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Tom Burns Organisation and Social Order Updated Sept. 1995; June 1997; Final Revision: 1.xii.00

Chapter I

ATHENS: THE INVENTION OF DEMOCRACY

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We begin with the constitutional and administrative set-up which was developed in Athens during the sixth and fifth centuries B.C., and lasted, apart from two brief intervals, until towards the end of the fourth century. Its lifetime, therefore, falls within that momentous period around 500 B.C., close to the very beginning of the history - the recorded history - of Europe, that Karl Jaspers called the Achsenzeit, the axial age, the turning point of history. In it were concentrated "an extraordinary number of extraordinary personages and events" - not only the philosophers, the tragedians and the historians of Greece, but Confucius and Lao-Tze in China, Buddha, Zoroaster, and the Jewish prophets. "Everywhere one notices attempts to introduce greater purity, greater justice, greater perfection and a more universal explanation of things. New models of reality, either mystically or prophetically or rationally apprehended, are propounded as a criticism of, and alternative to, the prevailing models."1 This was the time when Athens became a democracy - 'an association of persons, living in a defined territory, legally organised for their own government.' Democracy nowadays, as John Dunn says in his glum review of contemporary western political theories ("some of the central anomalies of our political understanding today"), has resolved itself into two quite distinct formulations: "one dismally ideological and the other fairly blatantly Utopian. In the first, democracy is the name of a distinct and very palpable form of modern state, at the most optimistic, simply the least bad mechanism for securing some measure of responsibility of the governors to the governed … In the second, democracy (or as it is sometimes called participatory democracy) is close to meaning simply the good society in operation, a society in which … all social arrangements authentically represent the interests of all persons, in which all live actively in and for their society and yet all remain as free....(roughly) as they could urgently and excusably desire."2 One of the more popular variants of the first of the two formulations Dunn puts forward is Schumpeter's. Modern representative democracy amounts to a system in which political leaders contend with each other for the citizen's vote in exactly the same manner that

1 A.Momigliano, Alien Wisdom, C.U.P., 1975, pp. 8-9. 2 J.Dunn, Western Political Theory in the Face of the Future C.U.P., 1979, pp.26-7.

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entrepreneurs compete with each other for the consumer's choice. This, we learn, makes democracy much more understandable - at least to economists. For economic and political activity resemble each other quite closely. The meaning and purpose of economic activity is obvious: people want food, clothing, shelter and so on, and production and commerce are there to satisfy those wants. But it would not get us very far if we took that as the starting point for acquiring an understanding of economic activity in present-day society. Far better to start out from ideas about profits, and how they are realised though market competition. In the same way, the meaning and purpose of political activity - in the western world at least - is to produce the legislation and the administrative measures that people want. "But in order to understand how democratic politics serve this social end, we must start from the competitive struggle for power and office and realise that the social function is fulfilled, as it were, incidentally - in the same way as production is incidental to profits."3 For political scientists, and for political commentators and writers too, Schumpeter's observations had an obvious and immediate appeal. It offered them a detective role in which they penetrated the disguise of overt political purposes and revealed the latent functions and the structure of relationships behind them. So well established and familiar did his interpretation become that, twenty years later, S.M.Lipset needed only to say, in his preface to the 1962 edition of Michels' Political Parties: "In essence, democracy in modern society may be viewed as involving the conflict of organised groups competing for support."4 Whether or not this holds good for contemporary western democracies, it certainly does not apply to Athenian democracy. Fifth century Athens, in fact, is the model of that idea of democracy which Dunn dismissed as "blatantly Utopian .... simply the good life in operation". This is in fact very much how Athenians would have described what their constitution was aimed at, however far short it may, for some of them, and for some of the time, have fallen in practice. For of course there were groups of citizens who supported leading figures like Themistocles, Cimon and Pericles, and other groups, with their leading figures, who opposed them, or had other ideas about what should be done. And, true, such leaders and their followers, did engage in "a competitive struggle for the people's vote". The crucial difference from what obtains in modern representative democracy was that the vote was itself the political decision, not about who should have the power to decide. The people themselves decided. It was, supremely, a 'participatory democracy' - the first recorded in history. And it was invented - manufactured out of familiar bits and pieces of what remained of a half-forgotten past. Those 'bits and pieces' of collective action deliberately removed from democratic control were for limited and quite clearly specified purposes only, mostly to do with external threats, and then to elected military and naval leaders - ten of them, and for one year only, although they might be reelected. During the fourth century, when finding money for military and other commitments became dificult, a few men regarded as expert in financial matters were also elected by the Assembly. Both cases, as 3 J.Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, Allen & Unwin, 1962 edn., p.282. 4 S.M.Lipset, Introduction to R.Michels, Political Parties, Free Press, 1962, p.52.

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A.H.M.Jones has observed, amounted to a surrender of democratic principles, "for the Greeks considered popular election to be aristocratic rather than democratic, since the ordinary voter will prefer a known to an unknown name."5 Political leadership was a different matter entirely. Political leaders in the Athens of the fifth and the fourth centuries had to be men who could command the attention of their fellow citizens in the Assembly rather than acceptance of their decisions and obedience to their orders. They were people whose proposals were most likely to be in accordance with the wishes of a majority of the four or five thousand who might be expected to turn up to a meeting of the Assembly, and so win the support of their votes. All citizens had the right to speak in the Assembly. Few of them actually exercised it, largely those whose experience, special knowledge, or political wisdom was generally recognised; the foolish and ignorant were shouted down. The Assembly did in fact look to a few men to present different lines of policy, among which they could choose. But this was utterly different from the way Schumpeter's definition of the democratic method as that in which individuals acquire the power to decide by means of 'a competitive struggle for the people's vote'. "Schumpeter meant power to decide quite literally: "The leaders of political parties decide, not 'the people'. Not in Athens. Not even Pericles had such power. While his influence was at its height, he could hope for continued approval of his policies, expressed in the people's vote in the Assembly, but his proposals were submitted to the Assembly week in and week out, and the Assembly always could, and on occasion did, abandon him and his policies. The decision was theirs, not his or any other leader's; recognition of the need for leadership was not accompanied by a surrender of the power of decision. And he knew it."6 How could this have happened? How can one possibly account for democracy - democracy in its most 'blatantly Utopian' form - coming into existence in a society which had previously been characteristically monarchic and aristocratic - a palace-ruled society in which something of the formal inflexibility of the ancien regime shows itself? It is as well to establish at the outset that the Athenian constitution bore little resemblance to what we are accustomed to think of as a 'state'. Even the term 'city-state' usually applied to it is misleading. Athens did indeed comprise a territory - Attica - of about a thousand square miles, but its boundaries were unmarked, permanently open, and undefended in time of peace. As in the case of all other political entities of the classical world (including Rome), Athens, for Athenians, meant themselves. They were citizens of Athens, moreover, by right of descent - not residence, or even birthplace. In Solon's time, at the beginning of the sixth century, Athenians may well have seen themselves as constituting (rather than 'belonging to') not much more than a loose 5 A.H.M.Jones, "The Economic Basis of the Athenian Democracy" Past and Present, 1, 1952, p.13. 6 M.I.Finley, Democracy Ancient and Modern, Chatto & Windus, 1973, pp.24-5.

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confederation. There were four large associations of 'phylai' (usually rendered in translation as 'tribes', for want of a better word) to which the people of Attica were traditionally attached; citizenship was secured on the basis of being a member of one or other of the four phylai. The phylai were composed of 'fraternities' to which citizens belonged, with the approval of the aristocratic families who assumed leadership in time of war. The phylai seem to have lost most of what claims on loyalty they may once have had well before the sixth century. The basic constitutional, juridical and administrative cells of the Athenian polity were the multiplicity of small communities that made up the phylai, each with its central village or township (although Athens itself had five of them). These were later reshaped, or reconstituted, in Cleisthenes' reforms as 'demes'. What sense of unity - outside wartime - there was among the whole population in pre-classical times (i.e., before c.600 B.C.) came as much as anything from the celebration of religious festivals and the representation of Athenians as a whole at pan-Hellenic gatherings - which, again, were held for religious purposes. Unity in other respects was largely a matter of combining for war, and for the oversight (rather than the direct administration) of justice. Nine archons were elected annually, each with his designated function: one to take the lead in war, another for religious ceremonies, and several to adjudicate in important legal disputes. After their year's term of office, the archons took their place in the Areopagus, a council whose function was, in formal terms at least, advisory. So far as the historical record goes, there is virtually complete agreement that the whole revolutionary change from this older dynastic ('eupatrid') regime to full democracy was the product of a series of specific reforms, constitutional and other, engineered by leading political figures, Solon, Cleisthenes, and Ephialtes, over the period stretching from the early 6th century BC to the middle of the 5th century.7 What occasioned the first set of wholesale reforms attributed to Solon is presumed to be large-scale disturbances or unrest - although the evidence for this comes from his denunciation of the way the existing system of justice worked, the rapacity and selfish indifference of the powerful, and the discontents which this bred among the common people, with its attendant danger of civil strife. The reforms themselves were designed to remedy the major abuses and remove the discontents which they aroused. The traditional system of exploitation which subjected peasant farmers to their aristocratic overlords (debt-bondage played a large part) was abolished. All officials were made accountable for any misdeeds during their term of office. Penalties imposed by magistrates which exceeded a specific level had to be referred to an assembly open to all citizens. It was also Solon who is said to have laid down the rules which determined citizenship, what its rights and obligations were, and, more strikingly, the qualifications required for different grades of military, civic and juridical duties and offices. The criteria for 7 See D.Stockton, The Classical Athenian Democracy, O.U.P., 1990, pp.20-21.

