Dr Peter Critchley The Ideal of Polis Democracy

THE IDEAL OF POLIS DEMOCRACY

2004

Dr Peter Critchley

(Developed further in The City of Reason vol 2 The Philosophical

Ideal of the City by Peter Critchley).

Critchley, P., 2004. The Ideal of Polis Democracy. [e-book] Available through: Academia website
<http://mmu.academia.edu/PeterCritchley/Papers

Critchley, P., 2004. The Ideal of Polis Democracy In : P. Critchley, The City of Reason vol 2 The
Philosophical Ideal of the City. [e-book] Available through: Academia website
<http://mmu.academia.edu/PeterCritchley/Books

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Dr Peter Critchley is a philosopher, writer and tutor with a first degree in the field of the
Social Sciences (History, Economics, Politics and Sociology) and a PhD in the field of
Philosophy, Ethics and Politics. Peter works in the tradition of Rational Freedom, a tradition
which sees freedom as a common endeavour in which the freedom of each individual is
conceived to be co-existent with the freedom of all. In elaborating this concept, Peter has
written extensively on a number of the key thinkers in this ‘rational’ tradition (Plato, Aristotle,
Aquinas, Dante, Spinoza, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Habermas). Peter is currently
engaged in an ambitious interdisciplinary research project entitled Being and Place. The
central theme of this research concerns the connection of place and identity through the
creation of forms of life which enable human and planetary flourishing in unison. Peter tutors
across the humanities and social sciences, from A level to postgraduate research. Peter
particularly welcomes interest from those not engaged in formal education, but who wish to
pursue a course of studies out of intellectual curiosity. Peter is committed to bringing
philosophy back to its Socratic roots in ethos, in the way of life of people. In this conception,
philosophy as self-knowledge is something that human beings do as a condition of living the
examined life. As we think, so shall we live. Living up to this philosophical commitment, Peter
offers tutoring services both to those in and out of formal education.

The subject range that Peter offers in his tutoring activities, as well as contact details, can be
seen at http://petercritchley-e-akademeia.yolasite.com
The range of Peter’s research activity can be seen at
http://mmu.academia.edu/PeterCritchley

Peter sees his e-akademeia project as part of a global grassroots learning experience and
encourages students and learners to get in touch, whatever their learning need and level.

1
Dr Peter Critchley The Ideal of Polis Democracy

THE IDEAL OF POLIS DEMOCRACY

The developments of 450 BC are instructive. With the most generous expansion of
democracy for free native Athenians, with individuals now being paid for the
performance of civic duties for the first time in history, came further restrictions upon
the requirements of citizenship. Whereas previously just one’s father had had to be a
citizen in order for a free person to become a citizen, now both parents had to be
citizens. This development makes the point that there is no necessary relation
between democracy and citizenship and that both categories are politically contested
and this struggle determines the balance between inclusion and exclusion according
to wealth and power. The high point of democracy as civic participation was also the
high point of the exclusiveness of citizenship. Why this should be so is easily
understood: ‘part of the idea may have been a selfish desire to limit citizenship to as
few people as possible, now that it brought greater material advantages’ (Simon
Hornblower Simon Hornblower, The Greek World, 479-323 B. C. (London:
Methuen, 1983:44-5). The result was that it ‘made the Athenian citizen body into a
closed group, inaccessible from outside, which it remained until the late third century
BC’ (J. K. Davies, Democracy and Classical Greece (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press,
1983), 73).

In terms of physical power, Persia should have been able to destroy the Greek city-
states easily. Xerxes demanded to know why the Greeks were willing to resist against
such apparently irresistible force. Demaratus explained that ‘poverty is my country’s
inheritance from of old, but valor she won for herself by wisdom and the strength of
law. By her valour Greece now keeps both poverty and bondage at bay’ (Herodotus,
The Histories, trans. Aubrey De Selincourt (New York: Penguin Books, 1973:475).
How could a country that idealised freedom raise soldiers who were strong and
obedient, Xerxes asked. ‘They are free – yes’, Demaratus replied, ‘but not entirely
free; for they have a master, and that master is Law, which they fear much more than
their subjects fear you’ (Herodotus, The Histories, trans. Aubrey De Selincourt (New
York: Penguin Books, 1973:471). Demaratus’ words celebrate aristocratic valor and
wisdom committed to the protection of the civic community from external bondage
and internal liberty as achieved through the submission of all to the rule of law.

2
Dr Peter Critchley The Ideal of Polis Democracy

Throughout the centuries, Athens functioned as the ideal model of civic freedom and
democracy. This model is a very idealised portrayal of Athens at a certain time. The
which was dominant in ancient Athens was one of aristocratic freedom. At the time,
the intellectual and political elites of Athens in the late fifth century were
reactionaries, vociferous critics of democracy.

There is a tendency to think of the polis as having an exclusively urban character.

This is encouraged by the definition of the polis as a city-state and the conception of
the city as an urban environment. The truth is that the ancient polis possessed an
intrinsically rural character. Certainly, the polis did have its urban centres. Whilst
many citizens lived near the agora, most Athenians lived scattered over the
countryside and came to urban centre only to do political, religious or other business.
And Athens was the most urban of the city-states. Other places had a much smaller
proportion of its inhabitants engaged in mercantile, artisanal, intellectual, and similar
activities. The point is that Greek citizenship, in both its celebrated Athenian and
Spartan forms, is not an exclusively urban product but inheres in the countryside.
Many of the key characteristics of citizenship which have endured throughout the
ages reflect geographical considerations that are independent of the political
organisation of the polis.

And not only was citizenship not universal, it was not egalitarian either. Citizenship
developed along hierarchical lines, arranged according to the ownership of land,
proper tribal membership, or regional residence. In other words, distinctions of birth
and/or registration were built into citizenship. (5/6). The introduction and
development of citizenship proceeded through rulers having to distinguish the loyal
and worthy members of the community from the rest. With the expansion of new
forms of wealth, this became an ever more pressing issue. Rulers therefore needed to
know these details in order to determine who was to be given citizen status and hence
receive the full benefits of city-state membership.

