Читать книгу A Companion to the Political Culture of the Roman Republic - Группа авторов - Страница 16

It was in 1989 that Josiah Ober used the concept of ‘political culture’ for the first time in a book on a classical subject, as far as I know, in his seminal work on the typology, status and functions of orators and oratory, and on the rhetoric of democracy in the political culture of fourth-century Athens. At about the same time, William Harris chose the same concept in his rejoinder to John North’s critical review of what the latter had labelled a ‘frozen-waste theory’ of politics in middle- and late-Republican Rome,¹ in the style of Friedrich Münzer’s ‘aristocratic parties’ and their deliberately, if only thinly veiled arcana imperii, published in 1920.² Above all, however, this label was meant to denounce Sir Ronald Syme’s concept of politics as a never-ending ‘strife for power, wealth and glory’, within the narrow and exclusive closed circles of ‘an aristocracy unique in duration and predominance’ as a ‘governing class’. This sombre vision of the decline and fall of the libera res publica was elegantly as well as magisterially expounded in his highly influential masterpiece The Roman Revolution, published in 1939 (see Chapter 7). Decades later, Syme still imperiously defended his radically elitist view as a kind of metahistorical eternal truth in his last book of 1986: ‘Oligarchy is imposed as the guiding theme, the link from age to age whatever be the form and name of government.’³ The underlying concept of Republican politics was based on a set of interdependent assumptions: politics was conceived as a sort of zero-sum game between a relatively small number of dominant families, the aim of which was power in the shape of the consulship. In order to achieve this object of their ambitions, leading figures of these gentes formed alliances on the basis of kinship, dynastic marriages and other personal relationships. These long-term alliances were assumed to be very stable, they constantly rose to take over government when others fell from power, only to rise again after a generation or even later – this was the gist of politics. Other classes – the plebs as well as more affluent voters – ‘had no voice in government’ and even ‘no place in history’, but were (at best) ‘susceptible to auctoritas, taking their tone and tastes from above’.⁴ That was meant to imply that the whole populus Romanus was tied to these families by a pervasive network of steeply hierarchical links of patronage and clientship (see 29). Moreover, the system of group voting, particularly in the consular elections held in the equally hierarchical comitia centuriata, was supposed automatically to guarantee the overwhelming influence of the oligarchy as such on the outcome of these annual contests for the maximus honos (see Chapter 16).⁵

It was Fergus Millar who rejected this apparently well-established orthodoxy – and who finally admitted that his teacher Ronald Syme had been its most influential representative (Millar 2002: 12–13). However, he went beyond the systematic deconstruction of the received wisdom and offered a new, indeed iconoclastic reading of the political character of the Republic and its political culture as a whole – although he neither explicitly used this concept nor systematically explained his descriptive and analytical categories (see Chapter 7). Millar not only insisted on the overwhelming importance of mass oratory and the central role and function of the orator before the people assembled in the comitium or Forum. He also claimed that the libera res publica was to be conceived of as a variant of ancient democracy, which was much more akin to the direct democracy of classical Athens than modern scholarship had been prepared to admit.⁶ Interestingly enough, it was this specific form of direct, close and intense communication and interaction which, on the one hand, was the central theme of Ober’s reconstruction of Athenian political culture and which, on the other hand, also became an important theme of the international debate on the character of politics in the Roman Republic, which got off the ground with the aforementioned exchange between Harris and North.⁷ This debate has been very lively, and continues to the present day – and it has moved well beyond the less than fruitful question of whether or not we should think of the Republic as a (sort of) democracy.

