Ancient political thought

Ancient political thought is the study of a continuous, coherent, and highly influential tradition of reflection on political life. To study this tradition is to understand the arguments and ideas presented in those texts, and then to form a judgment about their value — both in their original contexts and for contemporary political life.

Doing so is an exercise in history, philosophy, and literature, as Ryan Balot writes:

Greek political texts are historically situated, and they responded carefully to their contemporary contexts - and yet they do not understand themselves as limited by history. They typically exhibit broader philosophical ambitions that go beyond their local, embedded features. They approach both their contemporary worlds, and the world in general, in a variety of literary genres.³

This article, accordingly, provides some background on the Greek world and synthesizes some guidance on how to go about this exercise.

The Greek world

In the age of [[Aristotle]], approximately 8–10 million Greek-speaking people were distributed across ca. 1,000 city-states (poleis, singular polis). The Greek world stood at the edge of great empires and kingdoms, including Persia and Egypt.

It was, therefore, a world of small states, fierce competition, and new modes of social cooperation, including the invention of [[democracy]]. It was also a world that was marked by problematic gender roles, social inequality, and master-slave relations. And, despite these differences, it was a world that bears remarkable similarities to our modern one. Themes of equality, freedom, leadership, and authority run core to Greek political thought and remain central to our political lives today.

The basic question: politeia

The central question of political thought — not just in antiquity, though acutely present here — is formulated by Josh Ober as follows:

Who decides, and how, the question of who, around here, gets what, and why?

This question is recursive (circular, though not illogical) in that the who, how, and here depend on the what at stake: different groups and peoples have decision authority, using different procedures, over different things, in different settings (for example, thinking about the family versus a democratic state).

The what can be positive (offices, rights, goods, happiness) or negative (harms, punishments, misery). The how can be answered by formal rules, some type of judgment, or arbitrary preference. The here is the space of domain in which the decider has authority. And the why is justificatory — it must explain on what grounds who gets to decide.

By the age of [[Plato]] and [[Aristotle]], this question was examined through a society’s [[politeia]]. Although politeia is often translated as “Constitution,” it refers not just to formal institutions: it encompasses the entire social and political order of a city-state, including its laws, customs, norms, and practices.

Once we have described how a society answers this basic question at a given moment, two related questions come up.

1. First, how does that order come about? How did this political order emerge over any other political arrangement, and over a state of no order at all?
2. Second, how might that order be changed? This question comes up in cases where some are dissatisfied with the existing order, or when circumstances change, and the old arrangement no longer seems well-suited to current needs.

Primary themes

Throughout ancient texts, the basic question also gives rise to recurring themes:

• [[Interdependence]]: we need each other — sometimes reluctantly; how do we make that work?
• Justice: who gets what, and why?
• [[Power]]: who rules?
• [[Legitimacy]]: what justifies the current arrangement of goods and power?
• [[Reason]]: what is it, who has it, how is it achieved, and what are its limits?

Poetry and political thought

The study of ancient political thought has traditionally focused on the “systematic theorists of politics in the classical period,” especially Plato and Aristotle.⁴ But “the systemic theoreticians did not invent their intellectual worlds from scratch.”⁵ Dating back to Homer and Hesiod, Greek poets addressed many of the same themes while working in a different medium. Given the expansive understanding of “the political” in ancient Greece, we should understand a continuity between earlier Greek texts and the systematic theorists who came later.

How should we read these poets and historians as political thinkers? Balot writes that “all of Greek political literature is normative in the sense that the authors…shaped their material in order to provide an ethical analysis and a political evaluation.”⁵ This literature — especially [[poetry]] — often served a didactic function, imparting moral and political wisdom to its audiences.

In sum, Greek political thought is concerned with general and abstract reflections on the domain of politics, and on the ways human beings exercise their political capacities. Well-formulated reflections on political issues “could be adapted to make sense of specific situations and to give rhetorical and intellectual support to others,” even when many texts originated in response to immediate political circumstances and for different audiences.⁶

Why study ancient thought?

The importance of Greek political thought to us has to be argued for in specific and detailed terms, in the here and now. I would argue that studying Greek political thought provides an important political perspective for us in virtue of its combination of similarity to us and difference from us.⁷

For Balot, our chief difference with the Greeks — and accordingly, the chief value of studying them — is that “ethics and [[politics]] were connected at their foundations” in antiquity.⁸ As such, Greek political thought — its “virtue politics,” so to say — also took the form of analyzing virtues and vices.⁹

In analyzing the contemporary debate between [[liberalism]] and [[communitarianism]], Balot argues that Greek thought “provides a genuine tertium quid.”¹⁰ Like liberalism, Greek political thought approved of individual autonomy, private freedom, and equality of opportunity: beyond this, it also provided virtues that could support these “liberal” values. Similarly, like communitarians, Greek political thinkers rejected the “thin” (as Balot writes) conception of individualism, instead analyzing individuals through their attachments to families, religions, communities, and ultimately, poleis.