greek democracy, paul veyne
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Did the Greeks knowdemocracy?
Paul Veyne
I.
The Greeks invented the words ‘‘city,’’ ‘‘democracy,’’ ‘‘people,’’ ‘‘oligarchy,’’
‘‘liberty,’’ and ‘‘citizen.’’ So, if it were not for slavery, which would be the
major difference between their democracy and true democracy, it is tempting
to assume that they invented the eternal truth of politics, or of our politics. For
then there would be an eternal politics about which we could philosophise,
instead of just writing its history. Across the centuries we would find again an
identical essence of the political; political regimes, despite their differences,
would exhibit a functional analogy that could be represented in a number of
ways: establishing justice, getting men to live together peacefully, defending
the group, exercising class domination by the owners of the forces of
production . . .But let’s suppose that this is all just appearance and that the words mislead
us. Let’s suppose that what is defined as politics in different epochs is based
upon presuppositions that escape the consciousness of the historical actors,
and that they also elude a posterity that is too eager to recognise itself in its
ancestors, even if this trivialises their features. Identical words and vague
analogies would then conceal huge and invisible differences, like trees
concealing the wood.
We will try here to clarify some fragments of this hidden part of the iceberg.
We will call the biggest of these fragments, which is not the only one, the
ancient citizen’s ‘‘militantism’’; it roughly corresponds to what Claude Nicolet,
in a fine book (1980), called the citizen’s profession. Because an ancient citizen
does not have human rights or citizen’s rights, he has no freedoms or even
freedom; he has duties. We won’t find the democratic semi-ideal of Western
Copyright # 2005 Taylor & Francis Group Ltd
ISSN 0308-5147 print/1469-5766 online
DOI: 10.1080/0308514052000343903
Economy and Society Volume 34 Number 2 May 2005: 322�/345
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nations back in ancient Athens, but the mental climate of political parties
formed by activists.
II.
Militantism was a semi-ideal, just as democracy or human rights are for us: it
was neither pure ideology nor entirely a practice. Admittedly, this activist
‘‘presupposition,’’ never explicitly stated but present everywhere, came up
against indifference or passive resistance in its applications; it is true that it
deceived both profiteers and victims about the reality of social relations;
nonetheless it filled the air with imperatives that were sometimes obeyed, it
limited the inventiveness and choice of arguments in polemics, it inspired
political reformers and revolutionaries, and it paralysed demands and
outbursts of anger.
To express the strange conception of the relations between State and society
involved in civic militantism, we must start by making a quick detour through
more recent centuries: a bit of political ethnology will bring out the contrast
more clearly.
Politics has always sought men’s good, but of what man? For us, man makes
up a population, in the sense in which statisticians speak of a population of
microbes or even of trees. So, living within the borders of a national territory, a
human population works, reproduces and goes on holiday. For a long time the
doctrine of the public authorities was one of non-interference, of laisser faire ,
since this liberalism was supposed to bring about, by itself, the optimum for
the population; today we think that the population’s welfare [English in
original] is best secured by State intervention: public intervention will channel
the flows of demography, the economy, society and tourism. In other words, as
we understand it, politics is comparable to the task of a river inspector or forest
warden: he does not leave nature to itself, in a state of neglect, but neither does
he own it; he does not exploit it in his own interest like a farmer. Rather, he
wants to ensure the happiness of nature itself, and to this end he respects and
follows its natural tendencies: he confines himself to organising them. We
could also compare politics to the policeman’s job of traffic control: he does not
leave cars to themselves or decide where drivers must go, any more than he
redistributes vehicle ownership; he organises the natural circulation of cars and
pedestrians, he regulates the flow of traffic.
Just two centuries ago things were not yet like this. Politics was then a
matter of making the subjects happy. What was this happiness? Having a king:
it was thought that they needed nothing else. This king was a kind of
gentleman-farmer [English in original], a grand knight; he did not organise the
happiness of nature, like our forest warden, but exploited it to his own
advantage: his subjects were not a population but a flock, of which he was the
shepherd, and his whole art consisted in shearing the animals without skinning
them. Actually the king possessed a dominion in which a human fauna
Paul Veyne: Did the Greeks know democracy? 323
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survived as best it could and frolicked as it wished; it was not the king’s affair,
and he confined himself to the deduction of his share from nature’s crop.
Thanks to this tax, he pursued his own profession as king, which was
completely taken up by his relationships with other kings, his cousins and
rivals. As we can see, this king had his own activities and his subjects theirs,
and the king’s affairs, which were not those of his subjects, were called raison
d’etat . The king interferes as little as possible in his subjects’ affairs, and they,
for their part, would consider the excessive proximity of the royal tax collector
with some unease; the less the king concerns himself with them, the more they
will love him. At the most, thanks to someone like Colbert, the king will switch
from a tax collecting economy to the plantation and development, in his own
interest, of some forgotten corner of the realm. If he becomes aware of traffic
on a road or waterway passing through his lands, he will only interfere with
this natural flux in order to levy a tax, called tonlieu, on this resource.
Let us turn now to the Greek or Roman city-state. The group sociology of
each of these tiny states was less like that of a modern nation, whether
democratic or not, than that of a militant political party. An ancient city-state
was not constituted by a population with its leaders, by a civil society to be
governed as something distinct from the State: it was formed by its population
itself, with its economic and social life, but only to the extent that all or part of
this population was required to take an active part in an institution set up
within it and which was the city-state; those who are governed and the public
authorities are not clearly distinguished: all are involved in the measures taken.
The civic institution did not exploit the population, like a king: it made it take
an active part; the public authorities were only activists, like others that their
comrades had elected or accepted as officials. As Christian Meier writes in his
fine study: ‘‘A rift opened up between the social order and the political order.
While society, with all its inequalities, remained essentially unchanged . . .’’(Meier, 1990: 145). This was accompanied by an intense politicisation: ‘‘It is
only among us’’, says an Athenian, ‘‘that a man who takes no part in political
affairs is not considered a peaceable man, but a bad citizen’’ (Thucydides:
II.40.2).1
What, then, was the relationship between city-state and society? It cut every
citizen in two, a bit like the relationship, in a modern party, between the
militant as such and the militant as a private person immersed in the world of
economic forces and social relations. For example, every citizen earned their
living as best they could, was rich or poor, and property was sacrosanct;
nonetheless, the zeal with which the citizen made his efforts and resources
available to his fellows had to be more spontaneous than that of a simple
taxpayer. We know that civic festivals and also some military expenses were
usually financed by richer citizens who felt morally obliged to contribute in
this way, or whom were made to feel morally obliged; because civic
sponsorship arose from two very different motives. In a world where city-
state and society formed an equivocal or antagonistic couple, liturgies and
euergetism had a social motivation: the rich displayed and legitimised their
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wealth by giving it away, and these showy gifts were just as much spontaneous
as they were interested. But the second motivation was civic and more
compelling: while not being a formal duty, like a tax, euergetism was a moral
obligation nevertheless. Now, for a militant, morality is a strong obligation,
since he must do everything he can without meanly calculating his own share;
he could not deny his devotion to his own people.
III.
