Chapter Three: The Creation of Politics

Politics has acquired a fairly odious reputation among the great majority of people today. The word seems to denote techniques for the unsavory end of exercising power over human beings. We “play politics” not only on an international national, and local scale; we do so in domestic relations, in schools and places of learning, in ordinary jobs or extraordinary careers. Politics, in effect, is seen to have invaded the most private recesses of our lives. At worst, it is viewed as oppressive, manipulative, cunningly seductive, and basically degrading. Few words more readily evoke a contemptuous sneer than the term “politician.” Conceived instrumentally as a means to control people, politics is regarded as inherently corruptive of both its user, the politician, and the public on whom it is used. The ideal of a political life earns few acolytes among people with any degree of moral probity. Traditional conservatives and anarchists alike identify it with the state and preach a message of the attenuation or outright abolition of “political power.” Liberals and socialists rarely celebrate politics as a desideratum, but they wed it so closely to the state—a necessity in modern liberal and socialist theory—that its practice is seen as unavoidable in a highly imperfect world.

Modern social ideologies tend to blend politics with the state almost unthinkingly—and often throw society into the brew for good measure. The confusion on this score is massive. Just as there are many people who, by virtue of the all-pervasive role the state plays in their private lives, draw no distinction between “government” and “society,” so an incalculable number are incapable of distinguishing between the state and “politics. These attitudes and they are often, little more—are justified today by ordinary experience, as we shall see. That the social, political, and “statified” are not synonymous, indeed, that they are broadly demarcatable arenas with histories and identities of their own, is so far removed from the public’s mind that to distinguish them seems paradoxical.[2] The equatability of political with state activities is taken as a given. The penetration of the two, normally conceived as one common phenomenon, into private affairs still encounters considerable resistance, although in the form of a psychological tension that finds expression in existential resistance such as petty violations of the law rather than ideological clarity.

In recent years, however, serious attempts have been made to probe the distinction between “society” and politics, which has traditional roots in theoretical distinctions between, society and the state. The anarchists have been saying for years what everyone either knows or feels: the state is not the same kind of phenomenon as the family, workplace, fraternal and sororal groups, religious congregations, unions and professional societies, in short, the “private” world that individuals create or inherit to meet their personal and spiritual needs. This personal world can be designated as “social,” however much “government” penetrates, regulates, or, in totalitarian states, absorbs its forms. It is a world that has deep roots in what Marx and later Hannah Arendt were to designate as the “realm of necessity,” a world where the individual satisfies the conditions for his or her personal survival. Here, biology provides the soil for a system of self-maintenance such that people have a culturally conditioned but systematic way of reproducing their kind, feeding and clothing themselves, satisfying their needs for shelter and the support systems for resisting an inclement, presumably “cruel, mute, and blind natural world.”

---

To have sharpened the distinction between the social and the state is one of the major contributions of traditional anarchist theory. That there could be a political arena independent of the state and the social, however, was to elude most radical social thinkers, even so intense a political ‘thinker as Marx who allowed for “democratic” states that could “evolve” toward socialism and “Bonapartist” states that stood above and balanced off conflicting class interests. The reformist wing of Marxian socialism was by no means alone when it envisioned a pliable state that could be used for socialist interests. Its own “founding fathers’:’ were no less riddled with uncertainties about the nature of the state than the reformists are today.

The emergence of the political realm as unique has a complex background in the history of ideas,. Politics as a phenomenon distinguishable from the state and from social life initially appears in the extant writings of Aristotle, perhaps the most Hellenic of the Greek social theorists and philosophers. With Aristotle we are still dealing in terms of human association on the level of the city, or to be more precise, the polis, which is commonly mistranslated as the “city-state!”. [3]

By the middle of the fifth century B.C., when the Athenian democracy was approaching its high point of development, the concept of a state—of a professionalized bureaucratic apparatus for social control—was notable for its absence; Attic Greek contains no word for state. The term is Latin in origin, and its etymological roots are highly ambiguous. It more properly denotes a person’s condition in life—his or her status or way of life and “standing”—than a commonwealth or a state in the modern sense of the term. Not until the early sixteenth century, when we witness the rise of authentic nation-states and highly centralized monarchies, does the word come to mean a professional civil authority with the power to govern a “body politic.”

There is a very real sense in which the evolution of the word broadly reflects the evolution of the state itself. Not that state powers were rarities in the ancient and medieval worlds. Eric Vogelin’s “cosmological” empires—Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Persian—and the more “ecumenical” Roman empire were certainly states in the sense that they controlled vast resources, dominated millions of people, and were structured along highly professional, rationalized, and bureaucratic lines. State institutions emerged very early in human history, although in varying degrees of development and stability, often in “bits and pieces,” as it were, with highly tribalistic features. The Pharaonic state in the Nile valley already reached back thousands of years, perhaps beyond the unification of northern and southern Egypt, long before the Roman empire had begun its long decline.

Athens had a “state” in a very limited and piecemeal sense. Despite its governmental system for dealing with a sizable slave population, the “state” as we know it in modern times could hardly be said to exist among the Greeks, unless we are so reductionist as to view any system of authority and rule as statist. Such a view would grossly simplify the actual conditions under which humanity lived in the “civilized world.[4] Until recent times, professional systems of governance and violence coexisted with richly articulated community forms at the base of society—city neighborhoods in the world’s few large urban areas, self-contained towns and villages, a network of extended kinship ties, a great variety of vocational, mutual-aid, and fraternal groups—which were largely beyond the reach of centralized state authorities. In fact, these distinctly social formations were necessary to the maintenance of the state. They were sources of its revenues, its military personnel, and, in many cases, the source of many labor services for a great variety of public and religious tasks.

