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The Classical Conception of Citizenship

Ashok Acharya

The polis, properly speaking, is not the city-state in its physical location; it
is the organization of the people as it arises out of acting and speaking
together, and its true space lies between people living together for this
purpose, no matter where they happen to be.

Hannah Arendt, 1958

Introduction

In the Suppliant Women, written probably around 422 BC, Euripides—one

of the great Greek tragedy playwrights living in fifth-century BC Athens—
captures some aspects of the conventional contrast between one man's rule
(understood here as tyranny) and the rule of the many. A messenger from
Thebes, as Euripides recounts, appears before Theseus of Athens and asks
who the master of the land, whom he should give the message of King
Creon to, is. Theseus responds by saying: ‘To begin with, stranger, you
started your speech on a false note by asking for the master here. The city is
not ruled by a single man but is free. The people rule, and offices are held
by yearly turns: they do not assign the highest honours to the rich, but the
poor also have an equal share.’ Unimpressed, the Theban messenger
engages Theseus by arguing that the city he comes from is ‘ruled by one
man and not by a rabble. There is no one to fool the city with flattering
speech and lead it this way and that to suit his own advantage. And anyway
how can the common people, if they cannot even make a speech properly,
know the right way to guide a city?’ Not to let go of the wordy contest,
Theseus deepens the contrast by suggesting that there is ‘nothing more
hostile to a city than a tyrant. In the first place, there are no common laws
in such a city, and one man, keeping the law in his own hands, holds sway.
This is unjust. When the laws are written, both the powerless and the rich
have equal access to justice, and the little man, if he has right on his side,
defeats the big man. Freedom consists in this: “Who has a good proposal
and wants to set it before the city?’” (Euripides 2004: 154-55). The contrast
between the injustice of a tyrant's rule and the chaos involved in the rule of
the ‘rabble’ in a democracy is hard to miss. For many of democracy's
imperfections, one of the first that needed a robust defence during a time
when the idea and its practices, albeit imperfect, emerged, was: How do we
stand up to secure a form of collective self-government that
was intrinsically good?

Many others, such as Herodotus, Plutarch, Thucydides, Demosthenes and

Aristotle, have written or commented on some aspect of the Athenian
democratic experience that roughly dates back to the sixth-fourth
century BC. As scholars pore over the available sources, dig for new ones,
debate the authenticity of the available sources, and try new lines of
interpretation in order to reconstruct that ancient democratic experience,
most agree that democracy in ancient Greece was a novel experience and
one that gives us—we, the citizens of contemporary democracy—some
useful lessons to learn from. While we hold in abeyance our own views on
what we need to learn from the Greeks, we do need to engage the claim on
whether ancient Greece was the first place where democracy took root.
What explains the popularity of the Greek, or the classical, model? Can the
attention that the Greek experience has drawn in Western literature be
attributed primarily to the wealth of scholarship surrounding the origins of
democracy? Or has our own understanding of democratic citizenship been
so warped that we have not expanded the imaginary of democracy to
include other valuable experiences in other places? These questions assume
an enhanced significance in the present century, when we find ourselves
more open to sharing political knowledge—especially on the comparative
evaluations of democratic politics—than before, when the journey of
democracy was widely assumed to be a one-way flow—from the West to the
rest.

There is no doubt today that the Greek experiment was not the sole
narrative of the early origins of democracy; however, it certainly was
unique. There are other parallels to the Greek experience, narratives of
different places in ancient times. For instance, we know that democracy in
some form flourished in ancient Egypt and India, and there are good
reasons to unearth what we may find of value to compare and learn from
different sources. Perhaps at a later time such an exercise might help us to
better understand the trajectories of democracy as it has evolved in various
places, and how these might serve us to enrich our understanding and
explanation of the plural origins of democracy. Perhaps when we are able to
unearth all of that, and establish interrelationships across space in seeking
to decode the plural nature of such origins, would we rewrite much of the
uncritical, conventional accounts of democracy and citizenship today. This,
however, need not detain nor detract us any longer beyond flagging the
complex origins of democracy. We turn our attention, in what follows, to
how classical citizenship is captured both in theory and practice and the
lessons that we can learn from this account.

Classical Citizenship in Theory

The term ‘classical’ comes with a double bind: first, something which
denotes ideal or authoritative and is hence worthy of serious attention; and
second, it has reference to a particular period in history that in turn refers
to the ancient civilization, especially to Athens in the fifth and fourth
centuries BC and later to that of Rome (Pocock 1995: 29). One of the
paradoxes of the experience of democracy in ancient Athens is the fact that
while Athens was at the peak of this experimentation in actual practice, the
ancient Greek political philosophers, especially Plato and Aristotle, were
less inclined to consider democracy as a preferred regime in their works.

