Western Political Thought From The Ancient Greeks To Modern Times PDF

@Pearson Shefalijha  About Pearson Pearson is the world’s learning company, with presence across 70 countries worldwide. Our unique insights and world-class expertise comes from a long history of working closely with re...

@Pearson Shefalijha  About Pearson Pearson is the world’s learning company, with presence across 70 countries worldwide. Our unique insights and world-class expertise comes from a long history of working closely with renowned teachers, authors and thought leaders, as a result of which, we have emerged as the preferred choice for millions of teachers and learners across the world. We believe learning opens up opportunities, creates fulfilling careers and hence better lives. We hence collaborate with the best of minds to deliver you class-leading products, spread across the Higher Education and K12 spectrum. Superior learning experience and improved outcomes are at the heart of everything we do. This product is the result of one such effort. Your feedback plays a critical role in the evolution of our products and you can contact us – [email protected]. We look forward to it. A01_SHEF9343_02_SE_FM.indd 1 12/06/2018 11:19 A01_SHEF9343_02_SE_FM.indd 2 12/06/2018 11:19  Western Political Thought Second Edition A01_SHEF9343_02_SE_FM.indd 3 12/06/2018 11:19 A01_SHEF9343_02_SE_FM.indd 4 12/06/2018 11:19  Western Political Thought From The Ancient Greeks to Modern Times Second Edition Shefali Jha A01_SHEF9343_02_SE_FM.indd 5 12/06/2018 11:19  Copyright © 2018 Pearson India Education Services Pvt. Ltd Published by Pearson India Education Services Pvt. Ltd, CIN: U72200TN2005PTC057128. No part of this eBook may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the publisher's prior written consent. This eBook may or may not include all assets that were part of the print version. The publisher reserves the right to remove any material in this eBook at any time. ISBN 978-93-528-6934-3 eISBN 978-93-530-6471-6 Head Office: 15th Floor, Tower-B, World Trade Tower, Plot No. 1, Block-C, Sector-16, Noida 201 301, Uttar Pradesh, India. Registered Office: 4th Floor, Software Block, Elnet Software City, TS-140, Block 2 & 9, Rajiv Gandhi Salai, Taramani, Chennai 600 113, Tamil Nadu, India. Fax: 080-30461003, Phone: 080-30461060 Website: in.pearson.com, Email: [email protected] A01_SHEF9343_02_SE_FM.indd 6 12/06/2018 11:19  For My Mother A01_SHEF9343_02_SE_FM.indd 7 14/06/2018 15:29 A01_SHEF9343_02_SE_FM.indd 8 12/06/2018 11:19  CONTENTS Preface to the Second Edition xi Preface to the First Edition xiii About the Author xvii Introduction 1 1. The Greek City-State: Democratic Institutions in Athens 13 2. Plato (427–347 bce): Justice and Reason 26 3. Aristotle (384–322 bce): Moral Action and the Best Constitution 49 4. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas: Christian Political Thought in the Middle Ages 71 5. Machiavelli (1469–1527): Humanism and Republicanism 86 6. Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679): Contract as the Basis of Political Obligation 103 7. John Locke (1632–1704): Theological Premises and Liberal Limits on Government 125 8. Rousseau (1712–1778): The General Will and Moral and Political Liberty 142 9. Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832): Representative Government as the Maximizer of Utility 162 10. John Stuart Mill (1806–1873): The Benefits of the Liberty of Men and Women for Society 179 11. G.W.F. Hegel (1770–1831): The Social Conditions for a Non-Contractual Theory of Freedom 198 12. Karl Marx (1818–1883): The State and Class Struggle 216 A01_SHEF9343_02_SE_FM.indd 9 12/06/2018 11:19  x Contents 13. Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937): Hegemony in Civil Society as a Basis of the Modern State 232 14. John Rawls (1921–2002): A Liberal Egalitarian Theory of Justice 245 15. Carole Pateman, Martha C. Nussbaum, Judith Butler: Contemporary Feminist Theory 266 Afterword 284 Index 285 A01_SHEF9343_02_SE_FM.indd 10 12/06/2018 11:19  PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION I have often wondered at the nature of the hyper-political times we seem to live in. The news about the world, whether of my immediate national context, or from more distant parts, predominantly is about political events; this makes me want to be able to make sense of the importance of politics in our lives all the more. The use of political power to bring about change is a constant motif of our time. Whether it is through the capture of the power of the state, or through the mobilization of large groups of people into a movement, the political domain has become the medium of change and evolution of the world as we know it. Are the problems that confront us today of such a scale that they cannot be addressed except by organizing collectively? We also have to be careful about maintaining autonomy at some level, whether it is in the case of a cultural association or a sports association or a University. Whose idea of change is to be allowed to become politically effective and why? The dominant political idea of a representative democracy—which is multicultural and inclusive, egalitarian and socially just— is being challenged by the idea of majoritarianism. As this has set forth a cascading number of political conflicts, the question then arises, ‘How do we resolve these issues?’ This second edition of Western Political Thought is an attempt to include in its reach the political ideas of some of the more recent thinkers. These thinkers certainly draw on the classics of western political thought like the writings of Marx, Rousseau, Locke and Aristotle; however, they also extend our understand- ing of the political in several ways. Rawls, for instance, shows us that if the idea behind democracy is that of cooperation between A01_SHEF9343_02_SE_FM.indd 11 12/06/2018 11:19  xii Preface to the Second Edition free and equal citizens, then our acceptance of democracy as a form of government requires us to abide by certain other specific principles. Gramsci argues that democratization entails fundamental social change which cannot come about without political mobilization. And feminist political theory claims that the central ideas of western political thought— justice, individual liberty, equality, community, democracy—need to be re-examined in the light of how they apply to the position of women. Several of the chapters of this book have emerged out of my teaching of political thinkers to my students. I remain grateful to my students for their interest as well as their questions, which have enabled me to think more deeply about the arguments of the political philosophers. If students have been one mainstay of the development of the book, the other resource has been access to libraries. Here I must acknowledge both the Central Library of Jawaharlal Nehru University as well as the W.A.C. Bennett Library of Simon Fraser University for providing me access to some of the material on which these chapters are based. I would also like to thank both my editors at Pearson, Kaushal Jajware and Jubi Borkakoti, without whose constant encouragement, I would not have managed to find time from my University duties to finish this edition. Shefali Jha A01_SHEF9343_02_SE_FM.indd 12 12/06/2018 11:19  PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION The year 2009 began with a deluge of stories and analyses of the economic meltdown affecting almost each and every country in the world. News of shrinking economies, millions of jobs being lost, soaring unemployment rates, and governments trying dif- ferent measures to stimulate their economies dominated the media. This only highlighted the important role that govern- ments play in managing the welfare of their citizens. Why is it that in times of crisis we expect the government to bail us out, yet at other times, we want the government to stay out of our affairs? What does this assume about the relationship between us and the government? States, in order to ensure the welfare of their population, not only have to administer their own territories, but sometimes have to decide about intervening in the affairs of another coun- try. When the citizens of a country are accused of ‘terror strikes’ against the citizens of another country, can the government of the first country excuse itself by claiming these citizens to be non-state actors? Whether it is the case of what happened on 26 November 2008 in Mumbai, or on 11 September 2001 in New York, states are held accountable not only for the well-being of their citizens, but also for their actions. So states are not only to look after the welfare of their citizens, but also to exercise control over their population. Not only are they to control the actions of their citizens with respect to each other, but also with respect to other countries and other peoples. The twin governmental objec- tives of control and welfare are linked to one another. Without control, there will be no welfare, that is, control or disciplining by the state is always justified on the basis of its benefits or advantages for the members of the state. What happens, if, as it did happen in 2009, the head of a regime of a sovereign country is sought to be arrested by an A01_SHEF9343_02_SE_FM.indd 13 12/06/2018 11:19  xiv Preface to the First Edition international body? When the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant against the president of an independent country in early 2009, for crimes against his own people, demonstrations erupted in that country. Should not only the people of a country have a right to decide if its leaders have committed crimes against them? What if the people are so deeply divided that their government can act with impunity towards one section of them? We are back to the question of the relationship between people and their government or their state. It is clear that these political questions are not yet resolved, even though the institutions of the state and government have been with us for a long time. Long ago, in human history, groups of people organized themselves into political communities and states and governments emerged. To live subject to the rules made by those wielding political power now seems to be an inescapable part of our lives, but we continue to ask questions about the structures of political power in different societies. The significance of government and that of our relationships with each other in terms of power makes significant the activity of political thought, thinking systematically about these questions of politics. No wonder that we do have with us a long-standing tradition of thinking about political issues—a well-developed and rich tradition of political thought. It is a tradition that has often been mined for arguments in sup- port of, or against, alternative political arrangements. Many great thinkers are seen as part of this tradition because not only do they refer to one another in their work, but their writings are taken to have developed a common language for the discussion of political problems. Some of the thinkers belonging to this tradition of Western political thought do share a common spatial and temporal framework. Plato and Aristotle were, for instance, addressing political questions emerging from the practices of Greek city-states. Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau are seen as having created the social contract tradition in responding to similar changes taking place in their societies as the feudal world slowly transformed into an emerging modernity. Between the Greeks and the moderns, we look at examples of Christian political thought, as well as at Machiavelli. Our last four thinkers include two from the Utilitarian tradition, Bentham and Mill, and two German thinkers, Hegel and Marx; these thinkers are linked not only by belonging to similar schools of thought, but also by experiencing similar changes in their countries. But what is our justification for placing Aristotle and Marx, divided by so many centuries and analysing such different societies, in the same tradition of political thought? Not only does Marx refer to Aristotle in his writings, but many of his concepts show an Aristotelian influence. Finally, if we have agreed on the identity of this tradition of Western political thought, how do we link this tradition with our concerns today? A01_SHEF9343_02_SE_FM.indd 14 12/06/2018 11:19  Preface to the First Edition xv Many of the problems that we face today are understood as deriving from our political arrangements, and if these political arrangements could be understood more adequately, and modified or changed, we might be bet- ter off. The Western tradition of political thought may be just one tradition of political thought, but it is an important tradition. In addressing the political problems or concerns of their day, the thinkers belonging to this tradition, constructed the political subject with certain attributes—the attributes of reason and independence—and incorporated those human beings who apparently lacked these attributes differently into the state. The Western tradition of political thought developed a specific political theory of how rational and independent subjects were related to the state. When we look at how they used this theory to address their political issues, we become more self-conscious or reflexive about the terms in which we understand our own political investigations. That is why, in many parts of the world, including in India, one of the ways in which students of political science learn to think about political issues and about political ideas is by going through the works of Plato, for instance, or those of Rousseau or Marx. In their attempt to understand the ideas of these thinkers, students look for commentaries on their writings. This reader on Western political thought has been written for undergradu- ate students of political science in India who are just beginning their study of Plato’s Republic or Hobbes’ Leviathan or Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. The reader is meant to assist them in their effort to comprehend and under- stand the classics of Western political thought. Putting together this reader for students, I would like to acknowledge my own debt to my teachers, both at Jawaharlal Nehru University, and at the University of California, Los Angeles, who taught and introduced me to the discipline of political thought. It is their lectures and seminars that engendered and sustained my interest in this area of political science. I would also like to thank the students, both at Miranda House, and at Jawaharlal Nehru University, who attended my classes in Western politi- cal thought, and whose interventions often helped me with interpretive issues. I am grateful to the staff of the Jawaharlal Nehru University Library, New Delhi, the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi, and the Georgetown University, School of Foreign Service Library at Doha, Qatar, for providing me with all the material that helped me to write this reader. I would like to thank my editors at Pearson Education, specially Kamini Mahadevan, Debjani M. Dutta and Sukanya Chakrabarti, without whose insistence, encouragement and hard work, this book would not have been produced. Finally, I thank my family for their constant and patient support of my work. A01_SHEF9343_02_SE_FM.indd 15 12/06/2018 11:19 A01_SHEF9343_02_SE_FM.indd 16 12/06/2018 11:19  ABOUT THE AUTHOR Shefali Jha teaches political science at Jawaharlal Nehru University. She has taught courses in Western Political Thought both to undergraduate students at Miranda House, University of Delhi, and to postgraduate students at the Centre for Political Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University. She did her doc- toral work on Hegel’s concept of freedom at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her interests lie in the areas of political philosophy, feminist political theory and constitutionalism and democracy. A01_SHEF9343_02_SE_FM.indd 17 12/06/2018 11:19 A01_SHEF9343_02_SE_FM.indd 18 12/06/2018 11:19  Introduction READING CLASSICAL TEXTS OF POLITICAL THOUGHT: METHODOLOGICAL ISSUES In 1950, there were seventy-three sovereign countries in the world; by 1968, within a span of less than twenty years, some forty-nine newly inde- pendent nations had been added to the map of the world.1 Therein lies the root of our attraction, some might even say, the root of our fatal attraction, for politics. Containing the tantalizing and enticing whiff of the new, poli- tics enlarges our sense of self. Through politics, we can create new stories, or new worlds that we can now investigate. The Age of Discovery, with all its excitement of finding new lands, may be over, but with politics, the reaching out to the new remains an ever present possibility. In politics, this newness is not like the sudden disclosure of a new planet which had always existed as part of a solar system, instead it is the creation of some- thing that did not exist before, by us, through our political action. The European Union is new, the Islamic Republic of Iran is (was) new, the women’s movement is new, and so on, with the assumption being that these political entities are not just new, but new and ‘better’ for many of us. Politics seems to be one of the significant markers of human creativity, and in societies where this creativity often seems to bear fruit, as in a mod- ernizing society, thinking about politics is a central concern. This book, however, is not only about political thinkers from modernizing societies; it also ranges over what political thinkers from the distant past said about politics, how they defined politics and what they took its main features to be. Did they, in their classic works, also talk about the transformative or creative role of politics? A conversation with voices from the past is what an engagement with the history of political thought is. But why should we care about what was said about political institutions and political power in the past—the M00_SHEF69343_02_SE_Intro.indd 1 12/06/2018 11:27  2 Introduction new political institutions the creation of which was advocated in the past—when the past is long gone? And it’s not even our past—why make so much effort, in studying the history of Western political thought, to recover the meaning of voices from someone else’s long gone past? Well, we might be curious about that past. The past is a legitimate object of enquiry, pace the discipline of history. We read Plato and Aristotle to fulfil our antiquarian interests. We are curious about the Greek city-states of the pre-Christian era; we want to know about Athenian democracy and Spartan oligarchy and Republic and Politics help to satisfy that curiosity. But we are not historians. We are political scientists trying to get our bearings amidst the intense political conflicts of today. We might not have much interest in the ancient Greeks; we puzzle instead, over the reasons for conflict in our societies, and we investigate ways of managing or resolv- ing this conflict. How do we answer then, the question of the relevance of a work of political philosophy that was written in another time and place, to current politics? Have you at sometime come across an individual so immersed in her reading of Plato’s dialogues not because of any desire about Greece, but because, she says, reading Plato helps her to make sense of modern politics. Republic helps her to better comprehend the political arrangements of her own world; but how can a book about ancient Greek constitutions also be a book about contemporary politics? Or, to put it in slightly different terms, why are courses in the history of political thought part of the curriculum of a degree in political science in so many parts of the world? In answering the question of why do we, or why should we, study the history of Western political thought, we find that we are led to address the problem of how do we study a tradition of political thought. These two questions are inextricably linked, and in considering one, we cannot but probe the other. So, how do we recover the