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qualifying at each grade were uncompromisingly economic. Not that there was any question of other differences in standing by inherited position, prestige, and so forth being abolished. They were simply set aside when it came to constitutional and military rights and duties. Four classes of citizen were instituted, each defined in terms of the agricultural yields from the property they held, coinage being in its infancy and monetary values meaningless. The top class consisted of those who could reckon annually on getting at least 500 medimnoi of grain from their land. A medimnos is the equivalent of about a bushel and a half (11 gallons in liquid terms), so that citizens at this level owned enough property to provide basic subsistence for about twenty families. Candidates for election as archons had to be members of this wealthiest category. The next level (hippeis) had land rated between 300 and 500 medimnoi, and the third grade (zeugites) between 200 and 300. Citizens whose property yielded less than this were classed as 'thetes', the word used for bondsmen or hired labourers (not slaves). Important as these distinct categories of citizen were for the political organization of Athens (and they remained virtually unchanged for centuries) political considerations were not primary - or rather, they were consequential to military requirements. Citizenship was first and foremost a matter of military duty. Every adult male was, as citizen, liable to be called on to fight in the all-too-frequent wars. The wealthiest were looked to for major contributions to the armed forces: in later times, especially, they were responsible for equipping and maintaining ships for the navy. The second rank, as their name (hippeis) implies, had to equip themselves for duty as cavalry. Zeugites served in the army as heavy infantry, and were required to supply their own armour, shield, and spear. By the sixth century, infantry had come to play a much more significant part in warfare; they fought as 'hoplites', in close formation. Thetes were not called upon to be more than 'lightly armed' (whatever that amounted to) or to do more than serve as auxiliaries in fighting on land. Later on, however, it was the thetes who manned the galleys which won the all-important sea-victories of later years. Solon's 'ancestral democracy', as Aristotle called it, did not last long. Around the middle of the sixth century, Peisistratus, (at his third attempt) won personal and lasting supremacy over Athens. However, one of the novel features of Solon's institutional arrangements were that they were written down, and so publicly known. (Solon himself left a memoir, composed in verse[!] recording all his reforms.) Perhaps for this reason, but also because there was no good reason for him to repeal them, Peisistratus let the institutional arrangements stand, merely seeing to it that his own followers were installed in positions of authority - the archons, the Areopagus, and so on. In fact the 'reign' of Peisistratus led on to notable increases in the prosperity of Athens and the welfare of its people. Factional disputes were suppressed; loans backed by the public treasury were made available to peasants for improving their land and crops. Overseas trade grew. Clear evidence of the expansion of Athenian power and influence lies in the multiplication

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of its colonies. The Greeks had been long accustomed to setting up colonies; by the sixth century settlements had been established by many of the larger cities not only around the coast of the Aegean and the eastern shore of the Adriatic but along the southern stretches of the coast of Italy, in Sicily, and, quite early on, even in the south of France. They were not alone; Phoenicians had founded colonies even farther west in the Mediterranean. Founding colonies was a useful way of providing for poorer citizens; agricultural land was everywhere in short supply, and a bad harvest could bring famine. Once established, a colony customarily gained at least technical recognition as an independent polis ; the colonists ceased to become citizens of their city of origin. But religious ties remained, fortified by kinship and the form of Greek language they had in common, and most colonies were regarded by the original polis as overseas extensions. Moreover, there was also a second-grade form of colony: the 'cleruchy'. People settled in cleruchies retained their citizenship, and although they rarely had any opportunity to exercise any rights attached to it, they were liable to taxation and military service. Although zeugites could also be allowed in, the vast majority of first settlers in both types of colony were thetes, naturally enough; the amount of land allotted to them, however, meant that they qualified as zeugites. "By her colonies and cleruchies Athens raised more than 10,000 of her citizens from poverty to modest affuence, and at the same time increased her hoplite force by an even larger number, the cleruchs with their adult sons serving in the ranks of the Athenian army and the colonists as allied contingents."88 In addition, of course, relieving the pressure of population in the city of origin meant that fewer of the better-off citizens, or their children, would be forced into poverty and the status of thetes. The consequence of all this was a substantial growth in numbers of the more prosperous class of zeugites, and this, in turn, had a great deal of bearing on the next stage of reform. Peisistratus' son, Hippias, lost the standing and powers he had inherited, and was overthrown in 510 by an aristocratic faction aiming to restore the pre-Solonian regime. When internal disputes broke this group up, one set called on Sparta for help, and a small expeditionary force of Spartans occupied the Acropolis . It was at this point that Cleisthenes, himself a leader of one of the aristocratic factions, gained the support of the zeugite class, who, as hoplites, constituted the main fighting force. At all events, they proved numerous and strong enough to ensure victory for Cleisthenes over his chief rivals, besiege the Spartans, and force them to leave. Just what the arrangement was by which Cleisthenes gained the support of a large following is not clear, but there is no doubt that the reforms which take their name from him gave the zeugite class and, eventually, even the thetes, a substantial role in politics. Previously, they had been looked on merely as mob support in conflicts between contending aristocratic leaders. They now gained admission to full citizenship in political and juridical terms. The groundwork was laid down in the comprehensive redistribution of the affiliations to which the right of citizenship attached. Once again, there was no resort to the abolition of what had previously obtained; the old 'phylai' were left alone, but citizenship was now a 8 A.H.M.Jones, Athenian Democracy, Blackwell, 1957, p.7. (see also Appendix, pp. 168-77.

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matter of membership of one of ten new phylai ('tribes'). Once again, citizenship had military service as its primary feature. Each of the ten tribes supplied a force of hoplites under its own elected general ('strategos'). Membership of the tribes was now based on residence in one of the demes, the small communities which now numbered - officially - 139. A list of demes was drawn up and made public, and all adult free men were required to register at their local deme centre. The new system allowed of the admission to citizenship of a sizeable number of men whose membership of the old fraternities, and thus their affiliation to the former phylai, had been challenged by the aristocratic groups who had first taken over from Hippias, and in this way had become liable to be deprived of citizen rights. This was not all. The distribution of the demes belonging to each of the ten new phylai was systematically spread among three trytties (analogous to the three Ridings - 'thirdings' - of Yorkshire). These were distinct regions of Attica: Athens and Piraeus, plus the area around them; the coastal areas; and the inland region. Each of the ten phylai, therefore, was made up of demes from the three separate sections of the whole territory of Attica. Furthermore, after the first comprehensive registration, citizens were registered as belonging to the deme in which his direct ancestor had been registered at the time (the later years of the sixth century) when the new registration system was introduced. It is as if the affiliations to the four traditional phylai on which citizenship had previously been determined were shuffled, cut into three equal packs, and these then dealt out among the ten new phylai. Differentiation by wealth into four distinct 'classes' of citizen remained; so did distinctions of rank in terms of birth. The reforms of Cleisthenes were aimed at an approximation to equality in political terms. And they achieved this, together with equality before the law, with much success, and for a long time. Shuffling the citizenship pack of cards was only the beginning. By Pericles' time, in the latter part of the fifth century, practically all legislative, administrative, and judicial powers had been devolved on to the citizenry at large; any process of selection for liability for service was determined first by age and then by lot; those called for actual service were paid a daily subsistence allowance. After Cleisthenes' victory over his rivals, the Ecclesia became the supreme political decision-making body, open to all citizens, voting (usually by show of hands) on business and proposals presented for its approval by the Boule. The Boule - the Council of Five Hundred - was responsible for preparing the business coming before the Ecclesia, for conducting its diplomatic business and for seeing that its decisions were implemented. These included arrangements for seeing that any financial undertakings consequent upon decisions of the Ecclesia were met. Naturally, as Athenian power grew and colonies multiplied in number and size, and more and more overseas commitments were acquired, so the Council's functions expanded, especially those connected with diplomatic and financial affairs. The Council acted as watchdog rather than agent on the Ecclesia's behalf, instigating, inspecting and monitoring what was done in its name, and reporting back to it when necessary. Collecting taxes and other revenues

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(sales from the publicly-owned silver mines, tribute and customs duties exacted from its overseas colonies, client cities, and allies), paying out public money, and buying supplies was the job of individual officers and appointed boards. All these things were done under the direct authority of the Ecclesia. Moreover, all those selected for office were subjected to a preliminary scrutiny before they began their term - and to examination of the way in which they had conducted themselves when they came to the end of it. In David Stockton's words, "The widespread use of random selection of public officers by means of the lot, and of boards rather than individuals, together with the practice of annual and generally non-consecutive or even [non-]repeatable tenure of executive responsibility, meant that the boule ... was the body to which all the multifarious agents of the Athenian demos were, in the first instance at least, answerable and accountable."9 The fragmentation of executive responsibilities and their dispersal among a multiplicity of short-term officials meant that service in the Council of Five Hundred was fairly exacting, the more so since there was no hierarchic bureaucratic structure nor any possibility of meritocratic progress towards higher office. What it also points to is that the distinction between the administrative and executive branches of government was very much alive then. The Council's five hundred members were made up of fifty (all of at least zeugite standing) chosen by lot from each of the ten 'tribes' (and so from the three 'ridings', too). Its members were therefore drawn in equal numbers from different parts of Attica and randomly selected. They served for one year and - certainly later on - only twice in their lifetime. The Council met every day throughout the year except on days set aside as festivals or as ill-omened, with meetings open to a limited number of non-member citizens. In session, it received envoys and messengers, but its primary purpose was to prepare the business coming before the Ecclesia, which normally met on forty days in the year. Any citizen could bring forward a proposal or an issue for discussion and decision in the Ecclesia, but it had to go first to the Council. It then came before the Ecclesia either as a specific recommendation formulated by the Council, which could be approved or not at the next meeting of the Ecclesia 'on the nod', so to speak, or as an open question. Any such open question had normally to be settled in terms of a proposal made by an individual member of the Ecclesia and thereafter challenged, discussed, and voted on. Each contingent of fifty from one of the ten 'tribes' represented in the Council also served for one-tenth of the year (even the order of succession was decided by lot) as the standing committee of the Council of Five Hundred. The standing committee was responsible for supervising meetings of the Ecclesia and keeping order at them. There were several other jobs devolved on the standing committee, all of which made it necessary for the fifty members to be lodged and provided with meals in their quarters adjacent to the Council's meeting place during their thirty-odd days of office. The 139 demes were local administrative and jurisdictional units, as well as the constituencies from which the thirty ridings and ten tribes were made up. They were of 9 D.Stockton, The Classical Athenian Democracy, pp.90-91.

