Plato and the Invention of Political Science 9
man of ability and promise, Dion, son-in-law of the reigning tyrant of Syracuse, Dionysius I.
Dionysius I died in 367, leaving as his successor Dionysius II, a young man of 30 whose education had been neglected, leaving him totally unfit to take up his father’s task of checking the eastward expansion of the Carthaginians. This trading empire was threatening the very existence of Greek civilization in Sicily. The strong man of Syracuse at the moment was Dion, brother-in-law of the new tyrant, the same man who had been so powerfully attached to Plato 20 years before. Dion thoroughly believed in Plato’s views about the union of political power with science and conceived the idea of bringing Plato to Syracuse to educate his brother- in-law. Plato did not feel the chances of success were promising, but the Carthaginian danger was very real if the new ruler of Syracuse should prove unequal to his task. It would be dishonorable to the Academy if no attempt were made to put its theory into practice at this critical juncture in Greek history. Accordingly, Plato agreed to accept Dion’s invitation.13 Upon arrival, Plato at once offered Dionysius a serious course on geometry. For a while things went well. Dionysius liked Plato, and geometry became the fashion at his court. But the educational scheme wrecked on a double obstacle. Dionysius had limited intellectual capacity on the one hand, and he developed strong personal jealousies of Dion on the other. Dion was therefore banished, and Plato was told to return to Athens. Dionysius kept up a personal correspondence with Plato, however, and Plato did everything in his power to reconcile Dionysius and Dion. His efforts failed. Not only did Dionysius confiscate Dion’s property, but he also forced his wife, Dionysius’s sister, to marry another man. Stubbornly, Plato made another voyage to Syracuse and spent nearly a year there (361–360) trying to remedy the situation. Still a diplomatic failure, Plato eventually went back to Athens to spend the rest of his long life lecturing to his associates in the Academy and composing his longest and most practical contribution to the literature of moral and political philosophy, the Laws.14
10 Handbook of Organization Theory and Management
will be able to appreciate more fully Plato’s objections to them and why the debate he instigated continues in our own day.
In the pre-Greek world, advanced peoples had learned to live with nature by wresting secrets from her through patient observation and then applying them to gainful purposes. But such practical knowledge never lost its close association with demons and myths, fears and hopes, and punishments and rewards. The pre-Greek conception of nature viewed physical phenomena as essentially individual, unique, and incalculable rather than general, universal, and predictable. The Greeks were not the first to think about the recurrent regularities in the natural world, but they were the first to develop — going beyond observation and knowledge
— the scientific attitude, a new approach to the world that constitutes to this day one of the distinctive elements of Western life. Classical Greek thought tried to tame man and nature through reason.
Greek inventiveness and originality lay not in this or that political theory but in the invention of the scientific study of politics. Pre-Greek political thought had been a mixture of legend, myth, theology, and allegory.15 If there were an element of independent reasoning, it served as a means to a higher end, usually to be found in the tenets of a supernatural religious system. The contribution of Jewish thought to the political heritage of the world has been the idea of the brotherhood of man, a concept deeply rooted in monotheism. By contrast, polytheism made it difficult for the Greeks to see the basic oneness of mankind, and their religious pluralism reflected their inability to transcend, intellectually and institutionally, the confines of the city-state.
From a social point of view, the Judeo-Christian tradition was opposed to slavery on principle, a unique position in antiquity. It established a weekly day of rest, still unknown in many parts of the world, and it contained a host of protective rules in favor of workers, debtors, women, children, and the poor. The concept of covenant, first appearing in the agreement between God and Abraham, is a frequent theme in the Bible whenever momentous decisions were to be made. The concept was revived centuries later in the Puritan attempt to build a new religious and civil society; when President Woodrow Wilson, a devout Presbyterian, named the constitution of the League of Nations a covenant; and when President Bill Clinton baptized his legislative program in 1992 “a new covenant” between his administration and the American people.
However significant Judaic contributions to Western civilization may be, they never were, nor were they meant to be, political science. They were political and social ethics rather than science, and as such constitute one of the three chief tributaries to the mainstream of Western civilization, the other two being the Christian principle of love and the Greek principle of rationalism.