Aristotle

Aristotle was one of the first ancient political philosophers to chronicle the
democratic experiment in classical Greece. He draws from that experience
to frame his own conception of citizenship. Aristotle is famous for his
remark: ‘Man is by nature a political animal [zoon politikon]’. This was not
intended as a casual remark but encapsulates, on the contrary, a major
thrust of his political philosophy. At the core of the statement is an account
of the origins of political community or the polis—how it comes into being
for natural reasons and exists for the sake of the good life, which is the end
of the political community.

Nature, in Aristotle's usage, reflects the very process of evolution.

The polis, having grown out of natural partnerships such as the household
and the village, is natural because it fulfills the end to which human life
tends—self-sufficiency. All partnerships are natural in that they serve the
ends of self-sufficiency; however, the polis, or the city-state, ‘while coming
into being for the sake of living … exists for the sake of living well’ (Aristotle
1984: 1252b). As a form of political partnership, it is higher than other
forms of partnerships for it enables and directs us towards the good life.
Clearly, there is something else to nature that assigns the polis a higher
standing. For Aristotle, the answer lies in recognizing that the aim of the
good life of the polis is a natural end, its telos, and indeed the telos of all
associations prior to and smaller than the polis. This is why political
partnership is the highest form of partnership and the polis, Aristotle is
quick to add, is ‘prior by nature to the household and to each of us’. He
would go on to explain that ‘the whole must of necessity be prior to the part’
(ibid.: 1253a).

What set humans apart from other animals, according to Aristotle, are the
faculties of speech and reason (logos). Speech ‘serves to reveal the
advantageous and the harmful, and hence also the just and the unjust’, and
enables humans a perception of the good and the bad, the just and the
unjust, and other related objects of human judgement (Aristotle 1984:
1253a). These faculties predispose humans to deliberate upon their
flourishing (eudaimonia) as active partners engaged in the quest to realize
the political community. As such, the polis is greater than its parts, and its
citizens (polites). Citizenship is and must be geared towards the goals of
the polis. Aristotle, though, is aware of the diversity of the poleis (plural
of polis), and would make a case for a regime-differentiated understanding
of citizenship. That is, the nature of citizenship varies from regime to
regime, and citizenship is to be understood as largely regime-specific. In
other words, the requirements of citizenship in a democracy are different
from those required by, say, an oligarchy or aristocracy.

The Aristotelian conception of citizenship essentially hinges on what

Aristotle describes as ‘ruling and being ruled in turn’. The citizen in an
unqualified sense is defined by no other thing so much as ‘by sharing in
decision and office’ (Aristotle 1984: 1275a).

A citizen in the common sense is one who shares in ruling and being
ruled; but he differs in accordance with each regime. In the case of the
best regime, he is one who is capable of and intentionally chooses being
ruled and ruling with a view to the life in accordance with virtue (ibid.:
1283b, 84a).

This view is in contrast to the Platonic ideal in which ruling is a prerogative

of a distinct class. One needs to step down from this ideal, Aristotle may
insist, in order to accommodate the practice of sharing power among active
partners as equal citizens. But the universe of citizenship in a
Greek polis was restricted to adult males born to members of the same. In
most poleis there were a significant number of inhabitants who were not
accorded citizenship. Women, slaves and metis (of foreign origin)
comprised the excluded lot, and ironically constituted the majority in
any polis. What, then, justifies the political privilege of citizenship for the
adult males only? The idea of ‘ruling and being ruled in turn’, Aristotle
argued, must apply to ‘things advantageous’. He goes on to argue that
‘immediately from birth certain things diverge, some toward being ruled,
others toward ruling’ (1984: 1254a). For as the soul rules the body,
‘intellect’ rules over ‘appetite’; it is advantageous for both the body and the
appetite to be ruled by the soul and the intellect. This sets the tone for the
master-slave relationship, as one where the master is the ruler and the slave
the ruled. This relationship, Aristotle would contend, is not an equal one,
and the axiom of ‘ruling and being ruled in turn’ would only apply among
equals. Similarly, ‘the relation of male to female is by nature a relation of
superior to inferior and ruler to ruled’. The slave ‘participates in reason
only to the extent of perceiving it, but does not have it’ (ibid.: 1254b). In
Aristotle's exclusionary schema then,

the free person rules the slave, the male the female, and the man the
child in different ways. The parts of the soul are present in all, but they
are present in a different way. The slave is wholly lacking the
deliberative element; the female has it but it lacks authority; the child
has it but is incomplete (ibid.: 1260a).

