Polis Made Manifest. The Physiognomy of the Public in the Hellenistic City – with a Case Study of the Agora in Priene, in Ch. Kuhn (ed.), Politische Kommunikation und öffentliche Meinung in der antiken Welt (Stuttgart 2012) 78-122 (original) (raw)
Related papers
1993
in recent social and political theory. These are deployed to attack, on the one hand, empirical political science and, on the other hand, normative theory with universalist aspirations, such as that found in the work of Rawls. Zolo argues that the complexity of modern societies and the resulting fragmentation of standards of truth doom both of these enterprises. Instead, we should begin with a view of politics as achieving "the selective regulation of social risks." We accede to political authority because this serves to reduce the uncertainties of social life, which, in the contemporary world, always tend to increase. This leads to a view of democracy that we might call neo-Schumpeterian. Zolo wholeheartedly endorses Schumpeter's famous attack on "the classical doctrine of democracy" but then goes on to argue that Schumpeter's own elite-competition model has been overtaken by recent developments. Parties no longer genuinely compete to attract the popular vote: instead, they collude with each other and establish client relationships with groups outside the political sphere. The electorate no longer possess even that minimum level of political rationality needed to make the competitive model work. Their political experience is constructed for them by the mass media, which is most effective when not engaged in overt propaganda. The resulting system, Zolo argues, no longer deserves to be called a representative democracy: "liberal oligarchy" would be more accurate. Having delivered this indictment, Zolo's book comes to a sudden halt. He is hardly enchanted by the system he has described, but he appears to lack the resources to propose an alternative. Yet this disability is self-inflicted. He has ruled out, on epistemological grounds, empirical evidence that might, for instance, challenge his account of the effects of the mass media. And his attack on normative theory overlooks the fact that the systems he is describing are held together, in part at least, by the democratic principles espoused by their members, politicians, and voters alike. (One of the less helpful of Zolo's borrowings is a form of functionalism that seeks to explain the workings of the political system without reference to the aims and intentions of the actors themselves.) That is why Rawls's ambition to defend a normative theory by reference to the shared public culture of liberal democracies is not absurd. One might say that Zolo, having written his Prince, ought now to attempt his Discourses. Yet this is a challenging book for those inclined toward the radical democratic view taken up by most of the contributors to Mouffe's collection. Zolo lays his finger on the central difficulty: "What this radical-democratic vision appears to me to lack most of all is a perception of the variety, particularism and mutual incompatibility of social expectations in non-elementary societies. It fails to consider the structurally scarce nature both of social resources and of the instruments of power responsible for the allocation of politically distributable resources" (p. 70). In other words, some, at least, of the conflicts thrown up by a fragmented society are zero-sum; and simply to encourage higher levels of political participation by hitherto excluded or passive groups does nothing to resolve this problem. The challenge for would-be radical democrats is to show how it is possible both to respect the separate identities of the many groups that emerge in such a society and, at the same time, to arrive at collective decisions that are recognized as legitimate by all these
Bryn Mawr Classical Review, 1993
in recent social and political theory. These are deployed to attack, on the one hand, empirical political science and, on the other hand, normative theory with universalist aspirations, such as that found in the work of Rawls. Zolo argues that the complexity of modern societies and the resulting fragmentation of standards of truth doom both of these enterprises. Instead, we should begin with a view of politics as achieving "the selective regulation of social risks." We accede to political authority because this serves to reduce the uncertainties of social life, which, in the contemporary world, always tend to increase. This leads to a view of democracy that we might call neo-Schumpeterian. Zolo wholeheartedly endorses Schumpeter's famous attack on "the classical doctrine of democracy" but then goes on to argue that Schumpeter's own elite-competition model has been overtaken by recent developments. Parties no longer genuinely compete to attract the popular vote: instead, they collude with each other and establish client relationships with groups outside the political sphere. The electorate no longer possess even that minimum level of political rationality needed to make the competitive model work. Their political experience is constructed for them by the mass media, which is most effective when not engaged in overt propaganda. The resulting system, Zolo argues, no longer deserves to be called a representative democracy: "liberal oligarchy" would be more accurate. Having delivered this indictment, Zolo's book comes to a sudden halt. He is hardly enchanted by the system he has described, but he appears to lack the resources to