meaning of what was said by these voices from the past? We have to first understand what it is that they said, to interpret the meaning of their words, before we can use their writ- ings to either increase our knowledge of the past, or to better understand our own present-day conditions. Let me start, then, with the problem of methodology: how should we study the political thought of a particular thinker? THE TEXTUAL METHOD Let us take a well-known text, for instance, Hobbes’ Leviathan. How do we understand the meaning of what is written in this book? For a long time, the answer to such questions was provided by the textual method. The textual method has been described as insisting that given ‘the autonomy M00_SHEF69343_02_SE_Intro.indd 2 12/06/2018 11:27  Introduction 3 of the text itself as the sole necessary key to its own meaning,...the text itself should form the self-sufficient object of inquiry and understanding’.2 To understand the meaning of the Leviathan, we only have to read it again and again, or if necessary, we should read it along with the corpus of Hobbes’ other writings. If the meaning of some passage in the Leviathan is unclear to us, we take the help of some other passage in the same work, or at the most, in some other book written by Thomas Hobbes. A study of political thought becomes, then, a systematic perusal of certain classic texts. This method of studying the Western tradition of political thought came under attack, in the 1960s, by the members of the ‘Cambridge school’ who argued that since meaning can only emerge in a context, when we ignore the context by insisting on the autonomy of the text, what we do is to surreptitiously introduce our own context as a frame in which to put what the text says.3 We take the historical text to be answering our ques- tions. So it’s not as if we have really respected the autonomy of the text; because meaning requires context, what we have done is to illegitimately frame the text in our context instead of its own context. According to these critics, this has led to the canon of classic texts being taken to be providing answers to a number of set questions, like ‘what is justice’, or ‘what is the relationship between the citizen and the state’, or as I asked earlier, why is there conflict in human communities and how can we manage it, and so on. As each thinker is understood to be responding to these same ‘enduring’ and ‘abiding’4 questions, as important to us as to him, the discipline of political thought becomes a comparison of these answers given by different historical figures. Let’s look at a couple of examples: when we find Aristotle, discussing in the first few books of Nichomachean Ethics, the centrality of the concept of choice to the concept of moral action, and J.S. Mill, many centuries later, in On Liberty, making freedom of choice essential for the development of our moral and mental faculties, we take both philosophers to be grappling with the same issue, thus committing the fallacy of a liberal (mis)reading of Aristotle. Here is another, starker example: you might have come across a commentary on Plato in which he is presented as the first communist. To interpret Plato on property with allusions to Marx as if both these phi- losophers were dealing with the same (eternal) problem of property and power—is that not to make a serious interpretive error? The assumptions underlying the textual method are blamed for the following exegetical problems. When it is presupposed that a political philosopher is trying to answer a certain set question, the meaning of eve- rything she wrote is sought to be fitted in the framework of a doctrine, and any inconsistencies or contradictory statements of the philosopher are just ignored, instead of being taken as clues that the thinker might be trying to M00_SHEF69343_02_SE_Intro.indd 3 12/06/2018 11:27  4 Introduction do something other than answer some ‘universal’ question. Critics have further argued that this textual method also leads us into making the mis- take of conflating ‘the retrospective significance of a given historical work’ with ‘its meaning for the thinker himself’. THE SOCIAL CONTEXT METHOD The textual approach was sought to be replaced by the social context method in the study of political thought. The contextual method holds ‘that it is the context “of religious, political, and economic factors” which determines the meaning of any given text, and so must provide “the ulti- mate framework” for any attempt to understand it’.5 If we apply this methodological principle to our earlier example, it follows that before reading Leviathan, we must know that in writing it, Hobbes was trying to intervene in the raging debate between the king’s faction and the parlia- mentary faction in England in the first half of the 17th century. When Leviathan was published in 1651, the English civil war had just come to a close, with the English king, Charles I, being executed in 1649. For the next eleven years, no king was allowed to take the throne. It was in these turbu- lent times that Leviathan was written, and unless we are aware of this political context, no number of readings of Leviathan will help us to under- stand its meaning. Leviathan was a response to pressing political questions or political problems of the day. If we are unaware of these problems of 17th century English politics, we will take Leviathan to be answering our political con- cerns, and in this manner, completely misunderstand its meaning. Political philosophers of the past must not be taken to be addressing our political concerns; their political concerns are different, of their own time. We must not see the history of political thought as a series of different answers to the same questions; the questions themselves are different, these different questions emerging from specific historical circumstances. In order to study political thought then, we require knowledge of history. We must place the writings of the political philosopher we are studying in the economic, social and political context in which she was writing. If ideas are ‘responses to immediate circumstances’ then we must know the nature of the society in which the thinker was writing. It is the use of the contextual method that allows a scholar like Macpherson, for instance, to read the work of Hobbes and Locke in the context of a changing economic system, and to interpret it as the work of ‘bourgeois’ thinkers.6 What the historical context is, may however, also be a matter of interpretation: we are familiar with Tully’s criticism of Macpherson for misinterpreting Locke’s conception of property by not seeing that the M00_SHEF69343_02_SE_Intro.indd 4 12/06/2018 11:27  Introduction 5 property that Locke was concerned to defend against the state was the property of the religious Dissenters, and not that of the ‘bourgeois’ rich. For Tully, to use ‘the “rise of capitalism” as the governing framework [context] for interpreting seventeenth-century political thought’, 7 is to ensure misinterpretation of thinkers like Hobbes and Locke. Looking at the text in context is also a matter of interpreting the context correctly. If we use modern categories to interpret the context, rather than the text, it is as if we are committing the same error. We cannot claim to be moving beyond the text to the context when we seek to understanding the histori- cal context in our present-day categories. We have to read the past in its own terms. When the textual method was attacked in the name of ‘the context’, its proponents began to fear for the classics. If the text was going to be reduced to its context, what need was there to read the classic texts? In their cam- paign to save the text, the advocates of the textual method began shifting the battle lines of the methodological debate. No one believed any longer (that is, if someone ever had) the ‘absurd notion’ that the classic texts ‘are self-sufficient objects of inquiry, which can be understood in isolation’. Having accepted that ‘we have to read even a great text in its context’, what was still pointed out was that—‘but we have to understand what its author understood that context to be, not insert it into some context con- structed by our scholarship’.8 The question now was—how was the context to be understood? What should we mean by ‘the context’ became the new point of debate. ALTERNATIVE APPROACHES Although the textual method has been accused of committing the ‘most mistakes’ or leading to the ‘worst misunderstandings’ of a text, it is not as if the contextual approach, as we just saw above, does not have its own pit- falls. It is true that the contextual method makes us aware that we always approach a text with certain presuppositions. It is, as if, to guard against these presuppositions, that the contextual method warns us to situate the text in its own context. Many leading scholars of the art of interpretation have, while agreeing that meaning can only exist in context, however pointed out that it is humanly impossible to completely bracket our own presuppositions and our own questions. If it is true that contextualizing is an essential component of understanding, that understanding cannot take place without a context, then it is equally true that we cannot remove our own context from the picture. Hans-Georg Gadamer, an exponent of modern hermeneutics, for instance, argued that successful interpretation of meaning takes place through a ‘fusion of horizons’: a mingling of our M00_SHEF69343_02_SE_Intro.indd 5 12/06/2018 11:27  6 Introduction own horizon with the horizon of the text makes it possible for an earlier text to have meaning for us.9 If it is the context of the text that makes it what it is, it is our context which makes us what we are. We learn to think and reason within a cer- tain tradition, and the assumptions or presuppositions of this tradition mediate our grasp of what is written in the text. Instead of seeing these assumptions as hampering our understanding of the past, Gadamer believed that it is through these assumptions that we think, interpret and understand at