Polybius, Cheirokratia, and the Fate of Democracy

• In Event: Ancient Greek Democracy, Aesthetics, and the Cultivation of the Political

Abstract

Polybius’ account of the cycle of regimes in Book VI of the Histories ends with democracy supplanted by cheirokratia and bia — the rule of violence and force — before the citizens find for themselves once more a “monarch and master” (palin heurēi despotēn kai monarchon). This marks a return to the beginning of the cycle: “This is the cycle of constitutions, and this the regular ordering of nature, according to which constitutions change and give way to another and again return to the beginning” (VI.9). This account is famous, but also obscure: what would it mean for political time to be cyclical? And in what sense can political change constitute a return to a beginning? Against prominent twentieth-century historians and theorists (Kosseleck, Arendt) who see the Polybian cycle as a naturalizing frame for history that forecloses the possibility of innovation and change, I offer a reading of Polybius’ cycle of regimes focused on the construction and eventual collapse of normative expectations for politics. Polybius’ cycle opens with the move from the first monarchy to kingship, which involves the introduction of normative expectations for rule. The final move, from cheirokratia back to monarchy, is best explained by citizens coming to believe that the application of shared normative principles to politics is a fantasy, marking a return to a world in which politics is understood as fundamentally a matter of the struggle for power and rule by fear and force. I use the Achaean League as a case study for Polybius’ interest in the construction of shared normative orders. Polybius praises the democratic Achaean League for its ability to make the citizens of disparate political communities understand themselves anew as “Achaeans” (II.38). The eventual failure of the League also gives us insight into Polybius’ understanding of how and why such normative orders collapse. On the Polybian view I reconstruct, we are faced in politics with two distinct, recurring problems. First, there is the question of how we can hold those in power to the normative expectations we have for them. We can read the long history of Western constitutionalism as a series of attempts to address this problem, and Polybius’ theory of the mixed constitution is often taken as an important part of this story. But Polybius also points us to a second, more basic problem: how to sustain the idea of politics as a shared, normatively laden enterprise. The resources in Polybius’ history for posing and responding to this problem are perhaps less familiar, but equally valuable.

Author

• Matthew Landauer, University of Chicago