Pericles, from the traditional nobility, and Sophocles, the son of a wealthy
arms manufacturer, throughout the rise of Athens to becoming an imperial and urban
slave power (Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War (trans. Rex Warner), esp. 2.34-65;

3
Dr Peter Critchley The Ideal of Polis Democracy

and Plutarch, The Rise and Fall of Athens, trans. Ian Scott-Kilvert (New York:
Penguin Books, 1960), chap. 6. On both men, see Victor Ehrenberg, Sophocles and
Pericles (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1954). They represented the two sides of the elite
but were actively committed in serving the political and cultural life of the democratic
state. They were well aware of the dangers of democracy, and what distinguished the
democratic conception of freedom. In the funeral oration, given at the end of the first
year of the Second Peloponnesian War, Pericles sought to reconcile the various
elements of freedom, public and private, with each other for the greater civil good.
Before the oration, the elements had not only been separated from each other but had
frequently been in antagonistic relation. Pericles’ funeral oration is distinctive for
conceiving the word freedom in terms which combine all the basic components of the
value to create a general value. All the elements of freedom recognisable in the
modern world are present in Pericles’ statement.

The first element that Pericles incorporates is civic freedom: ‘Our constitution is
called a democracy because power is in the hands not of a minority but of the whole
people. When it is a question of settling private disputes, everyone is equal before the
law; when it is a question of putting one person before another in positions of public
responsibility, what counts is not membership of a particular class, but the actual
ability which the man possesses. No one, so long as he has it in him to be of service
to the state, is kept in political obscurity because of poverty’ (Patterson 20).
This freedom also entailed personal freedom: ‘And just as our political life is free and
open, so is our day-to-day life in our relations with each other. We do not get into a
state with our next door neighbour if he enjoys himself in his own way, nor do we
give him the kind of black looks which, though they do no real harm, still do hurt
people’s feelings’ (Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War 2.37) ‘I declare that in my
opinion each single one of our citizens, in all the manifold aspects of life, is able to
show himself the rightful lord and owner of his own person [self-sufficient], and do
this moreover, with exceptional grace and exceptional versatility’ (Thucydides, The
Peloponnesian War 2.41) [ie without suspicion]
What is important to note here is the way that personal freedom is defined as the
antithesis of slavery. The individual is personally free in being the ‘owner of his own
person’ [literally “body”] whereas the slave lacks such self-ownership.

4
Dr Peter Critchley The Ideal of Polis Democracy

Pericles, an aristocrat of ‘majestic bearing, of course incorporates aristocratic freedom

in the generalised conception. He favourably compares the Athenian version of arête
with the Spartan version based on autocracy, secrecy, and a restrictive educational
system. Pericles’ point is that there is a distinctive form of courage and manliness,
one based not on fear as in Sparta but on openness, connecting to civil and personal
freedom (Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War 2.39). The Athenian way is to meet
danger ‘voluntarily, with an easy mind, instead of with a laborious training, with
natural rather than with state-induced courage’ (Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War
2.39).

Pericles has sought to define a generalised freedom that incorporates civil and
personal elements whilst nevertheless retaining a place for the old aristocratic
freedom. Pericles is aware of the extent to which these differing conceptions of
freedom can contradict each other at certain points and hence that the generalised
conception is always capable of imploding. He is also aware that one the elements of
freedom must dominate. In the first half of the speech, Pericles accepts on an
intellectual plane that civic freedom is fundamental. In the second half, however,
Pericles takes the elitist position in arguing that aristocratic freedom should dominate.
Thucydides described Pericles as an aristocrat who ‘could respect the liberty of the
people and at the same time hold them in check’, and this does indeed seem to be the
character of the funeral oration – the first in a long line of attempts to achieve a
freedom and a democracy that was safe for the elites and preserved existing relations
of rule and power. Thucydides adds that ‘in what was nominally a democracy, power
was really in the hands of the first citizen’ (Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War
2.65). The rulers were having to accommodate an irresistible democratisation and
shift their categories and conceptions accordingly. If a managed change is not
delivered from above, fundamental changes in society will drive a fundamental social
transformation from below. The principle that guided Athenian social life and change
from the sixth century was the extension ‘downwards, to the rest of the descent-
group, [of] the applicability and appropriateness of aristocratic life-styles and values’
(J. K. Davies, Democracy and Classical Greece (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1978),
37).

5
Dr Peter Critchley The Ideal of Polis Democracy

For Loraux, it is not so much what Pericles’ says that is important than the ambiguous
way he says it or, indeed, what he doesn’t say. Pericles speaks of government for the
people but not of government by the people. Pericles is carefully silent on the idea
that the demos could and should participate in government. Loraux concludes that the
funeral oration ‘draws widely on the repertoire of arête and makes aristocratic
democracy the very symbol of unity’ (Nicole Loraux, The Invention of Athens: The
Funeral Oration in the Classical City (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1986), p
199). The celebration of values of freedom and democracy within institutions that
significantly bias their practice is nothing new. Similarly, nostalgic rejections of
modern liberal political institutions and values in favour of ancient and classical
concepts suffers from the assumption that these forms equated simply with freedom
and democracy and active, universal citizenship. That society has yet to be achieved
and exists as an ideal within past practice. Loraux notes the striking absence in
ancient Athens of a democratic way of speaking about democracy. Pericles’ funeral
oration amounts to ‘an aristocratic eulogy’ on democracy (Nicole Loraux, The
Invention of Athens: The Funeral Oration in the Classical City (Cambridge: Harvard
Univ. Press, 1986), 172-220). Pericles incorporates civic and personal freedom in a
generalised conception of freedom in which the elitist-legal-statist style of aristocratic
freedom dominates.