The Athenian democracy, if anything, was the opposite of a professionalized system of governance organized strictly for social control. If we choose to translate the word for the Athenian polis as “state,” which is done with appalling promiscuity, we would have to assume that the notion of a state is consistent with a body politic of some forty thousand male citizens, admittedly an elite when placed against a still larger population of adult males possibly three times that number who were slaves and disenfranchized resident aliens. Yet the citizens of Athens could hardly be called a “class” in any meaningful sense of the term. Indeed, within this body politic, we encounter economic distinctions that run the entire gamut of material resources from the wealthy to the impoverished.

We would also have to assume that the notion of a state is consistent with a consciously amateur system of governance, based on almost weekly popular assemblies, a judicial system structured around huge juries that represent the assemblies on an attenuated scale, the selection and rotation of civic officials by sortition, that is, the use of the lot, and the absence of any political professionalism or bureaucratism, including military forces that are authentic militias of armed citizens rather than professional soldiers.

---

These few remarks do not do full justice to the Athenian system of democracy, notably its high level of consciousness, civicism, commitment, and esthetics. They must suffice for the present to understand how politics was created on the rare occasions when it appeared in history with a reasonable degree of authenticity, and how it was conceived by its most renowed theorist, Aristotle. It is to Aristotle that we must turn for the earliest known distinctions between the social and political realms, the household and the public arena. The state was not alien to Aristotle; it existed as monarchy and tyranny, as everyone could see among the states that surrounded the Athens of Pericles’s day. And they were as easily confused with the polis by Aristotle and his students, just as we, today, confuse politikos, the administration of the polis’s affairs, with the state. What was central to Aristotle’s thought, however, was the polis, not that ambiguous phenomenon, the state. What is central to modern thought, by contrast, is the state not politics or, strictly speaking, the affairs of administering an entity that could pass for a polis. Hence, although politics and the state intermesh in both cases, they do so in very different ways and from remarkably different perspectives.

This distinction should not be reduced to a simple difference of vantage points toward a shared phenomenon. Aristotle and the modern social theorists are, in fact, looking at two very dissimilar worlds. The difference becomes very evident in Book Seven of Aristotle’s Politics where the proper size of the “ideal” polis is discussed. Both Aristotle and most modern social theorists would agree that a community that is very small risks the possibility, if it relies primarily on its own resources, of inadequately furnishing its inhabitants with the means of existence, much less providing for the “good life,” however one chooses to interpret this highly problematical phrase. Almost presciently, Aristotle derides, the view that a community’s greatness is to be judged by its demographic and territorial size. Important as numbers and resources may be, a polis with too large a population and area cannot have a “good legal government.... Law [nomos] is a form of order, and good law must necessarily mean good order; but an excessively large number cannot participate in order: to give it order would surely be a task for divine power, which holds the universe together. Hence the polis also must necessarily be the most beautiful with whose magnitude it combines the above-mentioned limiting principle; for certainly beauty is usually found in number and magnitude, but there is a due magnitude for a polis as there is for all things—animals, plants, tools,” otherwise it will lose “its true nature’’ as well as workability. Summing up this remarkable body of notions, Aristotle concludes “that the best limiting principle for a polis is the largest expansion of the population with a view to self-sufficiency that can be taken in at one view.”{7}

Probably no modern social theorist would reason out this case for “beauty” qua “magnitude” and “limit” qua “true nature” as the essence of a community. The ease for human scale has been argued by heterodox urbanologists on logistical, democratic, and esthetic grounds; but rarely, if ever, has it been argued on ethical, indeed metaphysical, grounds. A community “that can be taken in at one view”—that is, decentralized, comprehensible, and attractive—which Aristotle and his modern counterparts regard as a desideratum, is rooted in many, similar but also many different premises. Aristotle speaks to us from an age that found In magnitude and harmony the essence and, in the “true nature” of a human community, the limit to a polis. An ethical pragmatism pervades Aristotle’s remarks that qualitatively differs from the instrumental pragmatism of the modern urbanologist, however much the two share a common practical view of human consociation.

Politics, in turn, is also inseparable in Aristotle’s mind from its ethical context. Men are “animals,” a fact that greets us early on In the Politics, but they are animals of a very special kind. It is man’s destiny or telos, if he is to fulfill his “true nature,” to live in the polis. A polis, however, is more than a community or koinonia. It is a koinonia that has reached the ideal form of a shared commonality of purpose among men whose self-realization is the “good life.”

The “good life,” in turn, includes a degree of material self-sufficiency that goes beyond mere survival. But it does not consist in on appetite for goods, with all its attendant excesses, that clouds man’s ethical and intellectual clarity. Man transcends his animality insofar as he has reason and speech, or logos, which combines both lit tributes in the ability to symbolize verbally and generalize logically. But these abilities do not guarantee that man has reached or oven approximates the fulfillment of his potentialities. Institutions must exist that constitute the means for achieving human self-fulfillment; a body of ethics must exist that gives the required Institutions substance as well as form; a wealth of social activities must be cultivated in the civic center or agora of the polis, the gymnasium, and in the theater as well as the popular assembly and courts to nourish, interactions and discourse; a mode of character development and education, both of which are combined in the (Ireek word paideia, must be at work to enrich the interactions among men and thereby foster the growth of ethical and intellectual insight.

