Mixed Constitutions vs. Mixed Economies (or, Ancient and Modern Liberalisms)

(Attention conservation notice: Inspired by a student’s comment a while back, this has languished in my drafts folder. Contains speculative intellectual history, implausible connections between ancient and modern concepts, and self-promotion; nevertheless, I thought it would be worth trying out the argument)

The ancient Greco-Roman idea of the “mixed constitution” is usually taken to be the ancestor of modern (post 18^th-century) constitutional ideas about “checks and balances” and the “division of powers.” This is fine as far as it goes; the early modern writers who first proposed and defended these latter ideas in a systematic way – people like Harrington, Locke, and  Montesquieu, for example – seem to have been influenced to some degree by Greek and Roman theories of the mixed constitution. They used these ideas as one of the lenses through which they interpreted British constitutional practice of the 17^th and 18^th centuries; and there is certainly a sort of family resemblance between the ancient idea about the need for “mixture” in a constitution and the modern idea that a constitution should implement some checks on state power through the functional division of authority among different “branches” of the government.

However, as many people have noted, ancient ideas about the mixed constitution are in many ways quite different from modern ideas about the need for a functional division of authority to prevent abuses of state power. Even the guiding metaphors are different: “mixture” and “separation” denote contrary ideas. But perhaps more importantly, it strikes me that ideas about the mixed constitution played a role in ancient Greco-Roman political discourse that is very different from the role that ideas about “checks and balances” came to play in modern political discourse, and that is in fact surprisingly similar to the role ideas about the “mixed economy” – an economy that incorporates both market mechanisms and government intervention – play in contemporary political thought. I don’t mean this as a claim about intellectual history: ideas about the “mixed economy” today clearly owe nothing to ancient ideas about the mixed constitution. I mean it as a claim about the conceptual place of ideas within particular discourses or debates. Let me try to explain.

As I argue in much pedantic detail in a piece I published last year somewhat misleadingly entitled “Cicero and the Stability of States” (History of Political Thought 32(3): 397-423 [gated, ungated] – the first half is a survey of ideas about the mixed constitution in Plato, Aristotle, and Polybius), ancient ideas about the mixed constitution have two strands.

On the one hand, there is a concern with domination by powerful people and groups. Here the idea of the mixed constitution serves as a model of the “constraints” that should be imposed on the powerful to prevent tyranny, and in this sense it plays a very similar role to ideas of “checks and balances.” However, whereas modern discussions about the separation of powers tend to emphasize the need for a functional division of the tasks of government (into legislative, executive, and judicial activities, for example) to prevent abuses of state power, ancient discussions of the mixed constitution tend instead to emphasize a social division of power among significant social groups to prevent its monopolization (a group “becoming” the state, so to speak). The “simple” or “unmixed” regimes are precisely those regimes where one social group – the rich, the poor, military leaders – monopolizes power (for good or ill; the unmixed regimes are not always considered bad, but they are always considered fragile for a variety of reasons); by contrast, the “mixed” regimes are precisely those where power is “shared,” or, metaphorically, these are the regimes which "mix" the monopolistic regimes so that no social group has uncontested dominance over the others.

To put the point very roughly, I suspect the modern emphasis on separating power goes hand in hand with an emerging consciousness of “the state” as a distinct unified institutional actor that can develop interests that are independent of those of other significant social groups (including dominant groups), and hence is concerned with the institutional mechanisms that can limit its ability to act in dominating ways; ancient political thought, by contrast, has no such consciousness of a “state” as distinct from the social groups that exercise political power (most Ancient Greco-Roman societies had nothing like a state in the Weberian sense of the word anyway), and hence is more concerned with the compromises that various groups need to make to share power stably in ways that are beneficial to all. This is only an imprecise sketch of a complex history, of course. After all, early modern liberal political thought was often also concerned with the problems posed by the domination of one social group over another; 19^th century debates about suffrage are full of fears about what would happen if the poor were allowed to directly elect representatives and hence dominate the state, for example. And 17^th and 18^th century notions of “estate representation” do fit in quite naturally with ancient ideas about mixed constitutions.  Yet I am tempted to speculate in a vaguely Marxist way that ancient Greco-Roman political thought was more attuned to the permanent class conflicts of agrarian societies than early modern liberal thought, perhaps because the latter in part grew out of reflections on the management of confessional or sectarian conflicts in which the state was never merely a class agent, unlike the former.

