligarchic and democratic principles, in various forms depending on the circumstances; but while the avoidance of stasis may require concessions to democracy, the presumption is clearly in favour of oligarchy, because it is among the oligarchic aristocrats that at least a handful of virtuous men will be found.
The ‘best practicable’ polis, the ‘polity’ (an Anglicization of politeia, which Aristotle is using here in a narrower sense than the general term often translated as ‘constitution’), would be just such a combination, in which, despite some democratic elements, the effective primacy of oligarchic principles is clearly visible. Property would be a qualification for active citizenship, even for membership in the Assembly; and, while independent farmers of moderate means would be included and might belong, as hoplites, to the fighting element that is the backbone of the polity, ordinary shopkeepers, artisans and wage-labourers would not qualify. When Aristotle describes the best forms of democracy and oligarchy, they turn out to be very like the polity; and even in democracy, the role of the solid citizen of moderate means, the middling independent farmer, would be limited, because such men, as Aristotle points out, ‘not having any great amount of property, are busily occupied; and . . . have thus no time for attending the assembly’23 – which is all to the good, as government will, for all practical purposes, be concentrated in the hands of the rich and well born.
The philosopher’s political values are most clearly visible in the incomplete outline of the ideal polis in what are conventionally numbered Books VII and VIII of the Politics. There are significant similarities between this ideal polis and the polity, and indeed the best forms of oligarchy or democracy. But the fundamental principles are more explicitly stated. In particular, the proposal is based on one fundamental premise:
In the state, as in other natural compounds, [there is a distinction to be drawn between ‘conditions’ and ‘parts’]: the conditions which are necessary for the existence of the whole are not organic parts of the whole system which they serve. The conclusion which clearly follows is that we cannot regard the elements which are necessary for the existence of the state, or of any other association forming a single whole, as being ‘parts’ of the state or of any such association.24
We encountered a similar principle in Plato’s Statesman, in his distinction between the art of statesmanship and other, ancillary – ‘subordinate’ and ‘contributory’ – arts, which excluded from citizenship all those who worked to serve the daily needs of the polis. Aristotle’s ideal polis, too, relegates such people to the sphere of necessary ‘conditions’ and not integral ‘parts’ of the polis. ‘The state’, he declares, ‘is an association of equals, and only of equals’ – though now he makes it plain that the relevant criterion of equality is after all a social one, even in the ideal state: we must, he seems to suggest, always assume that those who do the necessary work cannot make a contribution to the essential, higher purpose of the polis. The presumption must always be in favour of those whose material conditions and social position suit them for the good life, whether or not they actually achieve or contribute to it; and they are the integral parts of the polis:
Upon these principles it clearly follows that a state with an ideal constitution – a state which has for its members men who are absolutely just, and not men who are just in relation to some particular standard – cannot have its citizens living the life of mechanics or shopkeepers, which is ignoble and inimical to goodness. Nor can it have them engaged in farming: leisure is a necessity, both for growth in goodness and for the pursuit of political activities.25
There are, of course, necessary functions not subject to this political exclusion: the functions of governance themselves, military and deliberative. These functions are in some respects separate, if only because young men do the fighting and deliberation is best left to older, more experienced citizens. But together they constitute the practice of rule, and they must be performed by men of property, never by those engaged in other necessary arts. Nor should farmers, craftsmen and day-labourers be allowed to serve as priests. The state should be divided into classes, and, in particular, there should be a division between farming and fighting classes. Indeed, all cultivation should be done by slaves or serfs, preferably non-Greeks.
Although Aristotle criticizes Plato’s political theory in various ways, the similarities between his own ideal state and Plato’s ‘second best’ polis should already be clear. Nor is this likeness accidental. The affinities between them are indicated even in specific proposals, such as Aristotle’s suggestion that every citizen should have two plots of land, one near the central city and one on the frontier, which, like other measures, he borrows directly from Plato’s Laws. That this polis is for Aristotle a perhaps unrealizable ideal and for Plato only ‘second best’ tells us very little about any differences between them in their opposition to democracy or their commitment to aristocratic principles. It tells us more about the differences in the tasks each man set himself and the very specific historical moment in which he thought about the polis. Even Aristotle’s criticisms of his predecessor are often motivated by the values they share, on the grounds that some of Plato’s proposals, such as his views on property or the community of wives and children in the Republic, would endanger, not advance, the goals both philosophers would like to achieve. Such proposals are not only impracticable but tend to dilute the differentiation of men and the self-sufficiency which both agree is essential to the polis.
Politics and Nature
We must also consider how Aristotle’s antidemocratic sentiments, while moderated for the real world, penetrated his most fundamental ideas and even his most analytic or descriptive ‘science’. At the beginning of the Politics, he lays out his basic definitions and applies his ‘analytic-genetic’ method to politics as he does elsewhere to other natural phenomena. His political preferences are already visible here; and when we move from the Politics to the non-political works in which his philosophical and scientific methods are developed, it is hard to escape the political assumptions that imbue them.