Underlying these various “means” is Aristotle’s emphasis on human solidarity or philia, which includes friendship (the common English translation for the Greek term) but which is a word more far-reaching in its connotation of civic commonality. The Intimacies of friendship may be reserved for a limited few, but philia implies an expansive degree of sociality that is a civic attribute of the polis and the political life involved in its administration. Man is “by his nature” a political animal or zoon politiken, which is to say that he is destined not only to live in a community but also to communize. In criticizing Lylcophron the Sophist, who contends that the polis is a “mere alliance” among men to prevent them from inflicting harm on each other (Hobbes’s later view of the “social contract”) and promote the exchange of goods to satisfy their individual needs, Aristotle argues that the polis is an end in itself, the realization of man’s need for consociation apart from its material benefits. “If men formed the community and came together for the sake of wealth,” he declared, “their share in the polis [would be] proportionate to their share in the property, so that the argument of the champions of oligarchy would appear to be valid... ; but if on the other hand the polis was formed not for the sake of fife only but rather for the good life... and if its object is not military alliance for defense against injury by anybody, [and] it does not exist for the sake of trade and of business relations,” the polis would be more than a community and its citizens would “take civic virtue and vice into their purview.” Indeed, lacking a concern for “civic virtue and vice,” men would form communities no different from those of animals or slaves, who are simply concerned with survival. Communities united by mere economic and military alliances—and, here, Aristotle has the Etruscans and Carthaginians in mind—would be no different from the associations other people establish who, for all “agreements about imports and covenants [to abstain] from dishonesty and treaties... for mutual defense,” have no “officials in common” and take no “concern as to the moral character of the other.”{8}

By contrast, the household is the sphere of mere survival, the place to which our zoon politiken repairs to satisfy his biological need for food, clothing, shelter—in sum, the “realm of necessity” to cite Marx’s commonly used phrase. It is the domain of the man’s wife, children, kin, and slaves where an apolitical “kingship” (patriarchy) prevails. Here, the man’s relationship between his own person and the members of his domestic group is determined not by logos but by need, and the social tie is strictly one of “ruler” and “ruled.” “The family,” we are bluntly told by Aristotle, “is the association established by nature for the supply of men’s everyday wants...”{9}

But men aspire for more and accordingly group their families together to form villages. To the extent that villages are transformed by man’s potential for the good life into ethical and cultural communities, the polis begins to appear. The family still exists to satisfy man’s animal wants. Hence the two worlds of the social and political emerge, the latter from the former. Aristotle’s approach to the rise of the polis is emphatically developmental and, in this way, resembles Plato’s account of the rise of the “ideal polis” in The Republic.[5] The polis is the culmination of a political whole from the growth of a social and biological part, a realm of the latent and the possible. Family and village do not disappear in Aristotle’s treatment of the subject, but they are encompassed by the fuller and more complete domain of the polis.

The distinction between the social and political in Aristotle’s thinking is strikingly processual: the difference is explained by the growth and development of the social into the political, not by their polarization and mere succession. The state has not yet emerged in a form that gives it a uniqueness apart from the other two domains. “Buie” properly belongs to the family. Where it does appear in the koinonia, it is simply a brute extension of the patriarchal family to the civic world (monarchia) or it takes the form of a despotism ruled by a tyrant (tyrannos). And Aristotle views monarchies and tyrannies as warped or unfinished forms of civic administration that are unbecoming to a polis, although rule by a monarch with its traditional constraints on the ruler is to be preferred to rule by a tyrant, which is the arbitrary supremacy of one man.

Nor does he prefer the rule of the few over the many—an aristocracy at best and an oligarchy at worst. By the same token, democracy that Aristotle understands to be the rule of the many over the few—specifically, a condition where the “poor” rule over the “wealthy”—is by no means desirable, although he does not seem to find it as abhorrent as arbitrary one-man rule.

The best-ordered polis is structured around a system of governance where the most ethically and materially meritorious stratum of the population manages the polis’s affairs in the interests of all. This “polity” or “meritocracy,” as it has been called, is an ethical union that simultaneously yields the “good life” in a moral and material sense. Politics consists of the practical reason (phronesis) and action (praxis) that enters into such a felicitous koinonia.

---

Athenian politics was nothing if it was not vital, indeed voluble, and popular in every sense of the term. Within a span of some three centuries, the Athenian people and their renegade aristocratic surrogates such as Solon, Kleisthenes, and Perikles were to dismember the traditional feudal system of Homeric times, wage a steady war against privilege within the citizen body, and turn the popular assembly from a lifeless, rarely convened mass meeting into a vital on-going forum for making major decisions, thereby opening public life to every Athenian adult male. Power ceased to be the prerogative of a small, well-born stratum of the population. It became a citizen activity. Athens’s historic calendar is marked by seething upsurges of the people, startling fluctuations between aristocratic rule, tyranny, limited popular government, until, by the latter half of the fifth century B.C., Athenian political life stabilized around a face-to-face democracy of the most radical kind. We may assume that similar developments occurred: in many Hellenic poleis that were to ally themselves with Athens for internal political reasons as well as mutual defense.

In any case, in recorded history we have no structure comparable to the Athenian democracy. Popular assemblies such as the New England town meeting and the Parisian revolutionary sections of 1793–94 were to appear elsewhere over time. The Swiss Confederation is one of the few among many aborted or incomplete examples where popular control formed the underpinnings of an on-going political system. Athens, however, is unique historically in that the polis fostered a degree of citizen participation not only in the decision-making activities of the assembly but in the everyday politics of the agora that impelled its admirers over the ages to regard it with uncritical adulation as evidence of a “pure” democracy—and its opponents as evidence of a horrendous “mobocracy.”