In this political reconstruction of freedom in response to fundamental social

transformation, the nature of democratisation becomes a significant issue. How much
changes through terms being widened or expanded? There seems to have been
democratisation to the extent that the aristocratic ethos, arête, the manly Greek virtue
which alone is free, has been made accessible to all. But there has been a mutual
exchange which, in a sense, has empowered the rulers and disempowered the demos.
Freedom in civil and personal meanings is no longer exclusive to the demos. From
this perspective, Pericles’ funeral oration represents an attempt to achieve a
generalised conception of freedom that would be of service to the ruling class and
which the subordinate classes could find acceptable. Freedom is now a value common
to all classes. Confusion arises here. All sides proclaim freedom from this moment
on. The subordinate classes composing the demos still struggled for freedom, of
course, and would still find themselves struggling even after they had been granted
freedom by the ruling class. There are different emphases and elements being

6
Dr Peter Critchley The Ideal of Polis Democracy

contested here within the generalised conception of freedom to which all subscribe.
Which element dominates depends upon the control of meaning in relation to class
and struggle.

Pericles (495-429) is noted in his political career for modifying the Cleisthenean
constitution on citizenship. In 451-450 he passed a law which made citizenship
dependent upon the Athenian origin of both parents. Previously it had depended upon
the Athenian origin of the father. Aristotle condemns Pericles for this act. From this
point on, Aristotle criticises, ‘it was always the common men rather than the better
men who were eager to participate in drawing the lot for duty in the law courts’
(Thucydides, Peloponnesian War 2.37) (23). A number of reasons are given to explain
Pericles’ action, from reducing the costs arising from paying citizens on state service,
to concern for young Athenian women seeking husbands, for racial purity, or to boost
the prestige of Athenian citizenship by making it rarer (Thucydides, Peloponnesian
War 2.37.). The various reasons offered indicate that Pericles is alert to the utility of
citizenship as an instrument of social or political control and how it can be
manipulated by legal definition.

Pericles understood the benefits accruing from citizen status, understood its
significance with respect to status and allegiance, and was alive to its symbolic
meaning. All of this is apparent in the funeral oration. Such points temper the image
of Pericles as a noble man of principle as distinct from a politically astute and
sensitive character.

Pericles is well aware of the tension between public and private interests. Pericles
praises those who have not been ‘enervated by wealth’ but who put public service
before private advantage. His target is personal, self-indulgent, material existence. By
the end of the Peloponnesian War, many citizens were asking not what they could do
for the polis but rather what the polis could do for them. Citizens were competing for
paid spots on the juries and places in the fleet, in search of a guaranteed income. The
‘social problem’ of Greek education has been defined as ‘how to repress
individualism and develop the character of every citizen on one communal model’
(Thucydides, Peloponnesian War 2.43.) (38).

7
Dr Peter Critchley The Ideal of Polis Democracy

From here arises the tendency to idealise citizenship as disinterested public service.
And there seems to be an ideological purpose at work here, the celebration of the
value in terms of public service serving to conceal its restricted definition. The
restrictive Periclean definition of citizenship, associated with legislation aimed against
immigration and the claiming of citizen status by aliens, is the reality behind the
idealisation of citizenship as a value. During the latter half of the fifth century,
Athenians were becoming increasingly protective of the achievements and material
rewards of their society as against those who wished to claim a share. Were those who
had not participated in Athens rise by undertaking the full range of citizen obligations
to be granted access to the honours and riches now available through citizen identity.
The idea of citizenship as a form of contract was lurking behind these disputes.
Would newcomers be as prepared as the native born to commit themselves to the
polis? (1-32). And would newcomers comprehend the complex socio-institutional and
spiritual infrastructure of Athens, its rich and elaborate civic fabric of interwoven
political institutions, religious festivals, theatrical offerings, and military
responsibilities? The concern of Plato and Aristotle to establish the proper size of the
perfect polis is in part related to this conservative defence of the status quo in times of
change. Hippodamus and other town planners had been exploring the question from
this angle long before the philosophers. These concerns reveal a certain closing of
ranks among dominant groups who were increasingly aware of the extent to which the
increase in the power of the demos constituted a threat to their own power.

Citizenship originated in the ancient world as a principle of exclusive inclusiveness

and this principle was intensified as the metic group expanded in numbers and
material power. This distinction was all important as Athenian citizens came to be
confronted by the increasingly wealthy metic (David Whitehead, The Ideology of
the Athenian Metic (Cambridge: Cambridge Philosophical Society, 1977:121). For
the Athenian citizens, civic freedom was the primary value and was placed higher
than personal freedom. To the freedman and other metics, denied civic freedom,
personal freedom was the primary value.

Human beings as they ought to be and public life as it ought to be were the very stuff
of political philosophy in the pre-modern age going back to classical Greece. The first
point to make here is that Athens was the first in many of the fields that have been at

8
Dr Peter Critchley The Ideal of Polis Democracy

the core of western civilisation throughout the centuries – the terms and practices of
politics, the structure and concerns of philosophy, the forms of architecture, science
etc. Lewis Mumford claimed that the Athenians did more in two centuries than the
Egyptians had achieved in two millennia. To a very large extent, the world has been
Greek since. Certainly, these achievements have been at the core of European life in
all the centuries since. (Hall 1998:24). It is well known that the Greeks invented
democracy. However, the Greek contribution to politics and philosophy cannot be
reduced to this. Democracy was just one form of government that the Greeks
pioneered, theorised and practised. Democracy means rule of the people, the demos.
But democracy – or anything else in Greek political philosophy – cannot be abstracted
from the polis, the Greek unit of social and moral life, order and association.

First and foremost, the Greeks gave the world philosophy. The classical Greeks were
a people who, although not very numerous, not very powerful, not very well
organised, ‘had a totally new conception of what human life was for, and showed for
the first time what the human mind was for’ (Kitto 1951:1). The Greek philosophers
asked an apparently but deceptively simple question that has proved of enduring
significance and which the world stops asking at its peril: ‘What is the proper way for
human beings to live?’ How that question is answered – indeed whether the question
is even asked at all – determines the kind of society in which one lives.

Both Plato and Aristotle identify politics with a concern with the good life for human
beings. Before going into the specific philosophical conceptions, this section
examines the polis as an historical institution with a view to defining a public life that
is constituted by a plurality of communities and identities and is empowered from
below.