At any rate, this concern with “sharing” power among significant social groups leads to a second strand of thought about political “mixture.” Here the idea of the mixed constitution serves as a model of the compromises that are possible and necessary between groups whose conceptions of justice – their conceptions of the appropriate distribution of the “benefits and burdens” in the community, their ideas about the appropriate level of hierarchy and equality in the organization of society, and so on – differ systematically according to their positions in society. For example, both Plato and Aristotle (and to a lesser degree other extant writers) suggest that the poor and the rich develop conceptions of justice that have a certain “bias” towards their own structural position: while the poor or the people tend to develop a conception of justice that emphasizes their equality as citizens, and hence the need for an equal distribution of power and authority in the community (expressed most radically in the lotteries of Athens), the rich or the elite tend to develop a conception of justice that emphasizes their inequality – their distinctiveness – and hence the need for an unequal distribution of power and authority (expressed in the demand for closed oligarchies and in justifications that claim the right to rule for those who contribute the most to the community, or those who are wisest, or have the most military virtue). Conflict between major social groups is not simply a clash of naked self-interest (at least not always), but rather appears as a contest between rival moralized conceptions of hierarchy, equality, and fair distribution.

For these Greek (and later Roman) writers, the key theoretical problem thus turns out to be how to bridge these divergent conceptions of justice for the sake of political stability while also promoting as far as possible various other important goods – freedom, independence, the effectiveness of the community as a fighting force, social solidarity, prudent decisionmaking, etc. How can political power be shared so that these contrasting conceptions of justice can all find some place in the community without monopolizing the whole, while maintaining a viable, even flourishing society in other respects? 

This problem is complicated both by material factors (extreme inequality makes it difficult to bridge the conceptions of justice of significant social groups, in the view of most of the extant Greek writers who talk about this problem) and by the fact that these group-relative conceptions of justice, however faulty, cannot be fully “educated away.” That is, whatever the truth of the matter about justice is (and Greek and Roman thinkers thought this was an answerable question) it is simply not possible to consistently convince people in structurally different positions that their conceptions of justice are incorrect. (At best, education can soften the edges of those differing conceptions of justice, but not transform them consistently). The “mixed constitution” is then an attempt to describe how one might give all these different conceptions of justice – or different ideas about what is valuable, or what gives people title to rule – some place within the polity despite the fact that they are partially incorrect (because one-sided) and hence in some ways damaging to the community, and despite the fact that they cannot be "corrected," while not wholly sacrificing other important values. In Plato, for example, the test of a well-organized mixed constitution is that it balances the characteristic values associated with “democracy” (where the poor or the many are dominant) and “monarchy” (a synecdoche for all regimes where small elites are dominant) so as to promote philia (social solidarity), eleutheria (freedom and political independence) and phronesis (prudent decisionmaking). Let me quote myself:

The Athenian Stranger [the main speaker in Plato’s Laws] suggests that a constitution can achieve these three objectives by “mixing” in the right proportion the values traditionally associated with monarchy, especially Persia, and the values traditionally associated with democracy, especially Athens (693d). “Monarchical” values emphasize subordination and status hierarchies, and thus enhance the coordination of action necessary to effective military power, i.e., the kind of power that ensures eleutheria as political independence (694a). But if they are over-emphasized, they disrupt both the solidarity and affection (philia) between rulers and ruled and the ability of information and insight to flow to the rulers (phronesis; 694a-b), increasing the city’s vulnerability to external forces and diminishing the ability of rulers to actually rule for the common good (697d-698a). By contrast, “democratic” values emphasize personal autonomy and equality, and thus enhance the solidarity and affection between rulers and ruled as well as the flow of information throughout the city, which makes the city able to defend itself intelligently at least so long as it can coordinate its actions through its laws and rulers even against vastly superior forces (cf. 698b-699d). But if they are over-emphasized, the city loses both its ability to recognize and defer to actual expertise (and hence loses intelligence; cf. 701a) and the ability to coordinate properly that submission to laws and rulers provide. It thus disintegrates into “every man for himself” (cf. 699c-d), again making it vulnerable to external forces.

Properly constructed institutions will ensure that the citizens will be properly submissive to the laws and the rulers (indeed, that they will “fear” and “revere” the laws and the rulers, cf. 698b), but will also grant enough personal autonomy and ensure enough status equality to ensure that phronesis flows through the city and rulers and ruled share enough affection for each other. Such a constitution will “weave together” the “mother constitutions” of monarchy and democracy (693d) in the sense that it will induce a measured combination of their characteristic values capable of simultaneously ensuring solidarity and affection between rulers and ruled, intelligence in the actions of the city, and the preservation of its political independence. (moi, pp. 403-404)

Though “liberalism” as such did not exist in the Ancient Greco-Roman world, the idea of the mixed constitution thus seems to me to be designed to deal with problems similar to those that have motivated much modern liberal thought: how to deal with intractable conflicts of value (about justice, in this case) when no significant social group can be assumed to have a monopoly on the truth (the philosopher does not count as a social group, even if she does have the truth about justice) in a relatively peaceful way. But ancient mixed constitution thinking (at least the mostly Greek variant of it before Cicero that has come down to us), unlike classical liberalism, tended to see these problems in the context of deep-seated, ineradicable distributional conflicts; and as such, it seems to me, it played a role in political thought similar to the role the idea of a “mixed economy” plays today.