all. We always bring our own questions to bear on the past; this does not imply that we read the canon of political philosophy as repositories of ‘timeless truths’ or ‘ageless wisdom’ but it does mean that we read Machiavellli’s Discourses not only because we want to know more about 16th century Florence, but because we want to use this book to increase our understanding of ourselves and of our political situation. In which way do these works of political thought add to our self-knowledge is a question that remains to be answered. Gadamer believed that all human beings were part of an ‘effective his- tory’, part, that is, of the same historical process. It is this shared belonging to the same historical process that allows our horizon to fuse with that of the past. In that sense, our presuppositions are not, as long as we are also aware of the text’s specific historical context, a hindrance to the under- standing of the text, but actually an entry into the meaning of the text. What needs to be clarified here is whether this applies to those belonging to a particular tradition, lets say that the past and present of the people of the West forms one continuous history, or whether members of a different tradition, let’s say the people of Kenya and Tanzania, are also part of this same history, and will therefore have an entry point into the meaning of the Western tradition of political thought. (Did the previous era of globali- zation—the colonization and the labour migrations of the late 19th and early 20th centuries—ensure one history for the world?) If they are not part of the same history, then how do they understand the work of an alien tradition, or do they misunderstand it? Moreover, when meaning is a vari- able determined by the fusing of two contexts, that of the writer and that of the reader, does it follow that for readers in different historical times, the meaning of the same text would be different—this conclusion seems to take us as far away as possible from the ‘autonomy of the text’ methodo- logical thesis. For members of the Cambridge school, on the other hand, going down the ‘fusion of horizons’ road of interpretation is to end up in a blind alley of misunderstanding and misinterpretation. Remember, their main criti- cism of the textual method was that it allows us to frame a historical text anachronistically in our contemporary context. These scholars disagree with Gadamer that we should not try to bracket our own presuppositions M00_SHEF69343_02_SE_Intro.indd 6 12/06/2018 11:27  Introduction 7 because they allow the text to speak to us. This will lead, they argue, to a completely instrumental view of the text which they want to counter not with the idea of the autonomy of the text but with the idea of the autono- my or integrity of a socio-historical slice of time. (Would it follow that the categories of 17th century English political thought would be as alien to a 21st century English reader as to an Indian reader?) The Cambridge school insists, then on the significance of the text’s historical context; where the social context approach goes wrong is in ignoring the most important historical context of a text—its linguistic con- text. In different historical periods, a certain political language is dominant, and we have to become familiar with this political discourse before we can interpret a particular text from that time. The contextual method has thus been faulted by the Cambridge school for throwing the baby out with the bathwater. As one critic puts it, while ‘a study of social context may help in the understanding of a text’, ‘the fundamental assumption of the contextual methodology, that the ideas of a given text should be understood in terms of its social context, can be shown to be mistaken, and to serve in consequence not as a guide to understanding…’10 If the meaning of the text is produced wholly by the social context, then why should we read the text at all? Often you will find yourself being exhorted not just to read about Hobbes but to read Hobbes himself. But if the meaning of Leviathan can be reduced to its context, then why do we bother with Leviathan itself? If we reduce the text to the social context, then we will, Skinner argues, lose the point of what is being said in the text. Skinner tries to replace the central concept of the ‘social context’ with his conception of the ‘linguistic context’. Again, what is the linguistic context of a text? For every philoso- pher in question, a certain language of politics is available to him in which he understands the political questions of his day. For instance, when Locke used the word ‘trust’ or the phrase ‘government by consent’, these words had a specific meaning at that time, which we must know in order to deci- pher the meaning of these terms in Locke’s writings. When we become familiar with the dominant political conceptions of a particular time, only then can we also understand the original contribu- tion of a political philosopher, because we can see then how he deviated from the dominant political ideas. As has famously been shown in the case of Machiavelli, it was Machiavelli’s use of the term ‘virtu’, a dominant idea of Renaissance Italy, with a completely different meaning given to it by him, which ensures that today we still read Machiavelli and leave the many others who also wrote advice books for princes in 15th–16th century Italy to specialist historians. For Skinner, to understand a statement is to know more than its meaning; it is to also grasp the illocutionary force11 of that statement. It M00_SHEF69343_02_SE_Intro.indd 7 12/06/2018 11:27  8 Introduction is knowledge of the linguistic context—how words were used at that time—that allows us to grasp the illocutionary force of an utterance. By making these statements political thinkers were not just saying something, they were doing something, since ‘to make a statement is to perform an action’. Given this theory of linguistic action or of speech acts, the meaning of their statements must include the use they wanted to make of the statements and this can only be revealed by knowing the linguistic context of the time. CONCLUSION We have looked at four positions on the interpretation and relevance of ‘political writing in past time’. Briefly, and simplistically, if the textual method’s advice is to read and reread the text carefully and we will find it answering our questions, the social context method asks us instead to make the economic and social context of the work a priority, using modern categories to interpret that historical context. For Gadamerian hermeneu- tics, our reading of the text must be informed by a true intermingling of contexts. For the Cambridge school, when we interpret a 16th century text through a familiarity with its linguistic context, keeping our own pre- suppositions out, we realize that the writer is using political terms with meanings specific to that time. Coming back to the question of why we study the history of political thought, this does not mean that it is an irrele- vant exercise, that the text has no relevance for us. It is its difference—how the political concerns of that time were different—that makes the text rele- vant to us, not the fact that its author was asking the same questions about politics as us. ‘The classic texts, especially in social, ethical, and political thought, help to reveal—if we let them—not the essential sameness, but rather the essential variety of viable moral assumptions and political com- mitments.’12 Approaching the texts in this way, ‘knowledge of the history of such ideas can then serve to show the extent to which those features of our own arrangements which we may be disposed to accept as traditional or even “timeless” truths may in fact be the merest contingencies of our peculiar history and social structure’.13 Such a consciousness allows us to develop a critical perspective with respect to our own society and to see what can be changed in it. Instead of seeing the history of political thought as a series of mistakes, as a series of unsuccessful attempts to answer our questions—we cannot use Plato’s organic conception of the state to defend individual rights; we cannot use Rousseau’s conception of direct democ- racy in contemporary large nation-states—we can use the work of earlier political thinkers to query our contemporary institutions—the centrality M00_SHEF69343_02_SE_Intro.indd 8 12/06/2018 11:27  Introduction 9 of labour in our lives, the overriding concern with consumption and there- fore with production, and the modern bureaucracy as such an integral part of the contemporary democratic state. Is that how the work of earlier political philosophers is used in con- temporary political theory? What are we to make of a political theorist, like Martha Nussbaum for example, making self-consciously Aristotelian arguments to throw light on contemporary political arrangements? Political theory today abounds with Aristotelians, Lockeans, Hegelians and Nietzscheans. In terms of method, how are we to interpret someone calling himself a Lockean today? Does that person read the Two Treatises on Government to understand how different our politics is, or does he read it in terms of a common political language between the past and the present? When a theorist argues for more attention to Hellenistic philosophy today on the grounds that ‘the writings of modern writers as diverse as Descartes, Spinoza, Kant, Adam Smith, Hume, Rousseau, the Founding Fathers of the United States, Nietzsche, and Marx, owe in every case a considerable debt to the writings of Stoics, Epicureans, and/or Skeptics, and frequently far more than to the writings of Plato and Aristotle’,14 is she claiming that the linguistic context of any modern political philosopher, whether it is Nietzsche or herself, is partly inherited from the past? Where does the linguistic context of any philosopher come from? Nussbaum argues for the importance of both ‘the historical and the literary context’, pointing out that even though Roman writers like Cicero were greatly influenced by the Greek