However, the ‘career’ of the concept ‘political culture’ began considerably earlier and in a completely different scientific context. The general intellectual background has been inspired from two rather different sides (independently of each other, but to a certain extent converging in the process). On the one hand, there was the introduction of the term in political science by Gabriel Almond, Sidney Verba, Lucian Pye, Lowell Dittmer and others since the late 1950s and early 1960s – their conception of ‘political cultures’ of contemporary societies was focused on subjective attitudes, knowledge, opinions and beliefs, i.e. cognitive, affective and evaluative orientations toward politics and political action.⁸ Interestingly enough, they included in their systematic outline of political culture(s) as a disciplinary category and new matrix, a cursory look at the type of the secularised city-state, characterised by limited differentiation, but also by relatively complex social structures such as the Greek city-states, Republican Rome and some of the city-states of medieval Europe. Since the ‘city-state as a political form is now primarily of historical interest’, however, ‘there would be little purpose in exploring the various categories which might be employed to order the examples of this type’ (Almond-Powell 1966: 256–258). Against the backdrop of the aforementioned debate on Roman politics, however, this historical interest has gained a new lease of life, and not only for ancient historians.⁹

On the other hand, there were the debates on the linguistic and cultural turns, and their impact on the modern historiography of medieval as well as (early) modern history, followed by a series of other turns (or perhaps rather ‘subturns’ under the umbrella of the universal ‘cultural turn’) – namely the spatial, performative and communicative turns. In the view of the advocates of a new cultural history of politics, it is to be seen as an interactive process of communication between different parties involved – that is, between elites and addressees – and as a process of discursive negotiating not only of concrete decisions on politics and policies, but also of the general rules governing the procedures of decision-making and the wielding of power in general, the acceptance of these rules, as well as the legitimacy of the decision-makers, their recruitment, status and claims, and their public performance and self-fashioning.

It is against this general backdrop that I want to suggest a concept of political culture based on modern (social and cultural) history, as well as political science. Such a strategy could provide a strong link between the various perspectives and methodological approaches, ideas and interpretations, and finally place them in a new, differentiated and complex context. The nodal point here is formed by the two fundamental sides of politics – political systems and the ‘political’ as such. On the one hand, there is, as it were, the traditional side of politics, that is the content or matter of politics and policies, which includes not only the concrete themes and topics on the political agenda of a given society, but also the rational or technical framework of institutions and formal procedures of decision-making. On the other hand, this concept necessarily includes, and to a certain extent focuses on, the symbolic dimensions of politics and power, their expressive side of representation or manifestation, which in turn includes not only the media, symbols, visual and other symbolic languages and discursive strategies, but also the collective repertoire of values, attitudes and mentalities of a given society, which are shaped, criticised, modified or otherwise negotiated in and through these languages and strategies.¹⁰

By this twofold approach, I would like to create an understanding of the conceptual system of social values and views of the world, of self and other, of mutual and shared expectations of behaviour in public roles, and of the semantics of politics in general that underlie the surface of power and interests, politics and political decision-making. We are talking not only of a system of moral concepts and their corresponding terms, or of a number of generally accepted convictions about the conventions and customs of a political order, but also of an entire range of images of reality, a system of making sense of, that is perceiving, interpreting and evaluating one’s immediate environment as well as the world at large – what one might call ‘nomological knowledge’. Such knowledge has a normative or prescriptive side, comprising attitudes towards, and expectations and standards of, right (and wrong) behaviour in a given situation. At the same time, it is also necessarily and indeed by definition related to real life, providing practical or applied knowledge, patterns or templates, remedies, concepts and even clichés for perceiving and processing reality and dealing with everyday problems. This deeply rooted knowledge is pre-theoretical and unreflected, which is what makes it very hard to grasp, describe and assess for badly documented periods (Hölkeskamp 2010: 54–55).

The important point of departure for further enquiries is that this level of collective ethical and cognitive dispositions always – in every political culture – strongly influences, determines, or even controls the public view of politics and policies as well as the ‘politicisability’ of topics, problems and challenges (and its limits, which can be expected to vary considerably in different cultures, and therefore need to be looked at). What we have called the ‘nomological knowledge’ of a given society also invariably conditions the socially accepted general requirements for obtaining and holding positions of power and political leadership, and the rules of recruiting the actual holders of these positions, as well as the hopes and expectations a given society overall places in these figures, in their abilities and leadership qualities, individually as well as collectively – that is, in their class as a whole and its role and functions. Vice versa, it is also a kind of nomological knowledge which determines the fulfilment of such expectations by political leaders, the usual roles and patterns of behaviour, the (re-)construction of their public personae, their individual and collective self-image and self-understanding, as well as the means and media of presenting and profiling themselves – that is, it applies to the complex dramaturgy of political action and public appearance in general. It thus affects all media, forms and levels of social interaction and communication, once again individually as well as collectively, inside the political class itself, between nobiles, ordinary senators and patrons, as well as between this class and the (notoriously elusive) ‘man in the Roman street’, the populus Romanus or the plebs at large (cf. Chapter 25; Chapter 30).¹¹