Modern economic debates about the role of the state in the economy are obviously never merely technical debates; they usually invoke, either implicitly or explicitly, different conceptions of justice and fairness, and different answers to the question about the kinds of power that partisans of these conceptions of justice and fairness ought to have in society. (Consider: "taxation is theft" vs. "you didn't build that"). They are debates about what is the right distribution of burdens and benefits in society, and draw on deep-seated intuitions about desert, property, and the like that appear to vary among distinct social groups. The idea of a mixed economy then serves as a model – varying in detail depending on its particular proponent, of course – of the appropriate distribution of social power among partisans of different conceptions of distributive justice, including both a description of the kinds of constraints that should be imposed on powerful social groups (e.g., how democratic states should constrain markets and vice-versa) and a description of the kinds of compromises that partisans of particular ideas of fairness or justice must make while still promoting efficiency (the modern equivalent of the Platonic “prudent decisionmaking” or phronesis), common identity (the modern equivalent of the Platonic philia), and personal autonomy (the modern equivalent of eleutheria).

Proponents of a mixed economy of course disagree about the specific institutions of that would instantiate it properly, just as Plato, Aristotle, Polybius, and Cicero had different views about proper mixture in a constitution. My point is more about how the abstract model of the mixed economy seems to serve as a reference point for attempting to find pragmatic compromises among social groups with ineradicably different views concerning distributive justice and enduring, if unbalanced, forms of social power (numbers vs. economic power, for example) even if we think that some of these views are correct (or more correct than others). We might say that like the mixed constitution in antiquity, the mixed economy today serves as a standard description of the second best.

Update 7 August: fixed some oddities of grammar and missing words.

Hills and Valleys in Greek Speculative History (Or, Prolegomena to a Sketch of an Anarchist History of Western Political Theory)

(Warning: 2000 words or so on the place of “hills” and “valleys” in Greek political thought).

As I mentioned in a previous post, reading Scott’s The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia pointed me in the direction of thinking about the place of “hills” and “valleys,” state spaces and stateless places, in political theory. Scott claims that both Southeast Asian and Western political thought have stigmatized those hill-dwellers who have no permanent residence (p. 101), and identified civilization with the settled states of the valleys (pp. 100-101), though he also pays homage to Ibn Khaldoun’s Muqaddimah (p. 20), a work which does not stigmatize the stateless (at least so far as I remember; it’s been a while). He even notes that Aristotle famously argued that human beings were political animals, i.e., animals that live in poleis or cities, a characterization that suggests that people who do not live in cities are not fully human (p. 101 – though Scott fails to note that for Aristotle such people can be both above and below the level of humanity). I cannot speak about Southeast Asian political theory, but it seems to me that at least with respect to Western political theory the picture is a bit more complicated, even if Scott is correct overall.

For example, Aristotle’s famous pronouncement about the polis-nature of human beings is complicated by the fact that the polis was most certainly not an agrarian state – the “statelessness” of the polis is well known, though some of the larger poleis did eventually develop something like police forces and other aspects of statehood – and that Aristotle did not define the polis in contrast to nomadic life and in terms of settled habitation, but in contrast to the family and in terms of its purpose. Indeed, he takes pains to distinguish the polis both from the great empires of his time (which were true extractive agrarian states of the sort that Scott discusses in his book) and from mere settlements (whose focus on “mere life” did not qualify them for civilization). The barbarian empires were “uncivilized” despite their possession of large and powerful states, and the city-less are low less because they are scattered than because they have no “clan” and are “lovers of war,” i.e., because they are insufficiently social.

Thus, though Aristotle does seem to indicate that nomadic peoples are “primitive” (the Cyclops, who are traditionally represented as a nonsedentary people, appear as an instance of the “old ways” of political organization), there is no clear indication that sedentary existence per se is necessary to the polis, or that it is in itself valuable. In this Aristotle is in keeping with what I take to be the traditional Greek way of thinking, where not the physical location but the citizens constituted the city: “For the men, not the walls nor the empty galleys, are the city,” and so “Wherever you settle, you will be a polis” as Nikias tells his soldiers in a speech Thucydides either invented or recreated for his History of the Peloponnesian War. To be sure, this is still consistent with the story that Scott tells about the importance of men, rather than land, in the construction of states; but it ought to put a wrinkle in the “stigma” thesis.