If politics is taken to be a form of popular activity in administering public life that, strictly speaking, is neither a, state, conceived as a highly professionalized system of governance, nor a “society,” conceived as forms of personal association for promoting survival and well-being, the Athenians’ could be said to have literally created politics. It was a parochial politics by modern “global” definitions of the term: civic rather than regional in,scale, limited to a minority of the population, Hellenic in its purview of the “civilized” world, contemptuous of slaves, women, the “barbarians” beyond the confines of the Greek ethnos, and resident aliens who performed much of skilled work and engaged in most of its trading activities.

Qualitatively, however, Athens made up in depth what it lost In scope. It may well be, as the Jewish Zealots were to believe, that a special insight of a spiritual or moral nature is the privilege not Of great empires but of small communities on the margins of the great classical ecumenes. Both peoples, the Hellenes and the Israelites, provide visible evidence of the truth that may be hidden In this seemingly self-serving conviction. Yet a “creation” had Certainly emerged that opened a new dispensation in human affairs. A new realm of life had appeared, the political realm, winch was to acquire many different meanings but whose origins in classical Greece still keep faith with the pristine values and practices that impart meaning to those ill-used words, the “public sphere.”

The Roman Republic, which looms high in its impact on the Euro-American political tradition, stands in marked, contrast to the Athenian notion of a public sphere., Polybius, the Greek chronicler of Rome’s rise to world hegemony, offers us the classical theory of republican, government, a theory that was to deeply affect the thinking of American and French constitutionalists in the eighteenth century.

According to Polybius, the virtues of monarchy were embodied III the consuls, the two chief magistrates of the Republic. The Sonate provided the Republic with the advantages of aristocracy, with its gradations in descending order of consular, pretorian, aedilitian, tribunitial, and questorial ranks. The image of the Roman Senate freely debating public issues is essentially a myth: no senator could voice his views on an issue unless the presiding consul solicited his opinion, and these requests were directed in a strict hierarchical sequence that often left little time for oratory by the body’s lower orders. Finally, democracy was represented by several assemblies of the people. These assemblies (some four have been identified) reflected, in their variety and ascendancy, the fortunes of the plebeians and other lowly orders in their conflicts with the ruling patriciate. Whatever their origins, Roman popular assemblies elected all the magistrates of Rome, some of whom, such as the tribunes and pretors, had enormous control over other branches of the government during their heyday.

Assemblies could be used by ambitious politicians to bypass the Senate and enact laws that the ruling oligarchies opposed. Hence, two political strategies existed during the more fervent periods of the republican era: an oligarchical one and a popular one. The comitia centuriata formed the principal popular law-making body of republican times. A complex mix of weighted voting groups sorted out according to military status and, later, according to classes based on property and age, the assembly was highly structured along hierarchical lines. It elected Rome’s consuls, pretors, and censors—each successively forming the most important or prestigious magistrates of the republic. The elective functions of the comitia centuriata were to be slowly supplanted by the Roman tribal assembly, the comitia tributa, largely based on territorial divisions in which 35 tribes were classified into 31 rural tribes and 4 urban ones. Coexisting with both of these ranked assemblies, the plebs had their own exclusive concilium plebis from which all patricians were excluded. The concilium chose its own tribunes and ediles, the latter constituting officials who administered public works and police and took charge of the grain supply and games that gave the city such ill-famed distinction.

We owe the word “plebiscite” (plebiscitia) to the right of the plebeian tribunes to submit laws for the approval of the concilium. Either the Campus Martius along the westward bend of the Tiber or the Forum constituted the principal meeting places for these assemblies, and discussion, if it occurred at all, was minimal. Laws, edicts, declarations of war were presented to the people by officials such as consuls, pretors, and tribunes; elections and confirmations were voted upon methodically. We cannot say with certainty that Roman popular assemblies were simply mute. Before the assemblies divided into their specific units, the highly structured comitia was preceded by a loosely organized contio where discussion may have been possible. “The contio may be a survival of an early form of assembly,” opined the late Lilly Ross Taylor, “like that of the Homeric warriors or the Spartans of later times, in which men expressed their opinion by shouting.”{10} If so, the contio does not bring the Roman assembly form any closer to the highly talkative Athenian assembly. Indeed, Greek observers of Roman procedures found the difference between the contio and comitia confusing. “With no such distinction in Greek lands between meetings for speaking and those for voting,” Ross notes, “Greek writers on Roman institutions have difficulty with the word contio.”{11} Polybius and Dio Cassius were to call the assemblies by one word, demos, or, simply, the people. Appian, an Alexandrian Greek, and Plutarch, who was born in Boeotia, seem to have been removed sufficiently from the traditional polis to designate the Roman assembly form as an ekklesia, the Greek word for the popular assembly that, as Ross emphasizes, “combined speaking and voting.”{12} If the contio was anything like the Homeric and Spartan assemblies, it did more listening than speaking, voicing its approval by acclamation and shouts rather than by oratory.

Polybius’s association of the Roman assemblies with democracy Is specious. The republic had no democratic component in the Hellenic sense of the term, and speech, while relatively free, was more an affair of delivering elitist rhetoric to manipulable audiences in the Forum than the verbal interchange of political equals. A face-to-face relationship, between active citizens for the purpose of arriving at a consensus is alien to republican systems of government. A democracy is participatory; a republic, representative. The first involves the exercise of power directly by the people; the Second, its delegation to selected surrogates, who then reconstitute the political realm that initially existed at the base of the koinonia into a distinctly separate and usually professional power at its summit. Republics are beyond the immediate reach of popular control; democracies are not even confronted by the issue of the displacement of power.

