Sites of Exposure by John Russon

Author:John Russon
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Published: 2017-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

LESSON 9: SUGCHŌREIN: DOMESTIC POLITICS AND CIVIC ECOLOGY

A. The Freedom of Belonging and the Role of the State

We have looked at the character of modern democracy and discovered the limits of its conception of freedom—the freedom of indifferent individuality. To develop resources to think beyond these limits, we can attend to other histories: those of societies that have been “other” to this Western history. The ancient Greeks and the early Muslims offer particularly compelling alternatives to modern individualism that can provide corrective insights to modernist presumptions.

Modern democracy recognizes the inherently individual dimension of freedom. Greek “democracy,” however, emphasized another essential dimension of human freedom: the freedom of group membership, of communal self-determination. Ancient Greek politics—the system of self-governing city-states, poleis—was democratic (as opposed to theocratic) in that it was committed to the idea of governance as human self-determination, but its focus was on communal rather than individual self-determination—with the result that that different self-determining city-states developed different systems for self-governance, with differing degrees of popular participation in government, some officially “democratic” and some oligarchic—and its commitment to the goal of human flourishing was rooted in a sense of communal identity.

It was Athens that most famously inaugurated the distinctly “democratic” polity (possibly originally called “isonomia”), which was democratic in that all citizens participated in city decisions. Solon laid the roots of democracy at Athens, by establishing property rather than birth as the condition for participation in the decision-making assembly (ekklesia) in 594 BC and by limiting the rights of aristocratic families to organize funeral celebrations; Cleisthenes’ reforms of c. 508 BC further challenged the authority of traditional clans by transforming the official “tribes” of Athens from four family-based groups to ten geographically based groups. The governance of Athens was now such that civic decisions were made by the assembly with a quorum of 6,000, in which all citizens could participate, and to which legislation was proposed by a council (boulē) of 500, made up of 50 members from each of the ten geographically defined tribes. What is striking in the innovations of both Solon and Cleisthenes is the establishment of a governing body that was suprafamilial, in which the members of the council functioned as citizens—as representatives of the city-state (polis) as such—rather than as representatives of the family (oikos) or clan (genos). Themistocles, in 483 BC, further strength-ened the autonomy of the suprafamilial polis by convincing the Athenians to use the wealth from the recently discovered silver mines at Laurium for the civic project of building an Athenian navy that could be manned by unpropertied citizens, rather than distributing the wealth directly to the citizens. Finally, Ephialtes, who in 462 BC succeeded in limiting the legal and political power of the elite-membered Areopagus court, and Pericles, who in 451 BC established pay for jurors, made it possible for all the important decisions of city life to be made by citizens from all property classes.

What is definitive of this Greek approach to politics, both in the notion of the city-state in

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