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very different size - not that it mattered, since there was no question of their being used as electoral constituencies; even to begin with, demes varied in area and population size, and the discrepancies must have increased over time - although not so much as they would have had the fact of citizenship been decided, on reaching the age of eighteen, by birthplace or residence alone. Citizenship for Athenians meant, in the first place, being citizens of their deme. Residence in a deme or descent from someone registered there at the time of Cleisthenes was the basis of citizenship; the name of the deme figured in the full formal name of a citizen, following the first name and patronymic. Demes had their own civic organisation, their own cults, temples and traditions. According to Thucydides, it was the deme which counted as the accepted and traditional setting and provided the everyday framework for their social, religious and political life. Not surprisingly, attachment to the deme and solidarity with fellow demesmen show up as important elements in political and legal disputes. Each deme had its assembly and its own officials - almost certainly selected by lot from men over thirty years old. Like everybody selected for public office, they were subject to preliminary scrutiny beforehand and held accountable after. The most important office at the level of deme was that of Demarch, who held office for - again - a year, and, presumably, never more than once. The list of his responsibilities is of formidable length, but since they were the same for all demes, they are not likely to have been all that burdensome except in the more populous and central localities, where the Demarchs must have been kept pretty busy. The Demarch presided over meetings of the deme assembly, and along with his fellow-officials, saw to it that whatever it decided was done. Other duties, which he shared with the few councillors appointed with him, were - exceptionally - of two kinds, administrative and executive, since he was the main link with the centre of government and also, in some respects, its agent. Many of his local duties were those of oversight: arrangements for local cults and festivals (including the appointment of local priests and priestesses) and for the community's participation in and contributions to major festivals, the proper conduct of funerals, surveillance of the construction and maintenance of public works and buildings (usually paid for by wealthy local citizens). On behalf of the central government, there were taxes to be collected, forfeitures and distraints on property to be registered and seen to. It may be assumed, too, that the Demarch had to ensure that the deme's contingents for army and navy were complete and properly equipped when they were called up. It was the legal system - or rather, the administration of justice - which seems to have been the principal object of the reform measures usually ascribed to Ephialtes (or Pericles) after the middle of the fifth century. Just how they came about is, like so much else, obscure, but they may well have been provoked by the resurgence of the old aristocracy during the years following the Persian Wars, which had caused such disruption - including the evacuation of Attica before the battle of Salamis. At all events, Ephialtes was

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remembered as the man who had successfully harried members of the Areopagus and deprived it of most of its judicial powers, which were dispersed among the Council of Five Hundred and a multiplicity of citizen magistracies and juries. Overall jurisdictional authority belonged to the Ecclesia. As well as making new laws, the Ecclesia also 'handed down' law, and acted on occasion as a court of law. In general, though, it was only major trials for accusations of treason or major cases of corruption that came before it, and even these were voted to be dealt with by special courts after 360 BC. Some judicial responsibilities also attached to the Council of Five Hundred, but the Athenians, who were more than usually prone to litigation, handled law-suits and trials in much the same way as they did the business of legislation and administration; i.e., they were dealt with by formally constituted judges and juries drawn from the whole body of citizens. There were, roughly speaking, two sorts of cases at law. The first category consisted of claims for damages or compensation brought by persons - or their guardians or relatives - claiming personal injury or loss against one or more specific individuals. (This category of case, it is worth remarking, was a great deal broader than anything comprehended by present-day definitions of 'civil law'; as in early medieval times in Europe generally, it included manslaughter, theft, and most other kinds of 'crime against the person'.) Minor cases involving small sums of money went before 'deme-judges' - three (later four) appointed to each of the ten 'tribes'; those for larger amounts or more serious injuries went before a court composed of the deme-judges in the tribe headed by an arbitrator. (Every citizen was obliged to act as an arbitrator, when called upon, during his sixtieth year.) But there was also, importantly, provision for appeals to be made to a much larger body of citizens (numbering 201 or, for sums over 1000 drachmai, 401) drawn by lot from the 6,000 citizens over thirty years old appointed as liable to serve as 'jurymen' for the coming year. The second and much broader category of trials (though smaller in number) was in matters of public concern, and were brought by anyone who chose to do so. These might be conducted before an assembly of anything from 201 to 1,000 or more 'jurymen' - all of whom were paid a daily allowance of half a drachma. The prosecutor in such cases, if successful, was entitled to a reward, which could be substantial; if however, he withdrew the case or failed to get cast on his side at least a fifth of the votes, he was liable to a heavy fine and loss of civic rights; defendants, if convicted, were liable to a penalties ranging from a fine up to confiscation of property, loss of civil rights or - as in Socrates' case - sentence of death.

II

The question posed at the beginning of this chapter was how was it that democracy - in its most 'blatantly Utopian' form - came into existence in a society in which 'politics' had previously been a matter of discussion, rivalry and dispute, occasionally descending into gang-warfare among would-be tyrants or would-be oligarchs? The account so far, brief as it is, contains what we have of the kind of factual evidence we look to narrative history to provide. The record of events and constitutional reforms which has been so painstakingly

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compiled by classical historians and epigraphists is not of course complete; it is by now perhaps impossible to hope for one. But, incomplete as it is, the history of constitutional reform from Solon to Pericles does make one thing abundantly clear. It is that the recital of the series of constitutional reforms does not in itself contain any explanation of how it was that so unique and absolute a form of participative democracy came to form the accepted framework of Athenian political life. Naturally, persistent efforts have been made by classicists to get closer to the truth of the matter. But until recently those efforts do not seem to have gone beyond the simple reassertion of 'Aristotle's important truth', as W.I.Newman called it over a hundred years ago, that the constitution of a state 'has its roots in what moderns term its social system' (as against, Newman went on, 'the prevailing modern social contract theory of the state').10 Fortunately, there have been some notable attempts during this century to interpret and understand the social order that prevails in a community at some special period of time: the ethos, beliefs and scale of values, citizens' self-conception - all those elements which are subsumed by French historians under the heading of mentalités and of either social or cultural history by Anglophone historians. There is, to start with, the conception Athenians had of the polis as a political unit. For us, the comparable political unit is the state. Since Bodin, the state has been seen as distinct from all other organizations by the sovereignty - the absolute sovereignty - which attaches to the head of it. Sovereignty is taken to signify the combination of authority and power; it includes not only monopoly of the right to make laws and issue commands which everyone in the community must obey but also the right to use physical force to compel obedience. If sovereignty had any meaning at all in the context of Athenian democracy, it was attached to the citizenry as a whole. "It is," says Ehrenberg, translating the phrase literally from Thucydides, "the men that are the polis. There were no subjects."11 And again, "only the full citizens possessed unrestricted rule in the state, roughly what we call sovereignty."12 Yet even to put the matter like that is to falsify it. The sovereignty of Parliament over the people of Britain is accepted as total. In Bryce's words, "Parliament can make and unmake any law, change the form of government, interfere with the course of justice, extinguish the most sacred rights of the citizen."13 This was not the case in Athens. Every citizen was entitled to attend meetings of the Ecclesia as and when he pleased and, for that matter, could speak in debate and propose amendments, as well as vote on proposals, "on war and peace, taxation, army levies, war finance, public works, treaties

10 W.I.Newman, The Politics of Aristotle, O.U.P., 1887, Vol. I, p.223. (Quoted by M.I.Finley, Politics in the Ancient World, C.U.P., 1983, p.1.) 11 V.Ehrenberg, The Greek State, (2nd. edn.) Methuen, 1969, p.88. 12 V.Ehrenberg, From Solon to Socrates, Methuen, 19 p.92 and p. 217. 13 J.Bryce, The American Commonwealth (1893), rev. edn., Macmillan, 1918, p. 36.