Rousseau, with barely concealed irony for the French philosophes who were so endeared to English constitutionalism, was to draw these distinctions sharply. “Sovereignty, for the same reason as it makes it inalienable, cannot be represented. It lies essentially in the general will, and will does not admit of representation: it is either the same, or other; there is no intermediate possibility. The deputies of the people, therefore, are not and cannot be its representatives: they are merely its stewards, and can carry through no definitive acts. Every law the people has not ratified in person is null and void—is, in fact, not a law. The people of England regards itself as free: but it is grossly mistaken: it is free only during the election of members of parliament. As soon as they are elected, slavery overtakes it, and it is nothing.”{13}

The Roman cult of libertas is structured around personal freedom/not political. An individual can exercise a wide range of choices in vocations, responsibilities, and the satisfaction of tastes. Roman license during the Empire, with its almost psychotic appetite for ‘extremes, merely expanded this cult into a way of life. Credo was warped into extravagant practice with the result that the state soon found it ceased to enjoy the support of its citizenry. Its citizens fled from military service, public obligations, tax levies, and the most minimal communal responsibilities. Accordingly, every aspect of government had to be professionalized, Under the Empire, Rome’s troops were mercenaries, increasingly of alien birth and culture; its bureaucracy became an elaborate apparatus, staffed by numerous ex-slaves who had acquired the skills for political affairs that their former masters lost and that Roman citizens generally neglected.

This extraordinary erosion of personal competence blemishes every aspect of the imperial era. But even the republic prepared the way for Rome’s decline, In the political sphere, Roman libertas never became freedom, the Greek vision of eleutheria based on equality. One searches Latin for a term other than libertas or licentia that expresses the centricity of individual political judgments, in short, a term that does not sort the individual into the collective and weighted units of the comitia and councilium. The search is a vain one. The Roman concept of political life is corporatist, even statist, to the core, and there is no reciprocal interaction between the personal and the political.

To find an individual who has room for a political fife, we turn to the Roman noble or well-born for examples. Here, political life is obligatory—indeed, apart from war, the authentic calling of an aristocrat. Hence it is to be conceived as a profession and suffers from the very professionalization of politics that Greek democrats tried so assiduously to avoid. Young men of patrician lineage were trained from birth in diction and rhetoric, physical fitness and military skills, amiability and the. arts of influence. Overly mannered and self-conscious, they were taught to gain favor with the powerful and befriend the potentially influential. By degrees, they were initiated into legal skills and affairs together with martial arts and the> postures of command. Polybius advises us that ten years of military service are necessary before a man can aspire to a political career—a prerequisite that was mercifully abbreviated in the later years of the Republic. One then went into the service of a provincial governor and moved onward, at home, to a minor magistrate or a military tribune.

To become a pretor was the “next obligatory office,” as Taylor puts it, followed by the consulship, if at all possible. Between times, one held important offices in the provinces where the opportunities for enrichment and plunder were immense. These broad outlines of the nobleman’s training and career could be painted with details that more appropriately describe politicking, rather than politics. The right friends, devoted clients, and suitable personal connections were critically important in achieving public office and political renown.

Even more significant than the Roman cult of libertas was the Roman cult of amicitia, the Latin word for “friendship.” Career success depended not only upon lineage and wealth but also on the elaborate system of friends and shared obligations a rising patrician developed. I use the word “system” advisedly to single out the complex machinery of personal ties and interactions on which the whole structure of rule was based. Roman “politics” must be seen as a network of clients and associates rather than dubs and parties. The fierce differences between factions in the Republic, that finally brought it to ruin were more personal in nature than political. Cicero’s allusions to the partes of the populores and the optimates (the “parties” of the “people” and “aristocrats,” to use these terms in a modern sense) are evidence of differences in methods of manipulation rather than programs. None of the nobles, with the exception of the brothers Gracchi, over tried to really shift political power from the patrician elite to the populace. Indeed, Roman politicians were rarely burdened by Nontimentality for the oppressed or the plight of the commoners.

To use the people for personal ends and career ambitions, however, was a widespread technique, not only during republican times but also during the imperial era. Nor were the Roman people the worse For the use of such demagogic tactics. Nobles gave immense quantities of their wealth to gain popular support against their rivals. A steady flow of emoluments, gifts, festivals, and games came to be expected by the Roman people as a characteristic feature of politics. Roman client and gift politics, in turn, accelerated the degradation of the citizenry, fostering an appetite for sensationalism and brutality that emerged in marked contrast with its traditional republican spirit and virtues. “Public things” or res publica became a highly merchandisable commodity—a “thing” to be sold, bought, and pilfered. In this respect, the Empire changed very little in Roman “politics.” It merely made the process of demoralization, vulgarization, and pilfering more systematic and orderly.

Early Rome did not produce a breed of kindly men—nor, for that matter, did Athens and other Greek poleis, Kindness and sentimentality are not classical traits. Obligation and duty are the preferred personal attributes of the ancient world. But these attributes did create an ideal of a highly committed, morally certain, and fiercely independent yeomanry. The landholdings of these yeomen provided the material competence for a solid independence of mind and a sense of community rootedness. Behind the more distinguished names of early republican Rome, such as Cincinnatus, who left his farmstead for vigorous public service, were the stern traditions of family cults, civic deities, and an unblemished ancestry—a lineage to be cherished because it exhibited soldierly simplicity and agrarian virtues. Dignatas and honorare were to be prized over wealth, social status, and public esteem, although invariably such rewards came with family probity.