In short, in Greece and Rome political thought always hesitated between two
models. One, usually corresponding to reality, admitted that some govern and
the others have only to obey. Certainly, the governors are not from a different
race than the governed, and they are not their masters; they come from the
ranks of the governed and will later return to them. Even so, governing is a
specialised activity. On the other hand, according to the second model the
distinction between governors and governed is less important than a larger
whole that unites them: the civic body made up of activists. The one who
governs is simply a citizen, albeit more active than others, who has been given
responsibilities by his peers. There was a constant temptation to interpret
reality through this schema, or even to apply it to reality. The hesitation
between these two schemas can be seen in the final six pages of The Crown ;
Demosthenes concedes to the Athenian crowd, who are his judges for the day,
that ‘‘it is true that one can live quietly without thereby being at fault and
failing to serve the city; this is the life most of you lead my dear fellow
citizens.’’ After this concession, the orator nevertheless depicts the good
citizen as an activist who is not content with the performance of
duties prescribed by the public authority, but takes on numerous other
commitments: he advises the people in the assembly, travels as an ambassador,
and spends his own fortune to construct fortifications or equip warships. To
our eyes, this good citizen is a politician by vocation. We can see the difference
from other epochs. A prince of the ancien regime expected only loyalty or
negligence from the subjects of his realm, and that they pay the taxes. All that
is required of a modern population is that it does not destroy the possibility of
life in common within a certain system; submission to a minimum of public
spirit, public order and military obedience is necessary for a population that
one has to take care of. An ancient city-state, on the other hand, considered
that, in a way, its citizens had chosen it (this is what the Laws of Athens say to
Socrates in the Crito ) and it expected them to have the zeal of professional
soldiers.
There is, then, no limit to what a city-state may rightfully expect from its
own people. When Xenophon writes that ‘‘a good citizen respects the laws’’
(Xenophon [a]: I.ii.iv), he does not mean that in order to perform one’s duty it
is enough not to violate the code. What was called the Law was much more
than that what we designate by the word2: the Law included laws, unwritten
Paul Veyne: Did the Greeks know democracy? 325
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customs, political decisions, orders of officials, and, more generally, the
collective will, which was a source of legitimacy over and above temporary
forms of legality (Xenophon [a]: IV.iv.2). The Law was the genius of Athens: in
the Crito, the patriotism of Socrates is attached to the laws, not to the soil,
ancestors, or nation. Obeying the Law meant zealously devoting oneself to the
will of the group. Obeying, and not demanding: a militant serves his party, he
does not make use of it to improve his lot; his political activity is added to his
social life and remains distinct from it. We can well imagine that the
presupposition of militantism will be more clearly and durably successful the
less it affects the interests of the wealthy.
Alongside society, militant zeal thus defined a political arena in the
restricted sense of the word (Meier 1990). A consequence of this was a
collective passion, a politicisation of thought that gives a misleadingly modern
look to ancient Athens. The fact that the citizen was an activist also means that,
as Rehm puts it (1896: 78), he was not the object of government but its
instrument; one did not govern the citizen but made use of him in order to
govern. This State was a strange ship without passengers: apart from the
captain (or rather, as one said, the pilot3), it carried only members of the crew;
when Plato and Aristotle speak of the ship of State, they only ever mention
seamen (Plato [a]: 488 a; Aristotle [a]: 1276 B 20).4 Whoever belongs to the
ship was supposed to be involved in handling it. With a slip that reveals his
modernity, a recent and otherwise excellent translator5 wrongly speaks of a
crew and passengers. Nothing is insignificant in a text, and content is
indistinguishable from form; far from being insignificant ways of speaking,
supposed nuances of expression often reveal chasms in thought, misunder-
standings between the ancients and ourselves6; if we overlook these nuances we
trivialise the text and think to find ‘‘eternal’’ truths in it.
Bourgeois liberalism will organise cruises in which all the passengers fend
for themselves as best they can, the crew providing them only with collective
goods and services. The Greek city-state, however, was a ship whose
passengers were the crew; individuals, with their different abilities and wealth,
find themselves having to cross historical time and its reefs7; they organise
themselves into a group for survival and each contributes the best of himself
for their common salvation.
Where does such a singular conception, which dominated thought and to a
degree practice, come from? We may think of two possible origins: war and the
community. War, in the classical epoch, was half of a citizen’s life (Aristotle [a]:
1254 B 30 and 1333 A 30; Xenophon [a]: II.i.6). Max Weber contrasted the
warrior democracy of antiquity with the medieval commercial city (Vidal-
Naquet 1986: 105; Meier 1990: 38). It may also be the case that militant
commitment and group solidarity have a more political origin. Christian Meier
has pointed out the nature of Cleisthenes’ reform: mobilisation of the masses of
the countryside in order to detach them from the patronage of the eupatrids
(Meier 1973: 115�/119). Maybe too the question of origins is a false problem:
the schema of militantism could have been invented on the basis of models of
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thought taken from contexts far removed from political and military action,
granted we accept that there is invention in history.
To a society as unequal and divided as many others, historical chance, or
inventiveness, juxtaposed a politics of equality and solidarity in civic virtue. It
is pointless to add that, since political life is very sensitive to social powers, the
outcome will be more complicated and ideological or, if you like, more
edifying: in Rome the poor will be imperiously called upon to put love of the
State before hideous greed. It remains true nevertheless that antiquity thought
politics in terms of militantism with the same naturalness with which we think
of it in terms of democracy, and it could not conceive of it otherwise. Such is
the ambiguity of the term ideology: apology, but also blinkers. We will confirm
this by considering the relations between political activism and the social
powers of time, in other words between civic virtue and free time or leisure.
IV.
To understand the importance of leisure or free time, or what was called this,
we must first understand the very specific nature of the would-be ‘‘demo-
cratic’’ Greek city-state. A city-state is an institution set up in the midst of
human beings, but full membership of which is normally restricted to the
privileged,8 those whose time is their own, obviously because they are rich.
Sometimes the privileged circle was extended to include the entire ‘‘people’’
(as in Athens), but this was either a great privilege or excessive laxity.9 Plato
restores healthy doctrines to the institution: all the participants in his model
city will have to have a patrimony that will enable them to devote themselves
exclusively to collective life, for which they have the leisure.
We can see that the Greeks posed the political problem in a way that is more
or less the opposite of ours. Plato does not mean to make men happy, or to get
them to live together peacefully, or to provide human society with a sovereign;
he does not propose to take in hand the human fauna but to establish the
existence among men of a well-made institution, the city-state. It is as if he
were recruiting a regiment, or rather, in his case, a contemplative order; he is
not trying to take the human masses in hand, but putting together a fine
regiment, and to that end the recruits are hand-picked. Plato wants to recruit a
city of individuals of leisure, as if he were recruiting them for a monastery of
monks who are sufficiently wealthy to be able to spend all their time singing
hymns, without having to work.
This (and it has not been sufficiently noted) is the presupposition of The
Laws (Veyne 1976: 205�/207), which is no different from the implicit
presupposition of the political thought and practice of the Greeks in general.
The Greeks did not question themselves about social life: they set out to
constitute a well-made city-state, instead of living in amorphous tribes, like the
barbarians, or in passive kingdoms, like the Orientals. When Aristotle writes
that man is a political animal, he does not take on the organisation of humanity,
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he means that the ideal, the telos of the perfect man, is to live in a polis rather
than elsewhere; what this means, in other words, is that the Greeks are
superior to the barbarians and that are they are the masterpiece of humanity
(Defourny 1932: 383).
The ancient problematic and the modern problematic were able to intersect
because some Greek city-states were extended to all of the people, and,
conversely, modern politics has sometimes distinguished between active and
passive citizens. Nonetheless, they derive from two diametrically opposed
points on the horizon: the modern problematic starts from a population, for
which politicians take responsibility and ask themselves how these people can
be organized as citizens; the Greeks ask themselves who alone will have full
entitlement to citizenship and take on the responsibility of constituting a
well-ordered city-state. We can see how idle it would be to speak of ‘‘one’’
eternal democracy, extending from the Greeks down to us; a modern
democracy may be limited to only active citizens; with the Greeks, the
movement was centrifugal and some city-states were extended to the whole
demos. Ours is a movement from universality towards the institution, while
they started from the institution and, even if they moved on to their
democracy, they never felt universalism as an ideal or a regret. Something else
was possible for them that would be unthinkable for us: they sometimes
reversed direction, returning to a suffrage based on a poll tax (while for us
universalism is a natural right the full realisation of which may initially tolerate
some restrictions, but from which, once it has been attained, it would be
unthinkable to turn back).