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and diplomatic negotiations, and anything else, major or minor, which required government decision."14 Democracy in classical Athens was not a matter of perpetual referenda, a la Suisse; nor can we treat the polis of Athens as ruled by a sovereign parliament in which all citizens had a seat. True, decisions were indeed arrived at by majority vote, and included such things as declarations of war, and so could be matters of life and death for the whole community, as well as for individuals. But enacted legislation has to be distinguished from another body of laws: the fabric of norms and beliefs sanctioned by the gods and sanctified by tradition which were general to the Greeks but also particular to each polis, and which exercised power over the destiny of its citizens and moral and social control over their conduct.15 The polis transcended its members. Once again, the words one has to use tend to mislead. Just as the idea of sovereignty makes little sense in the context of Athens in the fifth and fourth centuries B.C., so the notion of the civic community 'transcending' its members has a false ring about it. It presumes that the difference lies in the Athenian overcoming the antithesis between individual self-interest and social responsibility which is normal for us, and which it takes the extremities of fear, or triumph, or hostility, or love - or a strong sense of loyalty or of social or religious duty - to transcend. The implication is that the self is actually disregarded. But, as Aristotle put it, 'the polis is prior to the individual', a conception not far removed from Durkheim's view of the individual as the creature of society - except, of course, that 'society', for Durkheim, was categorically distinct from the polity - 'the state'. Part of the difficulty in comprehending Athenian democracy lies in the customary practice of modern scholars of construing the polis in rather abstract, normative, terms: a legal and moral entity rather than a community. "The use of the same word" (politeia) "for participation in the state and for its general structure shows that the participation was in the main not a purely legal act between individual and state; it reflected the vital adherence of the individual to the citizen body, as also to the other communities within the state, and therewith was bound to them, bound to religion and soil."16 Not that the Greeks themselves were averse to abstract terminology. The trouble is that the terms they used do not quite correspond to those we use to translate them. While politeia means citizenship, it also stands, we are told, for the whole body of citizens and for the constitution. Again, the polis may best be thought of as the realisation of what the Greeks meant by koinonia rather than the normative model of what we call the State - rather as the early Church conceived of itself as a realisation of the Christian community rather than the hierarchy of the Church in embryo. The word koinonia is meant to convey a sense of the way of life pursued by a community conscious of its common destiny, and conscious too that membership was neither optional nor anything else than lifelong. But it also reaches out to comprehend a great deal more. Philia, something more than friendship

14 M.I.Finley, The Ancient Greeks, Penguin Books,1966, p.75. 15 See H.D.O.Kitto, The Greeks, Penguin Books, 1951, p.94. 16 V.Ehrenberg, The Greek State, pp.38-9.

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(or even Adam Smith's 'sympathy'), and dike, something more than justice, were singled out by Aristotle as the major element of koinonia. It may well have been the memory of their undemocratic past, as much as anything, which was responsible for the reiteration of words like isonomia ("the most beautiful word of all," as Herodotus put it), which stood for equality - equality before the law and equal participation in the affairs of the state, and parrhesia or isegoria (freedom of speech), in the plays which celebrated, directly or indirectly, Athenian democracy as the perfection of the Greek polis. It was something that Athenians had striven for and achieved, a positive endeavour towards a more civilised form of society which the city itself, as it grew, made both possible and - if life were to be lived without constant dissension and turbulence - necessary. Much of the increased prosperity which Athens undoubtedly enjoyed during the classical age seems to have been put to use to bring to civilised perfection the kind of organised collective action with which they had made themselves so familiar, and wanted to retain, and to embellish its physical, cultural and religious setting. Civic pride is evident enough in the buildings which remain. Athens was evidently a community much given to idealising itself. The same self-congratulatory, almost self-adulatory, tone recurs in the plays of Aeschylus and the speeches of Pericles (as rendered by Athenian historians), and is implicit in the religious ceremonies which celebrated Athens and the gods and demi-gods who stood watch over its destiny. They reflect the all-consuming concern of each and every citizen in the survival, the welfare and the prosperity of the community as a single, integrated, organized, entity. But more than civic pride was involved. The chief object of collective action was the protection of the city from attack and the promotion of its wealth and prosperity, regardless of or at the expense of others, if need be. In the last resort, recognition by all citizens, rich and poor, of this as a civic responsibility acknowledged and demonstrated by all citizens, rich and poor, was central to Athenian democracy. For there was another side to all such utterances and displays. They found their most fervent and high-principled articulation, significantly enough, in the immediate aftermath of attack from outside or of dissension within. So the celebration of its idealised condition also reflects the anxieties and fears about its preservation which had just been overcome or encompassed. War was a perpetual condition of existence in classical Greece, either as present reality or imminent threat. So too, more particularly, was stasis - open dissension within the polis. In combination, what is more, war and stasis posed the further threat of treason. The aristocratic opponents of Hippias, late in the sixth century, had sought and obtained the help of Sparta; a hundred years later, in the mid-years of the Peloponnesian War, Alcibiades tried to play the same game. These are the most notorious instances, not the only ones. The word stasis seems to have had an extraordinarily wide range of connotations. It was applied to any conflict within the body of citizens, from conspiratorial or public hostility between rival groups to open conflict. Such conflicts might be between tyrants and their

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rivals, competing noble dynasties or oligarch groups, or, in democratic Athens, rich and poor. And again, the same word might be applied to the adoption of a partisan position in political debate as well as to murderous encounters between groups of citizens, or to civil war. One has, therefore, to juxtapose the idealisation of Athens as the embodiment of a wholly integrated community and the source of "virtually transcendent authority" with constant references to the threat to its survival posed by hostile forces within it as well as from outside. It is a contrast which has been taken up and used by Nicole Loraux.17 The suggestion which her argument embodies is that the oppositional struggle of stasis should be seen as virtually the precondition for the enhanced sense of unity which comes from re-unification when the crisis has passed. Feelings at such times were not dissimilar from the sense of dangers and troubles overcome when outside enemies had been defeated, and they were scarcely less intense. In both cases, the polis - the body of citizens as a whole - had restored its integrity and safety. Triumphant rejoicing over adversity was the best possible reinforcement of the sense of unity which called for such frequent celebration. The tragedies, writings and speeches that have survived are, she says, "haunted by the fear of division but perhaps also silently fascinated by duality." There is also the 'famous transparency' of Greek politics apparent in the vote by show of hands, seen as symbolic of democracy, but which could be turned by a handful of determined conspirators into a weapon against democracy. But perhaps in the present context, the critically important point of her essay is that made by the anthropologist Emmanuel Terray, whom she quotes: "For a political body to be able to allow itself ... the luxury of a decision-making procedure as explosive as the vote, it must be quite certain of its unity."18 It was in 'belonging' rather than in 'equality' that the revolutionary change of the sixth century reforms consisted. Freedom to speak in the Assembly, the 'one-man, one vote' principle, equal access to, and equal treatment before, the law did not mean that either high-born or low-born Athenians, or rich or poor, saw themselves as equal. Aristotle, in the fourth century, is quite specific about the 'general and principle causes' which turned the ever-present, though usually latent, contentiousness (stasis) into open conflict. It was inequality. For all Athenians, including the nobly-born, to accept others, including thetes, as fellow-citizens, as actually belonging to the same community, and to tolerate opposition from them bespeaks a change in attitudes and values at least as revolutionary as the reforms in the machinery of government carried through by Solon and Cleisthenes. Landless labourers - thetes - had no place in the system of values which obtained under the 'old regime', any more than they had in the palace household. "A thes, not a slave, was the lowest creature on earth Achilles could think of. The terrible thing about a thes was his

17 N.Loraux, "Reflections on the Greek City in Unity and Division", in A.Molho, K.Raaflaub, J.Emlen, eds., City States in Classical Antiquity and Medieval Italy, F.Steiner Verlag, 1991, pp.33-51. 18 N.Loraux, "Reflections on the Greek City in Unity and Division", p. 44 and pp.42-3.

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lack of attachment, his not belonging."19 For the Athenian form of democracy to happen at all, let alone to last as long as it did, there had to be one overriding presupposition. Every citizen had to have some regard for consultation, discussion and persuasion as the everyday currency of politics. This is not to say that classical Athens became permeated with the spirit of altruism and cooperation, or of consideration for others. The people of Athens were, Pericles told them, self-interested and pushy. Like the Romans, they believed very strongly in liberty - individual liberty - and this very definitely meant doing, and getting, whatever one pleased. (see below, Chap.3, pp.**). Dissension and political conflict persisted throughout the life of Athens as a democracy, as it did when it was an oligarchy or ruled by tyrants. The 'utopian' form of democracy which the Athenians arrived at is inconceivable outside of a fundamental change in values from those of the primitive, 'heroic,' past. Virtue - morality - right conduct - had to be thought of in terms other than those of the small communities of earlier times, comprising no more than one's own and a few neighbouring households. Athens - Attica - had been a society in which, like the rest of Greece, the rich and powerful - kings, together with their household entourages, to begin with, then landed aristocrats - had been the 'natural' rulers over an impecunious peasantry. Only they, in the first place, could afford to equip themselves with the armour and the horses needed for exemplary prowess in battle. It was they who were looked to for the courage, strength and skill needed in battle - not just to fight well but to win. This, supremely, was 'arete' - in Homeric times and for long after. The Homeric system of values was the preserve of royalty and the aristocracy, and of those who were members of their families (i.e., those of the extended family of which they were the head who lived in his house or close by). It was "based on the competitive standard of arete" (virtue, excellence), this being the term used to commend outstanding skills, physical gifts and "inherited social advantage."20 The well-being, the freedom, and, ultimately, the very lives not only of the palace household but also of all members of the community and their dependents, rich and poor alike, depended on the courage, strength and skill of their fighting men. The same thing held good in later times. "[S]ince no Greek city-state ever was, or felt itself, fully secure," A.W.H.Adkins notes, "arete tends to have this predominant flavour even in fifth-century Athens."21 But by the fifth century, "The primary social group is no longer the kinship group but the city-state.... To characterise a good man" [and thus a well-regarded, an honoured, man] "is in crucial part to characterise the relationship in which such a man stands to others and both poets and philosophers for the most part do not distinguish in their accounts of these relationships what is universal and human from what is local and Athenian. The claim is often explicit; Athens is praised because she par

19 M.I.Finley, The World of Odysseus, 2nd. edn. Penguin Books, 1979, p. 57. 20A.W.H.Adkins, Merit and Responsibility, O.U.P., 1960, p.46. 21 A.W.H.Adkins, Merit and Responsibility, p.73.