But it is in Plato that we find an explicit consideration of the valence of “hills and valleys” in the sense that Scott is really concerned with. In book III of his long dialogue Laws, Plato develops the contrast between the hills and the valleys through a speculative history which he uses to isolate those factors that gave rise to politeiai (political organization) and laws, both of which are associated with the cities of the plain and the states they controlled. (Ancient speculative histories are fascinating. I suspect they functioned among ancient thinkers much as economists’ or political scientists’ models function today: as interesting simplifications with some explanatory value that isolate general reasons for action operating in particular contexts.).

The narrative is more or less as follows. The Athenian Stranger (the leading character in the dialogue) asks his interlocutors to imagine a situation where, thanks to some massive flood, the states of the plains were destroyed, leaving only a slight remnant of pastoralists high up in the hills (677a-b). This catastrophe not only radically simplified technology (most arts and sciences are lost), but also greatly reduced exposure to the various forms of greed and morally dubious competition prevalent in cities (677b-c). In fact, the catastrophe destroyed the memory of cities and politeiai and laws: the hill peoples are clearly stateless in a radical sense (678a). But laws and political life are not necessarily good; the Athenian stresses that with laws and political life properly speaking you can get both virtue and vice (and more often the latter than the former, especially in the form of warfare). By contrast, the hill peoples are naïve or artless (εὐήθεις; literally having “good habits”), not educated (or mis-educated) by urban artifice, and rather peaceful.

Indeed, war is presented in the story as an artefact of civilization (678d-e); so long as land is abundant, and the memory of catastrophe is recent (the “fear of the plain”), the hill peoples do not fight (and at any rate they do not have much of the technology and arts of war, so their fighting is not, the Athenian speculates, highly destructive). On the contrary, they welcome each other (679a) and have pleasure in each other’s company (given low population densities, they do not meet each other that often), and because their societies are less unequal than urban societies (with less of both poverty and wealth, as well as less hierarchy and subordination), they develop in an environment that ultimately makes them more courageous, moderate and just than urban peoples (679d-e). It’s an idyllic picture (and not a terribly bad description of forager/pastoralist societies in the absence of states, either, though idealized in some respects). How do laws emerge, then? What are they for?

The first step towards law and political life is made possible, in this speculative story, by the very naïveté or artlessness of the hill peoples. Because they did not have the cunning and scepticism of urban peoples (who are experienced about deception, both as agents and subjects of it), they believed any old story that they were told about “gods and men” (679c), and adopted these stories as the basis of their customs. (Note the dig here towards all mythical stories of founding and legitimation; most of these stories are simply nonsense, in the Athenian’s view). These customs were not yet laws; their orality disqualified them from this status. (The hill peoples are illiterate, 680a). But they did not need to be laws in order to regulate their social life, which was still quite self-contained.

Their self-containment could be interpreted as a form of “savagery” (680b-d), or perhaps more accurately a lack of “domestication,” as the Athenian notes by comparing such hill peoples to the mythical Cyclops described in Homer. Yet he does not himself endorse the comparison, which seems at any rate inconsistent with his previous praise of the justice and moderation of the hill peoples; the one who proposes it is Megillos, the representative of the slave-holding valley state par excellence, Sparta (680d3), which was also known for its "savagery" (cf. 666e, where the Athenian calls the Spartan system "savage"). To be civilized, for Megillos, is to become domesticated; but the metaphor of domestication is not altogether unambiguous in Plato (sheep and pigs are also domesticated, after all).

But this self-containment cannot last. As the memory of the initial cataclysm fades (perhaps an echo of a collective memory of an old fear of the cities of the plain? Fears of slave-raiding, for example, as Scott suggests in his discussion of the stories of hill peoples from Thailand and Burma? Not that Plato mentions such fears), hill peoples move down, and some turn to farming and a sedentary life (681a), coming in contact with other recent transplants from the hills. But now they need to coordinate regarding which of their various and incompatible customs (based on the random stories mentioned earlier) is to regulate their common life; and here we have the origins of legislation properly speaking (681b-d).

From here the Athenian shifts from speculating about the origin of valley states to recounting the history of the first Greek valley states, in particular the Dorian states (Sparta, Argos, and Messene), a history that would have been familiar to his two interlocutors (the Spartan Megillos and the Cretan Kleinias). This narrative is then put to use in order to understand why in some states (Sparta) the rulers were more constrained by laws than in others (Argos and Messene), despite their various similarities. This is perhaps the first systematic empirical comparison in political science, using a “most similar cases” design, but the Athenian no longer mentions hill peoples, so I shall not summarize the rest here.