Aristotle begins the Politics by defining the basic forms of human association, of which the polis is the highest. Each one has its own specific purpose or telos, corresponding to various aspects of human nature. The most basic form is the oikos, the household, which deals with biological necessity, the daily recurrent needs of life. Then comes the village, an association of households, which contributes to the satisfaction of material necessities but also deals with something more than daily recurrent needs and is, in a sense, a bridge to the highest form, the polis. The polis, though it also incorporates and adds to the functions of the other two, has as its distinctive purpose the realization of humanity’s essential nature. It is natural in the sense that it develops from other natural associations; but, more particularly, it is natural in the sense that it is the perfect completion of human development. ‘Man is by nature a polis-animal’, a creature intended to live in a polis, because it is only in the polis that he can fulfil his own telos as a rational and moral being.
The nature of the polis is defined in relation, as well as in contrast, to the oikos. The household is characterized by three principal sets of relationships: master and slave, husband and wife, parents and children. It is in its very essence a hierarchical and patriarchal institution marked by fundamental inequalities. At the very outset, the philosopher lays out his theory of natural inequality, on the premise that there is a principle of rule and subordination operating throughout all nature, and that the soul rules the body. In this respect, he is in agreement with the fundamental dualism in Plato’s theory of knowledge and the cosmos. Aristotle goes on to say that, while slaves, women and children do possess the different parts of the soul, they do so in different ways. Women possess the faculty of deliberation, but in an incomplete form; and in children it is immature. They are therefore naturally subordinate to the man of the house. But there are some men whose powers are basically those of the body, while their understanding is capable of no more than following the orders of someone else’s reason. It follows that some men are naturally suited to rule and others to be ruled, some are by nature free and others are natural slaves. Since the master is the rational being, the subordinate condition of the slave is both just and beneficial to all concerned.
Aristotle goes beyond most Greeks, and indeed Romans, in justifying slavery on the grounds of natural inequality. While the ancients were prepared to justify slavery on other, often simply pragmatic, grounds, the idea of natural slavery, based on innate differences among individuals or races, seems never to have been widely accepted. The distinctiveness of the philosopher’s justification is certainly significant, but it is also important to note that the natural division between rulers and ruled operates for him also in the absence of such innate inequalities. The principle of hierarchy remains natural, even if it corresponds to no naturally inborn inequalities among human beings. Indeed, his political theory requires a principle of natural hierarchy between rulers and ruled that applies not only to the relation between masters and slaves – or even between men and women, adults and children – but also to aristocracy and common people, the leisured few and the labouring many. To widen the scope of this hierarchical principle Aristotle, like Plato, relies not only on fundamental innate differences among men to justify rigid divisions between those who are suited to rule and those who should be ruled. Even without substantial innate inequalities, those whose lives of labour bind them to necessity – and such men must always exist – cannot possess the qualities of soul required to rule.
It is true that Aristotle explicitly distinguishes between the slave and the free artisan, on the grounds that their degrees of servitude are different, the artisan less bound to a master; nor is the artisan naturally what he is in the way that the slave is by nature a slave. Yet the conclusion the philosopher draws from this is simply that the master has an obligation to produce in the slave the limited moral goodness of which he is capable, while there is no such obligation to the free man. The differences between free artisan and slave turn out to be less important in establishing Aristotle’s political principles than are the similarities in their respective conditions, in particular their function in supplying the basic necessities of life. The division between ‘banausic’ types and those whose life conditions fit them to rule is, in its way, no less grounded in nature than that between natural masters and natural slaves.
Those who labour for a livelihood, whether in farming, commerce or the crafts, lack the leisure and freedom of spirit to fulfil the essential nature of humanity. Their bondage to necessity places them on the wrong side of the divide between those who contribute to the fulfilment of the state’s essential purpose, its natural telos, and those who merely serve its basic needs – even if Aristotle acknowledges that, in practice, political concessions must sometimes be made to ‘banausic’ men of free birth. The polis, in contrast to the oikos, is an association of equals and only of equals; yet the principle of hierarchy established in the oikos is critical to the definition of relations in the polis too. The criterion of equality and inequality that Aristotle regards as appropriate in the distribution of political rights derives from the distinction between the principles of necessity and freedom established in the household.