propose an alternative. Yet this disability is self-inflicted. He has ruled out, on epistemological grounds, empirical evidence that might, for instance, challenge his account of the effects of the mass media. And his attack on normative theory overlooks the fact that the systems he is describing are held together, in part at least, by the democratic principles espoused by their members, politicians, and voters alike. (One of the less helpful of Zolo's borrowings is a form of functionalism that seeks to explain the workings of the political system without reference to the aims and intentions of the actors themselves.) That is why Rawls's ambition to defend a normative theory by reference to the shared public culture of liberal democracies is not absurd. One might say that Zolo, having written his Prince, ought now to attempt his Discourses. Yet this is a challenging book for those inclined toward the radical democratic view taken up by most of the contributors to Mouffe's collection. Zolo lays his finger on the central difficulty: "What this radical-democratic vision appears to me to lack most of all is a perception of the variety, particularism and mutual incompatibility of social expectations in non-elementary societies. It fails to consider the structurally scarce nature both of social resources and of the instruments of power responsible for the allocation of politically distributable resources" (p. 70). In other words, some, at least, of the conflicts thrown up by a fragmented society are zero-sum; and simply to encourage higher levels of political participation by hitherto excluded or passive groups does nothing to resolve this problem. The challenge for would-be radical democrats is to show how it is possible both to respect the separate identities of the many groups that emerge in such a society and, at the same time, to arrive at collective decisions that are recognized as legitimate by all these
Demos vs. Polis? Essays on Civic Responsibility and Participation
2019
When Cleisthenes empowered the demes in ancient Athens, they probably already existed as indications of suburban and rural Attica. Following his recall from exile after the Spartanpuppet tyrant Isagoras fled and was banished from the city, Cleisthenes' 508/7 bce reforms reorganised the demes to reflect not only geography but probably also the kinship groupings (gene) that were a legacy of the aristocracy, of which Cleisthenes was a part, as well as the brotherhoods (phratrias) and clubs (hetaireai) (Whitehead, 1986, pp. 25n86 & 31n117-118). He most likely reorganised them in this way so that the new political system could appear and actually be "as natural and as normal as possible" (Nails, 2002, p. 347). This reform, enacted upon a series of pre-existing and overlapping structures, tells us at least two things. First, the birth of democracy was never, perhaps can never be, pure or chthonic (Apollodorus, 3.4.1, & Plato, Rep. 414d-5c). It emerged through negotiation and renegotiation of competing and inherited interests, centres, and networks of power. Nonetheless, these negotiations themselves gave birth to something genuinely new. More than that, they did not merely redistribute that power. Mere redistribution is what the Spartans did by installing Isagoras after he and Cleisthenes solicited their support to overthrow the tyrant Hippias of Athens in 510. The negotiations and renegotiations, in generating something new, gave rise to a new power, the power of the demes or the demes as power. This novelty survives, even if the power of the gene also survived the reforms. Second, this very impurity-performed in order to give a sheen of purity, naturalness, and normalcy to the reforms-resulted in a real naturalness and normalcy to the new power structure. Reforms that truly, radically, purely generated a new system, it seems, would not have been recognised as anything other than chaotic and unnatural, as indeed Cleisthenes' isonomic system was considered by outsiders when they insultingly referred to it as demokratia (Arendt, 2006, pp. 20 & 276n12), or as imposed. To give birth to the new, the old must survive. To achieve purity, impurity is persistently required. The legacy or legacies of the first, oldest, and purest of democracies, pure despite its exclusion of women and by slavery (so some are fond of saying), the inheritance of this birth is that the rule of the demes was never quite, or never fully, a rule by the demes. Regardless, that legacy is also that the impurity of this inheritance can be purified, if only through reforms to existing systems or networks of power, that the purity is achieved through, or that the purity is the thought of, rule by the demes, the achievement of which requires not mere redistribution but more negotiations and renegotiations, more reconsiderations, more births and rebirths of power. This idea, that the inhabitants of the demes, those living in the suburbs and countryside, could be centres or nodes of political power, gives birth to the Athenian polis, properly speaking. As Hannah Arendt points out, "'Wherever you go, you will be a polis' : these famous words became not merely the watchword of Greek colonisation," although they were that (Arendt, 1998, p. 198). In addition to colonisation, the words speak to the power of speech as the expression of the negotiations and births of power in which all male Athenian citizens were empowered to take part, speech being a power uncoupled from a given location or moment. Every Athenian carried this