This speculative history is notable in two ways. First, it marks a contrast between the natural but “naïve” or “artless” goodness of the peoples of the hills and the potential for both virtue and corruption of the cities. The hill peoples do not need “technical” or "artificial" virtue to live well; their natural virtue is enough. But cities do need such “artificial” virtue (or rather, they need real knowledge), and it is not obvious that this is not a curse, since such knowledge is exceedingly scarce. As the Athenian notes in the “historical” part of his narrative, life in most valley states seems to end in some form or another or tyranny due to a lack of knowledge and virtue; the hill peoples had it better in that respect.

But second, the narrative suggests that short of a major cataclysm, there is no going back to hill life. Indeed, the point of the Athenian’s political theory in this part of the dialogue is to find a way to realistically mitigate the evils of life in settled valley societies; and for this, he will introduce for the first time a systematic theory of the “mixed constitution” - the ancient predecessor of our theories of the “separation of powers” and “checks and balances” (though the theory is in many ways quite different from our modern equivalents; more in a future post, probably). It is precisely the possession of something like a “mixed constitution” that enabled Sparta to become a relatively law-governed state, in contrast to the situation in Argos and Messene, which degenerated, in the Athenian’s telling, into more arbitrary regimes. But this did not make Sparta perfect; on the contrary, he had criticized it earlier as an “armed camp” more than a city (666e).

One could note that the Athenian’s narrative is still valley-centric; there is no mention of flight into the hills, for example, and certainly the background fact of slavery as a requirement of the valley states is kept deep in the background. At any rate, it seems that, from the point of view of a fourth century Greek like Plato, the hill frontier had more or less closed, or had become an unrealistic option (or perhaps it was all only a thought experiment to begin with). And the full flourishing of human life does seem to go through urban life, but in Plato (in contrast, perhaps, to Aristotle’s more optimistic take later on) this is a road that is almost certain to lead to disappointment. The hill peoples had it better.

Now, it is possible that canonical thinkers like Plato and Aristotle were not representative of the tenor of Greek political thought on the question of the valence of hills and valleys. One probably would have to scour a much larger sample of writings, and our sources are often fragmentary and biased. And though the “anarchism” of the early Stoics and Cynics is reasonably well attested, as well as the antipolitical attitudes of the Epicureans (or at least as well attested as the meagre fragments of their texts that survive allow), these attitudes clearly soften in later thinkers identified with these schools (and more from these later people survive). Moreover, the evidence of etymology supports the “stigma” thesis; the word asteios, for example, which originally meant something like “urban” in a neutral sense, eventually came to mean something like “good.” At any rate, canonical thinkers like Plato clearly tend to be unrepresentative; that is part of the reason why their thought can be continuously re-appropriated by later generations, and why it remains interesting beyond the narrow context in which it emerged. But still, in general it seems that there was more ambivalence about the identification of states and civilization in Greek political theory than Scott suggests, and this ambivalence does not simply die off. Beyond Plato to Augustine to Rousseau there is a strand of Western political theory that is willing to call most states “bands of robbers” and has difficulty making its peace with them; and as with Rousseau, this strand sometimes comes close to saying that a stateless existence would be better, even if they also acknowledge its impossibility in a world where the valley states are dominant.

Changes small and large: Epistemic Arguments for Conservatism II

One epistemic argument for conservatism (or rather, gradualism) goes more or less like this. We have grave epistemic limitations that prevent us from understanding the consequences of institutional change, and the bigger the change, the more these limitations apply. All things considered, it is harder to predict the consequences of major institutional change than of minor institutional tinkering. Moreover, even when we are in error about the consequences of minor change, the potential damage to our social life from such errors is also likely to be minor and easily contained, whereas when we are in error about major changes, the damages may be devastating. Hence we should try to avoid wholesale change to our institutions.

The key idea is that ex ante we have a better idea of the risks of small changes than we do of the risks of large changes, and ex post we can contain the damage of small changes better than the damage of large changes. Given reasonable loss aversion in the face of genuine uncertainty, this implies that we should be more careful about larger than about smaller changes to our institutions. Note that the argument is not that major changes will have bad effects, but that we should be more uncertain about the effects of major changes than about the effects of minor changes, and that this asymmetric uncertainty should make us more cautious about undertaking these larger changes.

There is a whole question here about how to define “small” and “large,” but let’s let that slide for the moment, since there are clearly some cases where the argument seems to make sense. Something like it forms part of Burke’s case against revolution: there are many potential bad consequences from trying to completely change an entire form of life, but given our epistemic limitations we can hardly know which major changes will be on balance good and which will be on balance bad. And today we might see this argument deployed to justify less action than some economists might like on restarting the global economy, or less action on climate change than some environmentalists might like, though whether the argument works in these cases depends in part on our estimates of the costs of inaction, estimates that may also be subject to our epistemic limitations. (A full formal investigation of the problems here would presumably use Bayesian analysis. But here I reveal my on epistemic limitations – I do not know enough to use it).