To put it in yet another way, a political culture has by definition more than just one side: there is the technical or rational side of politics, as it were, its surface concrete agenda, explicit content and matter; and there is also an expressive, a ceremonial and a corresponding cognitive side. Politics has symbolic, affective and aesthetic dimensions which together underwrite, permanently reproduce and renew, the legitimacy of the political system on the surface, and ensure its acceptance by assuring its meaning and sense.¹² It also confirms affiliations, generates compliance, grounds and maintains a collective identity and of a group – and this is a fundamental function of political culture understood as a ‘language of legitimation’. This language comprises, on the one hand, ‘a vocabulary of images, metaphors, rituals, assumptions and performances’, through which ‘political negotiations are conducted’, as well as, on the other hand, ‘a grammar, a set of conventions, governing the appropriate use of this vocabulary’ – a definition which seems to tie in quite nicely with Christian Meier’s concept of the ‘political grammar’ of late Republican Rome (Chapter 7).¹³ In this sense, political culture ‘constitutes the discursive environment in which power is legitimated’ (Braddick 2005: 69) – and more than that, this language serves the discursive construction of order, hierarchy and subordination and is therefore instrumental not only in representing power, but also in stabilising and even generating it: ‘Political symbols and rituals were not metaphors of power; they were the means and ends of power itself’ (Hunt 2004: 54).

Therefore, I suggest that we take the concept, firstly, to include the ‘symbolic dimensions of social action’ (Geertz 1973: 30) in the public sphere of politics and the concomitant communicative system of symbols, images and their semantics, shared (or at least understood) by the political community at large. Above all, secondly, a holistic model of a political culture in general (that is, premodern or modern, historical or contemporary) must highlight the specific interfaces and interconnections of these formal and social, ideological and symbolic layers, as well as their complex cross-referencing. A modern cultural history of politics could certainly profit from other modern models of middle-range explanatory reach which focus on these interdependencies, such as a systems-theoretical model of ‘institutionality’ which conceives of institutions both in terms of diachronic processes of acting out functions and their change, as well as in terms of habitualisation and structuration, ritualisation, formalisation and, ultimately, institutionalisation.¹⁴ Such a model should be able not only to describe functions and offices of any polity, but also explain the negotiation, emergence (or demise) and implementation of rules and norms, written and unwritten, and also of procedures and practices, formalised or informal.

By its very nature, I think, such a holistic model cannot do without comparative approaches, which focus on a whole variety of equivalent global and particular sociopolitical structures in different cultures in different (especially premodern) epochs. I again suggest that we must cross traditional disciplinary boundaries by drawing on comparative approaches as advanced in a volume of extreme importance which systematically put city-states in classical antiquity and medieval Italy in perspective (Molho, Raaflaub and Emlen 1991). This approach was inspired by innovative work on politics, its symbolic languages and ritual dimensions in late medieval and Renaissance city-state cultures, especially by the famous historians of early modern Europe, Edward Muir and Richard Trexler, and their analyses of civic rituals and public life in Venice and Florence.¹⁵

Further inspiration in the wake of the communicative and performative turns may be drawn from closely related recent German research on early modern political cultures of personal presence, immediate communication and ritual interaction.¹⁶ Last but not least, I suggest that we draw on the innovative and indeed radically new constructions of symbolic and ritual representations in the specific political culture during the French Revolution, focused on rhetoric, symbolic forms and images in general, and the revolutionary repertoire of festivals in particular (see Chapter 4).¹⁷