Politics and philosophy were born in the agora, the citizen assembly and market place
in Athens (Heller 1984; Doyle 1963:ch 2). ‘Most modern political ideals – such … as
justice, liberty, constitutional government and respect for the law – or at least the
definitions of them, began with the reflection of Greek thinkers about the institutions
of the city state’ (Sabine 1937:3). Finley presents the Athenian polis offers an
historical example of an expansive public life that may serve as a model for
emancipatory urban governance in the modern world. The polis was founded upon a

9
Dr Peter Critchley The Ideal of Polis Democracy

‘sovereign assembly .. open to every citizen’ and convened at least 40 times a year.
The polis made a virtue of its amateurish principle. The fact that it was managed by a
rotating council of 500, with the chair selected by lot and sitting for just one day,
checked the bureaucratic principle. The extensive use of selection of lot throughout
the institutions of governance indicated the high value placed upon self hood as
something obtained through participation. Free individuals possess politike techne,
the skill and techniques of the statesman, the ‘art of political judgement’ (Finley
1973:18).

These political arrangements reflect a philosophical anthropology. The classical

conception defines humanity as a social and cooperative species, possessed of philia
(friendship) and dike (justice). This points to public life as a solidaristic conception in
which each and all unite for purposes of individuation. Human beings are by nature
inclined to live in a polis. These characteristics of citizenships imply a controlled self-
hood, a ‘self-control’ that makes community life possible (Finley 1973:29/30).

Importantly, the polis made justice integral to its mode of life. ‘It was the common
assumption of the Greeks that the polis took its origin in the desire for justice.
Individuals are lawless, but the polis will see to it that wrongs are redressed. But not
only by an elaborate machinery of state-justice, for such a machine could not be
operated except by individuals, who may be as unjust as the original wrongdoer. The
injured party will be sure of obtaining justice only if he can declare his wrongs to the
whole polis. The word therefore now means ‘people’ in actual distinction from the
‘state’ (Kitto 1957:72).

The pursuit of justice becomes a question of making available a social identity that
connects public and private interest. This social identity was available in the city-
state. The city-state is a quite distinct institution from the modern state and is crucial
in envisaging a smaller scale public sphere located in everyday social activities. The
all-important political unit in classical Greece, the polis was more on the scale of a
modern medium sized town than the modern nation state or metropolis (Jones 1964;
Davies 1978; Mayo 1960: ch 2). The size of the city-state was kept in check in

10
Dr Peter Critchley The Ideal of Polis Democracy

numbers and in area deliberately so that citizens could meet within its centre and
engage in meaningful political activity (Doyle 1963:25).

In Aristotle’s conception, the original polis was a self-sufficient and self-governing

group of villages, in a narrow and closed region lying around an urban centre. The
poleis were mostly very small. When Aristotle wrote there was probably no town in
the classical world with a population of more than about 150,000. In all likelihood,
there were not more than half a dozen with a population of more than – 50,000 (Hall
1998:35).

If the polis was less than a state in the modern sense of the term, it was also
something more than a city. The polis had an urban centre but also embraced the
surrounding agricultural land. It consisted of farmers, craftsmen and sailors, and many
individuals would combine a couple or more of these roles (Bowra 1957:9; Chamoux
1965:291). When Marx speculated that in the future communist society the individual
could assume a number of roles rather be restricted to one specialised task imposed by
the division of labour, he was adopting the position of the Greek polis.

The obvious question is that, if Athens really was so successful and really did achieve
so much in all areas, why did it not presume to conquer and lead the city-states in a
unified Greek state. The question would have struck the Athenian – and other Greeks
– as illogical. The polis is what was integral to the identity of each individual and
nothing beyond the polis, no amount of riches or power, could have the remotest
significance with respect to that sense of self-identity. As Kitto put it, ‘if the Greek
was not within a day’s walk of his political centre, then his life was something less
than the life of a real man’ (Kitto 1951:121).
Every Greek knew the polis: ‘there it was, complete, before his eyes. He could
see the fields which gave it sustenance .. he could see how agriculture, trade and
industry dovetailed into one another.. The entire life of the polis, and the relation
between the parts, were much easier to grasp, because of the small scale of things’
(Kitto 1951:73).
Kitto defines the polis as a ‘community’ since ‘its affairs are the affairs of all’
(Kitto 1957:71). In the polis, every Greek understood the functions of other Greeks:

11
Dr Peter Critchley The Ideal of Polis Democracy

‘he could see how agriculture, trade and industry dovetailed into one another; he knew
the frontiers, where they were strong and where weak .. The entire life of the polis,
and the relation between its parts, were much easier to grasp, because of the small
scale of things’ (Kitto 1957:73).
The polis conception of scale is rational in that it is premised upon self-
consciousness as the distinctive attribute of the human species. Human beings engage
in rational action, are teleological and reflexive beings, projecting ends and reflecting
upon their actualisation. Reflexivity is built into human action. Praxis is rational. The
human habitat is to be evaluated according to whether it promotes the good life,
realising human potentialities, expanding rather than inhibiting the growth of human
capacities.

A human habitus is premised upon human scale and is, on that account, a public life
in the classical conception. A habitat that is beyond human comprehension and
control is unjust according to these premises. For reason of size and quantity, its
centralisation and concentration modern society is overscale and hence inhuman. The
exclusivity of its political and economic functions denies citizens the opportunity to
participate in the determination of the forces and decisions affecting collective life.
Denied the opportunity to participate in public life, individuals lose not only their
citizenship but also their sense of self-identity.

The physical form of the polis emphasised public space with temples, stadia, the
agora (combined market place and public forum) and theatres. This everyday public
life made possible an everyday public life in which all could participate. The accent
was upon association and interaction. Appropriate scale facilitates public
comprehension. The question is not, however, settled by establishing human
proportions. Beyond scale, there remains the ethical question of the just and the good.
A mode of life qualifies as ‘good’ to the extent that it achieves material sufficiency
and reflexivity in an ethical community founded on justice, participation and mutual
justice. This emphasises the importance of the polis.

