Citizens to Lords

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Ellen Wood. Citizens to Lords

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CITIZENS TO LORDS

A Social History of Western Political Thought From Antiquity to the Middle Ages

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Scholars have offered various explanations for the emergence of political theory in ancient Greece. There will be more in the next chapter about the specific historical conditions that produced, especially in Athens, the kind of confidence in human agency that is a necessary condition of political theory. In this chapter, we shall confine ourselves to the general conditions that marked the Greeks out from other ancient civilizations and set the agenda for political theory.

The most vital factor undoubtedly was the development, perhaps by the late eighth century BC, of the unique Greek state, the polis, which sometimes evolved into self-governing democracies, as in Athens from the early fifth to the late fourth century. This type of state differed sharply from the large imperial states that characterized other ‘high’ civilizations, and from states that preceded the polis in Greece, the Minoan and Mycenean kingdoms. In place of an elaborate bureaucratic apparatus, the polis was characterized by a fairly simple state administration (if we can even call it a ‘state’ at all) and a self-governing civic community, in which the principal political relations were not between rulers and subjects but among citizens – whether the citizen body was more inclusive, as in Athenian democracy, or less so, as in Sparta or the city-states of Crete. Politics, in the sense we have come to understand the word, implying contestation and debate among diverse interests, replaced rule or administration as the principal object of political discourse. These factors were, of course, more prominent in democracies, and Athens in particular, than in the oligarchic polis.

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