This is why the Greeks drafted constitutions and Laws when they
speculated; they did not write The Mirror of Princes, obviously, but nor did
they write The Social Contract or The Leviathan. They did not wonder about
the origin of society; their speculation consists in founding an ideal city-state,
and this schema was based on a reality: the foundation of real city-states given
a constitution by a founder who had first of all selected the future citizens. The
schema for Plato’s The Laws is the foundation of a colony (Plato [b]: 704 A�/C;
707 E-708 D; 735 E; 737 B; 744 BC). But why and how was the philosopher’s
city-state reserved for the rich? Why is the possession of free time hereditary?
For, in Plato’s city-state, there is succession and inheritance; Plato insists on
this: every man desires eternity and wants to leave his goods to his
descendants.
V.
In Plato’s city every citizen will receive a patrimony, which will remain his
property; each may enrich himself and increase his patrimony up to four times
the initial endowment. Citizens will not have to work; this was so obvious for
Plato that he only mentions it in passing, or rather as the minor premise of his
syllogism: ‘‘What way of life, then, will these men have to pursue, now that
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they have been assured of the right amount of necessities, others are doing the
skilled work, and slaves have been entrusted with agricultural work, providing
a sufficient part of the produce for our men to lead the well regulated life?’’
(Plato [b]: 806 DE). The young Aristotle, who also formulated a plan for a
city-state, was no less strict: ‘‘Citizens must not lead the life of artisans or
tradesmen (such a life being ignoble and inimical to quality), and nor must
those who wish to be citizens be farmers, since free time is needed both for the
development of quality and for political activity’’ (Aristotle [a]: 1328 B 35).10
It is easy to see that free time was not measured with a stopwatch in hand
but designated a permanent level of life: it signified wealth and, par excellence,
wealth based on land.11 In The Laws , Plato lays down that a citizen worthy of
the name must not do anything, but two pages later he maintains that the same
citizen will have to ‘‘stay awake at night to perform his tasks, political tasks if
he is a magistrate, or, if he is not, economic,’’ that is, domestic tasks: overseeing
his farms cultivated by slaves (Plato [b]: 806 D; 808 B). This rich man has time
to himself not because he does not work at all, but because he is not dependant
on anything or anyone, in accordance with the ancient conception of work. In
this sense, the man of leisure does not have a profession but is identified as the
possessor of a patrimony, and to possess one does not have to do anything: it is
enough to take life as it comes. However, and it does not even need to be said,
this patrimony must be administered: but this is the exercise of property
rights, not work.
It did not necessarily follow from this that the big landowner was an
absentee landlord content with a level of income sufficient to maintain his
rank. To the contrary, he often sought to develop his productivity in order to
pass on a larger patrimony to his children. It was even less likely that his
management was autarchic; rather, he produced for exchange on local and
distant markets. The market is only a means for getting richer; it is not the end
that organises the rationality of administration precisely because this end
remains internal to the family: to pass on a patrimony to one’s descendants.
Returning to a fine page of Alain Guillemin, ‘‘they are real landowning
entrepreneurs and they seek to make a profit, rationally organizing cultivation
so as to respond to the market. However, the principle that founds this
rationality is not the maximisation of profits, as it is for the capitalist
entrepreneur, but the management of a patrimony to be passed on to one’s
children; and this patrimony is not conceived of synchronically, in the manner
of jurists, but is associated with the lifespan of a family. The notables readily
contrast this purpose with the immorality of the commercial pursuit of an
immediate profit’’ (Guillemin 1980: 251�/257).12
Aristotle argues no differently when, in embarrassing or embarrassed pages
at the start of the Politics , he contrasts good chrematistics with the immoral,
bad sort. The cult of autarchy was not the rejection of exchange: it meant that
exchange is a means and not the end of patrimonial rationality. The millennial
contempt for trade lasted until the establishment of anonymous capitalism, in
which the enterprise is no longer the patrimony of a dynasty seeking to
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perpetuate its own social and political power. This dynasty is essentially, but
not exclusively, founded on landed property: a commercial, craft or banking
enterprise can also be managed as a patrimony, rather than as an anonymous
machine for generating profit. In that case, since the merchant or craftsman
shares the dynastic aim of the leisured class, he will be presumed not to work;
the ideology of the free use of one’s own time is an ideology of patrimonial
rationality. Roman law will put it thus: ‘‘To manage as a good father.’’ Either
one has a patrimony of landed property that one manages oneself or gets
someone else to manage, or one may also have an interest in commerce or a
skilled craft, but on a large scale, so that one is not reckoned to be a tradesman
or manufacturer: one remains oneself.13 For work or a job evoke the idea of
need, of the risk of privation. If one was rich and worked in order to remain so,
or in order to become even richer, one was not working, since the spectre of
need was far away; one let resources flow in without making an effort to
procure them. The few hours of the day or night expended to this end did not
count: they were only a mundane necessity, like getting dressed in the
morning. A slave, on the other hand, even if had had time off, was never a man
of leisure,14 since he lived dependent on a master.
Two mechanisms are put to work here that we put together under the name
of ideology: valorisation and presupposition. Free time or leisure will be highly
valued as admirable, since it was the privilege of the socially dominant class;
and political philosophers, whose vision of everything was blinkered by the
presupposition of militantism, will link civic behaviour with leisure; this will
be their way of taking into account the social powers in which they share or
from which they suffer. The rich lived as men of leisure and were socially
influential: the value of these two facts, or rather these two forces, will be
increased by the justification of each by the other. In The Laws (Plato [b]: 846
D),15 and in Aristotle’s Politics, there is a leitmotif that recurs with such
insistence as to betray a trace of disquiet or bad faith: only wealth provides the
free time that enables one to concern oneself with public affairs; wealth is
justified by political activity and, political activity is transformed into a
privilege of the rich,16 in the name of political realism. But was it really true
that the exclusive occupation of the rich was to get involved with public affairs,
and that, stopwatch in hand, the poor could not find an hour for this? Let’s not
dwell on this: we are in the realm of fictions. Actually, elsewhere, Plato, and
even Aristotle, censure the apolitical attitude of the rich who think only about
accumulating money and completely neglect the city-state.17 However, in their
eyes this is not a fact so much as a fault: the rich are at fault for not always
conforming to their own essence.
The hint of disquiet in our Athenian thinkers arises from the fact that they
continue to hear a contrary assertion repeated in the city-state: ‘‘It is possible
for one to attend both to one’s own affairs, which are different for each person,
and to those of the city-state’’ (Thucydides: II.40.2).18 Against this claim,
Aristotle’s Politics develops an argument over many pages, which, in its
incoherence, employs every available means:
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1. Those who toil have limited time to devote to the city-state, therefore they
are not involved in politics.
2. Those who toil are not worthy to concern themselves with the city-state,
since a poor toiler is not a man of quality and so must be prevented from
being involved in politics, the privilege having to be reserved for men of
leisure.