The polis embraces much more than the institutional make up and is both the
community of citizens and their collective sense of community. There is no equivalent
word for polis in the modern world. For Kitto, the usual translation ‘city-state’ may be

12
Dr Peter Critchley The Ideal of Polis Democracy

the nearest we can get but is still a bad translation since the polis was not much like a
city and was much more than a state (Kitto 1957:64). The Athenian would not have
understood the difficulty of translating polis and how inadequate the term city-state is.
To the Athenian, city and state are inextricably linked as one and the same. And to
complicate the issue even further, the Athenians did not conceive the city-state in
institutional or geographical terms, as a set of institutions or as a definite territory.
The polis was the people, it is as simple and as complex as that. There is an important
distinction to be drawn between the polis and the state. This distinction makes it
possible to separate public life from the institutional machinery of the state and locate
it in an autonomous self-governing urban realm. Kitto uses the term polis rather than
city-state so as to describe the reality of a self-governing community.
The polis establishes the social context within which individuals fully realise
their spiritual, moral and intellectual capacities (Kitto 1957:78). They realise these
essential capacities only in relation to each other. The polis is therefore a holistic and
moral framework. The polis ‘is so much more than a form of political organisation.
The polis was a living community, based on kinship, real or assumed – a kind
extended family, turning as much as possible of life into family life..’ (Kitto 1957:78).
The Athenians conceived the polis as a mode of life fostering a sense of community,
as a communal modus vivendi. The polis is an integral part of the realisation of the
good life, is a dimension of it. ‘The Greeks thought of the polis as an active, formative
thing, training the minds and characters of the citizens; we think of it as a piece of
machinery for the production of safety and convenience. The training in virtue, which
the medieval state left to the Church, and the polis made its own concern, the modern
state leaves to God knows what’ (Kitto 1957:75).
At the heart of the polis was a moral purpose based upon a philosophical
anthropology. The polis was a physical place, true, but more than geography and
space it was a collectivity composed of citizens (Chamoux 1965:309; Hansen
1991:62).. ‘it is the men that are the Polis’ (Ehrenberg 1965:88 quoting Thucydides).
The Athenian city-state was not the republic of Athens in its institutional form but the
Athenians as a people: the Athenians as citizens were the city-state; the city-state had
no independent significance but was embodied in the person and idea of demos, the
people.
Whereas the modern state is merely a piece of institutional machinery for the
protection and utility of private individuals, maintaining a neutrality between

13
Dr Peter Critchley The Ideal of Polis Democracy

competing perspectives of the good, the polis possessed a positive function in

realising a notion of the common human good. The polis pertains to ‘the whole
communal life of the people, political, cultural and moral’, also ‘economic’ (Kitto
1957:75). Although Athens did have a private life, Kitto argues that life was
essentially public. The Greek ‘was essentially social’, ‘essentially individualist’ in the
‘winning of his livelihood’ but ‘essentially communist’ in the ‘filling of his life’.
‘Religion, art, games, the discussion of things – all these were needs of life that could
be fully satisfied only through the polis – not, as with us, through voluntary
associations of likeminded people, or through entrepreneurs appealing to individuals..
Moreover, he wanted to play his own part in running the affairs of the community’
(Kitto 1957:78).

There is a need to avoid nostalgia and idealisation The Athenian polis suffered many
flaws as an historical institution. The polis excluded women, refused rights to
foreigners and rested upon the basis of slavery. Further, it demonstrated public
opulence and private squalor (Hall 1998:40). Nevertheless, acknowledging these
limitations in relation to the rights and freedoms of modernity, the political life of the
polis was remarkably democratic. Its participatory structures make democracy
possible in an ‘active’ sense rather than as something conducted indirectly through an
abstract system of representation.

This actively democratic conception of public life is denied by the centralisation and
bureaucratisation that characterise capitalist modernisation. Problems of quantity and
scale are crucial in the recovery of an associative urban public against the alien modes
of the modern state and capital. ‘The entire life of the polis, and the relation between
its parts, were much easier to grasp, because of the small scale of things..’ (Kitto
1957:73). Kitto concludes that as a result, public affairs possessed an immediacy and
a concreteness which they cannot have today (Kitto 1957:73). Joseph Schumpeter is
adamant that modern size and scale renders the democratic ideal of the classical polis
obsolete (Schumpeter 1943:242 269 283 295/6). At best, democracy is the right of the
people to choose between different sets of elites. Public life, the determination of
common affairs, has been separated from the demos. The only place where democracy
could survive is in the abstract public of the central state, a public that rests upon the
highly ambiguous relationship between the represented and the representatives.

14
Dr Peter Critchley The Ideal of Polis Democracy

The modern city and the modern state, in symbiotic relation with capital, are centres
of alienation, of depersonified, bureaucratised social power that disempower citizens.
The normative humanistic values that the polis embodied are to be recovered from
within the processes of alien rationalisation within which modernity has encased
them. Social empowerment and civic engagement are inextricably connected. The
contemporary situation is characterised by political and work structures that do not
encourage individuals to fully develop their faculties and exercise their abilities as
citizens. Such structures suppress the creativity of individuals, resulting in cities that
are hollow shells, having no space for the goodwill and intelligence of their
inhabitants.

This problem of scale and complexity is to be investigated by showing the relevance

of the polis ideal to modern community and democracy. This approach identifies a
principle of active citizenship that dissolves systems of alien mediation in favour of
self-mediated forms. The dissolution of alien control in favour of social control
enables the reduction of scale and complexity to human proportions. The crucial
argument of this thesis is that the good city is to be constituted through the practical
reappropriation of power alienated to the state and capital and the reorganisation of
this power as social power. The dissolution of the state and capital as alienated social
power expresses a demand for humanly scaled political and social units. This
empowerment enables individuals to consciously determine the circumstances of their
lives through actively democratic structures and social arrangements. This amounts to
the achievement of a modern polis democracy.

