Hansen, Athenian Democracy [Part 6]
The public-private dichotomy, as conceived by 4th century Athenians..
In his book The Athenian Democracy in the Age of Demosthenes: Structure, Principles and Ideology, published in 1991, Mogens Herman Hansen wrote:
Chapter 4 [continued]
Public and private
Like modern liberty, ancient democratic eleutheria [liberty/freedom] had two sides: it was both freedom to participate in political life and freedom from political oppression. As has often been noted, these two aspects of liberty are mutually exclusive, for ‘to rule in turn’ implies being sometimes ruled, so that if we maximize the principle of ‘not being ruled’ there is no room left for political decision-making in which to participate.
The two opposed aspects of freedom are, however, compatible, but only if combined with a distinction between a public sphere, in which political freedom operates, and a private sphere, in which personal freedom is protected against interference by the state as well as by other people.
The separation between a public and a private sphere is well known in the modern world, where it is a basic condition of democratic liberty; but did the Athenians recognize a private sphere in which the polis did not interfere but allowed the citizens to live as they pleased? There are, indeed, historians who urge that in principle the Greek city-state was all-embracing … and we must return to the theme now from a different standpoint.
Athenian sources debating about society regularly contrast the public and the private: what is idion [private] is set off against what is demosion or koinon [public].
The dichotomy of public and private is apparent in all aspects of life. The private person (idiotes) is opposed to the politically active citizen (ho politeuomenos); citizens’ homes to public buildings; the national interest to private profit; public finance to private means; private litigation to administration of justice in public actions.
Forensic Speeches are full of arguments such as ‘this dispute is a private matter and not to be brought before the jurors by a public prosecution which concerns the polis’. Or, conversely, as Demosthenes declares in Against Meidias, [quote] “Meidias’ assault on me is a public matter, since it was made on Demosthenes as representative of the polis, not on the person Demosthenes” [end quote].
Finally, the laws of the city are often subdivided into private (regulating the relations of private persons) and public (concerning the activities of government agencies).
Thus, the Athenians did distinguish a public sphere from a private sphere; but a note of warning is in order: the Athenian distinction is between the private (to idion) and the public (to koinon or demosion), which is not quite the same as our opposition between the individual and the State.
First, in many modern discussions, of democratic freedom for instance, the contrast individual/state is itself somewhat twisted: the opposite of individual freedom is not state authority but public control.
Next, in the Greek sources, the public sphere is most identified with the polis, whereas the private sphere is sometimes a social sphere without any emphasis on the individual: family life, business, industry and many types of religious association belonged in the private and not in the public sphere.
The Athenians distinguished between the individual as a private person and the individual as a citizen rather than between the individual and the state. Thus, instead of individual freedom, it is preferable to speak about personal or private freedom, which was often individual in character, but not invariably so.
The point was made earlier that the public sphere (i.e. the polis sphere) was specifically a political sphere: the polis did not regulate all matters but only a limited range of social activities, and matters such as education, industry, agriculture and trade were left to private enterprise. But, further, Athenians were regularly allowed to think and say what they liked about anything, as long as they did not, for example, profane the Mysteries, or, without due permission, form new cults and religious societies.
That is not denied by those historians who emphasize the omnipotence of the polis, but they counter it by another observation: if the Athenians in their Assembly decided to interfere with education, production, or whatever, they were entitled to do so, and no one could plead that it was a violation of individual rights.
Similarly, the people could at any time impose restrictions on freedom of speech, and sometimes did.
So [quote] “there were no theoretical limits to the power of the state, no activity, no sphere of human behaviour, in which the state could not legitimately intervene” [quoting Finley (1973)].
But that correct observation ought not to be invoked to establish a difference between ancient and modern democratic ideology, because precisely the same observation applies, for example, to modern Britain: no aspect of human life is in principle outside the powers of Parliament and there is no constitutional protection of individual rights, though in practice they are highly regarded and mostly respected.
Not only was the public sphere a political sphere; the majority of the inhabitants of Attica were excluded from it, for the Greek polis was a community of citizens only. Metics and slaves lived in the polis without being members of it. Freedom to participate in the democratic institutions applied only to citizens and only in the political sphere. Private freedom, however, to live as one pleased, applied to all who lived in Athens, including metics and sometimes slaves. According to the critics of democracy that kind of freedom was extended even to women, but that shocking charge was, of course, denied by the champions of the Athenian constitution.
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Mogens Herman Hansen, The Athenian Democracy in the Age of Demosthenes: Structure, Principles and Ideology, translated by J. A. Crook, Blackwell Publishers 1991
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