Ancient Athenian Office-Holding and Radical Republicanism

• In Event: Ancient History as Political Theory

Abstract

This paper argues that ancient Athenian practices of office-holding––that is, specifically, exercising political command through a magistracy––were inspired by an ideology of freedom as the absence of domination that certainly dovetailed with, and perhaps inspired, experiments in radical republicanism in the nineteenth century. Ancient Greek magistracies, an understudied subject in both Political Theory and Classics, has a potential contribution to make to contemporary theorizing on neo- and socialist republicanism.

While we tend to associate ancient Greek democracy with boisterous meetings of the popular assembly, no less important to the ancient Greeks was the question of the magistracies (archai): who had access to them, how they were distributed, and what powers they had. Melissa Lane, in a recent contribution (2023), has recently drawn our attention back to the importance for Plato of magistracies, the main vehicle through which ancient citizens exercised rule (archê). If assemblies passed laws, and popular courts judged infractions of those laws, it was the magistrates who actually enforced the laws in daily life (they constituted the executive). In ancient Greek democracies––much to Plato and Aristotle's dismay––individual magistrates tended to have very little authority: they worked on boards, had quite circumscribed powers, and could be challenged in their decisions and referred to a popular court for review. They were, in short, almost pure administrators, subject to constant oversight by mass popular bodies.

This paper explores Aristotle's critique of democratic magistracies in the Politics, a topic that has not received much scholarly attention when compared with the philosopher’s comments on collective judgment (Schwartzberg 2016) and on demagoguery (Polansky 2023). I excavate from scattered passages on democratic magistracies a specific understanding of the freedom of the citizen that animated democratic practice on this front. This conception can be called “neo-republican” as understood by contemporary scholarship (Skinner 1998, Pettit 1997), although in line with recent arguments (Edelstein and Straumann 2023), I locate its origins more in Greece than in Rome. I then compare Greek democrats’ understanding of freedom, as expressed through their handling of the magistracies, to the very similar conception of the power of magistrates that Karl Marx seems to have possessed, both in his youthful writings on democracy (Abensour 2011) and in his praise of the Paris Commune of 1871 (Leipold 2020). A return to the institutions of ancient Greek democracy may show a productive way forward for theorists interested in socialist republicanism and radical democracy (O’Shea 2020, Muldoon 2022), while also pointing to a paradox: radical democracy of the Athenian type evinces an almost libertarian mistrust of the state and its agents, while socialist republicanism requires an extensive state apparatus to mitigate domination in the economic sphere.

Works Cited

Abensour, M. 2011. Democracy against the State: Marx and the Machiavellian Moment. Cambridge and Malden, MA.

Edelstein, D. and B. Straumann. 2023. “On the Liberties of the Ancients: Licentiousness, Equal Rights, and the Rule of Law.” History of European Ideas 49: 1037-60.

Lane, M. 2023. Of Rule and Office: Plato’s Ideas of the Politica. Princeton.

Leipold, B. 2020. “Marx’s Social Republic: Radical Republicanism and the Political Institutions of Socialism.” In K. Nabulsi, S. White, and B. Leipold, eds., Radical Republicanism: Recovering the Tradition’s Popular Heritage. Oxford: 172-93.

Muldoon, J. 2022. “A Socialist Republican Theory of Freedom and Governmnet.” European Journal of Political Theory 21: 47-67.

O’Shea, T. 2020. “Socialist Republicanism.” Political Theory 48: 548-72.

Pettit, P. 1997. Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government. Oxford.

Polansky, D. 2023. “Populism and Democratic Conflict: An Aristotelian View.” The Review of Politics 85: 207-24.

Schwartzberg, M. 2016. “Aristotle and the Judgment of the Many: Equality, Not Collective Quality.” The Journal of Politics 78: 733-45.

Skinner, Q. 1998. Liberty before Liberalism. Cambridge.

Author

• Matthew Simonton, Arizona State University