These stern and dutiful farmers were to fill the legions commanded by Scipio in the brutal wars with Carthage. They were the fodder of costly, long-term, and debilitating conflicts that brought ruin to their farms and the destruction of their social moorings. Thereafter, an unyielding patriciate, too urbane to value the innocent simplicity of its own rural ancestors, effaced what the Punic Wars had largely undone—the ideals of republican virtue and the agrarian material conditions in which this sense of virtue and duty was rooted. Cincinnatus belonged to a social world rather than a political one. Governance in his day was seen as a domestic responsibility in which a public servant tended to the needs of the people more as a father than an administrator. Such men became short-lived dictatori without ever establishing dictatorships; they promptly went back to their farms after answering the call to public service. They did not thirst for power, much less professionalize it.

But Rome could not strike the balance between aristocratic values and public rights achieved by Athens. More precisely, Rome failed to turn the governance of the civitas into a genuinely political community. Men like Cincinnatus were to lose not only the landholdings that gave them independence of mind and spirit; they were to lose the social base for public commitment without developing a politics that could control and contain the new civic dispensation that was forming around them. Like Athens, Rome was to grow—and, like Athens, it was to be brought into a broad regional theater of power relationships and responsibilities. But where Athens drastically reworked its yeoman society into a vital public realm that fostered active citizenship among all its social elements, Rome permitted its yeomanry to dissolve into rootless constituencies and its public fife to languish. A republic rather than a democracy came into existence with a degree of administrative ingenuity unprecedented in the history of jurisprudence, efficiency, and military prowess. But for this achievement it paid a penalty that ultimately spelled its death. The late Roman Republic was not a world that could nourish a Cincinnatus or even a Marcus Portius Cato, whose writings are filled with denunciations of Rome’s moral debasement, lasciviousness, and extravagance. Politics was claimed almost exclusively by the patriciate and jealously guarded from any serious invasion by the people. In this sonse, republican Rome was true to itself: like all elitist regimes, it would have been exceptional if it failed to turn from an increasingly oligarchical republic into a completely despotic empire.

---

Athens and Rome ultimately became legendary models for two types of “popular” government: a democracy and a republic. And later social theorists and political practitioners who had lost any monarchic proclivities were to clearly favor a republican system of governance over a democratic one.

But democratic notions of a body politic did not disappear. They were to surface from the depths of a popular “underground” of deviant Christian sects throughout ‘the Middle Ages, such as the Brethren of the Free Spirit, Anabaptist movements, and blatantly anarchic conventicles during the Reformation Era. Like Athens, they were not without their flaws: elites are to be found within elites, saints within larger communities of believers, and the like. Nevertheless, village democracies kept alive strong traditions of popular assemblies that may have been inherited from distant Neolithic and similar institutions’and that also emerged in many medieval towns. The notion of the “people” or demos did not disappear. The ideals of “popular rule” were to linger on from classical antiquity well into modern times.

More commonly, however, republican theories of governance were hybridized with democratic notions, and they were to produce rising demands of self-governance with institutions that were redolent of democratic Athens. Machiavelli’s Prince and Discourses glitter with a fascinating mixture of republican and democratic ideas, largely translated into the virtues of his beloved Roman Republic, His aversion for the idle nobility is pronounced. Politics, in Machiavelli’s eyes, is not the fare for the slothful, ignorant, and crested boors who are the fatuous heirs of titles and aristocratic pedigrees. It is a highly skilled craft that must be exercised as gently by the prince in his relationship with the people as it must be exercised ruthlessly by him in his relationship with his rivals. Machiavelli’s demand for a total commitment by his chosen sovereign to politics reflects the emergence of a new kind of man, the Renaissance prince: secular, keenly intelligent, skillful, and cunning. He is a man of reason rather than faith, of judgment rather than belief, and self-reliance rather than dependency, A new political dispensation is in the air, a modern one, that draws its precedents from the senatorial party of the early Roman Republic rather than the sacerdotal party of the medieval church. Machiavelli’s references are to Scipio, not to Augustine; to Livy, not Aquinas.

But within this republican idea of a meritocracy, Machiavelli advances for sixteenth-century Italian concepts that could be found in Perikles and the Athenian commitment to amateurism. Comparable only to his, hatred of the nobility is his hatred of mercenaries who were plaguing and plundering Italy in his day—professional soldiers. The most commanding need of a well-ordered state, he tells us, is a citizen-army. Mercenaries are as unreliable as they are unscrupulous. They are born plunderers who have no allegiances other than those that money can buy. “Mercenary captains are either very capable men or not,” he declares; “if they are, you cannot rely on them, for they will always aspire to their own greatness, either by oppressing you, their master, or by oppressing others against your intentions; but if the captain is not an able man, he will generally ruin you. And if it is replied to this, that whoever has armed forces will do the same, whether these are mercenaries or not, I would reply that as armies are to be used either by a prince or by a republic, the prince must go in person to take the position of captain, and the republic must send its own citizens. If the man sent turns out to be incompetent, it must change him; and if capable, keep him by law from going beyond the proper limits. And it is seen by experience that only princes and armed republics make very great progress, whereas mercenary forces do nothing but harm, and also an armed republic submits less easily to the rule of one of its citizens than a republic armed by foreign forces.”{14}

Machiavelli’s argument clearly tips toward a republic and an armed citizenry rather than a prince and a professional army. Clearly, if princely government was central to his concerns, the prince’s competence would normally be beyond any legal assessment. There would be nothing that could prevent him from “going beyond the proper limits,” indeed, to tolerate any limits at all. Nor could Machiavelli, whose mind was steeped in the Greek and Roman classics, have been unmindful that the Athenian military forces, in contrast to the Roman imperial ones, were structured around clearly accountable captains who were strictly regulated by law, indeed by the ekklesia or popular citizen-assembly. Amateurism takes high priority over professionalism and political Institutions, visibly peopled by a free, and an armed, citizenry, over a state power with its mercenary bureaucrats and soldiers.