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excellence exhibits life as it ought to be."22 And this, in turn, rested on the presumption, which reached articulate expression as a matter of high principle when it was most threatened by attack from outside (or dissension within), that each individual citizen had an interest in the survival, the welfare and the prosperity of the community of Athens as a social organisation - i.e., in its entirety. As Adkins sees it, the decisive shift occurred when it became more important for the safety and well-being of Athens to win battles at sea than on land: "To ensure survival, the will and the ability to resist, coupled with good counsel, are the most evident necessities. In a hoplite-oligarchy, or any society in which the individual must buy his own fighting equipment, the most effective striking force is supplied by the rich; and, given the prestige derived from this in a society with the traditional Greek values, it is the rich who, even in a society which is a democracy in name, will give advice in the assembly and hold the important offices. In the maritime democracy of Athens, however, all this is changed: the poor man, not the rich, mans the navy, the most important striking force of the state, and, his equipment being provided for him, can meet the rich on at least equal terms on that score."23 For the democratic constitution of Athens to come about, the argument runs, one must assume some acknowledgement among the rich and powerful, however grudging and unwilling, of an obligation, or need, to share power not only with others of their kind but with their fellow-citizens in general. There may well have been some validation for this in the fact that the poorer citizens did display sufficient of the approved qualities of arete to win sea battles for Athens. This, in turn, may well have led to a settled resolve among the general run of poorer people to safeguard their rights by demanding the right to participate in political and administrative decision-making. Paying subsistence allowances to allow of time to be spent in discharging such civic responsibilities was a sensible and inevitable consequence; it was not a precondition.

The argument, which is at the centre of Adkins' thesis, is not altogether convincing. For one thing, the reforms of Solon, which were, and are, presumed to mark the first major episode in the development of Athenian democracy, occurred some time before its navy gave Athens the mastery of the Aegean and its imperial role. For another, it was the Athenian army which drove the Persian invasion back into the sea at Marathon, the victory on which Athenian confidence in its martial prowess was first founded. So, while the changed nature of warfare did afford some validation for the changes that had taken place in the nature of the Athenian polity, this is more likely to have been a 'rationalisation' arrived at after the event; it could hardly have served to justify their taking place as and when the changes occurred.

22 A.Macintyre, After Virtue, Duckworth, 1981, p. 124 and p.125. 23 Adkins, Merit and Responsibility, p.197.

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III One of the more striking aspects of the recent literature dealing with Athenian democracy is the assiduous and constantly renewed search for more, or better, explanations of how and why it came into being. Part of the reason for this may be the defensiveness of scholars provoked by the tendency to sideline participative democracy as unique and 'utopian', and therefore irrelevant to the concerns of modern political scientists and theorists. In addition, virtually all the contemporary evidence comes from philosophers, playwrights and historians either native to Athens or with close attachments to the city and its people. Self-praise tends to be suspect; and there are, after all, plenty of dissident voices. Many of them in classical times are easily dismissed as those either of contemporaries identified with oligarchic interests or of later writers obviously disposed to elaborate on the superior virtues of Roman political principles and practice. On the other hand, there was a tradition of principled disbelief in democracy, beginning with Socrates and Plato, which found frequent - and contemptuous - expression in the time of the later Roman Republic, and which, after an interval of almost 2000 years, was revived in the eighteenth century. Hume, for one, considered that since the minds of common people were 'debased by poverty and hard work', they were rendered unfit for politics, which was a matter for trained experts.24 It is a sentiment echoed frequently throughout the nineteenth century. If it is not openly expressed today, it is perhaps because representative democracy, in its Schumpeterian guise as 'entrepreneurial politics', has calmed the fears expressed by the ruling (or 'political') class over the generations following the French Revolution. It is outside my present purpose (and beyond my competence) to attempt anything like a general review of the explanations which have been put forward, but a few are especially relevant to the main concern of this chapter. Material changes - population growth, increased wealth, urbanisation, changes in social structure and in warfare - are basic to all of them, but the organising ideas come from the psychological, cultural or sociological framework different writers have adopted. Growth in population and wealth, and the consequent increase in size of the city itself, was fundamental. Athens prospered during the sixth century, after the reforms of Solon, and grew into a major Greek power during the period following on the reforms of Cleisthenes. As Athens prospered, its population grew, despite the multiplication of its colonies and cleruchies. Population growth, swollen by the influx of metics which the new prosperity and political power brought with it, was concentrated in the city itself, and the Piraeus. Even at the time of Solon, it seems, Athens itself "was made up of five villages separated by the open areas in which the dead were buried."25 During the following century or so, these merged together to form a composite whole. By Aristotle's time, the citizen population alone is estimated to have been about 30,000, for the whole territory of 2,600 square kilometers. It was possibly twice as much earlier, in the decades before the Peloponnesian War and the Great Plague. The city itself, given the increase in population and the concentration of commercial, political and social life within it, must 24 D.Hume, Essays and Treatises, Edinburgh, 1825, p.125. 25 D.Stockton, The Classical Athenian Democracy, p.58

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have contained a population of something like 50,000 men, women and children during the period of its greatest prosperity. So it apparently took no more than two or three generations for Athens to grow from a small agglomeration of villages into a sizeable town. And it has been argued that there is a special affinity between the freshly discovered liveliness of urban life and participative democracy. At all events, there is enough of a parallel visible in the situation and experience of the new Italian republics formed in the medieval renaissance of the twelfth century to have inspired an international conference on the lessons to be learned from comparing them.26 Two things have to be borne in mind. The first is that the size of classical Athens or medieval Florence and Venice fell far short of that of modern cities, so that the social life of their inhabitants had none of the anonymity which Louis Wirth picked on as the characteristic feature of modern urban life. Secondly, the transformation of social life was revolutionary, for aristocrats and ordinary people alike. The society of the small communities of pre-classical Greece was a good deal removed from the kind of society portrayed by Homer, but through tradition, carried within a society whose structure remained largely unchanged up to the end of the seventh century, there was an affinity with it in some important respects. One of these, much discussed by classicists in recent years,27 is that distinction of any kind - moral, intellectual, athletic, martial - was the preserve of the aristocratic leaders, their families and (possibly) the men who belonged to their households and followed them in battle. Arete, - virtue - was thought of in entirely competitive terms. It was simply excellence: "excellence of any kind; a fast runner displays the arete of his feet, and a son excels his father in every kind of arete - as athlete, as soldier, and in mind."28 To have virtue, therefore, was to be outstanding. Ordinary people - peasants, labourers, and the like - who played no part in the social, political or martial pursuits of the aristocracy and their households, naturally had no part in any of this; it was certainly not for them to think in terms of acquiring arete. Locked in the everyday world of farmwork and husbandry or servitude, there was for them no particular differentiation between the part a person played in his family and his position in any of the collective activities in which he and they participated. There was no need; they remained the same people; their relationships were unchanged. By contrast, the special quality of the new urban life - for aristocrats as well as ordinary people - lay in the multiplicity of its activities. In all of them: buying, selling, talking with friends, going to the Assembly, joining a religious procession, watching a play, exercising with a section of the army, manning a ship: on all these occasions, a man's presence would in all probability call for some quite specific kind of conduct and place

26 City States in Classical Antiquity and Medieval Italy (ed. A.Molho, K.Raaflaub, J.Emlen), Franz Steiner Verlag, 1991. 27 The discussion, initiated by W.H.Adkins' Merit and Responsibilty, O.U.P., 1960, has continued up to the present time. The most recent major contribution is by Bernard Williams. See Shame and Necessity, Univ. of California Pr., 1993. 28 A.MacIntyre, After Virtue, Duckworth, 1981, p.115.

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him in some quite different group. There were plenty of groups, formal and semi-formal, to which he might be attached, each with its distinctive and often incompatible demands and interests, and to each of which his involvement might vary according to his self-image, aspirations, discontents, and his standing within it. M.I.Finley lists an impressive variety of possibilities for quite different kinds of activity and of relationship which must have been in existence by the time of Herodotus and Thucydides. Purely informal groups aside, they extend from the family and neighbourhood to age-groups and table-fellowships. To these one can add the association with others - mostly strangers, to begin with, since they were all chosen by lot - on juries, year-long membership of the Council of Five Hundred, as well as military service in the army or navy. The special feature of urban life is that it redesigns the self into roles. It calls for a new kind of participation, one which allows for - demands - the self to be partitioned into selves. Relationships become differentiated according to their location, purpose, and the people involved. Both relationships and activities take on new forms, Perhaps a few of a man's companions in any one group might know a man in other situations and in his other capacities; most, probably, would not. In each part-self, therefore, an individual might then be able to demonstrate qualities of the kind appropriate to one of the many activities. Virtue - merit - might be obtained in each and any of the activities, in most or in none. Any merit - or demerit - acquired in one capacity might or might not reflect on his reputation in another, but would in any case attach to that one capacity. The implications are rendered succinctly by MacIntyre: "the conception of a virtue has now become strikingly detached from that of any particular social role."29 It is not so much that virtue became measured by cooperative rather than competitive standards, as Adkins suggests, but that it became immeasurable, or incommensurable between different activities. It is conceivable that it was awareness of this aspect of contemporary morality that drove Aristotle to define arete as moderation - striking a balance between excess and vices in all sectors of individual existence. To the multiplicity and variety of social interaction that surrounded the individual in the new city one must add immediacy. Limitation in size made it possible for all the affairs of the community, personal or public, economic, legal, administrative, religious, or political, to be conducted face to face. Greek political ideas, as Peter Laslett has remarked, were "conditioned by the fact that the polis was a face to face society."30 Everything Aristotle says, he remarks later, "implies that all citizens know all other citizens, and all citizens know their rulers, indeed, any citizen may be called upon at any moment to be one of the rulers."