3. Besides, those who toil are concerned above all with earning a living and
readily leave politics to the rich; they judge themselves (Aristotle [a]: 1318
B 10; 1319 A 300).19
Politics is handed over to the rich, and must be, because they have the leisure
for it, in fact, and because being a man of leisure is a quality, a ‘‘virtue,’’ that
creates a right: distributive justice requires that unequal rights are due to
unequal merits.20
We have not sought to condemn an ancient ideology so much as show
how two independent facts �/ having time at one’s free disposal and
public spiritedness �/ were made part of a system. This took place thanks to
a syllogism whose major premise presupposes while its minor premise
accords value: in politics, the good consists in activism, free time is the
good, therefore men of leisure are activists, while the poor cannot be, must not
be, and do not want to be. The state of affairs in which the rich have or claim
supreme control of politics is accorded value outright, since every force
considers itself to be the good and is pleased with itself: ideology as valuation is
reduced to this,21 and power’s prestige is equally perceptible to those subject to
it and those who exercises it.22 Sensitive to power like common mortals,
philosophers will think that the link between having time freely available to one
and political power is the good, and so they will try to justify, to found this
state of affairs. ‘‘Knowing already, beforehand’’ that it is founded, they
reinforce themselves in the superiority of this conviction; it would not matter
to them that the argument is not perfect in its details: the certainty of the
conclusion is no less incontestable.
Nevertheless, this link was doubly contingent. The conduct of politics is
only in the hands of the socially dominant class in ancient societies where
superiorities are cumulative,23 the same individuals possessing power, wealth,
and culture. Equally contingent was the fact that the content of politics was
lived or thought as militantism, rather than in the thousand other ways to
which the relations of production would have been equally well suited. We do
not ask ourselves whether or not the State is the instrument of the dominant
class, but only whether the rich exercised the political profession themselves,
or if the roles were distinct as in our times. We have seen that Plato and
Aristotle assert both that men of leisure govern, and that too often they refuse
to govern; the philosophers do not succeed in thinking a valuation of free time
that is not founded on the civic presupposition of their time. Militantism, a
‘‘discourse’’ born from historical chance, belongs to a series that is
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independent of the economy, to put it like Cournot, but in its own way it
shaped the ancient valuation of wealth.
VI.
It also shaped real struggles. As the young Marx wrote: ‘‘The sole object of
existence and of the will was the political State, as political.’’ In Athens there
was a strange division between the political arena and social powers; the people
demanded democracy and was proud of having it, and of being able to ‘‘have its
say’’ on public and international questions,24 if not on economic interests.25
But its respect for the social superiority of the notables, for the valuation of
free time, remained intact. Athenian pork butchers and tanners were not
opposed to this state of affairs. As Christian Meier writes, unlike the
bourgeoisie,26 which was itself excluded from the political arena for a long
time, the Athenian poor did not invent its own scale of values. We can
understand then what this democracy was: for the people, political participa-
tion was a kind of question of honour, a way of affirming their own dignity in
front of the powerful; the people found its pride only within the political arena,
as in later centuries it will find it in the church, where it will be equal to the
grand; political democracy was the opium of the people. In Athens, it was the
people who made up the juries and the exercise of justice was a civic right par
excellence (Plato [b]: 768 B); what satisfaction jurors had, seeing the wealthiest
humbled before the popular jurisdiction (Aristophanes [a]: 575)!
Those who did not belong to the people could accept the extension of
citizenship to the entire people, but they did not really want democracy, even if
they were not out and out oligarchs. Whether they were loyal or just resigned
towards the people, they looked on this democratic phenomenon, which gave
their native land its singular stamp, from the outside; democracy was a reality
whose defects they knew only too well; it was not an ideal they would have
shared while acknowledging its imperfections. Thucydides or Euripides are
only partly sincere when they put eulogies to democracy in the mouths of
Pericles or Theseus; in these eulogies these men of leisure practice a certain
indulgence towards the ideals of a people they love, through which they
govern, and that must be taken as it is.27 Aristophanes was certainly not an
oligarch, but he taunted the popular regime because it is not the job of a satirist
to be a panegyrist. Yet without being opposed to democracy, he looked down
on it, secretly; he acted as if his popular public agreed with him in regarding
the defects of popular government as an obvious reality towards which one can
only be indulgent. But fundamentally, the people are not so stupid! It knows
full well that it is being deceived! In its own heart it thinks like the knights
(Aristophanes [b]: 1111�/1150), like those fortunate, upright men who, by
definition, incarnate civic virtue.
In short, men of leisure retained enough superiority to allow them to be
paternalistic towards the democratic oddity; this is the sign that, together with
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their social power, their political power remained intact, and that the people
itself continued to respect the powerful. Here is the language, somewhat
embarrassing for the modern reader, that Demosthenes allows himself to use
against Aeschines in front of the assembled people: ‘‘I am worth more than
Aeschines and better born than he; I would not like to appear as someone who
scorns poverty, but it must be said that, as a child, I went to the best schools,
and I was wealthy enough not to be forced by want into shameful jobs. Your
fortune rather, as a child Aeschines, was, like a slave, to clean out the hall
where your father taught . . .’’ (Demosthenes: 10.e.256�/258). This was not a
day on which one should displease the people who, on that occasion, were
judges. And Demosthenes does not displease them: he wins his case
triumphantly. His good conscience as landowner is explained by the fact
that wealth determined every other type of superiority, and the different scales
of value and antagonistic forces that nowadays call for modesty did not exist
then.28
In short, the people fully agreed with the notables in thinking that
democracy was not self-evident: as we have already said, it was seen as the
extension of a privilege rather than as the realization of a universal right. This
fragile political conquest will not withstand social power for two centuries: in
the fourth century, the nobles will take back power and never let it slip from
their grasp.29
For thinkers there remained the possibility of blessing this development by
explaining that a city-state needs citizens who make their own wealth and time
available to it (Aristotle [a]: 1238.a.14 and passim ), and the possibility of saving
the honour of thought by subtly distinguishing between the duty of the
wealthy to contribute more to the city-state by governing it and their claimed
right to govern because they are wealthy (Aristotle [a]: 1280.a.25; 1316.b.1).30
It was not thought, therefore, that wealth would guarantee the independence of
active citizens, as will be repeated from 1789 to 1848: rather it was held that it
would enable them to do more for the good of the city-state. It is true that the
argument could have been turned around: if we redistribute the patrimonies,
the city will have more useful citizens. So argued the most famous social
reformers of antiquity, the Gracchi: they proposed to strengthen the city, not
to make individuals happy (Appian: I.7�/9; 26�/37). The presupposition of
their politics was still militantism.
The ancient democracies were always fragile and lasted only as long as the
duration of a collective passion. Should this brevity be attributed to a
particular feature of constitutional technique? We know that they were all
direct democracies; antiquity was unaware of the representative system. Max
Weber wrote: ‘‘every direct democracy tends to turn into a regime of notables’’
(Weber 1979).
No doubt, but constitutional law does not exist without reason. The
notables do not inherit power because they have the time and ability to govern,
but because they are socially powerful. Wealth is surrounded by such prestige
that its power compels recognition: such prestige is even more decisive than
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the economic blackmail a rich man can exercise on those who depend on him.
The reason that things have not been like this for a couple of centuries in the
West is simply the professionalization of the political craft; the bourgeoisie
governs, no doubt, but not the wealthy themselves.
Direct or indirect democracy? The alternative does not depend on a
technique that can be isolated as such from the historical context; there are not
two varieties, but two formations that cannot be compared with each other.
Athenian democracy could only be direct. This is not because this way of
governing is technically possible when the political tasks are not too
complicated, or when the state is a small city in which everyone can assemble
in a public place, but rather because, historically, what we call direct democracy
was an attempt to remove from the notables the political part of their general
influence, by transforming citizens into activists. Whereas, on the other hand,
the indirect democracy of the modern West is a way of legitimising the power
exercised by professional politicians over a passive population. These
specialists are no doubt elected, but they start by electing themselves (they
are made or become candidates) and the electoral system inevitably distorts a
general will that does not exist beforehand and that the system helps to form;
the relationship between the electors and the politics pursued by the elected is
even more remote, if that is possible. The asymmetry between governors and
governed is as blatant today as it was when people had masters. The difference
is that the representatives of the people can no longer be considered as masters
of the governed: the real role of popular elections is not to select
representatives, but to underline that they do not govern by divine right,
since their power is dependent on chance; elections are a lottery that reminds
everyone that power is only on loan to the governors, and that they are not like
a king who was the legitimate proprietor of his realm.