Stoics, their own work has to be understood to be ‘standing in an intimate relation to Roman history and politics’.15 The influence of the philosophical tradition of the past is always refracted by the theorist’s own historical situation. The same questions would arise for those of us who are from India, or China, or Africa, reading the canon of Western political thought. Just because in this book, a series of thinkers are chronologically arranged in successive chapters, we should not take this to mean that each of these thinkers has provided us with successively better designed new political institutions, since some of these political institutions seem to be based on opposing ideals. Nor are we to take the later writers as providing us with a better approximation of the general idea of politics. In fact, they provide us with radically different conceptions of politics, or we can say that they make us familiar with radically different ways of legitimizing political power. It is interesting to see the reasons given to legitimate polit- ical rule changing over time. If at an earlier moment, political rule was linked to the idea of the development of virtue, at another later moment, it begins to be legitimated by the idea of its protection of individual liberty. If, in earlier times, the language of virtue was used to discuss political M00_SHEF69343_02_SE_Intro.indd 9 12/06/2018 11:27  10 Introduction institutions, later this discussion comes to be couched in the language of liberty and the rights of the individual. This change in the political con- cepts justifying political authority also led to a questioning of the harmony between an individual’s interests and the interests of others. Virtue talk assumed the priority of the public good for the fulfilment of an individu- al’s private interests; but the language of rights seemed to construct the public good as the sum of individual interests. Politics brings about change; if our goal is human happiness or human welfare, we can use politics as an instrument to change things in that direction. In ancient Greek political thought, for example, the politi- cal community was to be organized to create virtue amongst its citizens because that was seen as the road to happiness. Individuals needed to be part of a community to lead happy lives; the community can only exist if its members behave virtuously; for the community to be sustainable over time, its members’ virtue must be continuously encouraged. The commu- nity seems to depend on something—its members’ sense of virtue—that it itself plays a role in creating. The community which is organized politi- cally in the right manner will be able to create virtuous citizens. In Greek political thought, however, as we will see later in the chapter on Plato, we also find a conception of virtue leading to happiness not through the political community but because virtuous individuals have healthy souls. But the legitimating principle of political authority remains its link to virtue. We find the legitimating principle of political authority changing over time. The goal remains individual happiness, but virtue does not get us there; instead, this role is taken over by individual rights. We ensure a greatest chance of happiness for individuals in that regime which is best at protecting individual rights—political authority is legitimated by the idea of individual rights. Do we study the history of Western political thought, then, to see how the legitimating principles of political order change? There was a time in the history of the West when happiness was seen as an attribute of another world, of life after death, and in that case, nothing much could be expected from politics. If happiness was available only in union with God, and that too after death, then all aspects of the human world, including politics, counted for nought. A variation on this way of thinking is to argue that when people are dying of poverty and disease, and happiness is equated with domination, hedonism and con- sumerism, then happiness is not of much value, and politics in the service of this kind of happiness is also not worth the effort. This is not to claim that the human world can never match the value (happiness) of the so called heavenly world, but that what we have made of the human world so far makes it imperative for us to create something else, something dif- ferent, something new. These changes in the history of Western political M00_SHEF69343_02_SE_Intro.indd 10 12/06/2018 11:27  Introduction 11 thought make us aware of or clearer about, what counts as a defensible view of human happiness today, and how is it related to the organization of political power. In answering the question of how is, or why should the business of political design be relevant to human concerns, political thinkers from the past help us to look anew at how we think of this question today. In fact, one suggestion has been, as we saw, that it is because they provide us with a snapshot of different ways of organizing our collective life that they are useful to us. To believe that our present was unfolding in the past, or that our present was contained in the past and therefore the past has inexora- bly led up to our present, is not the same as maintaining that the whole purpose of the past was to lead up to our present. The last proposition belongs to a teleological conception of the historical world, and holding on to it would lead us to make the unjustifiable claim that it was the goal or intention of earlier political thinkers, in writing their ‘great works’ to solve our contemporary political problems. They were grappling with their own political problems, given to them by their own circumstances, and they grasped these problems in their own concepts. These conceptual grids are taken by some to have changed radically over time, although others argue that some of these political concepts have travelled through time. What I have tried to do in this chapter is to show how debatable these questions still are—how do we study the history of political thought; why do we study it at all; what is it a study really of ? Before you start your reading of Plato or Rousseau, or as you study them, you should think about these three questions and try to work out your own answers to them because these answers will affect your interpretation and understanding of the meaning of their writings. I am not asking you to get bogged down in methodological issues, which seem to have become the bane of social scientists, but to keep some of these issues in mind. NOTES 1. Adam Przeworski, Michael E. Alvarez, Jose Antonio Cheibub, Fernando Limongi, Democracy and Development: Political Institutions and Well-Being in the World 1950–1990, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000, p. 36. 2. J. Tully, Meaning and Context—Quentin Skinner and his Critics, Polity, 1988, pp. 29–30, (emphasis in original). 3. Q. Skinner, J.M. Dunn, and J.G.A. Pocock are loosely said to belong to the Cambridge school because while teaching at Cambridge University, they shared similar positions on historical interpretation. 4. See L. Strauss and J. Cropsey (eds.), History of Political Philosophy (3rd edition), Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987, p. xiii. M00_SHEF69343_02_SE_Intro.indd 11 12/06/2018 11:27  12 Introduction 5. J. Tully, Meaning and Context—Quentin Skinner and His Critics, Polity, 1988, p. 30, (emphasis in original) 6. C.B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962. 7. J. Tully, An Approach to Political Philosophy: Locke in Contexts, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993, p. 127 8. See N. Tarcov and T.N. Pangle, ‘Leo Strauss and the History of Political Philosophy’, in L. Strauss and J. Cropsey, History of Political Philosophy, pp. 913–914. 9. See the ‘Introduction’ in Robert J. Dostal (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Gadamer, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. 10. J. Tully, Meaning and Context: Quentin Skinner and his Critics, Polity, 1988, p. 59, (emphasis in original). 11. For a discussion of the relationship between the illocutionary force of a sentence and its meaning, see Q. Skinner, Chapter 7 in Visions of Politics–Vol. I – Regarding Method, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. 12. J. Tully, Meaning and Context—Quentin Skinner and His Critics, Polity, 1988, p. 67. 13. Ibid., p. 67. 14. M.C. Nussbaum, The Therapy of Desire—Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1994, p. 4, emphasis mine. 15. M.C. Nussbaum, The Therapy of Desire—Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics, p. 7. M00_SHEF69343_02_SE_Intro.indd 12 12/06/2018 11:27  The Greek City-State 13 ONE The Greek City-State: Democratic Institutions in Athens O ne of the claims made in the introduction to this book was that in order to avoid misinterpreting the ideas of a thinker, we have to place that thinker in his or her historical context. We have to be aware of the social and political conditions that the thinker is responding to. Since, in the next few chapters, we are going to study the political thought of the philosophical threesome of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, which has domi- nated for so long the study of Greek moral and political philosophy, we need to have a look at their historical context. Socrates and Plato were Athenian citizens and even though there were times when they were severely critical of the social and political institu- tions of classical Athens,1 to understand their works, we must have some idea of how those institutions functioned. Aristotle was not an Athenian citizen, but he spent more than half of his life there, first studying with Plato, and then setting up his own school and teaching there. The Athenian city-state formed the backdrop for the political thought of all three philosophers. Ancient Greek history is usually divided into the following four periods: the Mycenaean period (1600–1100 bce), the ‘Dark Ages’ (1100–700 bce), the Archaic Age (700–480 bce) and the Classical Age (480–320 