DK834X_book.fm Page 10 Tuesday, September 20, 2005 8:11 AM
Plato and the Invention of Political Science 11
The first work that deserves to be called political science, in that it applies systematic reasoning to political ideas and institutions, is Plato’s Republic.16 After almost 2400 years, it is still matchless as an introduction to the basic issues that confront human beings as citizens. To understand fully the concerns of the Republic, however, it is first necessary to recount the immediate constitutional history of at least two Greek city-states, Sparta and Athens. The city-state, the polis, was a territory and a set of institutions of great variety in size, shape, and social and political organization. It was a community of citizens (adult males), citizens without political rights (women and children), and noncitizens (resident foreigners and slaves).
The community lived under a written constitution, and it was independent of any outside authority. It occupied a defined area, often much larger than the city itself. Athens, for example, controlled the entire peninsula of Attica. Although the land at large may have been virtually empty of residents or occupied only intermittently by farmhouses, villages, or small towns, there was a single focal point around which religious, political, and administrative authority gathered. That was the city, the polis proper.
It was usually fortified, and it always offered a market (an agora), a place of assembly, and a seat of justice and government, both executive and deliberative. The early city-state government tended to be either monarchic or aristocratic; the latter was usually oligarchic or democratic.
The sense of community was everything. By the classical period of the fifth and fourth centuries, there were hundreds of federations of Greeks living around the shores of the Mediterranean “like frogs around a pond,”
as Plato put it. From the central sea of the Aegean with its island communities, and the coastal towns of Turkey and eastern and southern Greece, the colonies had spread to northern Greece, the Black Sea coast and southern Russia, to Sicily and southern Italy, and as far west as Provence, Spain, and North Africa.17 The Greeks said that living in a polis was the only form of civilized life.
Aspects of the social and economic life of the cities varied greatly from region to region. Some had large agricultural territories and serf popula- tions. Others were heavily engaged in trade in raw materials such as corn, olive oil, dried fish, wine, metals, timber, slaves, or manufactured goods, either made on the spot or imported from other cultures. There was a huge outflow of Greek goods from such cities as Corinth and Thebes, and of skilled labor such as doctors, stonemasons, and pr ofessional mercenaries from Athens and Sparta. The functions of the cities varied greatly as well. Some were essentially fortresses. Others were founded on a religious shrine. Most had ports, and all had interior land and an administrative center. Plato in the Laws and Aristotle in the last two books of the Politics insisted that it was possible to discover an ideal city behind the multifariousness of the real Greek cities.
DK834X_book.fm Page 11 Tuesday, September 20, 2005 8:11 AM
12 Handbook of Organization Theory and Management
In his dialogues Plato portrays Athens in vivid detail as a world of young and godlike intellectuals meeting in private houses for conversation and social drinking, strolling in suburban parks, or walking down to the Piraeus for a festival, listening to famous visitors skilled in rhetoric or philosophy.18 But when Plato was writing, Athens was fighting a long and bloody war in which at least half her population died, many of them from a particularly horrible plague that scarred even those who survived it. The plague was partly the consequence of the unsanitary conditions in which vast numbers of Athenian citizens were camped on every available yard of open land within the city walls. The way down to the Piraeus must have been as filthy, stinking, and crowded as the slums of Calcutta.
The polis was essentially a male association. Male citizens joined together in making and carrying out all decisions affecting the community.
The origin of this phenomenon lay in military campaigns and the right of warriors to approve or reject the decisions of their leaders. The development of the polis was the extension of this practice of approval to all aspects of social life, with the partial exception of religion.19 Direct participation in making rational choices after discussion was the central political commitment of all Greek cities.
The organization theory behind the polis was related to natural and earlier forms of association. Anthropologists often call these associations kinship groups. Most Greek cities divided their citizens into hereditary tribes. Dorian cities traditionally possessed three tribes and Ionian cities four.20 The divisions were for military and political purposes, sanctioned by tradition and reinforced by specially organized state religious cults. A closer look at organization theory in Athens will illustrate.