VII.
We know that ideology is only power’s satisfaction with itself; it thinks itself in
laudatory terms, but what terms are these? What every age holds to be such;
capitalism will call itself liberalism in the centuries of liberty, while wealthy
Greeks spoke of serving the city-state. Plato, who believes everything his
society says, is a philosopher inasmuch as he takes it literally31; he will
systemise incoherent assertions arising from distinct powers.
Plato never doubts the superiority of the rich32 and their right to command,
but while the wealthy direct belief in their own superiority against the poor, he
will turn this back against the wealthy themselves and establish duties for
them. The doctrine of the free disposal of one’s time claimed that a wealthy
man is not working, even when engaged in an activity that would be called
work when performed by someone less wealthy; Plato will require them really
to stop working and, to achieve his ends, he will institute as many festivals as
there are days in the year.
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Plato calls his idle rich contemporaries oligarchs, since he does not want to
honour them with the name of aristocrats. He reproaches them for always
seeking to become wealthier; instead of making good use of the time at their
disposal, they employ it, out of greed, in a reprehensible way: they work. Their
love of wealth ‘‘leaves them no moment of respite for being concerned with
anything but their private property; the soul of every citizen is completely
devoted to his enrichment and never thinks of anything other than his daily
profit. Each is ready to learn any technique, and practice any profession, so
long as it brings him profit, and he derides everything else’’ (Plato [b]: 831c].33
It is necessary to put an end to this situation, since a citizen worthy of the
name ‘‘already has a sufficient profession, that of creating a well-regulated city
and not altering it, and this is not a matter of an occupation of secondary
importance’’ (Plato [b]: 846d).
‘‘No transactions will be conducted with a view to profit’’ (Plato [b]: 847d).
Export and import will be reduced to a minimum. The young Aristotle’s
judgement will be similar: a city-state is not a shopkeeper, does not need
excessive earnings, and should not have a port that is too big; a smaller shop, so
to speak, will suffice.34 Whether it is a matter of citizens considered
individually or of the city-state itself, the main enemy is greed, that is, wealth.
Is this a Vichy-like fear of an economic development that would oust the
dominant class? Not at all. The idea was the more disconcerting one of
autarchy, in the ancient meaning of the word: one must be economically
independent, or, better, one must not depend on the economy, because trade is
greed and luxury, and luxury means political decadence. This idea of autarchy
had a very weak influence on economic behaviour in antiquity, but it had a
considerable influence on ideas. It has, then, more or less the same degree of
reality as civic militantism, or rather, it is the same idea: when one concerns
oneself with profit one neglects the public good. So, if we want to measure the
importance of the militant presupposition in ancient thought, we should
consider that it is as great as the themes of luxury and decadence, which have
filled entire libraries, from Solon35 and Plato up to Rousseau, passing through
half a millennium of Roman ‘‘decadence,’’ from Cato to Heliogabalus, or to
Romulus Augustus.
We confess that this theme remains incomprehensible to us. So, injustice,
rivalry and lack of discipline are the products of wealth (Plato [b]: 678bc), and
this ruins the city-state? Increasing wealth presupposes, in fact, that citizens
look to their own egotistical interest rather than to the single public good, and
we know36 that they cannot do two things at the same time. What’s more, wealth
makes one lose one’s self-control: the wealthy no longer obey the Law and
become ambitious.37 Finally, wealth generates jealousy and internal struggles.38
How was it possible to think this for two millennia? In what respect was the
U.S.A. a more fragile power than the poor and virtuous Japan of 1941? Are poor
countries free from social conflict? And how could the collective dimension, in
which the destiny of societies is at stake, be reduced solely to the virtue of
individuals? The collective dimension is made up of material forces, automatic
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mechanisms, aggregate effects, of false consciousness, and the ‘‘virtue’’ of each
individual is a consequence rather than a cause, assuming that this virtue is
more socially useful than egoism. Faced with ancient sermons on decadence, we
are overcome by a kind of laziness; we let them talk and give up any idea of
finding a meaning in this simple-minded sociology.
We will only find meaning if we bring out its two or three presuppositions.
Society does not survive by itself but needs an energy that continually recreates
it, or else it will degenerate; this energy will be individual and ethical, for the
collective and material dimension is unknown; and ethics is a morality of effort
against temptations. The decadence of city-states is a natural fact like ageing
(Polybius: VI.9; VI.57)39: the inertia, or the ‘‘invisible hand,’’ is lacking that
would make society endure independently of individual intentions and create
the social dimension from an aggregation of egoisms; disorder is more natural
than order and only effort will maintain the stability of the city-state. Militancy
is not sustained by anonymous forces: it is distinct from society, we know; it is
an action that transforms a society into a city-state. So there would be no city-
state without the Law that trains militants and obtains their obedience.40
Without the Law, everything collapses: the Law creates the city-state. Also, it
does not have to be not too far ahead and not too far behind the customs of
society, as modern laws cautiously are: the Law creates society, makes it exist,
and fashions its customs by means of a training that is called education; it may
even diverge widely from society, so as to reform it, to revolutionize it. Plato’s
Laws will be seen as utopian dreams, whereas their revolutionary audacity is
only an illustration of the ancient legislator’s voluntarism.
This voluntarism is also typical of the citizens who actively obey the Law.
There is no salvation except through individual virtue: ancient thought
explained social facts on the basis of what it knew; when it did not resort to the
gods and Fortune, it explained them through the individual and morality.
Psychology is the driving force of politics. But, more precisely, how does lack
of self-control generate avidity, from which lack of discipline and ambition are
born? It was not really known, and there was no great concern to know: from
Plato to Sallust, the details of the progression were pictured in different ways,
when they were not left vague, or taken to be self-evident rather. It was self-
evident that every imaginable vice crowds in at the gate, and evil nature
spreads, when there is a fall in ethical tension.41 There is a single means of
defence: training individuals by means of the Law, which forms customs. If the
customs are evil and, in other words, the Law is no longer obeyed, or if the
Law itself is wicked, then there is no remedy.
Militancy was a permanent ethical tension and this voluntarism pervaded
everything that Greek and Roman society believed in and wanted to be. From
classical Athens to Quintilian, education �/ to speak only of this �/ induced
the child to submit to good order (eutaxia ) and to flee laxness: there is a Greco-
Roman obsession with virility . . . Not even fears and sorrows escape the imprint
of the moral militant. When the Greeks and Romans have nightmares of the
complete collapse of the city, they dream of this catastrophe as decadence, as the
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decomposition of social muscle; unlike the more passive citizens of gendarme
states or welfare states, they do not fear the spread of partisans of social equality,
of disorder and anarchy: in short, their fear is of themselves. And their
opponents behave likewise. Because, from Plato to Saint Jerome, there have
been men who felt themselves to be in exile in real society, who thought it badly
made, and whose days were sad; like Andre Breton when he renounced
bourgeois society, they lived in a constant ‘‘state of fury.’’ When they try to
formulate the grounds for their malaise, they do not blame the gap between the
ideal of real liberation and the poverty of bourgeois freedoms: rather, they take
as their target the distance between the militant ideal (that they assume was real
in the good old times) and social reality. Say, after this, whether Juvenal was of
the left or the right. In the militant presupposition, the ethical requirement was
blended with political conservatism. Plato experienced the unhappiness of the
militant consciousness for all his life, from Crito to The Laws.
VIII.