There is also another way in which the oikos sets the terms of political right. It is in his discussion of the oikos that Aristotle lays out his views on property and the art of acquiring it, and these are essential in defining the character of the proper ruling class. The art of household management (oikonomia) strictly speaking is concerned with the use, not the acquisition, of things necessary for life and comfort; but the art of household management must involve itself with acquisition, or, more precisely, with supervising the process of acquisition. We must, then, distinguish between ‘natural’ forms of acquisition, having to do with obtaining and securing things required by the household, and the unnatural mode of acquisition whose object is the making of money, retail trade for profit. There are certainly legitimate forms of exchange in which households acquire from others things they do not produce for themselves, and some gain may even be involved. But because monetary gain is not the object, these are in a sense extensions of oikonomia, or, in any case, they represent a more natural form of chrematistic, the art of acquisition. Unnatural chrematistic, exchange for the primary purpose of monetary gain, is concerned not with well-being or ‘true wealth’ but the acquisition of money, and this kind of exchange has become increasingly prevalent.
Aristotle here makes a distinction that was to become theoretically fruitful many centuries later and serves as a fine illustration of how an idea shaped by its specific historical context and even by particular social values can reach far beyond its time, place and ideology. ‘All articles of property’, he argues, ‘have two possible uses . . . The one use is proper and peculiar to the article concerned; the other is not.’26 A shoe, for example, can be worn or it can be used as an object of exchange for profit. More particularly, there is a distinction between production for use and production for profitable exchange. A shoe produced for one’s own use, or even simply to exchange it for necessary money or food, is one thing, while a shoe produced for making profit is something else; and these forms of production are quite different in their consequences. One is associated with acquisition which is limited in its objectives, while the other is in principle unlimited. Karl Marx would develop the distinction to quite different ends, but for Aristotle it plays an essential role in establishing the aristocratic principles that inform his conception of the polis.
As the argument proceeds, it becomes increasingly clear that the philosopher’s political preferences are embodied even in his most basic and ostensibly neutral definitions. Even as he develops his definitions of the various associations and applies his analytic-genetic method to them, we form a picture of the ‘equals’ who properly constitute the polis. They are, to begin with, heads of patriarchal households, engaged in supervision but not in labour, while slaves do the necessary work. Since the truly natural form of acquisition is from land and animals, the political class is properly a class of landowners; and, if the telos of the polis is truly to be realized, their property is substantial enough to free them from the need to work. Nor should their property be acquired by sordid commercial means. The hereditary property of the well born is certainly the cleanest kind of property. Those practising ‘unnatural’ chrematistic, retail trade or any other form of money-making such as usury, as well as those engaged in necessary labour, do not properly belong in the political realm, however important they may be to its maintenance. The fact that Aristotle is prepared to compromise on these principles in varying degrees in various circumstances does not make them any less significant in identifying his social values and political preferences, which play their part even in his most pragmatic proposals.
It is even difficult to detach his non-political theory from his politics. The argument of the Politics, as we have seen, deliberately proceeds from certain basic principles derived from his general theory of nature. Aristotle’s objective in studying nature is to explain the anomaly of constant motion in a natural world where everything tends toward rest. He seeks to discover the principles of order that remain constant throughout the processes of change. Two themes are essential to his explanation: the first is the notion of purpose or the telos towards which every process tends, and the second is the intrinsic hierarchy of the natural order.
When we speak of the telos or ‘final cause’ of objects created by humans, we mean the conscious, deliberate purpose of the craftsman who creates them; but we can still speak of such ‘final causes’ even where, as in the natural world, there is no deliberate purpose, no divine mind controlling natural change from without (here Aristotle tends yet again to differ from Plato, who sometimes seems to be suggesting a divine intelligence). In nature, the telos is immanent in the object itself, the final state ‘for the sake of which’ the natural processes of growth and development take place – as the oak is the telos of the acorn; and every immature object or being, including the human child, is potentially what it will (or ought to) be when it matures. Moreover, these processes, while not consciously willed, are not random but orderly and regular. Different outcomes are possible, if things go wrong, but there is only one true telos for every thing and every being in nature. How Aristotle puts this principle to use in his political theory is clear enough, as he develops his conception of the human telos and the political conditions necessary for its realization. Even clearer is the political application of his second principle: that there is, everywhere in nature, a ruling element and a ruled. Aristotle insists that the natural order is universally hierarchical and that the condition of rest towards which all nature tends forms a Great Chain of Being, in which every natural being is situated, from the highest to the lowest. The polis must in its way reflect that natural hierarchy.
It may be difficult to determine what comes first, the natural ‘science’ or the politics, or, more precisely, which has the overriding force. No doubt this doctor’s son was exposed very early to his lifelong scientific interests, particularly in biology, and no doubt these continued to shape his thinking in every domain. But it is also possible that Aristotle’s conception of nature was affected by his predisposition to social and political hierarchies. The issue here, however, is not whether we can unravel the complex order of causality in Aristotle’s thinking, or, indeed, in that of any other complicated human being. If, in his philosophy, aristocratic principles govern both the natural and political order, it is enough for us to recognize that the questions he was seeking to answer in both his scientific and political speculations were put to him by his social no less than his natural context.