The Philosophers
Such was the socio-political context for the work of Plato and Aristotle, the greatest
ancient philosophers whose perspectives understandably dominate cultural, historical
and political perceptions of ancient Greece. Like all philosophers, Plato and Aristotle
theorised in a specific social and historical context and the issues and controversies
and conceptions of their time and place enter into their thought. From a distance of a
couple of millennia, there is a tendency to read the works of Plato and Aristotle as
somehow ideal, products of the pure realm of thought, untouched by the material
concerns of social and political reality. The fact is, however, that Plato and Aristotle

15
Dr Peter Critchley The Ideal of Polis Democracy

are intellectual conservatives. The ideal ‘ought-to-be’ that can be identified in their
philosophical works is as much an idealisation of what had been in the Athenian past
as a radical demand for what should be in the polis democracy of the future. Their
views of citizenship articulate a desire to preserve the best qualities of Athenian
culture, that is, the traditional institutions and morals infused with a political
consciousness that was able to respond to a call to subordinate private interest to the
cause of the public good.

To identify the ideas of the philosophers with the popular politics and morality of the
day is to inflate the importance of ideas in history and politics. The views of the
intellectuals of any period owe as much and probably more to their ability to reflect
the consciousness of the political establishment as they do to popular views. There is
no doubt that ‘moral philosophy and popular morality are sharply contrasted in
respect of reason and reflection’, even without taking ‘idiosyncratic moralities’ into
account (K. J. Dover, Greek Popular Morality in the Time of Plato and Aristotle
(Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1974), 5. See, in particular, chaps. 3 and 6 ).
One should not presume that this implies a sharply antithetical relation between
philosophers and people. Some periods show a closer relation between the intellectual
representation of the conceptions of society and popular perspectives. With respect to
ancient Greece, the relationship was closer than most other periods. From the late
fifth century to early Roman times, the perspectives of intellectuals were of a great
deal of importance to the lives of the people; similarly, there is clear evidence that the
thoughts and feelings of the ordinary person fed into the perspectives of the
philosophers and coloured the way that they defined their conceptions.

From its inception, freedom has been a contested concept. From the moment it
became intrinsic to the struggles of the people, freedom has been subject to attempts
to appropriate it, separate it from its popular base, incorporate it within existing
institutions through intellectual redefinition and refinement. The purpose of this
activity is to produce a coherent conception of freedom that is acceptable to social and
political elites and their constituency. The result is that there have been competing
definitions of freedom. There is freedom as ordinary men and women have
understood it. This conception may lack intellectual clarity and logical rigour, but
makes up in content what it lacks in form. This is freedom as a value learned in the

16
Dr Peter Critchley The Ideal of Polis Democracy

struggle for one’s own essential humanity. Paralleling the struggles of the people to
achieve freedom for themselves in their everyday lives has been the theoretical work
of philosophers to produce an intellectually coherent and logical conception of
freedom. Moralising and intellectualising the term correctly would identity the
essence of what freedom really is. The conclusions depended less upon logic than
upon which concept a philosopher favoured, the premises upon which the intellectual
rested. As a philosophical concept, freedom could be anything from truth, god, the
world soul, private property, or communism. The fact is that, in ancient Greece, the
philosophical conceptions of freedom and the everyday conceptions of freedom
circulating on the streets or in the market place, popular assembly, or palaestra, would
often be quite contrary to each other.

The centrality of the value of freedom in Western civilisation can be gauged by the
concern that the philosophical mind has shown in every age with defining the idea.
Freedom is a value that has been raised to the highest intellectual as well as political
status. This elevation has, in turn, served to extend and entrench the common
idealisation of freedom as a value that all classes and categories of people can respect.
Freedom, which originated in the struggles of ordinary people in affirmation of their
essential humanity, was appropriated intellectually but, in turn, came to be
reincorporated into the popular understanding. In other words, intellectualisation
could be an appropriation of the value of freedom to render it serviceable to the ruling
class but it could also be a reappropriation which informs the popular consciousness.
Robert MacIver has criticised that, with respect to freedom, ‘the greatest sinners
against reason have been the reasoners, the philosophers, and high priests’ . The
(4)

anti-intellectual implications of that position seems to imply the rough and ready
practical wisdom of the people as the only genuine reason. There is a clear danger
here of a reactionary theory and politics. One can criticise the intellectual
appropriation of the value of freedom. The attempt to establish its philosophical status
could and did result in a value that originated in popular struggle coming to be placed
in the service of the ruling class. Even if this is the case, it is significant that the
dominant classes should feel the need to respond to the demands of the demos. In
making freedom as a generalised conception, something which all may claim on
account of their essential humanity, the philosophers in alliance with the rulers
opened up a path to the free and rational polity of the future. With freedom as the

17
Dr Peter Critchley The Ideal of Polis Democracy

central value, those sections of the demos who created that value could legitimately
claim to take their place within an expanded polity. For this reason, one can firmly
reject the criticism of the philosophers as ‘sinners against reason’ and argue that such
an explicitly anti-theoretical notion has a clearly reactionary political purpose.
Freedom rationalised is capable of concealing existing power relation; it is also
capable of being reappropriated by the people and incorporated back into their social
practices as they claim their legitimate place in an expanded political order.
This is to recognise that the philosophical delineation of freedom is an
ambiguous phenomenon. On the positive side, intellectualisation has generated a
substantial body of work developing the idea and showing what it meant and how it
was applied throughout the ages. In however diluted and prejudiced a form, this
record even applies to what the generality of ordinary women and men thought the
value meant at any one time. The problem here is that much of what is presented as
typifying the ordinary person’s view comes from the pen of writers who wrote from
the perspective of the legitimacy of the status quo and were frequently contemptuous
of popular values and demands. The only reason that we know of freedom as a
popular value in late fifth century Greece is that the intellectual elitists and
conservatives of the time subjected it to withering criticism (5). The philosophy of
rational freedom is very much a philosophy from above, making sense of – or simply
dismissing – popular understanding from the perspective of what is rational in respect
of the dominant conceptions of the existing political order.
A similar point applies to the discussion of freedom within the intellectual
tradition. A great deal of what is known about the philosophical and political ideas of
various parties and movements of ancient Greece stems from the work of Plato and
Aristotle, philosophers who were not disinterested in the matters, but who had their
own distinctive view. There is a tendency from a distance of two millennia to accept
that the work of Plato and Aristotle constitutes the whole of Greek political
philosophy, which is far from the case. There is a danger of an extremely biased
conception of reason and freedom emerging from an acceptance of the authority of
Plato and Aristotle. This can be seen in the tendency for succeeding ages to accept the
criticisms that Plato and Aristotle made of the Sophists as decisive whereas in fact
they are quite contentious. The Sophists were the first philosophers to have a popular
influence in Greek politics and culture, particularly in the way that they expounded
the idea of freedom. The Sophists had a popularity and an influence which can be