The ideal of this ancient democracy was that the citizens be its slaves. Its
generating movement was the opposite of that of our democracy; modern
times have conquered a zone of freedoms and private life against the State,
whereas the only freedoms the Athenians had were those left them by the city-
state; a modern State only concerns itself with the morality of citizens in
explicitly defined cases, whereas a city-state’s right to examine the private life
of its citizens was unlimited, even if it was seldom exercised.
Comparing the freedom of the ancients and the moderns, Benjamin
Constant said that the city-state was free, but its citizens were slaves. Jellinek
has shown that this to be an exaggeration: ‘‘For the ancients, as for the
moderns, the individual had a sphere of free activity at his disposal,
independent of the State, except that antiquity was never aware of the
juridical character of this sphere of independence’’ (Jellinek 1921: 307), it did
not formally guarantee this freedom. However, rather than a lacuna, a mere
oversight, is this not the sign of a radical difference? As Menzel says in his
memorable study of the trial of Socrates: ‘‘It remains the case that this freedom
was only a de facto status, that it was never a subjective right that could be
asserted against the State’’ (1938: 59). For us, even if human rights are often
violated or annulled, they nonetheless exist; what existed in Greece, on the
other hand, was the city-state’s right to pry, which was nothing other than the
correlate of the militant presupposition: the citizen was not a sheep in the flock
of the governed, but an instrument of the city-state that expected him to have
the private morality that modern states demand from their officials. The right
to pry therefore had the same degree of reality as the ‘‘discourse’’ of
militantism: it was rarely put into practice. It was in the trial of Socrates. To
establish freedoms against the city-state would have been unthinkable,
immoral; it was already too much that the city was constrained to formulate
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prohibitions, itemizing them one by one: good citizens should not need such
detailed prescriptions, their consciences should be enough to dictate what
should or should not be done in every case.
Isocrates also prefers civic morality to written laws. Only the ignorant ‘‘can
think that men are better where the laws are more detailed’’; as if one could
inculcate morality by decree! ‘‘Quality, virtue, is not developed in this way, but
by daily habits; the number and precision of the laws are the sign of a badly
organized city in which one has to erect barriers, and lots of them, against
wrongdoings; when the straight and narrow path of civic virtue is followed, the
porticos are not filled with laws, duty is carried in the soul’’ (Isocrates: 39�/41).
In short, there is no need for barriers when citizens know how to govern
themselves and their conduct is dictated by their zeal for the Law. But what if
their zeal is not steadfast? In that case, the simplest thing for the city would be
for it to cast the master’s gaze on their consciences directly, instead of
channelling them as best it can by means of barriers. We can see that the
militant ideal, which was willingly inquisitorial, and the more permissive
reality, which confined itself to enforcing respect for the laws, correspond
respectively to the two possible modalities of power between which Greek
thought wavered.
The best modality would be for the city to have a direct hold on the soul of
its instruments, rather than to govern them from outside with orders and
prohibitions. If citizens were fully educated in obedience to the rule, in
eutaxia , then each would carry the Law of the city within himself and the city
would not have to govern an entire flock of citizens as a whole, by confining
itself to correcting deviations after the event; every citizen would follow the
straight path. However, since this ideal is almost never realised, since
education is never perfect (which is why one talks so much about it), the
city is founded as a substitute for the weaknesses of conscience: it undertakes
the supervision of each individual’s private morality.
But why supervise it, rather than reserve public severity for acts that harm
others or the group? What private vices matter to the State? We will see. In any
case, for the Greeks it was self evident that the group could not be indifferent
towards private life, and when they tried to explain why, they maintained that
prevention is better than cure. We know that luxury and wealth form
undisciplined characters, and ‘‘love of innovations is also caused by the habits
of private life; it is good to create magistrates who will keep their eye on those
whose way of life brings danger to the constitution’’ (Aristotle [a]: 1288.b.20);
it is also good to prevent wicked teachers from corrupting young people.42 No
one protested against this principle, and neither Plato nor Xenophon invokes
freedom of conscience in defence of Socrates; in their eyes atheism43 is
rightfully judged blameworthy, and they defend Socrates only by challenging
the facts: he was not really an atheist. If he had been, Plato would have been
the first to make him drink the hemlock; the death penalty also awaits the
impious in the city-state of The Laws, whose citizens live under constant
surveillance and surrounded by denouncers, whom Plato does not call
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informers however. On occasions real cities established magistrates responsible
for private morality: ephors, gyneconomes , and censors in Rome, and the
Areopagus in Athens.
We won’t be surprised to learn that the activity of these inquisitors will
remain symbolic or limited to making some examples. An old archon was
excluded from the Areopagus for having dined in an inn (Athenaeus: XIII,
566),44 which was very loose conduct (Isocrates: 49).45 Someone who
squandered his patrimony on pleasures was no longer a good citizen46; an
Athenian who frittered away his own wealth on courtesans dared to reply to
the censure of the Areopagus that he was doing what he liked with his own
money,47 but this defender of the right to a private life no longer had the title
of citizen and became an agent of the Macedonian kings who then had Athens
as their protectorate. Aristotle rightly said that tyranny is indifferent towards
private morality (Aristotle [a]: 1919.b.30); no doubt because a tyrant no longer
has fellow citizens, but only slaves.
On the other hand, can Athenians remain indifferent to the impiety of one
of their fellow citizens? Socrates’ religious shortcomings concern solely the
duties of the moral individual (there was no State religion forming a distinct
order of things). However, ‘‘every activist is a public man,’’ as a proverb says
somewhere, and Socrates was condemned. He could have fled, but in a dream
the Laws of his land told him not to: ‘‘What are you thinking about Socrates?
Of destroying us, the Laws, and with us the city itself?’’ (Plato [c]: 50ab). For
only the Laws enable the city to survive (Aristotle [d]: I.4.1360.a.19).48
Socrates preferred an undeserved death to giving an example of disobedience
of the laws and thereby destroying what in his eyes was the framework of his
homeland. He may be compared with those old Bolsheviks victims of show
trials who, out of party patriotism, and so as not to wreck an organisation based
on discipline, died without saying anything. Perhaps this is sublime, but if it
was not sublime? It would be revealing.
IX.
It would be revealing of what ancient politics thought it was.
If we ask how the moral individual matters to the State, political thinkers
have given, and give, a thousand answers, all of them false: fear of scandal and
the contagion of example, protection of individuals, magical fear of the
consequences of impiety for the group, the idea that personal morality is the
weak point in the chain and that if it gives way the collective fabric will break
up. These bad reasons are of little importance: the rationalisations count less
than the force that pushes men to think them true and leads them to be
continually reborn. Bergson called this force social obligation, because he
situated the energy of morality in the pressure of others, of society, and not in a
Kantian imperative. Public opinion cannot not be scandalised by private vices;
if it wants to be a political force, it will provide a political rationalisation for its
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moral indignation; if it is armed with a secular arm it will act ruthlessly, even if
the culprit’s fault consists solely in what he thinks in his own head. There is no
original specificity of politics; this confused initial state is offered by Plato’s
The Laws , where morality and civic duties are on the same level. The State will
impose private morality for so long as it is not distinct from society and public
opinion. It remains to know when, in what cases, public opinion has the secular
arm at its disposal; here again we will find the two possible modalities of
authority between which the Greeks wavered.