bce) We begin our story around 800–700 bce when the so-called Dark Ages were ending and the Archaic Age was beginning in Greece, with the rapid establishment of hundreds of Greek city-states. By 750 bce, the Greek peninsula was suffering from the effects of a population explosion, and many city-states of the Greek peninsula began sending out colonies to settle down in nearby coastal areas. First, the Aegean coast of Asia Minor was colonized, followed by the southern coast of the Black Sea. Then, to the west, colonies were settled on the coast of Albania and southern Italy, in Sicily, on the southern coast of France, and even in north-eastern Spain. M01_SHEF69343_02_SE_M01.indd 13 12/06/2018 11:27  14 Chapter 1 Greek colonies were also found in Egypt and Libya. ‘By the 6th century, Hellas had become a cultural and linguistic area much larger than the geographical area of Greece. Greek colonies were not politically controlled by their founding cities, although they often retained religious and commercial links with them.’2 Some of the famous modern cities of the Mediterranean coast have their beginnings as new settlements of the Greek city-states, for instance, Marseilles (Massilia), Naples (Neapolis) and Istanbul (Byzantium). By the classical era, there were certainly more than 1,500 city-states in this region, even if some were little more than modern towns. Each city-state or polis consisted of the main city surrounded by an agricultural hinterland. Each city-state formed a separate and independent political unit. The age of archaic and classical Greece was not only the age of the spread of the Greek city-states all over the Mediterranean coast, but it was also an age of transition in, and consolidation of political institutions in these city-states. Originally, each Greek city-state was ruled by a king, called the basileus, but gradually, by about 700 bce, the basileus was replaced in most Greek city-states by groups of three men, called archons. The archon eponymous functioned like a chief magistrate, the polemarch was the head of the armed forces and the archon basileus performed reli- gious duties.3 In Athens, these three officials were elected from the ranks of the nobility for a term of ten years, but by 683 bce, their term had been reduced to just one year. Gradually the number of archons in Athens increased to about nine. After finishing their term, these archons became lifetime members of a body called the Council of Areopagus which was responsible for the city’s government. The government of Athens in the 7th century was thus in the hands of the aristocracy, in the form of the nine archons supported by the Council of the Areopagus. In most of the other city-states as well, kingship was replaced by oligarchic forms of government. Oligarchy, that is, rule by the few, usually the noble born, and the rich and wealthy, was the dominant form of government in the Greek city-states. DEMOCRACY IN ATHENS We said earlier that there were as many as 1,500 city-states at this time; yet, the city-state of Athens has received more historical attention than any other. There are several reasons which justify this concentrated attention. First of all, Athens was much larger than most other city-states, both ter- ritorially and in terms of population. In the 5th century, Athens is supposed to have had as many as 50,000 citizens, whereas Sparta, with the next larg- est citizen body, had only 10,000 citizens. Many Greek city-states had a M01_SHEF69343_02_SE_M01.indd 14 12/06/2018 11:27  The Greek City-State 15 citizen body of only about 400 to 900 citizens. Attica, with Athens at its centre, covered a territory of 2,650 sq. kms, whereas the average Greek city-state had a territory of only 50 to 100 sq. kms. The region of Boeotia, just north of Attica, for example, with about 2,600 sq. kms, contained sev- eral poleis.4 Politically too, Athens was an anomaly in Hellas given that from about 500 bce to around 300 bce, except for two brief interruptions, Athens remained a democracy. For 200 years or so, with hardly any real break, the city was under democratic institutions and these institutions must have influenced Athenian life a great deal. Did the flowering of culture in Athens at that time—in the form of the great philosophers like Plato and Socrates, the celebrated dramatists, like Aeschylus, Euripides, Sophocles and Aristophanes, and beautiful art— have something to do with its democratic practices? It has been pointed out that when the other Greek city-states, from the 8th to the mid-6th cen- turies, were establishing colonies, Athens was quiet; during the 7th and 6th centuries, Athens had no poets to boast of, except Solon; and there is no record of any visits of the famous 6th century Ionian philosophers to Athens. Suddenly, in the 5th century, Athens was at the forefront of every- thing. Did this have to do with the establishment of democratic institutions by Cleisthenes in 508/507 bce? Soon after democracy was firmly estab- lished in Athens, the Greco–Persian wars began and Athens helped the Ionian Greeks to throw off their recently acquired Persian yoke. The Persian king, Darius, sent a large army to Greece which was defeated by a much smaller Athenian force at Marathon in 490 bce. In 480 bce, a large Persian fleet of over 1,200 ships, sent by Xerxes, Darius’s son, was defeated by the Athenian navy, off the coast of the island of Salamis. In 478 bce, Athens established the Delian League under its leadership, ostensibly to protect the other Greek city-states, since skirmishes with Persian forces continued sporadically for another three decades, till the peace of Callias was finally declared in 449 bce, when Persia accepted the independence of the Greek city-states of Asia Minor. Did Athens’s increase in power in the 4th and 5th centuries have to do with its new form of government? Questions such as these as well as our modern interest in democracy draw our attention specifically to the city- state of Athens. We began our discussion of the Athenian polis by referring to the argument that much of Western political thought is a response to Athenian democracy. This claim is often repeated: ‘The history of political thought in the West is largely the history of warnings about the hasty, greedy, and intemperate courses on which the masses are likely to embark if they ever get power in their hands.’5 If it is not just Plato and Aristotle who were reacting to Athenian democracy, but the entire tradition of Western political thought, then it seems all the more important for us to have some idea of this democratic regime. M01_SHEF69343_02_SE_M01.indd 15 12/06/2018 11:27  16 Chapter 1 When was democracy first established in Athens? This question con- tinues to be debated extensively by historians. Many scholars take Cleisthenes’s reforms of 508/507 bce to be definitive, but some insist that Athenian democracy can only be said to be established much later with the reforms of Ephialtes and Pericles in the period 460–452 bce. Sidestepping this debate we can only note that there seem to be at least four important moments in the development of democracy in Athens: Solon’s economic reforms of the late 6th century, Cleisthenes’s reorganization of the tribes in the early 6th century, the reforms of 462–460 bce associated with Ephialtes and Pericles and finally, the changes of 404–403 bce.6 We can examine each of these transitions briefly. Usually, accounts of Athenian democracy begin with Solon, who was appointed the archon eponymous in Athens in 594 bce. Solon is said to have started the story of Athenian democracy by undertaking some major eco- nomic reforms. As soon as he became the archon, Solon cancelled all outstanding debts and forbade any creditor from selling anyone who was in his debt, into slavery. In Attica which had an agrarian economy, poorer farmers who had taken loans from a richer neighbour to make ends meet were forced to mortgage their land to their creditor when they were una- ble to repay their loans. These debt-ridden farmers became the hektemorioi or tenant farmers bound now to pay one-sixth of their land’s produce to their creditor. Many of these hektemorioi had by the 7th century, finding themselves unable to even pay the sixth part of the produce to the creditor, been forced to sell their families and themselves as slaves to the creditor.7 When Solon decreed the cancellation of all debts and the return of their lands to the hektemorioi, and abolished all forms of debt-slavery, he took a major step towards reducing the stark inequalities that existed in Attica. Some fragments of Solon’s poems are still extant, in which he describes himself as freeing the land and liberating the farmers.8 This, however, did not mean that the differences between the rich and the poor disappeared. To Solon also goes the credit of formalizing the Athenian population into four property classes: At the top were the penta- kosiomedimnoi or the ‘five hundred measure men’, who obtained, every year, at least 500 measures of produce from their land. One measure or medimnos was approximately equivalent to 38 kgs or 50 litres. The next class was made up of the hippies whose estates produced between 300 and 500 measures annually, and who were able to provide a horse and be cav- alrymen in times of war. They were followed by the zeugitai, with 200–300 measures, who could pay for their own armour and who became infantry- men during war. The last class was made up of the thetes, who could only produce less than 200 measures from their land. The thetes were manual labourers and did not pay taxes. It is estimated that more than half of the citizen population of the city-state of Athens was made up of thetes.9 What M01_SHEF69343_02_SE_M01.indd 16 12/06/2018 11:27  The Greek City-State 17 Solon did was to allow Athenian citizens from all four classes to partici- pate in Athenian political institutions, unlike before, when political activity in Athens was only the preserve of the nobility, or of the wealthy. To counteract the power of the nobility in the Areopagus, Solon decreed that the archons