In about 507, Cleisthenes, head of the great noble house that had supported Solon, the Alcmeonidae, took advantage of recently successful Spartan arms and political intrigue to offer a new sociopolitical structure to Attica that would serve it well for 200 years. Cleisthenes changed the number of tribes from four to ten. The essence of the new system was the recognition that small local units, i.e., country villages, towns, and territorial wards of the city, should control their own affairs independent of local aristocrats such as himself. For state purposes, these demes, as they were called, were grouped into larger coherent geographical blocks (with some gerrymandering), and it was from these blocks that the ten new tribes were constructed. Each tribe would have one block from the geographical regions called the Plain, the Coast, and the City. The army and all other parts of the administrative system, above all the Solonian council, were based on the tribes. The Solonian council, the primary governing conclave, was composed of 50 representatives from each tribe, each tribal contingent serving as a standing committee of the whole council for one-tenth of the year.
DK834X_book.fm Page 12 Tuesday, September 20, 2005 8:11 AM
Plato and the Invention of Political Science 13
Thus an Athenian in his village could make good use of whatever self- confidence he may have had. He could simultaneously develop a sense of nationality as the citizen of a city-state. Did Cleisthenes promote a change of attitude with his reforms, or did he merely reorganize a change that had already occurred? Whatever the answer, he was wise enough not to tamper with existing social groups and their cherished cults. Instead, he created a new organizational structure. The village or deme became an administrative unit,21 and the principle of isnornia was established.
Isnornia was the condition in which final political authority was vested in the citizenry, and the city’s fate was determined by majority vote.
Even more important to the ordinary Athenian citizen than local or central governmental organization was the phratry (phratria). This is the sole context in Greek of the important linguistic root common to most Indo-European languages found, for example, in the Celtic brathir, Ger- man Bruder, English “brother,” Latin frater, and French frere. In Greek it designates the nonfamilial type of brotherhood that originally was an aristocratic warrior band but became the larger social organization that dominated a citizen’s life. The community, the polis, was a brotherhood.
Each phratry worshipped a male and a female god. In Athens it was Zeus Phratrios and Athena Phratria. Annual festivals were held in honor of these gods, and various rites of passage were observed in what the Greeks called the seasons of the soul. At an early age, for example, the young male Athenian was presented to the phratry by his father and relatives at the altar of Zeus Phratrios. Later, the acceptance of his first sacrifice signified his acceptance into the community. In adolescence he was again presented and dedicated his shorn hair to the god. The phratry then voted to admit him as a member and inscribed his name on the list of the brotherhood. It was also the phratry that witnessed the solemn betrothal ceremony that was the central public act of an Athenian marriage, and who celebrated the final consummation of the marriage with a feast paid for by the bridegroom. Thus the phratry was involved in all the main stages of a man’s life and was the focal point of his daily activity. When in difficulty, when a man needed witnesses at law, for example, he turned first to his phratry.
Sparta had a similar theory of brotherhood but worked it out quite differently. The male citizen body was divided into syssitia, or mess groups, on which the entire social and military organization of the state rested.
From the age of seven, boys were given a state-organized upbringing and brigaded into age groups. They lived communally from the age of 12 and were taught multiple skills useful to self-reliance and survival. The boys were provided with inadequate food and clothing to toughen them. At age 20 they were officially inducted into their syssitia, where they had to live until the age of 30. Even thereafter, they were required to eat daily
DK834X_book.fm Page 13 Tuesday, September 20, 2005 8:11 AM
14 Handbook of Organization Theory and Management
common meals in their mess groups, to which they contributed food from the land allotted to them and farmed under their supervision by state- owned slaves. The slaves were descendants of the original inhabitants of the Spartan territory, and they required constant suppression. The theo- retical elegance of the Spartan social system and the way it built on traditional Greek customs much impressed ancient political thinkers and offered a counterideal to Athenian democracy.22
Unlike Sparta, who froze her institutions, the other Greek cities were networks of associations in transition. There were aristocratic religious groups called gennetai who claimed descent from a common ancestor and monopolized the priesthoods of the more important city cults. There were drinking groups occasionally mobilized for political ends. There were groups associated with the various sporting complexes or gymnasia of the city. There were benefit clubs, burial clubs, and clubs associated with individual trades and activities. There were mystical sects and intel- lectual organizations such as Plato’s Academy. The range of such associ- ations is shown by the Athenian law relating to them: “If a deme or phrateres or worshippers of heroes or gennetai or drinking groups or funerary clubs or religious guilds or pirates or traders make rules amongst themselves, these shall be valid unless they are in conflict with public law.”