1 See M.I. Finley, The Ancient Economy (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1973), p. 28.
2 V. Herodotus, The Persian Wars, transl. George Rawlinson (New York: Modern Library [Random House], 1947), V.78.
3 Rodney Hilton, Bond Men Made Free: Medieval Peasant Movements and the English Rising of 1381 (London: Temple Smith, 1973), p. 235.
4 Hektemorage used to be understood as a consequence of default on a mortgage or loan, but it is now more commonly thought to be an old-established dependent condition in which, whether as serfs or clients, peasants were bound to a lord.
5 The Greek word, tyrannos, referred not necessarily to an evil or autocratic ruler but simply to a leader and sole ruler who had not been lawfully established.
6 Paul Cartledge, who prefers to translate this passage from Herodotus to read that Cleisthenes ‘hetairized [the demos] to himself’, has argued that this is a tendentious formulation on the part of the historian (‘Democracy, Origins of: Contribution to a Debate’, in Kurt Raaflaub et al., Origins of Democracy in Ancient Greece, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2007, pp. 155–69). Cleisthenes could not, of course, have literally included the demos collectively in his hetaireia (if, indeed, he had one). The effect of Herodotus’s formulation, which makes the demos little more than a pawn of its aristocratic leader, is to deny its revolutionary force; and the passage, Cartledge suggests, represents the historian (or his aristocratic source) using traditional aristocratic (and hence antidemocratic) language to describe, and traduce, a revolutionary transformation of consciousness that had led to political revolution in practice.
7 Martin Ostwald, Nomos and the Beginnings of Athenian Democracy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969), p. 55.
8 Ibid., p. 160.
9 Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War, II.XXXVII.1 and XL.2–3, Loeb Classical Library translation.
10 These estimates come from an article on ‘Population (Greek)’ by A.W. Gomme and R.J. Hopper in the Oxford Classical Dictionary (1970). I am not offering this estimate as in any way decisive. There are other, different estimates, some of which suggest a far smaller slave population. The point for our purposes here is that the argument about Athenian democracy can be persuasive only if it can confront even large numbers of slaves. The role of slaves in the Athenian economy is just as controversial. This is not the place to deal with this matter, which is discussed in detail in Ellen Meiksins Wood, Peasant-Citizen and Slave: The Foundations of Athenian Democracy (London: Verso, 1988), especially Ch. 2 and Appendix 1. The essential point is that slavery did not free Athenians from labour and that the majority of the citizen body worked for a livelihood.
11 The phrase ‘politically constituted forms of property’ was originally proposed by Robert Brenner, who used it for the first time (probably) in the Postscript to his book, Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict, and London’s Overseas Traders, 1550–1653 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), p. 652.
12 For detailed discussion of these disagreements, see Ellen Meiksins Wood and Neal Wood, Class Ideology and Ancient Political Theory: Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle in Social Context (Los Angeles and Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), Ch. 3; and Wood and Wood, ‘Socrates and Democracy: A Reply to Gregory Vlastos’, Political Theory, Vol. 14, No. 1, February 1986, pp. 55–82.
13 Protagoras 319c–d, transl. W.K.C. Guthrie.
14 Ibid. 324d.
15 Ibid. 321d.
16 It has been suggested that this opposition is the most distinctive characteristic of Greek thought, which has set the agenda for Western philosophy ever since. See, for instance, Jacques Gernet in ‘Social History and the Evolution of Ideas in China and Greece from the Sixth to the Second Century BC’, in Jean-Pierre Vernant, Myth and Society in Ancient Greece, transl. Janet Lloyd (Sussex: Harvester Press, 1980). The suggestion that the opposition between sensible and intelligible worlds is uniquely Western may be misleading; but there is a uniquely antagonistic conception of the relation between them in the Western philosophical tradition since Plato; and this owes much to the antidemocratic convictions on which his argument is based. The connection drawn by Plato between this epistemological division and the division between rulers and ruled is critical here; and a philosopher who could take for granted the division between rulers and producers (as Mencius did, for instance) might not have felt the same compulsion to emphasize the antithesis between these two worlds, with their corresponding forms of cognition.
17 The authenticity of the Epistles is controversial, although the Seventh Epistle is more generally accepted as Plato’s own work.
18 Seventh Epistle, 325d–e.
19 Werner Jaeger, Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 2nd edn, 1945), Vol. I, p. 34. The definition of Ideas appears in Theatetus,
20 495d–e.
21 Nichomachean Ethics, transl. Martin Ostwald, 1124b5–1125a16.
22 Politics, 1328a–b.
23 Pol., 1218b.
24 1328a.
25 1328b–1329a.
26 1257a.