Kinch Hoekstra on ancient Greek concepts for democracy as tyranny
Polis with Personality: In 5th century Greece dēmos is the tyrant, the ‘uncontrolled controller’ ...
Kinch Hoekstra wrote:
Chapter 1
Athenian democracy and popular tyranny
An account of popular sovereignty that begins with the fifth century BCE may seem to be off to a false start. Foundational works in the history of political thought have taught us that the very notion of sovereignty, and thus of popular sovereignty, emerged from the particular historical circumstances of the early modern era. One might thus believe that fifth-century Greeks could not be discussing popular sovereignty some two thousand years before this concept's emergence. Leading ancient historians and classicists have adopted this view, deeming ‘sovereignty’ a misleadingly anachronistic way of thinking about Athenian democracy in the classical period. [MGH: see ‘context’ footnote at END]
For the concept of sovereignty seems embedded in a later historical context, in which the dominant political unit is the state, the paradigmatic religion is Christian monotheism, and the term emerged – to simplify – from an attempt to articulate and reinforce the supreme authority of the monarch, and was then transferred to the people who depose him. The logic of sovereignty as initially formulated applies to a unitary, supreme and absolute political authority that has been thought to be alien to Athenian conceptions. This view has been reinforced by recent scholars who have aspired to reject or moderate a simplistic understanding of Athens as a direct democracy and bring it closer to a more palatable constitutionalist system replete with constraints on all political power. …
… [There] is an ancient Greek concept that meaningfully resembles and historically influences the early modern idea of sovereignty: tyranny. Given the Athenians’ opposition to tyranny and their use of it as the antithesis of their democracy, we might think that we have hereby found … why it is impossible to locate a conception of popular sovereignty in fifth-century Athens. However paradoxical it may seem to us, there is nonetheless ample evidence that the Athenians frequently thought of their democracy in terms of tyranny, not only identifying Athens as a polis turannos , but also characterising the power of the Athenian people as anupeuthunos , and even referring to the authority of the dēmos as tyrannical and despotic. Advocates of Athenian democracy, like the early modern writers on sovereignty … arrestingly illustrate just how much power is required when they insist that it is tantamount to that of a tyrant …
[The] dēmos or people was understood by fifth-century democrats as properly holding tyrannical authority. …
… I believe that there is evidence that a strong version of ‘the control thesis’, according to which the people had power by exercising a significant measure of control over government officials, was already developed in the fifth century; and also that it was seen by democrats (though not by Aristotle) to be necessarily paired with what I would call ‘the out of control thesis’. On the democratic view, it is a prerequisite of the people's control of the powerful that the powerful not be in control of the people. Or, to put it differently, neither to be in control nor to be uncontrolled is by itself sufficient for sovereignty, but they are jointly sufficient. This also indicates an analytic advantage of the dramatic comparison of sovereign with turannos , rather than with kurios, the Greek word most commonly referred to when translators write ‘sovereign’.
The one who is kurios is in control of people or things, but the Greek term does not imply that no one is in turn in control of him; rather, the reference is generally to an authority whose status is guaranteed and limited by a higher legal and political authority.
[FOOTNOTE] For example, a male Athenian citizen was the kurios of his wife and minor children; but this certainly did not mean that he had full discretionary powers to do to them as he wished. The legal authority of the polis prohibited a wide range of actions towards such wards (who were not slaves, douloi ), and indeed imposed obligations for their care. As they both can signify ‘master’, sometimes kurios is used as a synonym for despot ē s , but the latter ultimately has substantially greater discretionary power.
One may be kurios of some people or in some respect and still be under another's control; so too there can be multiple kurioi (e.g. with specific authority over distinct functions, or over distinct sub-groups) within a given domain. By contrast, the sovereign, like the tyrant, is supreme. …
… A locus classicus of how tyranny is characterised and contrasted with democracy is the ‘constitutional debate’ in Herodotus, which has sometimes been seen as establishing or reflecting a paradigm of fifth-century political thought. In this debate about whether rule by one, few or many is best, Otanes assimilates monarchy to tyranny, and describes it as rule that ‘is unaccountable [aneuthunos] and can do what it wishes’. This is contrasted with rule by the many, wherein every magistrate is hupeuthunos , subject to account. Aneuthunos here (like anupeuthunos , the generally later form of the word) means ‘unaccountable’, and so even ‘irresponsible’: the meaning can be narrower (not being liable to the judicial examination of a magistrate's performance and finances upon demitting office) or more extended (having impunity).