would no longer be purely from the members of the nobility; the nine archons could now be chosen from the first two prop- erty classes of the pentakosiomedimnoi and the hippies. Solon is also said to have established a new political institution, the boule, to advise the archons. Membership to the boule was open to the first three Athenian classes. Solon also increased the importance of another pre-existing advisory body, the ekklesia, by enacting a law that every Athenian citizen, including the thetes, could sit in the ekklesia where they would vote on governmental policy. Solon also reformed the judicial system. Whereas, earlier, the archons and the Areopagus performed all judicial functions, Solon now allowed mem- bers of all property classes to be included as jurors in a new system of courts. Any citizen could appeal to these new courts against the decisions of the archons. Solon’s democratic reforms became the foundation on which later statesmen, who wanted to introduce democratic laws, based their policies. His reforms withstood the tyranny of Peisistratus, who was a younger associate of Solon, and who, presenting himself as the champion of the people, ruled as a tyrant, first from 559 to 556 bce and then from 546 to 528 bce. Even as a tyrant, however, Peisistratus kept the Solonian constitution in place. Finally, his sons were overthrown by Cleisthenes, who retained some of Solon’s changes and who is considered, due to his own revi- sions to the constitution in 508/507 bce, to be the real founder of Athenian democracy by most scholars. Like Solon, the first thing that Cleisthenes did was to modify the social structure of Attica. Bypassing the earlier four Ionian tribes which had been based on kinship, Cleisthenes reorganized the people of Attica into ten new tribes based on demes, or place of resi- dence. Attica was divided into 139 demes; these demes were classified as belonging to the coast, to an inland area, or to the city. The demes or locali- ties of the coast were divided into 10 groups or trittyes and the same was done with the inland and the city demes. One group or trittyes of demes from each region was assigned to one of the 10 new tribes. So each of the ten tribes was made up of three trittyes and through the trittyes of any- where from six to twenty-one demes. Thus, the new tribes were dispersed over the entire geographical area of the polis. It was on the basis of these new tribes that the membership of citizens from all over Attica to Athens’s central political institutions was organized. ‘This was the first systematic attempt to establish binding institutional links between the centre and the periphery and incorporate all of Attica formally within the Athenian polis. The result was less the restructuring of an old political community than M01_SHEF69343_02_SE_M01.indd 17 12/06/2018 11:27  18 Chapter 1 the creation of a new one’.10 Thus, Cleisthenes was the one responsible for integrating all the people who lived in Attica into one political com- munity. By opening the highest political offices to all citizens, he made them feel that they were all a part of the same body. We will come to know more about his political reforms when we discuss the political institutions of Athenian democracy, in the next section. The following description of Athens’s main political organs will incorporate both Cleisthenes’s reforms as well as some of the changes made by later democratic leaders. POLITICAL INSTITUTIONS OF ATHENIAN DEMOCRACY Let us look more closely at some of the central political institutions of democratic Athens. At the forefront was the ekklesia, which it was the right and duty of every male Athenian citizen, who was over 20 years old, to attend. Citizenship was restricted to free born Athenian males, and out of a population of about 300,000 in Athens, not more than 50,000 would have been citizens. The quorum of the ekklesia was set at 6,000, and it met about 40 times in a year, which means that there was a session of the ekklesia after about every nine days. Of the 40 annual meetings, at least 10 were extremely important. Each such session was called the main meet- ing or the ekklesia kyria, ‘in which there was always a vote of confidence for the officers of the state, discussions on the price of corn which was set by the state, the taking up of matters related to defence as well as to the confiscation of the property of various persons by the state’.11 About a century after the reforms of Cleisthenes, when democracy was restored in Athens after the oligarchic coup failed in 403 bce, payment was also introduced for attending the meetings of the ekklesia and each citizen was paid around three obols (approximately one day’s earnings for manual labour) for attending. Five days notice had to be given for a scheduled meeting of the ekkle- sia. Along with this notice, a placard announcing the proposals to be discussed at the meeting had to be put up in the agora (marketplace). On the day of the meeting, some police officers would descend on the market- place with long ropes, dipped in red colouring, in their hands. With these ropes they would try to herd in all the citizens who were delaying going to the assembly. If a citizen got red colour on his clothes, he would be fined for attending the meeting late. The citizens at the assembly voted on the laws being proposed, or the policy being decided. A proposal would be announced, say, a proposition to increase the garrison of the allied city of Byzantium. After the proposal was introduced, the herald would ask loudly, ‘Who wishes to speak?’ After that, it was open to anyone and eve- ryone to come up to the bema (podium) to put forth his views on the matter M01_SHEF69343_02_SE_M01.indd 18 12/06/2018 11:27  The Greek City-State 19 at hand, ‘When it is something to do with the government of the country that is to be debated, the man who gets up to advise them may be a builder or equally well a blacksmith or a shoemaker, merchant or ship owner, rich or poor, of good family or none.’12 The Athenians saw free speech as inte- gral to the proper functioning of their democracy. Not only was Athenian democracy based on isegoria—an equal opportunity to speak given to all citizens, irrespective of their status—but democracy in Athens also allowed parrhesia—frank and critical speech—to all its citizens.13 Whenever an important motion was being discussed in the assembly, there would usu- ally be many speakers, both supporting and opposing the motion. Soon there would be a demand for closure through a vote and voting would take place by a show of hands. This is how important issues of war and peace, treaties with other city-states, as well as matters of domestic policy were decided by the Athenian citizens. Decisions of the assembly were recorded and published, and the more important ones were even carved in stone tablets, several of which have survived. There were many mechanisms set in place to ensure that the citizens took the proceedings of the assembly seriously. The rules demanded that speakers stay on the subject at hand, and not slander anyone. Breaking this rule meant having to pay a penalty. There was also the interesting mechanism of graphe paranomon, which was a suit, or an accusation against a bill or proposal which was contrary to the law. If the assembly passed this accusation against any leader or against any of its members, that person would have to pay a fine. It was important that the deliberations of the assembly were conducted carefully, especially since it was an extremely powerful body. Along with passing laws and policymaking, the assembly also had the power to hear charges of eisangelia, which was an accusation of crimes against the state. At each ekklesia kyria, any citizen could bring charges of treason against any official or a private citizen. To bring these charges, no prior permission from the boule was needed. In the later years of Athenian democracy, from 403 bce to 322 bce, the Assembly prosecuted some 30 generals on charges of eisangelia.14 The second important political institution in Athens was the boule or the council, which was permanently in session throughout the year, and which was responsible both for preparing the agenda of each session of the assembly, as well as for implementing the decisions taken at these ses- sions. The council consisted of 500 citizens, with 50 citizens (all over 30 years of age) being assigned to it every year from each of the 10 tribes. Each group of 50 from a particular tribe acted as a standing committee or prytaneis of the boule for 36 consecutive days. This group of 50 was respon- sible for the work of the boule for those days. On each of those 36 days, one out of those 50 would be chosen by lot to become the chairman of the boule for that day, and would preside over its meetings on that day. If there was M01_SHEF69343_02_SE_M01.indd 19 12/06/2018 11:27  20 Chapter 1 a meeting of the ekklesia set for that day as well, then he would also preside over that meeting. No citizen could serve on the boule more than two times in his lifetime. Anyone wanting to be a member of the boule had to be approved first by his deme. The demarch or head of the deme, who himself was chosen by lot for a year’s term, together with the deme’s assembly which met at least once a year, would consider his demesmen for member- ship to the boule. If there were more candidates than the deme’s allocation, then the members of the boule from that deme were chosen by lottery. Membership to the council was, however, restricted to the first three prop- erty classes. The boule set the agenda of the assembly. Mostly, no proposal could be discussed in the ekklesia unless it had already been vetted and debated in the Boule. The draft proposals or probouleumata of the boule were ‘either in the form of recommendations or simply as open questions for the assembly to decide on’.15 Decisions taken at the assembly were recorded as decisions of the boule and the assembly, for example in the form of ‘Resolution of the boule and the Demos’. The boule was helped in its executive functions by magistrates, and there were as many as 600 of them in Athens, each appointed for an annual term. The most important magistrates were the ten generals or the strategoi, appointed annually; one from each tribe. Each tribe selected its own general and there was no bar on repeated appointments of the same person for generalship. Pericles, for example, was a strategoi continuously from 443 bce to 429 bce. Since Athens was almost always at war, the strategoi were very important officials. About 90 other magistrates were also elected, including the most important financial officers and some religious functionaries. The other 500 magistrates—the superintendents of the market and of weights and measures, those responsible for the maintenance of roads and for cleaning the streets, those in charge of the prisons, the record keepers, etc.