Machiavelli undoubtedly had his eyes sharply focused on Italy and the cause of national independence, but his feet were firmly planted in his beloved Florence and the cause of freedom. The sap flowed, as it were, from the roots upward—from city to nation—with the result that a republican, even princely, state was nourished by and mixed with civic democratic notions.

---

Ideologically, the hybridization of two very distinct and potentially conflicting classical ideas of public governance arises from a serious confusion over what we mean by politics and statecraft.

The rise of the nation-state from the sixteenth century onward greatly altered the entire framework of political discourse. The basic unit of public governance was the city, not larger entities such as the province, nation, or empire. A citizen’s allegiances to gover nin g institutions could be comfortably enumerated as a very distinct hierarchy of loyalties. He was first and foremost a townsman. The town was the authentic and most meaningful locus of his personal and public life. Only secondarily did he identify himself with a province or a region. The idea of “nationality” was at best vague, that is when it existed at all. Romans in the most far-flung reaches of the empire consistently visualized themselves as citizens of the imperial city. Among the Greeks, civic loyalty was virtually all-consuming: Athenians, for example, sharply and disdainfully distinguished themselves from Spartans or Corinthians, a sentiment that was freely reciprocated by all citizens of other poleis with respect to other Greek cities. The Stoic philosophers who were to pave the way for Christianity insisted well into Roman times that civic loyalty defiled the novel notion that all men were brothers. But the Stoic notion and its very novelty has the ring of an ideological protest against the more popular view that citizenship implies a primary loyalty to one’s town, not to a vagary called “humanity.”

The rise of the nation-state altered this hierarchy of loyalties—and, with this change, the way in which politics was conceived.

Not that ancient and medieval civic parochialism was an unblemished desideratum. Parochialism had a very harmful, often dehumanizing, effect on urban life generally. The tendency to set one city against another fostered local chauvinism with such pathologies as ethnic antagonisms, wars, and cultural introversion. In a world where the city produced a deep sense of ethnic and cultural identity that compares with the modern world’s most strident forms of nationalism, the conquest of one city by another often terminated in the sheer annihilation of a people as a distinct community. Rome’s total destruction of Carthage in the last of the Punic wars was not merely the dismantling of a major ancient city; it was the enslavement and total effacement of a people—of their identity, culture, traditions, uniqueness, indeed their very claim to exist. Jericho, Troy, and Jerusalem were to suffer similar fates, to cite only the most well-known examples of what urban destruction often meant in the early and classical worlds—an act of devastation comparable only to genocide in the modern world.

With the rise of nationalism and the nation-state, the state began to assume ideological preeminence over the city, and even radical social thinkers began to formulate their political ideologies in broad territorial or national terms. Puritan revolutionaries thought of their “rights” not as citizens of London, which formed the real center of parliamentary unrest against the court, but as “Englishmen.” Puritan theory, based on a doctrine of natural rights, formulated these “rights” not in the characteristically civic forms of popular assemblies and politics based on personal intimacy; a nation, “England,” was conceived as the legendary victim of invading “barbarous” Normans who had crossed the channel from France some five hundred years earlier and imposed a royal tyranny on a representative system of Saxon self-governance. The Combatants in the revolution expressed their loyalties in terms of their adherence to “parliament” or the “court.” Larger-than-life Institutions, far beyond the reach of the ordinary citizen, began to Supplant the civic institutions within which some kind of face-to-face democracy was feasible. Republicanism, in effect, was a radical ideology of nations rather than cities and statecraft became the “politics” of highly centralistic state structures.

It is hard to overstate the amount of intellectual mischief the extension of the word politics, basically rooted in the civic life of the polis, produced when it was permitted to encompass statecraft. Classical politics always implied the existence of a body politic—in its own way, a kind of ecological community in the social sense even in Rome, when the words populus Romanus came to mean little more than an aristocratic oligarchy. The classical notion of a body politic was not a euphemism for an “electorate” or a “constituency,” as it is today; it was a real, physical, and clearly observable entity. It could be seen daily in public squares where heated discussions over political issues intermingled with the chitchat of personal and business problems; it assembled with almost weekly regularity on a hillside of Athens, the Pnyx, where meetings of the ekklesia were convened, or it gathered in open spaces of the Roman Forum where the comitia tributa often held its sessions. It could be heard quite audibly, whether by acclamation in Sparta, arguments in Athens, or even in the most despotic of Rome’s imperial periods when the hoots and shouts of commoners at the Coliseum reminded the emperors that they were not beyond the reach of public criticism. In more militant times, this body politic rioted in Rome’s St. Peter’s Square during the Middle Ages and stormed into Florentine churches to hear the sermons of Savonarola during the Renaissance. In short, the body politic existed in the literal sense that it was a tangible, protoplasmic entity that expressed its concerns in the eye-to-eye contact of personal confrontation and fervent discourse.

