But we need to look more closely at the polis, and especially the democracy, to understand why this new mode of political thinking took the form that it did, and why it raised certain kinds of questions that had not been raised before, which would thereafter set the agenda for the long tradition of Western political theory. There will be more in the next chapter about Athenian society and politics, as the specific context in which the Greek classics were written. For our purposes here, a few general points need to be highlighted about the conditions in which political theory originated.
The polis represented not only a distinctive political form but a unique organization of social relations. The state in other high civilizations typically embodied a relation between rulers and subjects that was at the same time a relation between appropriators and producers. The Chinese philosopher, Mencius, once wrote that ‘Those who are ruled produce food; those who rule are fed. That this is right is universally recognized everywhere under Heaven.’ This principle nicely sums up the essence of the relation between rulers and producers which characterized the most advanced ancient civilizations.
In these ancient states, there was a sharp demarcation between production and politics, in the sense that direct producers had no political role, as rulers or even as citizens. The state was organized to control subject labour, and it was above all through the state that some people appropriated the labour of others or its products. Office in the state was likely to be the primary means of acquiring great wealth. Even where private property in land was fairly well developed, state office was likely to be the source of large property, while small property generally carried with it obligations to the state in the form of tax, tribute or labour service. It remained true of China, for instance, throughout its long imperial history that large property and great wealth were associated with office, and the imperial state did everything possible – if not always successfully – to maintain that connection and to impede the autonomous development of powerful propertied classes.
The ancient ‘bureaucratic’ state, then, constituted a ruling body superimposed upon and appropriating from subject communities of direct producers, above all peasants. Although such a form had existed in Greece, both there and in Rome a new form of political organization emerged which combined landlords and peasants in one civic and military community. While others, notably the Phoenicians and Carthaginians, may have lived in city-states in some ways comparable to the Greek polis or the Roman Republic, the very idea of a civic community and citizenship, as distinct from the principles of rule by a superimposed state apparatus, derive from the Greeks and the Romans.
The idea of a peasant-citizen was even further removed from the experience of other ancient states. The role of slavery in Greece and Rome will be discussed in subsequent chapters; but, for the moment, it is important to acknowledge the distinctive political role of producing classes, peasants and craftsmen, and their unique relation to the state. In the Greek polis and the Roman Republic, appropriators and producers in the citizen body confronted one another directly as individuals and as classes, as landlords and peasants, not primarily as rulers and subjects. Private property developed more autonomously and completely, separating itself more thoroughly from the state. A new and distinctive dynamic of property and class relations was differentiated out from the traditional relations of (appropriating) state and (producing) subjects.
The special characteristics of these states are reflected in the classics of ancient political thought. When Plato, for example, attacked the democratic polis of Athens, he did so by opposing to it a state-form that departed radically from precisely those features most unique and specific to the Greek polis and which bore a striking resemblance in principle to certain non-Greek states. In the Republic, Plato proposes a community of rulers superimposed upon a ruled community of producers, primarily peasants, a state in which producers are individually ‘free’ and in possession of property, not dependent on wealthier private proprietors; but, although the rulers own no private property, producers are collectively subject to the ruling community and compelled to transfer surplus labour to their non-producing masters. Political and military functions belong exclusively to the ruling class, according to the traditional separation of military and farming classes, which Plato and Aristotle both admired. In other words, those who are ruled produce food, and those who rule are fed. Plato no doubt drew inspiration from the Greek states that most closely adhered to these principles – notably Sparta and the city-states of Crete; but it is likely that the model he had more specifically in mind was Egypt – or, at least, Egypt as the Greeks, sometimes inaccurately, understood it.
Other classical writers defended the supremacy of the dominant classes in less radical and more specifically Greco-Roman ways. In particular, the doctrine of the ‘mixed constitution’ – which appears in Plato’s Laws and figures prominently in the writings of Aristotle, Polybius, and Cicero – reflects a uniquely Greek and Roman reality and the special problems faced by a dominant class of private proprietors in a state that incorporates rich and poor, appropriators and producers, landlords and peasants, into a single civic and military community. The idea of the mixed constitution proceeded from the Greco-Roman classification of constitutions – in particular, the distinction among government by the many, the few, or only one: democracy, oligarchy, monarchy. A constitution could be ‘mixed’ in the sense that it adopted certain elements of each. More particularly, rich and poor could be respectively represented by ‘oligarchic’ and ‘democratic’ elements; and the predominance of the rich could be achieved not by drawing a clear and rigid division between a ruling apparatus and subject producers, or between military and farming classes, but by tilting the constitutional balance towards oligarchic elements.
In both theory and practice, then, a specific dynamic of property and class relations, distinct from the relations between rulers and subjects, was woven directly into the fabric of Greek and Roman politics. These relations generated a distinctive array of practical problems and theoretical issues, especially in the democratic polis. There were, of course, distinctive problems of social order in a society, like Athens, that lacked an unequivocally dominant ruling stratum whose economic power and political supremacy were coextensive and inseparable, a society where economic and political hierarchies did not coincide and political relations were less between rulers and subjects than among citizens. These political relations were played out in assemblies and juries, in constant debate, which demanded new rhetorical skills and modes of argumentation. Nothing could be taken for granted; and, not surprisingly, this was a highly litigious society, in which political discourse derived much of its method and substance from legal disputation, with all its predilection for hairsplitting controversy.
Greek political theorists were self-conscious about the uniqueness of their specific form of state, and they inevitably explored the nature of the polis and what distinguished it from others. They raised questions about the origin and purpose of the state. Having effectively invented a new identity, the civic identity of citizenship, they posed questions about the meaning of citizenship, who should enjoy political rights and whether any division between rulers and ruled existed by nature. They confronted the tension between the levelling identity of citizenship and the hierarchical principles of noble birth or wealth. Questions about law and the rule of law; about the difference between political organization based on violence or coercion and a civic community based on deliberation or persuasion; about human nature and its suitability (or otherwise) for political life – all of these questions were thrown up by the everyday realities of life in the polis.
In the absence of a ruling class whose ethical standards were accepted by the whole community as its governing principles, it was no longer possible to assume the eternity and inviolability of traditional norms. They were inevitably subjected to theoretical scrutiny and challenge. Defenders of traditional hierarchies were obliged to respond not by repeating old proverbs or reciting epics of aristocratic hero-kings but by constructing theoretical arguments to meet theoretical challenges. Questions arose about the origin of moral and political principles and what makes them binding. From the same political realities emerged the humanistic principle that ‘man is the measure of all things’, with all the new questions that this principle entailed. So, for instance, the Sophists (Greek philosophers