power, itself taken as the power of democratic Athens 2 if we listen to the speech Thucydides puts in Pericles' voice (Thucydides, 2.40), with them throughout the ancient world. To be sure, this deterritorialisation and detemporalisation of power is how, along with its naval strength, Athens became a colonial power that hid its hegemony by calling itself a trading league. Still, if democracy as the mark of the Athenian polis is power in speech, potentially in any one of the male citizens, then this power, borne regardless of where and when they appeared, tells us that the democratic polis, as a polis, is itself a mode or form of deterritorialisation and detemporalisation, finding its power in the decentring and perhaps destabilisation of power. And yet, this polis still needed to be built. If part of the pre-Cleisthenic legacies that survived the reforms were the gene, phratrias, and hetaireai, so were things like the Assembly, the literal buildings and walls of the city of Athens. That is, speech needs a place for its expression, a place that empowers it, where others can hear it, even if they do not always, or not all of them, listen. Without this, we speak into an abyss, become a polis exclusively within ourselves. Speech, in order to appear as speech, must be mediated. It can only be speech through others. An unmediated speech would be silent, which, politically speaking, appears as the protest of going home or the tyrant's unwillingness even to hear, let alone listen (Plato, Apol. 32a-e), this last being at least similar to what Arendt considers the silence of violence (Arendt, 2006, p. 9). Democratic speech requires an architectonics if not an architecture for its power to be empowered. It requires a territory or location where it can appear at a given time, appropriate or not, appreciated or not, heard or not. This is the stability at work within democratic speech's deterritorialisations, and it is a stability that can form or has formed a legacy for its architect. This very stability, however, lends itself to the thought that the architecture is the seat of power, that democratic political power is a techne for maintaining its arche, perhaps in a continued exclusion from the locations that empower speech by giving it a space to potentially be heard, in sustaining a deafness to the words of those who were excluded from the founding negotiations and renegotiations. It is also the source of the belief that speech seeks to make present in others what is present in oneself, that it is reducible to the techniques of persuasion (Plato, Apol. 17a, & Gorg. 452e; Aristotle, Rhet. 1354a-5b). Nothing, in other words, prevents the democratic polis from becoming the tool of undemocratic interests acting in and through the name of democracy's architectural soundness. Except perhaps the self-same, true (and by 'true' we mean pure qua impure, most impure when calling for purity) Cleisthenic legacy of deterritorialisation and destabilisation, if others are willing to listen to or live that legacy, rather than merely inherit it, like an aristocrat. This legacy is why a democracy worthy of the name remains a praxis rather than an accomplished fact (Arendt, 1998, pp. 195-6), why Aristotle distinguishes between the arche of the master over the slave and that of the polis (Aristotle, Pol. 1277a-b). To this interlocking and overlapping network of contestations, negotiations, internal and external conflicts, inheritances, and destabilisations, we have added one word more. It requires leaving Attica and entering a second language and empire (or third, depending on one's perspective on the language used here). From ancient Greek and Athens, then, we turn to Latin and Rome, and specifically to the word that, as it has developed in English, itself indicates contestation and conflict: versus. Being a participle of the verb verto, this word has its origins in a network of meanings more complex (Lewis & Short, s.vv. "versus3" & "verto") than how it appears now in English (Versus, 2019). This simplified contemporary appearance, as a facing against or contrast, is accurate in that verto does refer to a directing or looking 3 toward and a turning around. Demos and polis, citizens and city, turn to face each other, contest each other, vie for the legacy and architectonics or architecture of the system of rule by the people. Each already within themselves contestations of meaning and truth, they argue and fight between each other as much as if not more than they fight within themselves. It is an open question, perhaps, which fights are more intense, those within demes, gene, phratrias, hetaireai, or the conspiratorial clubs called synomosiai (Nails, 2002, p. 351); those between the demes in the architectural locations for speech placed within or appearing as the polis; or those between the demes and kratos, between the people and the power that itself emerges as distinct and new in the empowering of the demes. But the Latin verb can also mean turning about, turning one's back and running away, giving an account or making profitable, altering and transforming (even to the point of changing one's country, i.e. emigrating). As a turning about, this versus would be the whirling and circling of demos and polis around each other, opposite magnetic poles in a dialectic without Aufhebung except perhaps in opposition and differentiation, in the difference and distinction between the demes and the polis, even if it is only a polis via its demes. If versus indicates a running