The associations helped to create the sense of community and belong- ing that was the essential feature of the polis. The ties of kinship by blood were matched by multiple forms of political, religious, and social group- ings, and of companionship for a purpose, whether it was voyaging, drinking, or burial. This conception of citizenship made civil war an even more poignant experience. When the democrats and oligarchs of Athens battled in 404, friend fought friend to the death.
In such a world it might be argued that multiple ties limited the freedom of the individual, and there is certainly a sense in which the conception of the autonomy of the individual apart from the community is absent from Greek thought. The freedom of the Greeks was public freedom, externalized in speech and action. It derived from the fact that the same man belonged to a deme, a phratry, a family, a group of relatives, and a religious association. Living in this complex world of conflicting groups and social duties, he nevertheless had the freedom to choose between their demands and so to escape any particular dominant form of social patterning. This explains the coexistence of the group mentality with the amazing creativity and freedom of thought in classical Athens. The freedom that results from belonging in many places is no less a freedom than that which results from belonging nowhere.23
In many ways the Greek family is the key to Greek organization theory.
It was monogamous and nuclear, being composed of a husband and wife with their children. But Greek writers tend to define the household as an
DK834X_book.fm Page 14 Tuesday, September 20, 2005 8:11 AM
Plato and the Invention of Political Science 15
economic unit and to regard other dependent relatives and slaves as part of it. The family fulfilled a number of social functions apart from economic ones. It was the source of new citizens. In the classical period, the state established increasingly stringent rules for citizenship and thus for legiti- macy. In Athens, a citizen had to be the offspring of a legally recognized marriage between two Athenian citizens whose parents were also citizens.
It became impossible for an Athenian to marry a foreigner and very difficult to obtain recognition for the children of any foreign liaison. This was a democratic ideal, the imposition of the social norms of the peasant majority on an aristocracy that had previously behaved very differently. The aris- tocracy had frequently married outside the community and determined its own criteria for legitimacy. Even the great Pericles, the author of the first citizenship laws, was forced to seek permission from the assembly to legitimate his son by his Milesian mistress, Aspasia. Pericles had divorced his Athenian wife in 445, and his two sons by her had died of the plague during the Peloponnesian War. The Athenians granted legitimacy to Aspa- sia’s son, but not without considerable debate.
Intimately connected with citizenship was the inheritance of property.
Greek society in general did not practice primogeniture, the right of the eldest son to inherit. Rather, the property was divided equally by lot between all surviving sons, so that the traditional word for an inheritance was a man’s kleros or lot. The Athenian family tended to be unstable for this reason, because each family survived only as long as its head. Athenian government was unstable for the same reason. Leaders were replaced virtually every year as new ones were selected by lot. The ideal was to keep government in the hands of amateurs and out of the hands of professional administrators. Government agencies would thus be more responsive to citizen demands. The lot could fall on any citizen, who, having served as commissioner of grains for one year, for example, was not subject to reelection to the same position.
Marriage was endogamous, within a close circle of relatives, in order to preserve family property from fragmentation. The Athenian family clearly served as a means of protecting and enclosing women.24 Women were citizens, with certain cults reserved to them and not available to foreign women, but women were citizens only for the purpose of marriage and procreation. Otherwise they lacked all independent status.
They could not enter into any transaction worth more than one medimnos (54 liters) of barley, and they could not own any pr operty with the exception of their clothes, jewelry, and personal slaves. At all times they had to be under the protection of a kyrios, or guardian. If they were unmarried, the kyrios was their father or closest male relative; if married it was the husband; if widowed it was a son or other male relative by marriage or birth.
DK834X_book.fm Page 15 Tuesday, September 20, 2005 8:11 AM