It is important to notice that in building these relationships of inequality,

he is making a larger case for separating the household (oikos) from
the polis. By separating the work of the master from that of the slave and
man from woman, Aristotle's polis builds up a public sphere that belongs
only to adult males. How arbitrary is the distinction? As modern subjects,
we are most likely unconvinced by his arguments and take affront to the
arbitrariness of the distinctions employed. Is he only justifying the
prevalent convention of slave-owning, or is there more to it? Perhaps there
is a bit of conventionalism. And perhaps there is also a perceived need,
within the Aristotelian system, to free males from everyday chores and
thereby allow them more time to participate as active citizens.

Aristotle requires citizens to inculcate certain virtues that will prove crucial
in the pursuit of the good life. For him, human character is neither wholly
good nor wholly bad, and definitely not fixed at birth. Hence, without
proper laws and education, people are liable to degenerate in various ways.
Citizens need to have the right habits instilled in them, both by a regime of
education and by appropriate laws. Early on in The Politics, Aristotle claims
that ‘just as man is the best of the animals when completed, when separated
from law and adjudication he is the worst of all’ (1984: 1253a). Further on,
he would make a stronger case for the rule of law over the rule of men. In a
stronger sense, the rule of law better reflects the principle of ‘ruling and
being ruled in turn’, but the argument goes deeper when Aristotle suggests
that

one who asks law to rule, therefore, is asking god and intellect alone to
rule, while one who asks man adds the beast. Desire is a thing of this
sort; and spiritedness perverts rulers and best men. Hence law is
intellect without appetite (ibid.: 1287a).

Laws shape citizens’ characters, and education fosters a collective spirit.

Aristotle favours a state-sponsored education programme, which should be
common to all and is not to be introduced on a private basis. ‘Since there is
a single end for the city as a whole, it is evident that education must
necessarily be one and the same for all’ (1984: 1337a). This is a far cry from
our times; most liberal democracies allow the coexistence of both public
and private schools, even if the curriculum remains the same. Much of the
contemporary revival of civic republicanism is inspired by Aristotle, and it
is easy to understand why claims for a common education system with a
curriculum designed to inculcate in citizens some of the significant civic
virtues are being made. If education shapes characters in a desired way and
induces the cultivation of virtues, what brings together the citizens in
a polis and keeps them bonded are the associational ties of civic friendship
(philia). Ties of friendship do not run counter to the demands of justice in a
political community, but complement each other. What is more, they help
to arrive at harmonious agreements in the disputes that generate in a
diverse citizenry.

Aristotle's works on citizenship as a full-blown account in The Politics is

one of the earliest systematic attempts to theorize the subject. His
limitations apart, The Politics has inspired almost all successive scholars to
imagine and engage with the ideal of citizenship in their own times, most of
all in the modern period.

Classical Citizenship in Practice

Any serious, scholarly discussion of citizenship is held to be relatively
incomplete without an understanding of how not only the idea, but also the
practice of citizenship originated. Knowledge of the ancient practice
becomes invaluable, especially when the practice in question offers an
alternative or corrective to practices in contemporary times, as we debate
the continuing significance of our democratic lineages. We would get a
better sense of the idea of classical citizenship in practice if we turn our
attention chiefly to the working of the classical model of democracy in
Athens, although we need to be forewarned that it is only recently, say, in
the last couple of decades, that we have turned serious scholarly attention
towards a reconstruction of democracy in practice by piecing together
classical literature with archaeological discoveries.

Demos (people) was an expression to denote the collective existence of

citizens. Most accounts of citizenship are incomplete without reference to
the democratic poleis of ancient Greece. Democracy took many, many years
to take root in Athens and other poleis. It was a powerful practice; it was
powerful because it empowered the majority, who were poor. In giving
power to the people, it frightened the rich. This was a major revolution in
the collective life of a polis. Resonating with Aristotle's views to a large
extent, many scholars of ancient Greece judge how ‘[i]n ancient
democracies, as indeed in all poleis of whatever constitutional or
ideological hue, citizenship was construed and constructed actively, as a
participatory sharing’ (Cartledge 2007: 157).