This is a sort of “selection” argument for conservatism, though it does not look like one at first sight. In order for this argument to justify gradualism, however, rather than rigid immobility, we have to assume that small deleterious changes are either eliminated quickly or else that they cannot accumulate and interact in collectively very harmful ways. For example, a firm that produces bad products should go bankrupt without affecting the ability of other firms to operate too much, and small regulatory changes that do not work must be quickly identified and eliminated through some explicit mechanism (e.g., litigation, as in some defences of the common law). Whenever there is no selection mechanism to get rid of such minor but potentially harmful changes (and there may not be one, especially if the changes are only truly harmful in connection with many other changes), they can accumulate until they reach a kind of threshold (when they become really bad). The point is that if our epistemic limitations are binding with respect to the consequences of large “revolutionary” changes, they are also binding with respect to the consequences of collections of small changes that interact in complex ways with one another. Thus, in the absence of knowledge about the interactions of many small changes, the argument would seem to justify rigid immobility, not gradualism.

Indeed, an awareness of this problem seems to have led most classical political thinkers to a position that is in a sense the reverse of the Burkean “gradualist” position, i.e., willing to contemplate major changes to institutions under some limited circumstances (when the legislator has good knowledge) but extremely wary of small changes that might accumulate and interact in unexpected ways (since the presence of knowledgeable individuals capable of understanding their effects in the long run cannot be assumed). Plato, for example, while quite willing to recommend radical institutional innovation in cities (e.g., equal education for men and women, major censorship, new religious institutions, etc.) insisted that a city must be very careful about changing its “educational” laws, in part because the deleterious effects of any minor changes would not be visible until many years later, and they could easily accumulate in destructive ways. Similarly, Aristotle was not shy about recommending large institutional changes to political communities, but nevertheless urged cities to be vigilant about institutional drift, the minor changes that seem harmless individually but may collectively lead to the destruction of a politeia.

The point is not that they believed that major change was epistemically “safe” while gradual change was not; they thought both major and minor change was epistemically problematic. (Plato’s insistence on the need for knowledge in politics is grounded precisely on an extreme distrust of normal human epistemic capacities; we would only need philosopher kings if we were effectively incompetent in political matters). But they did not think gradual change was any less exempt from the problems caused by human epistemic limitations than revolutionary change, since they did not think that there were appropriate “selection mechanisms” able to weed out deleterious gradual institutional change under normal circumstances (other than “state death,” which is of course not especially ideal from the point of view of the state in question; as Josiah Ober has noted, whereas bankruptcy may be the consequence of “failure” in a market economy, “state death” in the classical world typically implied the death or enslavement of much of the population). From this point of view, major but planned institutional change had a slight “epistemic advantage” over unplanned, gradual change, at least so long as gradual changes could accumulate and interact in deleterious ways that could not be easily identified either at the time or in advance. 

The Class Struggle in Classical Greece

From Aristotle, Politics V.1310a9-11:

at present in some oligarchies they [the oligarchs] swear "And I will be hostile to the people and plan whatever evil I can against them"

Polybius and the Dialectic of Forgetting (Or, Theoretical Models in the Classical World)

(Warning: A very long footnote – 2,500 words - about Polybius, human moral psychology, and the use of “models” in the Classical World, written as part of research for this project.)

The extant fragments of book VI of Polybius’ Histories contain a famous (in certain circles) discussion of the “cycle of regimes” (VI.5.10-9.14). The story goes more or less like this.

Human beings start in something like the “state of nature,” without arts or sciences, and in particular without highly developed moral norms, where we herd together like other animals following the strongest or most daring man (the basic primate pattern, we might say today: I can’t help viewing a lot of the stuff I’m reading right now through the lens of Boehm’s book, and this post will be no exception). This is what Polybius calls “monarchy” (μοναρχίαν), where the authority of the leader is limited by his physical strength and daring. This sort of “natural monarchy” then evolves towards kingship (βασιλεία) properly speaking, which is no longer a simple hierarchy sustained by strength and daring but a moral community where the authority of the leader is very much constrained by relatively egalitarian ideas about justice. In such a community, the king does not attempt to distinguish himself from his subjects by their dress or in their food and drink, and he gains the support of others only insofar as he coordinates the enforcement of community norms (VI.6.11-12), even as he may be weak and infirm; tendencies to domination are effectively kept in check.