In the Athenian democracy all officials, most of whom were chosen by lot from the citizen body, were subject to audit or euthunai ; in principle, no one was powerful enough to escape this check and review. The administrative associations of the word hupeuthunos, accountable, were above all with the Athenian democracy, whereas the tyrant was the one who was unaccountable. The opposition between rule by tyrant and rule by dēmos is frequently drawn; so Alcibiades in Thucydides, to take just one example, says that ‘what is contrary to a tyrant is called the people’. Aristotle later appears to confirm the nature of an established dichotomy when, in concluding his taxonomy of the different kinds of constitutions or regimes, his first characterisation of ‘tyranny in the highest degree’ is that ‘the monarch rules in an unaccountable fashion [ anupeuthunos ]’. …
… Sovereignty is necessarily supreme, unaccountable and above human law. The Athenians were familiar with the conjunction of these criteria, but… [paradoxically] they defined their democracy … as if the tyrant could serve as the proper measure of a free state . Thus, even if we locate an important classical element in early modern theories of sovereignty, we might doubt that anything like the idea of popular sovereignty was present in Athenian political thought. …
… It is true that in Athens the tyrannicides were lionised, distinctive practices such as ostracism were thought of as warding off the evil of tyranny, and encroachments on the democracy were denounced as tyrannical. But tyranny had an ambivalent legacy. Early denunciations of tyranny or monarchy were generally articulated by or for conservative aristocrats, and a monarch could correspondingly be seen as a euthunos of hubris , one who could overpower these elites and make straight and restore justice to the city suffering from the crooked ways of its leaders. The tyrant is certainly sometimes set up as a foil in the fifth century, yet the selection and construction of such a foil can reveal much about that to which it is contrasted.
And although the democracy set up tyranny as an antithesis, we should not assume that this means that the tyrant's unity, supremacy and ultimate discretionary power imply democratic repudiations of these characteristics. Indeed, there is considerable evidence that these features of the tyrant were seen to be basic features of the ruling dēmos.
Thucydides provides a good starting point. Addressing the assembly in 427 BCE, Diodotus complains in familiar terms about the irresponsible authority of the dēmos . He chafes at the constraints placed on the leaders in the Athenian democracy, and suggests that the deciding dēmos should be likewise reined in by being held responsible for their decisions:
We who offer recommendations are held to account [hupeuthunon] while you who hearken are unaccountable [aneuthunon]. If those who gave advice and those who followed it were similarly held in check, you would make more moderate decisions. But as it is, in the anger of the moment, when things go wrong you punish the single judgement of your adviser and not the many judgements of your own that were involved in the shared error.
Although the members of the dēmos in the Athenian assembly would not have taken seriously Diodotus’ suggestion that they should be liable to constraint and punishment (which is thus best read as a way of exhorting the assemblymen to correct their own error), there is no reason to think that they would have questioned or disliked his characterisation of them as aneuthunos [unaccountable]. The Athenians’ own account of the rise of democracy in response to tyranny has been plausibly interpreted as an account of the seizure by the dēmos of the supremacy and total arbitrary power that the dēmos was seen to have replaced, rather than as a repudiation of such supremacy and authority. That the power is in this sense tyrannical does not mean that it could not be understood as democratic: what Otanes had singled out as the democratic characteristic that officials be hupeuthunos is presented by Diodotus as part of the same Athenian system that makes the dēmos, like the tyrant, aneuthunos.
The basic tenet here is that the dēmos is the uncontrolled controller: from Diodotus’ objection to it, we can glean the Athenian democratic principle that it is essential to the authority of the dēmos both that it holds all other powers to account and that it is itself unaccountable.
It may be objected, following Otanes (Herodotus 3.80), that if it is the people who seize sovereignty, then that is enough to change the character of sovereignty essentially. The tyrant is singular, and that is much of the problem, whereas the people is necessarily multiple and diverse, and so in taking over supreme power no longer holds it in a single locus.