away, however, is this is an act of cowardice or the only political act available in a circumstance where power, as kratos or as the rhetorical architecture of democracy, refuses to listen, even if it is, in itself, the location for the appearance of listening? If the space for contestations over meaning and truth, political or otherwise, has been shaped or built such that it is only a rhetorical space, only an apparent space for the appearance of speech, then is going home not also itself an opposition, a versus, an appearance in silence of speech, an attempt to take back power and rule for the demes by boycotting or turning one's back on the space that has no true or real space for them, is a corrupted or impure space, because it is only a location for kratos as such? Would this not be, in its very silence, an account, an attempt to make and remake the profitability, to itself and to all of Greece,...
The Public and the Private in Aristotle’s Political Philosophy
Ancient Philosophy, 1994
in recent social and political theory. These are deployed to attack, on the one hand, empirical political science and, on the other hand, normative theory with universalist aspirations, such as that found in the work of Rawls. Zolo argues that the complexity of modern societies and the resulting fragmentation of standards of truth doom both of these enterprises. Instead, we should begin with a view of politics as achieving "the selective regulation of social risks." We accede to political authority because this serves to reduce the uncertainties of social life, which, in the contemporary world, always tend to increase. This leads to a view of democracy that we might call neo-Schumpeterian. Zolo wholeheartedly endorses Schumpeter's famous attack on "the classical doctrine of democracy" but then goes on to argue that Schumpeter's own elite-competition model has been overtaken by recent developments. Parties no longer genuinely compete to attract the popular vote: instead, they collude with each other and establish client relationships with groups outside the political sphere. The electorate no longer possess even that minimum level of political rationality needed to make the competitive model work. Their political experience is constructed for them by the mass media, which is most effective when not engaged in overt propaganda. The resulting system, Zolo argues, no longer deserves to be called a representative democracy: "liberal oligarchy" would be more accurate. Having delivered this indictment, Zolo's book comes to a sudden halt. He is hardly enchanted by the system he has described, but he appears to lack the resources to propose an alternative. Yet this disability is self-inflicted. He has ruled out, on epistemological grounds, empirical evidence that might, for instance, challenge his account of the effects of the mass media. And his attack on normative theory overlooks the fact that the systems he is describing are held together, in part at least, by the democratic principles espoused by their members, politicians, and voters alike. (One of the less helpful of Zolo's borrowings is a form of functionalism that seeks to explain the workings of the political system without reference to the aims and intentions of the actors themselves.) That is why Rawls's ambition to defend a normative theory by reference to the shared public culture of liberal democracies is not absurd. One might say that Zolo, having written his Prince, ought now to attempt his Discourses. Yet this is a challenging book for those inclined toward the radical democratic view taken up by most of the contributors to Mouffe's collection. Zolo lays his finger on the central difficulty: "What this radical-democratic vision appears to me to lack most of all is a perception of the variety, particularism and mutual incompatibility of social expectations in non-elementary societies. It fails to consider the structurally scarce nature both of social resources and of the instruments of power responsible for the allocation of politically distributable resources" (p. 70). In other words, some, at least, of the conflicts thrown up by a fragmented society are zero-sum; and simply to encourage higher levels of political participation by hitherto excluded or passive groups does nothing to resolve this problem. The challenge for would-be radical democrats is to show how it is possible both to respect the separate identities of the many groups that emerge in such a society and, at the same time, to arrive at collective decisions that are recognized as legitimate by all these
Democracy and Public Choice in Classical Athens
Drawing on classical Athens the paper explores the qualities and workings of direct democracy and provides a simple model of public choice to analyse policymaking with specific reference to war and peace. Given the cost and the benefits of defence and the public revenues at the time, it looks into the motives, processes and consequences of decision-making for war or peace in two historical situations (the Themistocles' Naval Law and the Eubulus' and Lycurgus' "social contracts") to ascertain that under direct democracy economically-motivated, bounded-rational individuals tend to designate policies that advance their personal welfare along with the overall welfare of the community. Moreover, such a policy course has not only economic, but also political and social implications: it entrenches direct democracy to the polity and reinforces equality, freedom, security and solidarity among the people.