Polybius explains the development of these ideas about justice as the result of spontaneous reflection about reciprocity (VI.6.5-10): because we expect others to reciprocate our good deeds, and value the good deeds of others, norms codifying those expectations emerge, in turn sustaining the authority of those leaders who coordinate their enforcement. Our “natural” ideas of justice are thus quite egalitarian (cf. the use of “democratic” language to describe these norms in all regimes: VI.8.4 πολιτικῆς ἰσότητος καὶ παρρησίας, VI.9.4 τὴν ἰσηγορίαν καὶ τὴν παρρησίαν), though they will accommodate some hierarchy to the degree that a leader can enforce them. But Polybius argues that this sort of “egalitarian” kingship is not stable; insofar as kingship becomes hereditary (something that is common, Polybius suggests, due to the popular belief in the inheritability of virtuous dispositions) it develops necessarily into tyranny, i.e., a regime where egalitarian community norms no longer constrain the leader. The increase in the security of the position of the king’s heirs, which comes also as a result of other changes (e.g., the emergence of resources such as fortified places that can be monopolized by the leader), increases their temptations to try to dominate others. They begin by trying to distinguish themselves from the others by dress or other signals (VI.7.7), and end by trying to obtain more material resources and reproductive advantages than anyone else in the community. The basic mechanism of change in the Polybian theory of change appears here for the first time: security of position enhances a human tendency to domination (as I was writing this, I came across this recent piece by Ryan Balot that makes a similar point).

But this tendency to domination is counterbalanced by an apparently equally natural tendency to resent domination in the name of the earlier egalitarian community norms. The “best” men – those who are most high-spirited and resentful of domination – will tend to rise up and overthrow the tyrant in the name of these norms, setting themselves up in their place. As speculative political history and anthropology, this is perhaps not self-evident (why would tyranny necessarily give rise to aristocracy rather than democracy or a renewed kingship?), though in general I think Polybius gets the basic features of long-run political development right, even if modern anthropologists would insist on a finer gradation of steps from the basic primate hierarchy to relatively acephalous egalitarian societies to “big man” societies to the kind of morally constrained “chiefdom” that corresponds to Polybius’ notion of kingship and eventually to tyranny. At any rate, the transition from tyranny to aristocracy does fit the history of Rome well enough (and remember, Polybius is writing a history of the growth of Roman power). But as a depiction of a common political psychology, Polybius’ idea is very much on target, insofar as human nature does seem to contain both tendencies towards domination (at least among males) and tendencies to resent domination, and our “default” social norms are mostly egalitarian.

We could thus say that political change, in the Polybian story, is all about the emergence of egalitarian norms, their violation by individuals capable of accumulating resources, and the restoration of such norms by those outside the “winning coalition” who still value such norms. The pattern is repeated at the next step in the cycle. As time and generations pass, the sons of aristocrats become again secure in their position, and again engage in attempts to dominate others in contravention of community norms: this is the beginning of oligarchy. Polybius describes how these new leaders no longer have any experience of the previous egalitarian norms (ἄπειροι δὲ καθόλου πολιτικῆς ἰσότητος καὶ παρρησίας), and have forgotten the misfortunes that led their parents to rise up against tyrants (VI.8.4-5). There is a kind of normative drift: signs of distinction that had been freely given to their parents for their services are interpreted by their sons as things that they deserve naturally, so that the relatively egalitarian norms that had regulated the conduct of their parents no longer regulate their own conduct. What happens instead is that the oligarchs abandon begin to pursue unrestrainedly material and other advantages: they take from others without reciprocating. But the egalitarian norms still remain strong within the rest of the population, and so eventually the people rise up and overthrow the oligarchs, banding behind any leaders who credibly promise to enforce the old moral norms. The people, however, remember with fear both the kings (and their transformation into tyrants) as well as the more recent oligarchs (note the emphasis on memory, which is partly the historian’s domain); they thus decide to manage their affairs by themselves, and democracy is born.

In democracy, as in aristocracy or kingship before, egalitarian norms remain strong as long as some are alive who experienced the previous form of domination; but when the experience is lost (with the grandchildren of the founders of democracy, VI.9.4-5), their influence weakens. People begin to take such norms for granted, and those with resources (the wealthy) begin to attempt to “aim at pre-eminence,” i.e., attempt to dominate others. This competitive struggle among rich individuals sets in motion a process of far-reaching social disintegration, where each wealthy individual corrupts the people by turning their desires in the direction of material accumulation and accustoming them to getting what they want by raiding the wealth of other wealthy individuals. This turns the democracy into a rule of violence (χειροκρατίαν), where multiple demagogic leaders compete to dominate by promising each other’s wealth to the people; the process ends with the masses turning into beasts again (cf. ἀποτεθηριωμένον, VI.9.9), i.e., returning to the state described at the beginning of the cycle, herding like the other animals without real social norms, and eventually getting a new “master,” a new leader who is only limited by his capacity for violence, though under social conditions that are different from those operating at the beginning of the cycle.