18
Dr Peter Critchley The Ideal of Polis Democracy

overlooked in light of the damaging criticisms of Plato and Aristotle. (Plato,

Protagoras, trans. W.K.C. Guthrie in Edith Hamilton Cairns, ed., The Collected
Dialogues (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press), 1961. On the distortion of the
Sophists, see W. K. C. Guthrie, The Sophists (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ.
Press, 1971), 51-54. Havelock, Liberal Temper, chaps. 7 and 11.).
There are quite distinctive conceptions of freedom in opposition here between
the Sophists on one side and Plato and Aristotle on the other. As Erik A Havelock
observed “liberalism was in the field first” (Havelock, The Liberal Temper in Greek
Politics (London: Jonathan Cape, 1957), 400). The crucial point is that in a number of
key areas, the clash between the Sophists and Plato and Aristotle is parallel with the
modern conflict between individualist-empiricist liberalism on the one hand and
rational freedom on the other.

All of the principal doctrines of the Sophists pertains directly upon the idea and value
of freedom (Guthrie, Sophists; Havelock, The Liberal Temper; E. R. Dodds, The
Ancient Concept of Progress and Other Essays on Greek Literature and Belief
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), esp. Chaps. 6 and 7; Victor Ehrenberg, From
Solon to Socrates (London: Methuen, 1967), Chap. 8; Farrar, The Origins of
Democratic Thinking (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1988).). The Sophist
position was characterised by a humanistic individualism. The Sophists transformed
the Delphic injunction “Know thyself as a human being, and follow the god” into a
wholly secular precept, as can be seen in the homo mensura maxim of Protagoras: ‘Of
all things the measure is man, of the things that are, that they are, and of the things
that are not, that they are not’. This position implies an epistemological shift in focus
from people in their relation with god to people as the basis for all judgement about
the world (Guthrie, Sophists, chap. 2; Ehrenberg, From Solon to Socrates, 338-51;
Farrar, Origins of Democratic Thinking, 38-43. The translation of the fragment of
Protagoras is from Kathleen Freeman, ed. and trans., Ancilla to the Pre-Socratic
Philosophers (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1948), 125.). Allied to agnosticism,
the Sophists established the ethical principle that the focus of reflection should be
individuals in their relations with each other.

A significant characteristic of Sophist theory and practice is the bias toward

relativism. This was made clear in the way that the Sophists approached the basic

19
Dr Peter Critchley The Ideal of Polis Democracy

distinction in Greek thought between phusis, or nature, and nomos, or convention and
laws, what could also be called culture (Guthrie, Sophists, chaps. 4 and 7.).

Ostwald identifies the Cleisthenean democratic revolution as responsible for the

profound shift in the conception of, and attitude toward, nomos – defined as “a social
norm accepted as valid and binding by those among whom it prevailed”. ‘Norms
which before Cleisthenes were thought of as having existed from time immemorial,
now came to be regarded as having been enacted and as being enforceable in a way
similar to that in which statutes are decided upon by a legislative agency’ (Martin
Ostwald, From Popular Sovereignty to the Sovereignty of Law (Berkeley: Univ. of
California Press, 1986), 93. Guthrie makes the same point, although he gives it
less emphasis, in his Sophists, esp. 19-20).

The conception of norms as resting on qualities of timelessness and immutability

engendered by the gods was replaced by ‘the idea that human agents now became the
authors, formulators, enactors, and enforcers of a nomos that could no longer be taken
for granted as a perennial pattern of human existence’ (Dodds, Greeks and the
Irrational, 130.). Whilst the development was pronounced amongst intellectuals and
leaders, it also had an impact upon popular thought, although archaic patterns of
though persisted alongside the new, often in contradictory relation (Dover, Greek
Popular Morality, 133-60).

This example reveals the interplay between social practices, political thought, and
philosophical reflection. The Cleisthenean democratic revolution was the product of
social struggles involving interests and values. A consequence of this reflection upon
social and political processes and struggles is to create a body of social thought, what
Ostwald calls ‘the language of rule and the language of practice’ (Patterson 150).

Alongside humanism and relativism in philosophy and social life, the Sophists
asserted the value of individualism. Together, all these notions fed a distinctive
conception of freedom. Given the relativism of Sophist thinking, it is difficult to give
a clear and concise definition of Sophist freedom, particularly when one adds the
culture-nature distinction. The way that any particular Sophist thinker interprets
nature and its role shapes the definition of freedom presented to a large extent. The

20
Dr Peter Critchley The Ideal of Polis Democracy

Sophists were the first social thinkers and it is striking how many of the ideas and
issues with which they dealt remain problems in the modern world.

Relativism can impact in any number of ways. With Antiphon, Hippias, and most
radically Alcidamas, relativism cultivated a feeling of respect and tolerance towards
other cultures. With the likes of Gorgias, relativism generated a scepticism, even
cynicism, with respect to human values. Such was the price to be paid for losing the
objective foundation of morality, for conceiving norms as something subject to
alterable human convention.

The situation is made worse where these contrasting approaches are linked to
different conceptions of nature. In this scenario, the doctrines which were produced
tended to extremes, from a left wing revolutionary utopianism to being a right wing
tyrannical politics. The split between human nature and law confronted Sophists with
this ‘grand question’: “Is the social restraint which law imposes on nature a good
thing or a bad thing?” (E. R. Dodds, The Ancient Concept of Progress and Other
Essays on Greek Literature and Belief (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985:99).