When authority is exercised with a firm grip, opinion reigns and the city-
state is nothing other than the set of its members; governing is not a particular
profession with its own maxims and esprit de corps. It is the same individuals
who govern the city, that is to say, themselves, and who constitute public
opinion, the source of obligation, ever ready to censure the other person and to
consider deviations as challenges to its shrewdness; the city will condemn a
fellow citizen for scandalous conduct in the same way as it will flare up against
an enemy city. Let us suppose, on the other hand, that a specialised organ takes
power or that power is given up to it; this division of roles will entail the
constitution of a particular domain, that of politics, which will be the province
of a new modality of authority. For the group that governs, fellow citizens are
no longer peers whose private life is commented on by all the neighbourhood
gossip, and their possible deviations are not a State affair: they do not
compromise the survival of the civic flock. Politics now concerns only the
collective interest, and it matters little that the flock has its fun; what matters is
that they do not fight amongst themselves and produce disorder in the ranks.
All that matters is public order and public security; the rest is private life. One
won’t go so far as to recognise the latter as a formal right to freedom, but one
does more perhaps: one forgets it.
Preferences were divided between these two forms of authority: their
respective effectiveness is practically the same, and in our own times we have
seen dictatorial regimes waver between puritanism and a supposedly
depoliticising permissiveness, without them losing or gaining authority in
either case. On the other hand, the effects they produce and the expenditure of
energy they call for are unequal. For some professional politicians, control of
individual life is only pointless zeal, which one tacitly abandons; politics is
carried out at the level of mass effects. If an official puritanism is nonetheless
imposed, it will be less as a method of government than as a threatening
message: moral laxity is prohibited in order to signify that subversive ideas are
also prohibited and that every citizen must feel himself to be an instrument of
the State, which is the conscience of its members.
Thinkers, however, take puritanism seriously: Plato, Isocrates and Aristotle
prefer the method of controlling consciences to that of the overall conduct of
the flock; they reproach Athenian democracy with having abandoned the first
method, allowing each to ‘‘live as they see fit’’ (Aristotle [a]: 1310.a.30;
1317.b.10; Isocrates: 37; 20; Plato [a] 557b), since it is human to ascribe an
inevitable evolution to a political regime that one does not like. Intellectuals are
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fearful and proselytes; less sensitive than politicians to aggregates, they are
disturbed by isolated disorders that they see as symptoms; out of ethical zeal,
they do not make a clear distinction between politics and individual morality
that they consider to be a political necessity. Public opinion has the same
reflexes; it likens the government of civic aggregates to the educational control
of a household and calls for strict authority.49 Antiquity, then, saw the constant
rebirth of a militant ideal that had very little to do with its real politics, except
when some reformers undertook to put this more exacting ideal into practice;
because in troubled times this civic ideal was taken literally. Socrates had the
misfortune to live in one of these periods of zeal, but in truth, with regard to
this ideal, he was of the same view as his killers.
The last word falls to Rene Char: ‘‘History is the long succession of the
synonyms of an identical word. To contradict it is a duty.’’
Translated by Graham Burchell
Source : ‘Les Grecs ont-ils connu la democratie?’’ appeared in the journal
Diogene . . .’ No. 124, (1983), pp. 3�/33.
Notes
1 See Meier (1990: 141). We call this presupposition or ‘‘discourse’’ (in Foucault’ssense) what Meier calls the ‘‘political identity’’ of a society. On politicisation, see pp.165�/176.2 On the Law, see Victor Ehrenbeg (1957: I. 77).3 Since the gubernator, or pilot, was also the captain of the ship, as J. Rouge (174) hasshown.4 The metaphor of the politician as a gubernator has been studied by C.M. Moschetti(1966).5 See Tricot’s note (Aristotle [b] 1962: 1276 B 20).6 On the method, see O. Ducrot: ‘‘We can search in every text for the implicitreflection of the deep beliefs of the epoch: it will be understood therefore that the text isonly coherent on condition of completing it with these beliefs. Although we know that itdoes not appear as an affirmation of these’’ (1976: 13).7 ‘‘The State is like a ship at sea . . . steered through the waves of internationalaffairs’’ (Plato [b]: 758 A 5); Polybius, (VI.44).8 Either one participated in the city-state, or one didn’t; some felt themselves‘‘excluded from the city’’ (Plato [b]: 768 B) and suffered as a result.9 Down this road one will end up assigning offices in the city-state to beggars andslaves, complains the Athenian Theramenes (Xenophon [b]: II.iii.48). This text revealsnot the slightest hesitation on slavery; Theramenes wants to associate his adversary withthe absurdity of democracy pushed to its ultimate consequences and resorts tohyperbole that his adversary himself finds exaggerated; it is as if in our world childrenwho have just reached the age of reason wanted to vote. Or to give citizenship to beastsof burden. There is no point in saying that no one ever tried to open the city-state toslaves, or to the metics.10 The term arete is best translated as ‘‘quality,’’ rather than as ‘‘virtue’’which distorts the nuance and makes many pagan texts incomprehensible. ‘‘Virtue’’
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opposes the single moral value to other, true or false, advantages; ‘‘quality’’ designatesequally well a virtue and the noble title of a ‘‘man of quality’’; being rich was aquality.11 The problem of the disparagement of work in antiquity is quite complex; it variesaccording to social class, as De Robertis has easily been able to show. The variation itselfis expressed through four different variables: 1) what was considered to be work in theeyes of the ancients, that is the fact of depending on another person or on things, is notwhat we understand by work; 2) the place of work in the ancient definition of the socialindividual is different from our epoch: a noble ship owner was a noble, not a ship owner(one who was happy to equip the ships); a ship owner who was not noble, however, wasdefined as a ship owner; people of no worth, precisely, are defined by their job: this iswhy work was esteemed by the popular classes; 3) a particular case was thedisparagement of commerce and of manual trades; 4) if a notable is not defined byhis own economic activity, he is nevertheless proud of being good at business or as afarmer: it was a talent that was appreciated, an extra quality. With regard to thesuperstition that valued agriculture but deprecated commerce and artisanal activities,see the brilliant arguments by which Xenophon tries to rationalise it (Xenophon [c]:IV.2 and V.4). On the double attitude of the Greeks and of Plato towards artisans, andon the hesitation between two models (‘‘the political level separates what the technicallevel joins’’), see P. Vidal-Naquet (1986: 224�/245).12 As Maurice Godelier writes (quoting from memory): ‘‘The intentional rationalityof economic behaviour is not an absolute given but depends on the hierarchy of socialrelations.’’13 It will be the same in Rome where the artes liberales only keep their specific liberalcharacter on condition that they are exercised by a free man; exercised by a slave or by afreedman they do not have any liberal character at all. After the work of De Robertisand D. Norr, see now J. Christes (1975).14 This was a proverbial expression (Aristotle [a]: 1334 A 20).15 More generally, The Laws in their totality are a programme that immerses the richin a sort of contemplative civic life in which they no longer have time to concernthemselves with their economic affairs.16 ‘‘The contempt for work was born from the ideal of political life; whoever has toearn a living does not have time to satisfy their political vocation’’ (Christes 1975: 25).In The Suppliant Women (Euripides: 419), the herald of an oligarchic city declares:‘‘Even if a poor farmer is not ignorant, his work will prevent him from being occupiedwith common affairs.’’17 For Plato, see the end of this article; for Aristotle, Politics, 1286 B 13.18 Pericles’ speech.19 See Polybius (IV.73.7�/8).20 On distributive justice in politics see, Plato ([b]: 744 BC; 757 B�/E), Aristotle ([a]:1280 A 10; 1282 B 20; 1301 A 25, and [c]: 1131 A 25) and Isocrates (21).21 That is, ideology serves for justifying before others, it is a functional, finalisedassumption, that the facts often contradict (one can eulogise oneself with arrogance,with challenge, one can assert one’s own strength rather than justify oneself, oftenmoreover the ideology is only read and known by its own beneficiaries; it is also possibleto keep silent and harden oneself in one’s own haughtiness).22 Those who suffer it can also react against power, they can display anger andrebel, but they may also ‘‘resent’’ it (overcompensate), asserting the superiority ofhumility and the eminent dignity of the humble who will get their reward when the lastwill be first.23 See Veyne (1976: 117) where an idea of Robert Dahls’ is developed.24 On freedom as the right to express one’s own opinion, see Meier (1990: 169�/170)and ‘‘Freiheit’’ in, O. Bruner, W. Conze and R. Kosellek (1984�/1992: v.II, 247).