Deliberative Democracy and Public Sphere Typology
Estudos em Comunicacão/Communication Studies, 2007
The purpose of this article is to explore the morphology and development of the concept of public sphere present in various of Habermas’ works, as well as the main criticisms that accompany such concept, particularly with regards to: (a) the recognition of multiple publics and its implications for the defense of the critical processing of problems of common interest; (b) the construction of a public sphere typology and its theoretical consequences for the articulation of argumentative exchanges that occur in the domain of simple interactions, in various spheres of everyday life, in denser debates within civil society associations and, finally, through the dissemination of information by mass media. Finally, I will explore some difficulties regarding the institutionalization of contributions that derive from the public debate.
Citizens and Statesmen: A Study of Aristotles Politics, by M.P. Nichols
1993
in recent social and political theory. These are deployed to attack, on the one hand, empirical political science and, on the other hand, normative theory with universalist aspirations, such as that found in the work of Rawls. Zolo argues that the complexity of modern societies and the resulting fragmentation of standards of truth doom both of these enterprises. Instead, we should begin with a view of politics as achieving "the selective regulation of social risks." We accede to political authority because this serves to reduce the uncertainties of social life, which, in the contemporary world, always tend to increase. This leads to a view of democracy that we might call neo-Schumpeterian. Zolo wholeheartedly endorses Schumpeter's famous attack on "the classical doctrine of democracy" but then goes on to argue that Schumpeter's own elite-competition model has been overtaken by recent developments. Parties no longer genuinely compete to attract the popular vote: instead, they collude with each other and establish client relationships with groups outside the political sphere. The electorate no longer possess even that minimum level of political rationality needed to make the competitive model work. Their political experience is constructed for them by the mass media, which is most effective when not engaged in overt propaganda. The resulting system, Zolo argues, no longer deserves to be called a representative democracy: "liberal oligarchy" would be more accurate. Having delivered this indictment, Zolo's book comes to a sudden halt. He is hardly enchanted by the system he has described, but he appears to lack the resources to propose an alternative. Yet this disability is self-inflicted. He has ruled out, on epistemological grounds, empirical evidence that might, for instance, challenge his account of the effects of the mass media. And his attack on normative theory overlooks the fact that the systems he is describing are held together, in part at least, by the democratic principles espoused by their members, politicians, and voters alike. (One of the less helpful of Zolo's borrowings is a form of functionalism that seeks to explain the workings of the political system without reference to the aims and intentions of the actors themselves.) That is why Rawls's ambition to defend a normative theory by reference to the shared public culture of liberal democracies is not absurd. One might say that Zolo, having written his Prince, ought now to attempt his Discourses. Yet this is a challenging book for those inclined toward the radical democratic view taken up by most of the contributors to Mouffe's collection. Zolo lays his finger on the central difficulty: "What this radical-democratic vision appears to me to lack most of all is a perception of the variety, particularism and mutual incompatibility of social expectations in non-elementary societies. It fails to consider the structurally scarce nature both of social resources and of the instruments of power responsible for the allocation of politically distributable resources" (p. 70). In other words, some, at least, of the conflicts thrown up by a fragmented society are zero-sum; and simply to encourage higher levels of political participation by hitherto excluded or passive groups does nothing to resolve this problem. The challenge for would-be radical democrats is to show how it is possible both to respect the separate identities of the many groups that emerge in such a society and, at the same time, to arrive at collective decisions that are recognized as legitimate by all these