Protagoras and his followers taught that all individuals were by nature equal, that
good laws and justice were mutually conditional and were improvable. For
Protagoras, virtue was not dependent upon birth or nature but could be taught
(Guthrie, Sophists, chap. 10.). Protagoras had been referred to as the ‘first democratic
political theorist in the history of the world’ (Farrar, Origins of Democratic Thinking,
77 and, more generally, 77-98). Against Socrates, Protagoras argued that ‘civic virtue
as a whole’, or political wisdom, could be found in all human beings and constituted
an essential precondition for democracy. For this reason, Protagoras commended the
Athenian citizens for identifying civic virtue as a special quality which was possessed
by all individuals: ‘when the subject of their counsel involves political wisdom, which
must always follow the path of justice and moderation, they listen to everyman’s
opinion, for they think that everyone must share in this kind of virtue; otherwise the
state could not exist’ (Plato, Protagoras, 323e).

21
Dr Peter Critchley The Ideal of Polis Democracy

The arguments of Protagoras and his disciples form the earliest formulation of the
value of civic freedom and were influential throughout the fifth century BC.
Protagoras and his followers “rationalize[d]” the democratic achievements of the age
of Pericles (Havelock, The Liberal Temper 190. See also, Ehrenberg, From Solon to
Socrates, 348-49).

For Protagoras, the social universe was a socially constructed order which was
constituted by as a result of the interactions of individuals with each other and with
their culture, itself the result of accumulated interactions. Individuals are influenced
by culture as inherited patterns created by previous interactions, but not in a passive
sense. Protagoras employs the metaphor of the practitioner or craftsmen to underscore
the reality shaping praxis involved. Individuals are change agents engaging in the
everyday practices and discourses of living in its totality. In practicing the ‘art of
politics’ individuals make themselves ‘good citizens’, in engaging in the art of living
they teach each other virtue, and the whole creative process issues in ‘civilised and
humane society’ (Plato, Protagoras 319a, 327e-328a).

Protagoras developed a conception of human knowledge which located the evolution

of beliefs in the interaction of individuals as they experience the world and each
other, and a conception of human needs which entailed that all individuals could and
should display its qualities. Order is not transcendent, but emerges through
interactions implicit in the world of experience as a world of change. (Farrar, The
Origins of Democratic Thinking 47).

Sophists with a ‘liberal temper’ (Havelock) reconciled the claims of each individual
for personal fulfilment with the needs of the polis by arguing that the polis exists
fundamentally to realise these individual needs and by applying a reductionist theory
of the relation between human nature and the prerequisites of society (Farrar, Origins
of Democratic Thinking, 95-96).

Sophists of a more radical temper developed Protagoras’ thoughts into an outright

egalitarianism. Hippias, therefore, considered all individuals his ‘kinsmen and family
and fellow citizens – by nature, not by convention’. Hippias went so far as to
repudiate convention as ‘the tyrant of mankind’ which ‘does much violence to

22
Dr Peter Critchley The Ideal of Polis Democracy

nature’ (Plato, Protagoras 337c-d). The radical individualism of the fourth century
Sophist and rhetorician Alcidamas was even more extreme: ‘God has left all men
free; Nature has made none a slave’. Such views form the basis for an outright
rejection of all institutions and belief systems etc which are based upon slavery,
relations of domination and exploitation of all kinds (Dodds, Ancient Concept of
Progress, 101). The realisation of the goal of personal freedom therefore implies the
repudiation of all-man made authority and of the enslavement to convention as
unnatural constraint.

The Sophist movement ‘shows the same typical traits as the liberal thought of the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: the same individualism, the same
humanitarianism, the same secularism, the same confident arraignment of tradition at
the bar of reason, the same robust faith in applied intelligence as the key to perpetual
progress’ (Dodds, Ancient Concept of Progress, 101-2).

The value of personal freedom had emerged out of the conflictual and creative social
dynamics of master, slave, and freeman. The achievement of the Sophists’ is to have
raised the value of personal freedom to the level of conscious, philosophical
reflection, engendering a conscious civil culture. The value which had been created
and given expression at the level of social practice was given the weight of reason.

However, the Sophists’ emphasis on nature over convention combined with their
relativism could easily take illiberal and outright reactionary forms. Depending upon
where one placed the stress, nature could be as inegalitarian as egalitarian. If, as
Protagoras claims, that man is the measure of all things, then some men are by nature
superior to others. The argument from nature is not necessarily egalitarian. If some
are leaders by nature, then others are followers; if some are free by nature, then others
are slaves.
A similar argument applies in the realm of convention. Laws, institutions,
culture in general may be human-made, but this does not necessarily mean that they
are all of equal worth. Some pertain to free cultures, others to slave cultures. Some
are superior, others inferior, according to the superiority or otherwise of the people.
And it is the genius and natural superiority of the leaders that makes for the
superiority of the superior collectivity. The greater the superiority, the better and

23
Dr Peter Critchley The Ideal of Polis Democracy

more free a culture. This line of thought came to articulate a conception of freedom as
power. The person is more or less free according to how much power he or she has.
And the more free a person is, the greater his or her right to rule those with less
freedom. The argument comes with the claim that the true freedom of the less free
lies in the rule of the powerful and the free and that the less free best serve their
interests by recognising the fact. By such means, the value of personal freedom,
emerging through creative social struggle, comes to be reconstructed in terms of an
explicit aristocratic freedom. This conception became the dominant one amongst
elitist and conservative thinkers, but originated in the thought and actions of the likes
of Thrasymachus, Critias, Alcibiades, and Polus. Their attitude is located in the
cynical rhetoricism of Georgias, who taught ‘the power to convince by words’
(Patterson 155).

Liberal in one wing, the Sophist movement could also be downright reactionary. The
relativism of the Sophist movement gave it a certain arbitrary character, a
consequence of rejecting the view of morality as being founded upon eternal and
unchangeable qualities. The idea that human beings were creative agents in relation to
convention and culture was in one sense liberating but in another could leave
humanity rootless, subject to arbitrariness and uncertainty. This was the point at
which Plato, followed by Aristotle, attacked. Plato and Aristotle May have
bequeathed a biased interpretation of the Sophist movement to history, but the points
on which they target Sophist doctrine are the key ones. Plato and Aristotle defined
their philosophies in opposition to the key principles of the Sophists.

24