It is striking, however, how ready Athenian writers were to treat the dēmos as singular, willing as they were to attribute characteristics of an individual or personality to a polis, or to personify the people as a whole.
The Athenians were quick to identify dēmos and polis, and in some ways of course it is easier to understand how we might consider a whole people, rather than one individual like a monarch, as a sovereign equivalent of the state. In Greek it is especially easy to see, given that in political contexts what we refer to as Athens was commonly referred to as hoi Athēnaioi: the Athenians. This was apparently tied to the ultimate power of decision in classical Athens being in the hands of the citizen body as a whole. For example, when Thucydides writes of actions and decisions, he overwhelmingly chooses to characterise those done or made by Athens as undertaken by ‘the Athenians’, for that captures the responsible agent; but when he talks about Persians or Macedonians, they are not the subject but the object of action (or description), whereas the subject of action is generally the autocrat who ruled them.
It is also worth noting that the Athenians were more prone than most moderns to understand ‘the people’ as a unified entity, and were much more inclined to identify the people with the polity itself. Understanding ‘the people’ as singular is facilitated by the language: ho dēmos is masculine singular, so while the Greeks would have regarded the referent as a collective, they were simultaneously primed to think of the people as having the unity and other characteristics of a man. The ready identification of the Athenian people with their polity can be seen in the language of surviving treaties that refer to the entity making the inter-state agreement as ho dēmos ho Athēnaiōn, the people of the Athenians. …
… Many Greek writers were ready to characterise poleis and their peoples as bearing the traits of individuals, including their passions, attitudes and capacity or incapacity for prudential calculation.
Although we may particularly identify the move of talking about poleis as if they were people with Plato in the Republic, Thucydides and other earlier writers provide many examples. In some of these cases the polis is cast as a tyrant, a figure who in normal language is always a single person. So the Corinthian envoys in Book I of Thucydides, mobilising a striking contrast with Athenian democratic valorisations of liberty and equality, say that ‘a tyrant polis set up in Greece is set up alike over all and rules over some already and the rest in intention’, and thus recommend action: ‘Let us attack it and bring it to terms, and let us henceforth live our own lives in safety and set free those Greeks who are already enslaved’. The Corinthians put themselves in the role of resisting a tyrant who is enslaving Greece as a master, where that tyrant and master is the Athenians. The Athenians here are treated as an individual: the Athenians are the polis, and the polis, however democratic, is a tyrant. …
… The emphasis here is on the rule of the Athenians over other poleis, but it is worth bringing out two points. First, if the Athenians were ready to understand themselves as holding a tyranny over others, then, because of the identification of the polis and the dēmos in Athens, the dēmos could see itself as a tyrant. Second, and relatedly, the vocabulary of tyranny here is not simply negative. …
… The Athenian dēmos could conceive of itself as a tyrant over other poleis, so it was not a far step to see itself as a tyrant within the polis, where the dēmos held ultimate power; and this tyrannical control was associated with control of those who aspired to lead or control the dēmos itself. …
… The unaccountability of the dēmos may promise the people freedom and other benefits, but it also opens up the possibility that they will take on characteristics for which the monarchical tyrant was notorious, including greed, cruelty and arrogance. The democratic challenge … was for the dēmos to avoid these self-destructive excesses through self control rather than through allowing itself to be controlled. Although unaccountable supremacy could lead to tragic reversal, to weaken the unaccountability of assemblymen and jurors is to compromise democratic control, to render the polis vulnerable to … takeover by anti-democratic forces.
Some interpreters have understood the use of mechanisms of accountability or what we might call constitutional checks to be the form of that self-control, but this is not warranted by the fifth-century sources.