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Isegoria is the right to express one’s own opinion on politics without having to keepquiet in favour of just the powerful; parresia is the right to speak frankly on politicalmatters or the courage to speak freely without fear of the powerful: see, for example, forparresia, Aeschines, 6, and for isegoria , Polybius, II.38.6; IV.31.4; V.27.6; VI.8.4 and 9.4;VII.10.1; XIII.12.9, where the term is often linked to parresia.25 Meier (1990: 146).26 Meier (1990: 145).27 Euripides’ Ion, or Book VIII of Thucydides, in which he speaks in the first person,are very different from The Suppliant Women or the speech given by Pericles in Book II.28 Or, at least, were almost nonexistent. There was the sense of solidarity that willlead loans of money between citizens to be seen as fraternal conduct that does notthreaten property rights. From Isocrates to Cicero, this fraternity is widely praised.There is also (Isocrates: 44; Aristophanes, Pluto ) eulogies of (agricultural or evencommercial) work, with a Hesiodic tone: ‘‘In the good old times people of lower rankwere directed towards agriculture and trade, because it was known that poverty is bornfrom idleness and criminality from poverty’’ (Isocrates). Instead of wondering what theancients thought about work, it would be better to wonder what they thought about theworkers: they despised them as socially inferior; work was nonetheless a good thing. Ifnot for the privileged class, at least for the people of little account.29 With Aristotle, citizenship ceases to be a function so as to become a status; so thereare governors and governed facing each other. See C. Mosse (1979: 241). Even duringthe century and a half of democracy, Athens had its own clan of oligarchs who heldthemselves aloof and peered at the actions of democracy; ‘‘What’’ they repeat ‘‘wouldbecome of the people without us?’’ (Pseudo Xenophon, The Constitution of theAthenians ); ‘‘We have nothing in common with them’’ (Theophrastus, Characters,XXVI, The Oligarch, 3). The particularity of this attitude is obvious: the oligarchs feelthey are foreign to Athens. Hellenic patriotism is a patriotism of the band, of theconcrete group; either you are in the democratic band or you are opposed to it: sincecity-state and civic body are the same thing, one cannot dream of an eternal Athens,which survives beyond the errors of democracy, as does Action Francaise , which serveseternal France and detests the Republic, or like De Gaulle, who preferred France to theFrench. The career of Alcibiades is a good example of this group patriotism: theAthenians are Athens, that is the men with whom Alcibiades breaks every relationshipfor another city, and then with whom he makes peace . . . After the Athenian defeat of405, the oligarchs destroy Athens’ wall to the sound of flutes, as if it were a festival: theydid not feel themselves involved in the defeat of an eternal Athens; they had prevailedover a rival band.30 The wealthy have the duty to serve the city-state: they are its slaves, Isocrates (26)maintains.31 It would be tempting to contrast Plato’s attitude with Stoic universalism, whichextends responsibility to the poor and to slaves. But, once again, we need to see thereasons for such universalism; it arises not so much from a consideration of the poorand the slave as from the difference in comparison with wealth and false privileges,which do not ensure security, autonomy. The wealthy and powerful can be overthrownand reduced to slavery. Faced with these blows of destiny, they will only be autonomousby learning to despise wealth and liberty. In short, the real addressees of Stoicuniversalism are the privileged.32 According to Letter VII, 334 BC, a city’s strength is constituted by five in everythousand of the civic body, namely the old citizens of noble birth, who have a sufficientpatrimony.33 In The Republic, the greedy rich who work are depicted as obsessed and repressedpuritans, preoccupied only with accumulating and saving.
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34 Aristotle ([a]: 1327.a.30), a text we have retranslated in Annales E.S.C., 1979, p.230 and note 70. In this article we tried to show the curious contrast between theautarchic ideal and the real, scarcely autarchic situation; it is a contrast that we cannotexplain if we have not understood the extension, in the ancient subconscious, of thissubmerged continent that we have baptized, to the best of our ability, thepresupposition of militancy: the autarchic ideal, in the theoretical prohibition ofcommerce and international trade, is only a piece of this continent. The reality was verydifferent; see, for example, L. Gernet (1909: 375sq ).35 For Solon, see the fragment 3, verses 5�/10. On the vacuity of the theme of thedecadence of Roman customs at the end of the Republic, see F. Hampl (1959: 497).36 See note 16.37 Excessive wealth makes submission to reason and the public authority difficult(Aristotle [a]: 1295 B 5�/20); only poverty generates restraint, while wealth producesindiscipline (Isocrates: 3). For the ancients, being wealthy signifies believing thateverything is permitted (this will be the double meaning of luxuria in Latin).38 Plato, Aristotle, Polybius (VI.57)39 While humanity continues to exist, after every period of decadence everythingbegins again, and the constitutions evolve, all in all, cyclically.40 See a fundamental page of The Laws (Plato [b]: 875a�/d).41 Man is made for toil: if he relaxes, danger threatens (Plato [b]: 779a); lack of self-control is the source of all lack of discipline and every excess (734b); only self-controlenables us to prevail over the pleasures (840c). Everywhere political life is contrastedwith pleasure.42 On the legal basis of the accusation of corrupting young people, see Menzel (1938:26). In my view we should assume that corruption is judged not for its material effects(the particular actions of corrupted adolescents) but for the content of the teaching; sothat we would call it a crime of opinion (but this expression would have no meaning fora Greek).43 ‘‘Socrates does not worship the same gods as the city.’’. For theous nomizein seeMenzel (1938: 17), and W. Fahr (1969: 156), who shows that Plato modified themeaning of this expression in accordance with his own religious opinions. Greekreligion is not defined according to the criterion of a profession of faith, in which oneconfesses one’s ‘‘belief ’’ in the gods, but according to the criterion of cultural practices.44 That is, Hyperides.45 In Rome, good emperors, the enemies of licence, prohibited innkeepers fromselling food.46 One of Solon’s laws prescribed atimia for whoever squandered their patrimony(Diogenes Laertius, I, 55). The censors in Rome were extremely severe with knightswho, as public figures, were held (like Greek citizens, in theory) to follow a morerigorous morality. See Quintilian, IV, 3, 44 and 74. Abdera persecuted the philosopherDemocritus for having squandered his patrimony (Athanaeus: IV, 168 B).47 Athenaeus, VI, 167e�/168a and 168f. A Roman knight will respond similarly to thereproofs of a censor: ‘‘I thought that my patrimony was mine’’ (Quintilian).48 See Aristotle ([a] 1310.a.35): ‘‘it is not slavery to live in obedience to theconstitution; it is rather salvation’’ (salvation of the city, obviously, and with it of thecitizens); Plato ([b]: 715d).49 Immorality is both a direct threat and a disturbing symptom for the city-state; inthe absence of public supervision, customs are corrupted (Isocrates: 47); when everyonedoes exactly what they please, this is a sign that the city is breaking up and that citizensare as independent of each other as cities are (Aristotle [a] 1280.b.5). In antiquity, theconstant theme of the present day disorder of customs is due to a quite natural illusion:politics is conceived only as a constant control that either comes from the publicauthority or arises from the individual moral sense, formed by education. Now, when it
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is observed that sadly this control hardly exists, it is concluded that people will surelytake advantage of this to behave badly. The theme of decadence comes down to theunreality of the ideal.
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