This eye-to-eye contact of active citizens was an organic politics in its most meaningful, protoplasmic, and self-fulfilling sense. Political assemblies were not mere audiences on which public officials practiced their arts of statecraft; they were legislative communities united by a reasonable commonality of shared, public interests and ethical precepts. That political life had worked its way out of social life to acquire a distinct identity of its own and presupposed social forms as its underpinnings is evident enough from any account of the polis or its near-equivalent in the medieval city-state or “commune.” But even so conservative a thinker as Aristotle never confused a family or a workshop with the agora, where public affairs were normally discussed, and the ekklesia. Where the body politic physically assembled to make public decisions. Hence, the Greek polis was never a state in any modern sense of the term with professional surrogates for an assembled body politic, nor was it a social entity such as a “family” that united the people into an authentic kin group. Aristotle’s notion of philia or solidarity as a crucial precondition for a political life expressed the unique identity politics possessed as a form of governance, one That transcended mere kinship obligations. If kinsmen were obligated to each other by virtue of blood ties and tribal custom, citizens were obligated to each other by virtue of civic ties and ethical precepts.

If politics can be said to have emerged from society in the strict sense that I use the latter word to denote familial, vocational, and sociable relationships, so statecraft can be said to have emerged from politics conceived as the activities of a directly involved body politic. Aristocracies, monarchies, and republics ultimately dissolve the body politic as a participatory entity, an essentially ecological phenomenou into an amorphous mass of privatized “social” beings we so aptly call an electorate or a constituency. The “deputies of the people” replace the people, to use Rousseau’s pithy formulation, and bureaucratic institutions replace popular assemblies. The identity of politics as a unique phenomenon to be distinguished from other, presumably “social” activities, is not a concept that was confined to classical thinkers such as Aristotle. It is a recurring and often perplexing problem that appears in the writings of Rousseau, in constitutional documents of the past that distinguish between “active” (propertied) citizens and “passive” (propertyless) citizens, and today, most strikingly, in the writings of a highly gifted political philosopher, Hannah Arendt.

What is so curious about this literature and its attempt to single Out politics as a clearly identifiable area of public activity is the extent to which it is burdened by the institutional weight of the nation-state. Arendt’s distinction between a “political realm” and one that is “social” allows for very little difference between political activity and statecraft. The state has so thoroughly merged with the political—institutionally and functionally—that the two almost seem identical. What is remarkable is that modern social theory does not find this congruence of very different arenas of public governance problematical. Clear as the old Aristotelian distinction between the social and political may be, the equally crucial distinction between the political and the statist tends to be lost in the modern literature on politics. Political activity and statecraft have become so thoroughly intermixed in theory and l’Oality that the present-day usage of the word “politics” is taken to be the “art” of the politician, who, for all practical purposes, replaces the body politic. That the state historically depoliticized tills body politic and essentially disbanded it institutionally seems like a meaningless ideological curiosity in a world where political activity” takes the form of an on-going battle of political gladiators in a strangely muted, almost empty arena.

Perhaps the main reason why the confusion between politics and statecraft persists so strongly today is that we have lost sight of the historic source and principal arena of any authentic politics—the city. We not only confuse urbanization with citification, but we have literally dropped the city out of the history of ideas—both in terms of the way it explains the present human condition and the systems of public governance it creates. Not that we lack any valuable histories of the city or attempts to evaluate it sociologically. But our urban literature generally neglects the relationship between the city and the remarkable phenomenon of citizenship it produces. Urban historians tend to fixate on largely narrative accounts of the city’s development from village to megalopolis—accounts that are riddled by nostalgia for the past or a brute acceptance of existing urban conditions and the future they portend. The notion that the city is the source of immensely provocative political, ethical, and economic theories—indeed, that its institutions and structures embody them—is generally alien to the modern social theorist.

An ethical interpretation of historical urban standards must highlight one central issue: the need to recover civic forms and values that foster an active citizenry. This amounts to saying that we must recover politics again—not only the social forms of personal intercourse that underpin every kind of human activity. The city, conceived as a new kind of ethical union, a humanly scaled form of personal empowerment, a participatory, even ecological system of decision making, and a distinctive source of civic culture—this civic notion of community must be brought back again into the history of human ideas and practical wisdom. It must be critically reexamined as a realm of thought and activity that gives rise—as it did in various periods of history—to political consociation, a politics that places family, work, friendship, art, and values within the larger context of a rounded civic world. Politics, in effect, must be recreated again if we are to reclaim any degree of personal and collective sovereignty over our destiny. The nuclear unit of this politics is not the impersonal bureaucrat, the professional politician, the party functionary, or even the urban resident in all the splendor of his or her civic anonymity. It is the citizen—a term that embodies the classical ideals of philia, autonomy, rationality, and, above all, civic commitment, The elusive citizen who surfaced historically in the assemblies of Greece, in the communes of medieval Europe, in the town meetings of New England, and in the revolutionary sections of Paris must be brought to the foreground of political theory. For without his or her presence and without a clear understanding of his or her genesis, development, and potentialities, any discussion of the city is likely to become anemically institutional and formal. A city would almost certainly become a shapeless blob, a mere chaos of structures, streets, and squares if it lacked the institutions and forms appropriate to the development of an active citizenry. But without the citizens to occupy these institutions and fill these forms, we may create an endless variety of civic entities—but like the great urban belts that threaten to devour them, they would be completely socially lifeless and ecologically denatured.