The special feature of face-to-face society in a small city like Athens is not that everyone in it really knows everyone else but that he knows of, or can get to know, them, at least by sight - everyone, at least, who 'is anybody' - as well as relatives, friends, acquaintances, shopkeepers, fellow-workers. They have been born into the same community and will

29 A.MacIntyre, After Virtue, Duckworth, 1981, p.24. 30 P.Laslett, "The Face to Face Society", in P. Laslett (ed.), Philosophy, Politics and Society: First Series, Blackwell, 1956, p.162.

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live their lives out within it; in some important respects, they share a destiny common to all. They are aware of how others have behaved on innumerable occasions in the past, and behave with this awareness (which others may well have of them) in all transactions and discussions about what to do. Further, Laslett observes, critical situations to which there is no immediately obvious solution have to be met by people meeting together and 'talking it out.'

Laslett uses the family as the prototypical face to face society, although he acknowledges that this is not an altogether satisfactory model, for a community such as the polis "has an infinitely longer continuous history, with no break at the generations: its purposes are ever so much wider; they are, in fact, the totality of purposes."31 More to the point, perhaps, the family in classical Greece was, as in Rome, the last place one would find decisions arrived at by 'talking things out'; the family was a legally sanctioned tyranny. Nor does the 'artificial family' idea serve any explanatory purpose. This is a term which has been used to account for the extraordinary proliferation of oath-bound associations - confraternities, guilds, brotherhoods and sisterhoods, religious orders and so on - met with in medieval Europe by representing the relationships people entered into as 'quasi-familial.' It does not make much sense to treat relationships which are essentially voluntary as if they were involuntary, as kinship relationships are. Cities, even relatively small ones like Athens - or Florence, Venice, Pisa and so on - are categorically different from households or family and kinship systems, 'nuclear' or 'extended'. Evidence of a pragmatic system of mutual help has also been advanced, as tying in with democratic propensities. There was prevalent among the poorer sort in Athens - and the not-so-poor, Socrates among them - a give-and-take (or rather, borrow-and-lend) system of the kind represented in the eranos loan, by which "a person who was in financial difficulties would go the rounds of his philoi" (relatives, neighbours, friends), collecting from them small contributions, until he had raised the sum required."32 The argument is that mutual aid practices of this sort became so well-established among Athenians as to first to reduce and then remove the need for dependence on rich patrons and then to point towards subsistence payments for service in the courts, in the army and navy, and even attendance at the Assembly. It is not suggested that the practice predisposed the citizens of Athens, rich and poor alike, to political democracy but merely that it eased the path towards its all-round participant character. Unfortunately, far from helping to explain, it actually deepens the mystery. The informal 'whip-round' among much the same set of friends and acquaintances is a familiar mutual-aid device in today's (or at least, yesterday's) workplaces and working-class neighbourhoods, just as the slightly more formal 'ales' were in the Middle Ages.33 Neither seems to have much connection with democratic beliefs, let alone with founding political

31 P.Laslett, "The Face to Face Society", p.158. 32 P.Millett, "Patronage and its avoidance in classical Athens" in A.Wallace-Hadrill, ed., Patronage in Ancient Society, Routledge, 1989, p.41. 33 J.M.Bennett, "Conviviality and Charity in Medieval and Early Modern England", Past and Present 134, Feb. 1992, pp.19-41.

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institutions on those beliefs.

One further consideration enters in which complements the implications Laslett has read into the face-to-face society which obtained within it. It consists in an antithesis which is hidden from us, just as the Greeks would have been blind to that between 'state' and 'society' which exists for us. It lies in the distinction between conduct and action - "the essence of conduct," in John Jones' words, "being that it is mine or yours; of action that it is out there - an object..." not "issuing from a solitary, secret, inward focus of consciousness."34 The Greek polis was an arena of action - of political action - which could be fiercely competitive as well as cooperative. The whole notion of a primary concern with action - things done, and the way in which 'the Gods', moral obliquity, or, especially 'fortune' affects the outcome - rather than with motive, intention, character, or any personal attributes or relationships is, as John Jones claims, "desperately foreign" to us. It was these characteristics on which the constitution of fifth-century Athens was founded, and they were built out of the hard-won experience the citizens had accumulated, since those first days of Solon's reforms, of the sheer gain - economic, cultural, and moral, as well as political - to be had in their lives from balancing or reconciling their common, or mutual, interests with individual gain, the public good with private ambition, autonomy with safety. If it is detached from the rather distracting family model Laslett uses (and he fairly obviously had the Greek polis in mind throughout), the picture of democratic Athens he presents resolves itself into one of a community set on creating for itself a sophisticated and civilised political organisation contained within the social framework of a face-to-face society. That it was all accomplished consciously and deliberately is not in question. There is plenty of evidence for this, much of it to be found in Thucydides, the best example being his rendering of the speech made by Athenagoras before the young oligarchs of Syracuse: "There are people who will say that democracy is neither an intelligent nor a fair system, and that those who have money are the best rulers. But I say, first, that what is meant by the demos, or people, is the whole polis, whereas an oligarchy is only a section of it; and I say next that though the rich are the best people for looking after money, the best counsellors are the intelligent, and that it is the many who are best at listening to the different arguments and judging between them. And all alike, whether taken all together or as separate classes, have equal rights in a democracy."35 Of course there were dissidents, radical critics, atheists even, just as there were those who, in public as in private, were ready to point out how impossible it was for a democracy to be other than inefficient and ineffective, as well as being at the mercy of the vulgar and

34 John (H.J.F.) Jones, On Aristotle and Greek Tragedy, Chatto & Windus 1962, p.33. 35 Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, tr. Rex Warner, Penguin Books, 1972, pp.435-6.

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ignorant. Yet this did not diminish the sense of identity between the community of citizens and the polis. Of course, too, while the notion of sovereignty, even of the sovereignty of the people which is written into the constitution of the United States, has no place in this system, any more than does the idea we have of the State, there was still government. The business coming before the Assembly had to be prepared and proposals shaped so as to be effective legislative acts if approved - work which was carried out by the Council of Five Hundred. Disputes had to be settled according to the due process of law. There was an administrative system. Decisions of the Assembly had to be carried out and, if necessary, enforced. Taxes - extraordinary taxes on wealth to meet wartime expenditure, which were imposed by the Assembly - had to be assessed and collected. Payment had to be made - for example, to the thetes, the poorer citizens who manned the fleet and were paid a fixed wage, as against the better off, who served with the army as hoplites and had to provide their own armour and equipment and maintain themselves in the field. For all this administrative business, and much more, there were officials and magistrates, chosen by lot; at the end of their year of office, their performance was subject to official scrutiny, with prosecution to follow if they were shown to have been unsatisfactory. But there was no hierarchy of appointments; whatever the importance of his office, every officeholder was responsible directly to the people, either in the Assembly or in the courts. "The pivotal mechanisms were election by lot, which translated equality of opportunity from an ideal to a reality; and pay for office, which permitted the poor man to sit on the Council and on jury courts, or to hold office when the lot fell to him..... Though the pay was sufficient to compensate a man for the wages he might have lost as a craftsman, it was no higher than that. Hence no man could count on officeholding as a regular livelihood, or even as a better one for some periods of his life." Thus M.I.Finley, who also, in the same passage, makes the point that "In a sense, amateurism was implicit in the Athenian 'definition' of a direct democracy. Every citizen was held to be qualified to share in government by the mere fact of citizenship."36 The charge of amateurism is more than a little odd. One would be hard put to it to find anyone in ancient Athens who qualified as a 'professional' in any sense comparable to our own. It might be thought just as remarkable that the selfsame principles of universal obligation to serve and selection by lot have applied to jury service in Britain for centuries, and in America also. More to the point, wartime service in the army and navy was on precisely the same 'amateur' basis. Fighting in the wars was in fact the true qualification for citizenship; indeed, according to A.W.H.Adkins, it was the decisive element which validated Athenian democracy. Still more to the point, there is another side to the picture of randomly selected, brief, non-consecutive, non-repeatable appointment of 'amateur' judges and administrators to office. With one year the typical term, a high proportion of citizens must have had personal 36 M.I.Finley, The Ancient Greeks, Penguin Books, 1966, pp.76-7.

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experience of office-holding, and most of those over forty (thirty being the usual minimum age) might well have had held several different posts. And, quite apart from attendance at the Ecclesia, membership of the Council of Five Hundred, appointment to one or more of the wide variety of offices, there were also the grass-roots democratic institutions at the level of the demes. All in all, it looks as if the participant democracy of classical Athens, however utopian it may seem to us, had pretty solid foundations in the experiential knowledge of its operation which its constitution - idiosyncratic as it undoubtedly was - obliged virtually all its citizens perforce to acquire - time-consuming as its acquisition undoubtedly was. The leisure which the Greeks (and Romans) of classical times regarded as the indispensable component of the good life takes on a rather different complexion; citizens who could not afford time to devote themselves to their responsibilities as citizens were paid to do so. In Athens, a good deal of attention was paid to making the good life - the acquisition of merit - politically possible for all citizens.

