Citizens to Lords. Ellen Wood

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