We can judge the significance of the Athenian definition only by comparing it to democracy as we understand it today. While we have to recognize the severe limitations of Athenian democracy, there are also ways in which it far exceeds our own. This is true of procedures such as sortition or direct democracy, with ordinary citizens, and not just representatives, making decisions in assemblies and juries. But even more important is the effect of democracy on relations between classes. It is true that modern democracy, like the ancient, is a system in which people are citizens regardless of status or class. But if class makes no (legal) difference to citizenship in either case, in modern democracy the reverse is also true: citizenship makes little difference to class. This was not and could not be so in ancient Greece, where political rights had far-reaching effects on the relations between rich and poor.
We have already encountered the peasant-citizen, whose political rights had wider implications. Peasants have been the predominant producing classes throughout much of history, and an essential feature of their condition has been the obligation to forfeit part of their labour to someone who wields superior force. Peasants have been in possession of land, either as owners or as tenants; but they have had to transfer surplus labour to landlords and states, in the form of labour services, rents or taxes. The appropriating classes which have made these claims on them have been able to do so because they have possessed not only land but privileged access to coercive military, political and judicial power. They have possessed what has been called ‘politically constituted property’.11 The military and political powers of lordship in feudal Europe, for instance, were at the same time the power to extract surpluses from peasants. If feudal lords and serfs had been politically and juridically equal, they would not, by definition, have been lords and serfs, and there would have been no feudalism.
This type of relationship, and even patronage (such as would exist in Rome), was absent in democratic Athens. Its absence certainly had the effect of encouraging the enslavement of non-Greeks. But it is, again, important to keep in mind that the majority of Athenian citizens worked for a living, mainly as farmers or craftsmen, and that citizenship in Athens precluded a whole range of legally and politically dependent conditions which throughout history have compelled direct producers to forfeit surplus labour to their masters and rulers. This is not to say that the rich in Athens had no advantages over the poor – though the gap between rich and poor was very much narrower in Athens than in ancient Rome. The point is rather that the possession of political rights made an enormous difference, because it affected how, and even whether, the rich could exploit the poor.
Here lies the great difference between ancient and modern democracy. Today, there is a system of appropriation that does not depend on legal inequalities or the inequality of political rights. It is the system we call capitalism, a system in which appropriating and producing classes can be free and equal under the law, where the relation between them is supposed to be a contractual agreement between free and equal individuals, and where even universal suffrage is possible without fundamentally affecting the economic powers of capital. The power of exploitation in capitalism can coexist with liberal democracy, which would have been impossible in any system where exploitation depended on a monopoly of political rights. The reason this is possible is that capitalism has created new, purely economic compulsions: the propertylessness of workers – or, more precisely, their lack of property in the means of production, the means of labour itself – which compels them to sell their labour power in exchange for a wage simply in order to gain access to the means of labour and to obtain the means of subsistence; and also the compulsions of the market, which regulate the economy and enforce certain imperatives of competition and profit-maximization.
So, both capital and labour can have democratic rights in the political sphere without completely transforming the relation between them in a separate economic sphere. In fact, it is only in capitalism that there is a separate economic sphere, with its own imperatives, and so it is only in capitalism that democracy can be confined to a separate political domain. It is also only in capitalism that so much of human life has been put outside the reach of democratic accountability, regulated instead by market imperatives and the requirements of profit, the commodification that affects all aspects of life, not just in the workplace but everywhere. Citizenship today, in the conditions of capitalism, may be more inclusive, but it simply cannot mean as much to ordinary citizens as it meant to Athenian peasants and craftsmen – even in the more benign forms of capitalism which have moderated the effects of market imperatives. Athenian democracy had many great short comings, but in this respect, it went beyond our own.
In one other respect, Athenian democracy was no less imperfect than is today’s most powerful democracy. The commitment to civic freedom and equality among citizens at home did not extend to relations with other states. Athens increasingly exploited its growing power to impose imperial hegemony on allied city-states, largely for the purpose of extracting tribute from them. The Athenian empire was, to be sure, shaped and limited by the democracy at home. Imperial expansion was not driven by the interests of a landed aristocracy, and the Athenians often displaced local oligarchies in dependent city-states, establishing democracies friendly to Athens. Nor, while commercial interests were certainly at work, was the Athenian empire a mercantile project. The imperial mission was, in the first instance, to compensate for domestic agricultural deficiencies in order to ensure the food supply by controlling sea routes for the import of grain. This project was certainly a costly one, requiring ever-increasing revenues from tribute to maintain the Athenian navy; but the social property relations underlying the democracy ensured that Athens never established a territorial empire, as the Romans would do. While Roman peasant soldiers, as we shall see, would be subject to years of service far away from home, leaving their properties vulnerable to expropriation by aristocratic landowners, Athenian military ventures were strictly limited by agricultural cycles and the needs of free peasant soldiers returning home to work their farms. Yet however limited their imperial objectives may have been, the Athenians could be spectacularly brutal in pursuit of their aims; and nothing in their democratic culture precluded such brutality.
The two faces of Athenian democracy would be eloquently captured by the historian, Thucydides, in two of the most famous passages in his History of the Peloponnesian War. In Pericles’s Funeral Oration, the historian puts in the mouth of the great democratic leader a speech extolling, among other things, the virtues of civic equality. In Athens, Pericles suggests, inequalities between rich and poor, the strong and the weak, are tempered by law and democratic citizenship. In the Melian Dialogue, the Athenians, in debate with a recalcitrant city-state that refuses the status of tributary ally, are made to express with unadorned ruthlessness the imperial principle that ‘right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.’
The Evolution of Political Theory
Political theory has been defined here as the systematic application of critical reason to interrogate political principles, raising questions not only about good and bad forms of government but even about the grounds on which we make such judgments. It asks the most fundamental questions about the source and justification of moral and political standards. Do standards of justice, for instance, exist by nature, or are they simply human conventions? In either case, what, if anything, makes them binding? Are the differences between rulers and subjects, masters and slaves, based on natural inequalities, or have human beings who are naturally equal become unequal as a result of human practices and customs? These moral and political questions have inevitably raised even more fundamental issues. In fact, the tradition of Western philosophy emerged in ancient Greece in large part out of debates that were in the first instance political. In Athens, political debate opened up a whole range of philosophical questions discussed ever since by Western philosophers: not only ethical questions about the standards of good and bad but questions about the nature and foundations of knowledge, about the relation between knowledge and morality, about human nature, and the relation between human beings and the natural order or the divine.
It is easy to take these forms of thought for granted as emerging more or less naturally out of the human condition and