The participatory sharing of power (or ‘ruling and being ruled in turn’)
grew out of the constitutional reforms carried out in the Athenian polis.
Two figures, Solon and Cleisthenes, loom large in ancient history, to whom
credit must go for having rescued Athens from tyranny and the reign of
the archons (aristocratic rulers), and initiating reforms that paved the way
for the evolution of democracy. Whereas Solon chiefly instituted reforms
aimed towards freeing the poor from debt and introducing a mixed
constitution whereby power could be shared between different social
classes, Cleisthenes brought about political reforms by reconstituting
the demes that made up the polis and in securing the allegiance of the
citizens towards the polis instead of the traditional loyalty to one's tribe.
The Athenian citizenry chiefly comprised of a large body of small
landholders, supported by the institution of slavery.

The democratic polis had three main institutions: the Assembly (or

the Ekklesia), the Council of 500, and the People's Court. The Assembly
(Ekklesia) was the regular gathering of adult male citizens to deliberate
upon and vote on decrees and laws that touched their lives, both public and
private, involving matters as diverse as taxes, war, treaties, religion, public
festivals, ostracism, and various other sundry matters. The Assembly
captured the spirit of isegoria—the equal right of every Athenian citizen,
irrespective of one's class background, to speak on issues of public
significance. All citizens were required to attend the Ekklesia, which met
roughly 40 times in a year. However, although the population of the
Athenian citizenry varied from 30,000 to 60,000 over the period of the
democratic polis, the actual attendance in the Ekklesia was roughly around
6,000-8,000 where the required quorum was 6,000. There could be
various reasons for this. One reason that perhaps explains this non-
participation may well be that it was easier for wealthy citizens to attend
meetings than it was for their poorer counterparts. Another reason could be
that those citizens who lived in the countryside and away from urban
clusters would have found it difficult to attend meetings at short notice
(Rhodes 2009: 65). However, those who did attend had the freedom to
raise any particular matter that they felt was of concern for the entire polis.

The Council of 500 (or Boule) effectively represented the government of

Athens. Its 500 members were drawn from the 10 demes (formed by
Cleisthenes), with each selecting 50 members by lot to the Council, who
served for a year. A citizen needed to be 30 years of age to be selected to the
Council, and then could be selected only twice in his lifetime. The Council
also had a President, rotated among members, and he was like the Chief
Executive Officer of Athens. The main function of the Council was to
prepare the agenda for the Assembly. Whereas each citizen could become a
member of the Council twice in his lifetime, he was paid for attending
meetings. Athenian democracy required every prospective member of the
Council, including other public offices, to undergo a public scrutiny by
citizens, in which they could be asked personal questions determining their
suitability to political office. The Council's agenda was usually controlled by
one of the demes, who divided the year into 10 parts. Each deme was also
required to rotate amongst its members the office of the President, and
Aristotle records in The Constitution of Athens that this effectively meant
that a President enjoyed the office for only one day and one night!

Participation in the Assembly and the Council essentially meant the

involvement of citizens in framing and passing decrees, which had more
immediate relevance than the framing of laws (nomos), the passing of
which involved other bodies such as Nomothetae and involved a longer and
complex procedure. Most scholars—except those who romanticize the
Athenian model—argue, however, that the participation of ordinary citizens
in the Ekklesia and Boule was more or less compromised by the domination
of citizens from aristocratic and wealthy backgrounds, besides the presence
of the demagogues who dominated proceedings.

In Solon's mixed constitution of sixth century BC, where power was shared

between the oligarchs, aristocrats and ordinary people (or the many who
were poor, referred to as the kakoi), the principle of democracy was
introduced not in the Council or the political offices, but in the courts. From
then on, the role of the courts has assumed a profound significance in
Athenian democracy. Later, as democracy took root, they would be known
as People's Courts in the fifth and fourth centuries BC. The People's Courts
(also known as Heliaea) were primarily responsible for the administration
of law, and were also sites for public trials (recall the famous trial of
Socrates). These courts had large juries with more than 200 jurors who
listened to oral arguments in both civil and criminal cases, as well as to
appeals made by citizens who were dissatisfied with the rulings of the
Assembly or the Council. Jurors were paid for their service, which allowed
poorer citizens to participate in the governance of their city.