Such mechanisms as euthunai were aimed at individuals, not at the people as such: the dēmos was the source rather than the object of review. Although they were drawn from the body of the people by lot or election, the magistrates were always the object of strict control as potential usurpers of the people's ultimate authority. Some scholars have thus identified an elemental Athenian distinction between sovereignty, which inhered in the dēmos as a whole, and government, which was undertaken by officials accountable to the sovereign dēmos. …
… In the late fifth century, eunomia , good order according to law, is an anti-democratic watchword. Critics of democracy praise the constitutional constraints of aristocracy or oligarchy according to law, and lament Athenian democratic lawlessness. As the Old Oligarch observes, however, the people understand that if the constraints of law are applied to them, then they no longer have supreme authority: to be in control, they must be uncontrolled. We can see vociferous insistence on this tenet in Xenophon's report of a notorious meeting of the assembly in 406 BCE for the collective trial of the generals who were at the naval battle of Arginusae. When Euryptolemus tries to block the proceeding on the grounds that it is paranomos or against the law, which would have suspended the assembly and the trial until its legality was approved, ‘the majority shouted that it would be outrageous if someone were to prevent the dēmos from doing whatever it wished’. This episode has frequently been seen to illustrate the descent of direct democracy into (or its ultimate identity with) mob rule. But it can instead be read as a potent expression of the democratic conviction that the dēmos must be able to direct and judge even the most powerful officials as it wishes, while not being itself hemmed in by laws or officials . …
… The Athenians did have a word – fraught, double-edged – for unitary, supreme, unaccountable political power: tyranny. If the dēmos was to be able to look after its own interests, it had to be unlimited and unaccountable, and thwart the rise of leaders who would diminish its authority. The materials of sovereignty not being available under that name, the people put on the robes of the tyrant.
[END]
[Context FOOTNOTE for whole chapter, first page/paragraph]
A point of agreement in the long-running argument between Mogens Herman Hansen and Josiah Ober is that referring to sovereignty in classical Athens is an anachronism. So: ‘Historians who speak of the sovereign ekklesia [assembly] avail themselves of a constitutional concept developed in sixteenth-century Europe to support monarchy. The correct statement: The ekklesia was the most important body of government is transformed into the erroneous and anachronistic statement: The ekklesia was sovereign ’ ( M. H. Hansen , The Athenian Assembly in the Age of Demosthenes ( Oxford : Blackwell , 1987 ), p. 105 ) . And: ‘The concept of sovereignty was developed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries by Western European political theorists writing on the institution of monarchy. Monarchical power is by definition unitary, since it is located in the person of the monarch…these theorists conceived of sovereignty, properly so called, as unitary state power that resided, preferably, either in the person of the monarch or in a representative assembly. The traditional theory of sovereignty does not encompass the idea that legitimate power could reside with an abstraction such as “the People”; consequently it is of very limited utility in explaining democracy’ ( J. Ober , The Athenian Revolution: Essays on Ancient Greek Democracy and Political Theory ( Princeton : Princeton University Press , 1996 ), pp. 120–1 ; cf. p. 30). Ryan K. Balot reflects a recent consensus when he censures ‘scholars [who] have anachronistically imported the modern language of sovereignty ’ (in R. K. Balot (ed.), A Companion to Greek and Roman Political Thought ( Oxford : Blackwell , 2009 ), p. 6 ); see also A. W. Saxonhouse , Athenian Democracy: Modern Mythmakers and Ancient Theorists ( Notre Dame : University of Notre Dame Press , 1996 ), esp. pp. 4–7.
My disagreement with Hansen and Ober here ultimately has more to do with their reading of early modern than ancient theory. Moreover, despite their reservations, and despite those who have appealed to their authority in labelling any such claims anachronistic, both have made clear claims for the sovereignty of the dēmos understood as the entire body of Athenian citizens: M. H. Hansen, Athenian Assembly , pp. 97, 106 (and see M. H. Hansen , Polis and City-State: An Ancient Concept and its Modern Equivalent ( Copenhagen : Munksgaard , 1998 )) ; Ober, Athenian Revolution , pp. 119, 121 (and see J. Ober , Mass and Elite in Democratic Athens: Rhetoric, Ideology, and the Power of the People ( Princeton : Princeton University Press , 1989 ), esp. pp. 299 – 304 ). Hansen now rejects ‘sovereignty’ in favour of ‘ κύριος πάντων ’ (M. H. Hansen, ‘ The Concepts of Demos , Ekklesia , and Dikasterion in Classical Athens’, Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies 50 ( 2010 ), pp. 499 – 536 , esp. p. 500 n. 5) …
The Source:
Kinch Hoekstra, ‘Athenian Democracy and Popular Tyranny’ in Popular Sovereignty in Historical Perspective, edited by Richard Bourke and Quentin Skinner, Cambridge University Press 2016
Evolutions of social order from the earliest humans to the present day and future machine age.