—were chosen by lottery, and usually worked in committees of ten, with one member from each tribe. One particular magistracy could be held only once in a lifetime, and all magistrates had to submit to an audit of their euthynai (accounts) on leaving office. Under this procedure, auditors looked at the accounts of the funds under the officer, and brought charges of corruption, if any. If the officer was convicted, he had to pay back 10 times the amount that he had defrauded. Like the assembly, the Athenian court system allowed for a maximum of participation by the citizens. The courts were known as the dikasteria and the jurors who served in them were the dikasts. Under Cleisthenes’s reforms, every year 6000 Athenian citizens aged 30 or over were chosen and registered as a pool of jurors. These 6,000 were chosen by lot from those willing to stand, 600 being selected from each tribe. The majority of the jurors, after the introduction of pay for the dikasts in 451 bce, actually M01_SHEF69343_02_SE_M01.indd 20 12/06/2018 11:27  The Greek City-State 21 came from the poorer classes. The courts ranged in size from 201 to 501 jurors to even larger sizes depending on the kind of case being heard. There were basically 10 kinds of courts differentiated by the type of offences they could hear. Each of these 10 courts was assigned 600 dikasts, and on the days on which one particular kind of court was in session, the dikasts assigned to it would turn up at dawn, and the court would begin as soon as the required number of jurors had turned up. These courts were in session for about 200 days in a year. At each session, the petitioner and the defendant were assigned an equal amount of time to make their case; there were no lawyers in the Athenian system. The jury heard both sides but did not deliberate. The members of the jury would, after listening to both sides, cast their vote anonymously.16 Finally, the nine archons and the Areopagus continued from earlier times, but their powers were much curtailed. From 487/486 bce, the archons began to be chosen by lot from a list of 500, put forward by the tribes, and this made their position weaker. They were left with some judicial duties and the Areopagus, of which they still became members after their year was over, became a body with mainly religious duties. By the reforms of 460–452 bce, the Areopagus lost its powers of the scrutiny of and control over office holders, such powers being transferred to the assembly. The archonship was also opened to the zeugitai class in 457 bce. THE SOCIOLOGICAL BASIS OF ATHENIAN DEMOCRACY It has often been pointed out that when, in a population of 250,000 to 300,000, about 80,000 to 100,000 were slaves, 25,000 were metics or resident aliens with no political rights, not to mention all the Athenian women who were not given any rights, and only up to a maximum of 50,000 Athenian males were considered citizens, it is difficult to call such a system demo- cratic. The non-participation of the majority of the population cancels out the active participation and self-rule of a minority of the population. Even if we accept that Athens was a democracy in comparison with the form of government prevalent in other city-states, the received opinion is that it was slavery that was the basis of this ancient democracy. Both Hannah Arendt and the Marxists, for example, agree on this one fact, although one views it positively and the other negatively. For Arendt, since the slaves did all the work, ordinary Greek citizens could remove themselves from the sphere of production and devote their energies to politics, the life of action. Labour confines us to the realm of necessity; the slaves made it possible for Athenian citizens to do something more reflective of human freedom, that is, political action. Marx and Engels decried this same fact; M01_SHEF69343_02_SE_M01.indd 21 12/06/2018 11:27  22 Chapter 1 the slaves did all the work and the citizens, specially the richer ones, reaped all the fruits thereof. For Marx and Engels furthermore, it is labour that expresses all human creativity, and so the Greeks lost out not only because of inequality, but also because they were idle. Against both these positions, E.M. Wood puts forward her interesting thesis that it was the ordinary peasant citizens and the craftsmen citizens who formed the basis of Athenian democracy. Wood convincingly shows how the ordinary Greek citizen was a farmer or craftsman, who had to do his own manual work himself. When Solon came to power in 594 bce, many of the farmers were, as we have already seen earlier, in debt-bond- age to large landowners, and Solon laid the foundations of Athenian democracy by his one sweeping reform of abolishing debt-bondage. Wood suggests that debt bondage be interpreted not only as bonded labour because of unpaid debts, but as many other forms of tributary labour as well. Due to this reform, by the 5th century, the Athenian land tenure sys- tem was characterized by a mass of small independent producers.17 These small farmers who lived in the villages of Attica, did own one or two slaves, but that did not enable them to earn their living without doing any work themselves. These citizen farmers and craftsmen had to work quite hard at cultivating their farms, or at their crafts, to support their families. They also had to find the time to attend the meetings of the assembly and the sessions of the courts. One of the reasons why payment for attending the assembly was introduced in later years, both for the dikasts as well as assembly members, was because, for these ordinary citizens, taking a day off from work to fulfil their political duties meant a loss of their earnings. It was to encourage these small farmers to be part of Athenian democracy that payment was introduced. ‘The Athenian countryman had a close and direct relationship with the city, he voted in its assembly, bought and sold in its markets, took part in its religious festivals, sued in its courts, had the same political rights and obligations—including that of military service— as the urban population.’18 Here we must also point out the bearing of the Athenian citizen army on the kind of democracy that existed in Athens. If every citizen in Athens could attend the ekklesia and discuss and vote on matters of state, every citizen over 18 years of age was also to serve in the army. The Athenian army was a citizen army. Those who fought for Athens—and we have to remember that Athens was almost always at war—were citizens, and not the slaves or the women. We have seen earlier that Solon’s classification of Athenians into different property groups foregrounded a citizen’s ability to serve in the army. Those who could provide a horse were the cavalry- men of the army, belonging to the hippies class and citizens of the zeugitai class, who could provide their own armour, were the hoplites or the infan- trymen of the army. The thetes, who were the poorer citizens, who made M01_SHEF69343_02_SE_M01.indd 22 12/06/2018 11:27  The Greek City-State 23 up more than half of the citizen-population of the city-state, had not the resources to be either cavalrymen or infantrymen. Instead, they manned the triremes or the ships, which formed the backbone of the Athenian navy. If 9,000 Athenian hoplites fought against the Persians at Marathon, the sea battle of Salamis in 480 bce saw the use of 180 Athenian triremes, with at least 200 men being needed to man each trireme. Athens ran the Delian League on the basis of its all powerful navy, and this navy would not have been able to function without the ordinary rowers of the triremes. If these rowers, comprising of thetes, were the basis of the might of the Athenian empire, they had to have a say in the decisions of this empire, which they did through their role in the assembly and the dikasteria. It was during these years that Athens became so powerful that its imperial behaviour sparked off a war with Sparta in 459 bce. The second Peloponnesian War between Sparta and Athens lasted for nearly 30 years, from 431 bce to 404 bce, ending in Athens’s defeat, for which it was its democratic regime that was held responsible. So, according to many scholars, including Wood, it is not true to say that politics in Athens was the preserve of the rich and that democracy was a pure sham. There really was wide spread participation in politics, irrespective of one’s class position. Irrespective of one’s ‘ancestry, educa- tion, or wealth’, that is, in spite of not belonging to ‘the old and new upper classes’,19 any Athenian male citizen could express his opinion at any giv- en time, on any subject. Politics, in Athens, however, was the preserve of men. Women were cloistered and kept indoors. It is said that a girl would not recognize her grown-up brother because women and men occupied, and grew up in different spaces in the house. Women looked after the home and the men looked after the affairs of the city. Athenian men lived a public life, spending all their time in the gymnasia (exercise halls), the agora and in the ekklesia with other men. The private sphere was looked down upon, and even the emotion of love or eros denoted, not a relation- ship between a man and a woman, but a homosexual relation between an