Besides participation in the above institutions, which were thrown open to

all, citizens were also obligated to be conscripted for service in the army as
hoplites (heavy-armed infantry) if they had the means to buy their own
armoury as well as financially support the war efforts of the polis. In other
words, the obligations of citizenship involved serving the polis with ‘person
and property’. There has been some criticism of these practices, suggesting
that due to these obligations, the appropriate roles of citizenship were
understood differently by the rich and the poor. Cutting across class
differences, however, Athenian citizens related to each other as members of
a face-to-face community. Finley (1983) describes this pretty well:

This was not only a face-to-face society, it was also a Mediterranean

society in which people congregated out of doors, on market-days, on
numerous festive occasions, and all the time in the harbor and the town
square. Citizens were members of varied formal and informal groups—
the family and household, the neighbourhood or village, military and
naval units, occupational groups (farmers at harvest-time or urban
crafts which tended to concentrate in particular streets), upper-class
dining-clubs, innumerable private cult-associations. All provided
 opportunities for news and gossip, for discussion and debate, for the
continuing political education … (p. 82).

This depiction captures not only the nature of the Athenian community, but
also that of other cities. Depending on the types of regimes that each had,
there would be subtle differences between them. A large part of our analysis
has focused on Athens, chiefly because it symbolized the pinnacle of the
classical democratic experience, and also because it is written about more
than other poleis (except Sparta). As new material emerges on Athens and
life in the Greek polis, some of the earlier ‘romances’ of modern authors is
now being replaced by a more accurate, historically-sensitive balanced
analysis. Given this new interest and a newer approach, one more sober
and less romantic, we rethink what it is that we take as our lessons from the
classical model of citizenship, and how these help us evaluate contemporary
democratic practices.

Classical Citizenship: A Model for the Future?

As citizens in modern democracies, which are much larger than the

Greek poleis, we enjoy a few basic rights that we consider for the most part
inviolable. Modern liberal democracies bestow upon their citizens certain
rights, and also require a certain way of doing politics that is
institutionalized. Opposition and contestation are built into both the
electoral framework and the public space. We have political parties, interest
groups, more formal structures, associations and political processes that
were largely absent in the Greek polis. One could argue, for instance, that
citizens in Athens had ‘rights’ in a loose sense of being able to express
themselves in the Assembly or the courts or participate in public activities,
but most such ‘rights’ are to be understood in a different vein and certainly
not in the way we understand rights today (catalogued in the Constitution
and zealously guarded by the courts). By any stretch of the imagination, the
Greek polis was anything but ‘liberal’, although it was and still remains tied
to the democratic imagination.

One paradox of ancient Athens that remains unexplained is the trial and
execution of Socrates. Some regard this ‘as clear evidence of Athenian
democracy's moral turpitude’ (Ober 2008: 79), and certainly a denial of the
freedom to deserve a fair trial. Was this one of the reasons for Plato's anti-
democratic political philosophy? Whichever way we answer this, the fact
remains that Plato and Aristotle, both of whom defined the content of
ancient political philosophy, were sceptical of the inherent goodness of
democracy. It is difficult to explain how, when ancient Greece was
experimenting with novel democratic practices, including citizenship, of
course with all their limitations, the pinnacle of ancient Greek philosophy
epitomized in the works of Plato and Aristotle achieved its greatness
outside the realm of the democratic imagination. Perhaps one answer lies
in how both theory and practice, despite their differences and separation
from each other, took all too seriously the collective pursuit of the good life
in different directions.

What lessons do we as citizens of contemporary democracy take from the

classical conception of citizenship? For one, we are reminded of the selfless
service of ‘virtuous’ citizens to their political community. This has been the
stuff of current discussions on participatory, deliberative and republican
(each one is distinct from the other) conceptions of citizenship, and has
animated both political theorists and practitioners from Rousseau through
J. S. Mill and Tocqueville, to Hannah Arendt and others. At the heart of all
these different conceptions is a desire to reclaim for democratic life the
imperative of active citizenship.

Second, it is believed that some forms of accountability found to be lacking

in contemporary forms of electoral democracy can be revived by looking
back at the ancient model, and best reworked at the local levels of
governance. Novel practices of accountability (such as social audits or
democratic audits), the sine qua non of any true democracy, need to be
encouraged outside the realm of formal political structures and institutions.

However, in a globalizing world, there may well be limits to the use of the
ancient model to undertake cosmopolitan projects. As responsible citizens
of an increasingly interconnected world with a greater perception of
responsibility towards the needs of those who live beyond the borders of
our political communities, we would find it difficult, if not impossible, to
balance our interests of active citizenship, both at the local and global
levels. So a more realistic assessment of the classical conception of
citizenship may be called for. But the idea of the bounded polis with an
active citizenship body will keep alive the democratic imagination for a long
time.