IV

Just as miniatures prettify, so abbreviation tends to idealise. Even so, some reservations are inescapable, even in an account of this brevity. They spring, as much as anything, from the uneasy feelings that grow as one reads the succession of secondary writings that I have, perforce, relied on. Classicists are all too ready, even nowadays, to slip into the role of apologist, advocate, even public relations officer, when they approach the topic of Athenian democracy. Ancient Athens, it seems, has been too long the great pedagogue of the western world for classical scholars to forego the gratification of illuminating our present darkness. Among all the reservations and qualifications that suggest themselves, there are four of special relevance. The first is slavery. The number of writings on slavery in ancient Greece and Rome has grown enormously during this century, although it has added precious little new 'hard' information. Finley begins his 1959 paper with two generalisations: "First, at all times and in all places the Greeks world relied on some form (or forms) of dependent labour to meet its needs, both public and private. By this I mean that dependent labour was essential, in a significant measure, if the requirements of agriculture, trade, manufacture, public works and war production were to be fulfilled. And by dependent labour I mean work performed under compulsions other than those of kinship or communal obligations. Second: with the rarest of exceptions, there were always substantial numbers of free men engaged in productive labour. By this I mean primarily not free hired labour but free men working on their own (or leased) land or in their own shops or homes as craftsmen and shopkeepers."37 Yet slavery varied enormously in sheer amount and the way in which it was regarded changed too, although to a lesser extent. In Homeric times, it seems, slaves were thought

37 M.I.Finley, "Was Geek Civilisation Based on Slave Labour?", Historia 8, 1959, p.145.

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of (though not necessarily treated) as ordinary human beings who had suffered the misfortune of becoming subject to a master. In later centuries, growing prosperity, most obviously in Athens, though not confined to it, capped by success in the Persian wars, multiplied the number of slaves, who were for the most part, of foreign origin. The rich bought slaves for household service and to work their home farms. The not-so-rich also found they could afford to acquire slaves and use them as household servants and to supplement their own labour as artisans or entrepreneurs. By the fifth century, there seems to have been much the same number of slaves as citizens, engaged not so much as farm labourers as domestic servants, mine workers, masons, and as skilled craftsmen or unskilled labourers for those who could afford to employ them and so increase the output of their enterprise. In this last case, they often would work alongside their masters; some were foremen or managers. And there are accounts of slaves working as bankers for the richer citizens who lent money. So the social distance, in our eyes, between master and slave varied very considerably. But, at bottom, what counted was working for a master. Essentially, it meant an utterly repugnant curtailment of liberty - eleutheria. Working under a master in whatever capacity came to have a stigma attached to it. Its seemingly inevitable accompaniment was the stigmatizing of all the kinds of labour that was, or could be, performed by slaves. Another accompaniment, not so inevitable, was the attempt to justify the subjection of some men and women to others. There were indeed a few Greek thinkers who saw slaves as the equals of their masters 'in nature'; they were slaves 'by convention'. Aristotle's response to this was to argue that the difference was inherently natural: that there were people for whom it was natural that they should be, or become, slaves. They were, he argued, physically and mentally inferior - demonstrably so. It is this that has made the passage in the first book of his ‘Politics’ so notorious. "If there is something worse than accepting slavery," Bernard Williams remarks, "it consists in defending it."38 There is, then, something fundamentally anomalous about 'the glory that was Greece'. As Finley puts it at the end of his article, "the cities in which individual freedom reached its highest expression - most obviously Athens - were cities in which chattel slavery flourished. The Greeks, it is well known, discovered both the idea of individual freedom and the institutional framework in which it could be realized. The pre-Greek world..... was, in a very profound sense, a world without free men, in the sense in which the West has come to understand that concept. It was equally a world in which chattel slavery played no part of any consequence. This, too, was a Greek discovery. One aspect of Greek history, in short, is the advance, hand in hand, of freedom and slavery."39 What also has to be said is that while it is true that slavery does not now exist in Europe and America, it is hardly for people of our times to take too high a stand. Much the same

38 B.Williams, Shame and Necessity, Univ. of California Pr., 1993, p.111. 39 M.I.Finley, "Was Greek Civilisation Based on Slave Labour?", p.164.

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increase in (national) prosperity that Greece experienced in the sixth and fifth centuries B.C. has come to us in the last hundred years or so, and it, too, has been accompanied by an increasing disparity between rich and poor. The 'underclass' - a term coined in the U.S. and now current in Britain and Europe, despite the detectable (and detestable) echo of the German 'Untermensch - has become familiar during recent decades as the seemingly inevitable corollary to what Kenneth Galbraith has called a 'culture of contentment'.40 We haven't quite shed the connotations of social darwinism, with its own echo of Aristotle's argument. The next qualification is that of the sheer limitation in size of the ordinary Greek polis. This is one which is rarely omitted from the literature, however devoted a philhellene the writer may be. The Greeks themselves saw this numerical limitation as an essential precondition of the existence of the polis itself, let alone democracy. It relates to the kind of social order peculiar to a face-to-face society which this smallness made possible. The third qualification is one which, like the reference of behaviour to a man's or woman's actions rather than to their character, makes ancient Greece so 'desperately foreign' to us. The whole conceptual array of koinonia, philia, dike, and the rest has a distinctly Durkheimian ring about it, although the multiplicity of ways in which social solidarity manifests itself far exceeds anything Durkheim unearthed from the ethnographic texts on Australian bushmen which he made so much use of. The Durkheimian implications become even stronger when it becomes apparent that the special relationship which bound the citizens of the polis together, the sense of fellowship in the community which transcended the individual, found everyday expression not in terms of the analytical ideas one finds in Aristotle or in the equal participation of rich and poor, great and small, in the debates of the Assembly and the administration of government and justice, in service in the citizen army and the citizen navy, but in the round of religious ceremonies, processions, and ritual. The dictates of the normative rules which prescribed right conduct, and bound the citizen to the polis - and therefore to each other - had religious as well as moral, or legal, force. The first charge against Socrates was that of impiety, an offence against the gods, and therefore against the community. And, in the fourth place, while sovereignty, in the modern sense, was non-existent, not even something vested in the whole body of citizens, neither was there anything recognisable to modern Europeans as natural rights. Citizenship meant membership of the political community and a degree of participation in governmental and legal decision-making far beyond anything available to the ordinary people of modern states, but, on the other hand, the authority of the political community was total. The Greeks of democratic Athens "lacked, and would have been appalled by, inalienable rights."41 Duties owed to others and to deities, certainly; obligations, possibly; rights, no. The very idea of rights, as enumerated in the Declaration of the Rights of Man, for instance, would have offended the Greek conception of liberty. One can see the point, though it was not one which would have made any more sense in classical times than the idea of natural rights. It

40 J.K.Galbraith, The Culture of Contentment, Penguin Books, 1993. 41 M.I.Finley, The Ancient Economy, University of California Press, 1985 p.154.

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implies selection, and therefore limitation. The omission of education from the rights listed in the Declaration of 1789 is notorious - largely because it was inserted in the 1796 version without there being the slightest attempt to implement it; and there are those which have been introduced since: subsistence, medical treatment, housing accommodation. This last set of considerations, abstruse as the anachronistic puzzle on which it rests may be, does something to explain the precariousness not only of Athenian democracy but of the political organisation of the Greek polis generally. Political voice mattered more than rights. The particular configuration of the constitution as well as the balance of political forces could have fateful consequences for the lives and well-being of all citizens. Conscription and taxation have borne heavily on the lives and property of citizens in the twentieth century too, but when the consequences of defeat, if he escaped death or injury in battle, might well be not simply capture and imprisonment but being killed off himself and the massacre or enslavement of his wife and children, commitment to his community had to be unconditional. But his commitment "was indeed diminished or obliterated if he considered that the organisation of his community was injurious to him. This was the origin of the internal conflicts (stasis) so prevalent in Greek cities, and therefore of the development of Greek political theory, which was not primarily concerned with the nature and validity of the citizen's obligations to his state, the question which has tended to dominate modern political theory, but rather with the form of state which would best guarantee his welfare."42 Since Athens was 'the Athenians,' the lands and the income of the polis belonged to them. The wealth accumulated by Athens was put more to public than to private use. The vestiges of the palaces which rulers and great men built for themselves are still visible in Rome - as they are at Knossos and Mycenae. They are absent in Athens. Nevertheless, the prosperity which came to Athens and to other poleis from successful wars, increased trade - and moneylending - did make for the inequality which had always been present to become exacerbated. It led, as inequality has done in all times and places, to discontent, unrest, conflicts. Aristotle is quite specific about the 'general and principle causes' which turned chronic, though usually latent, contentiousness (stasis) into open conflict. It was inequality. Perpetual conflict, open or latent, could be interpreted as the price paid for the coexistence of an unequal distribution of wealth and the full and equal participation of all citizens in the political community - or for the coexistence of a subsistence economy and the social and political order of a face-to-face society which were overlaid - 'framed' - by commercial interests. Claims to inalienable natural rights may not have been dreamed of, but men recognised differences of interest. And since the citizenry was the ultimate repository of power, success in the conflicts between rich and poor, or between the factions which bid for their support, meant being able to alter the distribution of authority. Such an interpretation is hardly contestable, but it almost certainly does not represent the whole truth of the matter. Conflict, of varying degrees of intensity, was part and parcel of 42 P.A.Brunt, The Fall of the Roman Republic, O.U.P., 1988, pp.300-301.

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the life of Athenian democracy and of its citizens. For in fifth and fourth century Athens, even though the high level of consensus about values usually assumed by most writers may well have existed in fact, the right decision, fair judgment, the means of attaining the good life, for the individual citizen no less than for the city, had to be arrived at by debate - either within oneself or within the properly appointed council or committee. If we follow Alasdair Macintyre, the conflict was as much ethical as it was political. "For each virtue and timidity, justice between doing injustice and suffering injustice, liberality between prodigality and meanness."43 The point is taken further in another passage: "Of course all the evidence is that the overwhelming majority of the Greeks, whether Athenian or not, took it for granted that the way of life of their own city was unquestionably the best way of life for man, if it even occurred to them to raise the question at all; and it was equally taken for granted that what the Greeks shared was clearly superior to any barbarian way of life." However, "moral disagreement in the fifth and fourth centuries does not only arise because one set of virtues is counterposed to another. It is also and perhaps more importantly because rival conceptions of one and the same virtue coexist that conflict is engendered."44

V This may go some way towards explaining an apparent paradox. For while the economic inequality which was built into Greek (and Roman) society was a frequent cause of civil disorder and uprisings, egalitarianism in economic terms seems never to have figured as a political objective. The equality and inequality Aristotle speaks of as political goals concerned political power - 'voice' in political decision-making. True, there was at least one polis, Sparta, in which citizenship meant equality in possessions (or, rather, equality in lack of personal possessions), but Sparta was unique, an oddity even for the Greeks themselves, admirable in many ways but a model not to be imitated, except theoretically, as in Plato's ‘Republic’. "The judgment of antiquity about wealth was fundamentally unequivocal and uncomplicated. Wealth was necessary and it was good; it was an absolute requisite for the good life; and on the whole that was all there was to it."45 The distribution of wealth between ranks and social classes was, by and large, little affected by changes in the distribution of political power backwards and forwards between tyranny, oligarchy and democracy. The economic consequences of constitutional changes of that sort resembled more what happened after the English revolution of the seventeenth century, or the American War of Independence, rather than after the French, Russian or Chinese revolutions. True wealth was measured in land. Booty, including slaves, acquired in war and conquest

43 A.Macintyre, After Virtue, p.144. 44 ibid., p.125. 45 M.I.Finley, The Ancient Economy, pp35-6.

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belonged to the polis, apart from what was 'disposed of' in the field at the commander's discretion. Trade brought profits and loans brought interest, but one's standing in society depended on the amount of land one owned ( so that profits and interest tended to be translated into land ownership fairly quickly). The fact that, almost without exception, land ownership was reserved for citizens was as much consequence of this as it was cause. Which brings us to the bedrock of the Greek economy and of Greek economic organisation. In essence, Greek society rested, as I have already remarked, on a subsistence economy. In other words, it was a society of peasant landowners, in which each household provided for itself. Clearly, in Athens and a great many other places this system was supplemented by a second system founded on large estates (which were commonly multiple small-holdings rather than single properties), and it was this, and the fact that wealthy landowners could collect rents from farmers and interest from debtors, that forced the upper and lower limits of wealth and poverty farther and farther apart. Inequality, in turn, promoted demand for commodities and goods among the better-off far beyond the range of subsistence needs. Trade, and the wealth it brought to those able to profit from it, served as an effective economic multiplier of inequality. None of this reached the extremes it did in Rome, but it entailed a degree of division of labour and a volume of trade well in excess of that needed for an economy of single households. There was division of labour, just as there was commerce, but it lacked the dynamic of growth we associate with them (and which Adam Smith treated as intrinsic to the development of modern industrial economies and Durkheim to the growth of modern civilised society itself). The same is true of Greek (and Roman) technology, although it was by no means altogether primitive, crude or devoid of intellectual or scientific foundations, and it is true for much the same reasons. There was plenty of activity in trade and in manufacture for sale in the classical world, but most of it was small-scale, even by comparison with medieval commerce and industry. Any large-scale trade in commodities was contained within what we would now call 'the public sector', carried on either by officials of the polis (or, later, of the Roman Republic or Empire), or by the contractors they engaged. Domestic manufacture of the kind practised in the classical world has always featured in industrial production; it persisted as the principal mode of organisation for industrial production until a few hundred years ago and has survived, in modified form and over a narrowing band of products, until the present day. What is quite unfamiliar, however, is the absence of any organisation expressly for controlling and supervising production. Even construction work - building houses, fortifications, harbour works, temples and other public buildings, ships - was handled in the same way, by individual craftsmen each under contract, sometimes in association with two or three other citizens, metics (resident aliens) or slaves. Each craftsman, whether citizen or 'foreigner' (Greek noncitizen), operated as an independent contractor. Even slaves, who might well be at least as skilled as any other craftsmen, worked alongside the free citizens. This applied even in the case of the construction of ships or large buildings,

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such as the temples which crowned the Acropolis. The building of the Erechtheum in 409BC seems to have occupied 27 citizens, 40 metics and 15 slaves.46 Metics and slaves worked not only in the same trades but on identically the same tasks as the workers who were citizens. All workmen (including slaves, although their pay presumably went to their masters) were paid at much the same rate. It all seems extraordinarily casual and 'unorganised'. So it was, if one is thinking of production in terms of profitable enterprise or even of what Weber called economic rationality. Difficult as it may be for us to grasp the idea, such notions are irrelevant. This does not mean that we are entitled to regard them as irrational. Production was for use - whether for necessities, for pleasure or for splendour. These may be provided through the medium of profitable enterprise, but it is possible to achieve the same ends directly. The entrepreneur as such, the professional trader or manufacturer, was held in low esteem throughout Greek and Roman history. But what, for us, constitutes the problem, the anomaly, goes deeper. Not only was entrepreneurship regarded as vulgar and unworthy (though of course necessary), but there was nothing about the processes of production which could possibly bear the label of management, or formal organisation. Even in the case of large-scale building construction, the remains of which are still standing, everybody did his own job, or at most worked in a team along with a handful of other craftsmen, and was apparently left to keep of his own accord to the general design and the planned sequence. They presumably consulted each other about this, and on occasion would follow the lines laid down by some one with an established reputation for being good at design work and planning; in the case of the larger and more important buildings, the major design responsibility would lie with officials, or the representatives of the polis, or the citizen who was footing the bill, and they might, or might not, consult known experts. In Rome, later on, Cicero accorded the same standing to architecture as to medicine and teaching. All were occupations which were for the most part filled by slaves. The great divide was not so much between manual work and what we know as clerical work and the higher professions as between 'employment' (producing goods - other than farm produce, of course - or services for others), and self-sufficiency. Agriculture was honoured beyond even the superior civil occupations, even if for the most part this was lip-service, a gesture of deference towards traditional values, amounting at best to what used to be known in England as 'gentleman farming'. Working for another for pay, or producing goods for sale (which was reckoned to amount to much the same thing), or engaging in trade, was mean and despicable, because it meant being dependent on others. An exception to this principle existed in the case of commercial enterprise if it were on a large enough scale (and therefore in all probability involved public officials). It might then be rated as respectable, partly because it could be said to benefit the public at large rather than to mark dependence on individual customers, clients or employers, but more especially because it could, and unfailingly did, enable the successful merchant to buy land. 46 A.Zimmern, The Greek Commonwealth, O.U.P., 1931, p.263.

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Practising law, engaging in politics and other pursuits which were unpaid in any direct sense, remunerative though they might be, was respectable, even honourable. Lawyers, and some other 'professionals', collected no fees, but were able to call on the financial resources, or the social and political influence, of those whom they represented in the courts, or advised, or to whom they dedicated or addressed their writings. Money-lending, which was by far the most profitable business, and the most widely practised by Roman patricians, was eminently respectable, if not particularly honourable. Best of all was to possess estates which could provide all one could possibly need or want. Quite apart from its evident practical utility and from any increment in social standing, self-sufficiency represented a moral ideal fundamental to the ancient world, Greek and Roman alike, something which was both underpinned by, and supported, moral philosophies of different schools. For Platonists, Neo-platonists, cynics like Diogenes, stoics and epicureans, freedom from all dependence on anything external to the individual represented the essence of 'the Good' - and also the foundation of true citizenship. The essential, central, value attached to personal autonomy goes some way towards explaining the absence of formal organisation, as we know it, in the industrial system of classical Greece and Rome. Authoritative control over others, outside the army (and the prescribed powers of Roman magistrates which stemmed, by and large, from military command), was limited to that extended over the women, children and slaves of a citizen's own household - the patria potestas of the Romans. To accept direction from others meant that one was less than a man. It followed that even to work for wages, or to produce goods for individual customers, was demeaning, though obviously necessary for the poorer citizens. Such 'organisation' as went into industrial production and other operations which we regard as demanding some kind of formal structure of management organisation is best understood as a set of assumptions which served as the tacit, unacknowledged infrastructure of the way in which people worked together. It has some parallel with the 'regulative organization' said to apply to specialised economic activities of the present time like the stock market and even, by extension, to markets and to civic life in general (although these are nowadays pervaded more and more by legal restrictions and regulations), but the resemblance is a distant one. It seems more appropriate to relate the organisation of industry and commerce almost entirely to what modern economists like to call 'external' factors:47 in this case the social order of the Greek polis, with all its political, moral and religious overtones. What provided the basic organisational structure for this aspect of life, as for so many others, is the participative community of equal citizens, bound together by a common ethos, which acknowledged, in spite of all the manifold backslidings and contraventions, the overriding need to pursue a common way of life in justice and harmony beyond any minimalist principles of live-and-let-live.

47See T.Burns, "Sociological Explanation", British Journal of Sociology, Vol.18, 1967, p.355.