In summary, Polybius claims that simple regimes develop according to the following cyclical pattern: pre-social state of nature/natural monarchy->;kingship->;tyranny->;aristocracy->;oligarchy->;democracy->;mob rule/post-social state of nature->;natural despotic monarchy (repeat). This “theory” has sometimes been criticized by modern scholars (see, e.g., von Fritz, p. 84) for its apparently “deterministic” or “rigid” sequence of changes, and indeed Polybius’ presentation is a far cry from the nuanced discussions of political change found in Plato (on which he claims to draw, though Polybius’ discussion is very different from what we find in books VIII and IX of the Republic and in the Statesman) and Aristotle (whose discussions of the problem of political change in book V of the Politics he may not have known, given the possible loss from public view of a lot of Aristotelian writing between the third and the first century ADBC). Moreover, the “theory” of the cycle of regimes sits uneasily with Polybius’ “historical” sensibilities; it is abundantly evident to any observer of historical reality that regimes sometimes change in ways that do not fit a clear pattern (as it was to Aristotle, for example, who criticized – wrongly - Plato for a similar idea). Democracies sometimes turn into oligarchies (as when the Thirty took power in Athens in 404BC), monarchies into democracies, and in general any kind of regime into any other kind, as Aristotle documented in exhaustive detail in book V of the Politics. Writers who knew their Polybius well often tactfully pointed this out after summarizing Polybius’ “theory.” Thus Cicero notes in De Re Publica I.68, after a discussion of regime change that is obviously influenced by Polybius, that regimes tend to change in ways that do not necessarily fit any simple pattern (a remark that is attributed to Scipio, who had been a friend of Polybius in real life), and Machiavelli notes that a community would be unlikely to experience all the stages of change described in the theory before it was taken over by a more stable and better organized state (Discourses I.2 – there is a bit of a puzzle here, for though Machiavelli is clearly describing something like Polybius’ theory, he knew no Greek, and book 6 of Polybius had not been translated at the time). Given that Polybius was not politically or historically naïve, it seems unlikely that these observations would have escaped him.

Yet the criticism is unfair. Polybius explicitly indicates that he is simplifying the “more precise” discussions found in Plato and other philosophers (VI.5.10), which he finds too complicated for pragmatic purposes. The “simplified” theory of the cycle of regimes is not to be taken as an accurate representation of historical reality, but as something like a “model” in the sense in which economists use the term: a distillation of the incentives and other influences affecting the main political actors in a regime, and pragmatically useful as a tool for analyzing political changes in more complex regimes, like the Roman one. (Polybius’ “solution” to the difficulties of the cycle, the “mixed regime,” is also best understood as that sort of model, though that is a subject for another post). These incentives are not simply incentives to behaviour (as in much modern rational choice theorizing) but to character: the model describes how certain characters emerge endogenously from certain regimes, given some assumptions about human nature and about the preservation of historical memory.

What is especially neat about Polybius’ presentation of the “cycle” of regimes is how he ties experience and forgetting with the natural tendencies to both attempt and resent domination in the explanation of political change. Constitutions change for the worse because people forget their experience of earlier attempts of some to dominate others, or rather, because the people who overthrow bad regimes are unable to pass on this experience with sufficient clarity to their children as the children’s position in society becomes increasingly secure. Without real fear of domination (which mostly comes from actual experience of such attempts), egalitarian norms do not survive, a point that applies as much to the newly victorious Rome of Polybius’ time as to other polities. (Incidentally, this seems to indicate that the historian’s role is to remind his audience of these misfortunes, a point argued at some length by Balot with many examples from the rest of the Histories). Thus we have a dialectic between the tendencies to resent domination (which sustain egalitarian norms) and the tendencies to dominate (which corrupt these norms): as one gains the upper hand, it immediately begins to weaken. This dialectic is also a process of corruption: healthy norms are first destroyed among a small elite, then among a larger elite, and finally among the entire people as the historical memory of domination is lost first among the heirs of the monarch, later among the heirs of the larger elite that overthrew the tyrant, and finally among the people themselves through the corrupting effects of the competitive struggle for position among rich individuals. A secure, healthy simple regime is in a sense bad for the education of its leaders, whereas a certain kind of misfortune is a good education, a theme that Polybius emphasizes throughout the Histories.

Ultimately, of course, this “model” of political change is used by Polybius to understand and analyze Roman history: Rome was successful insofar as its leaders instinctively chose courses of action that constantly prevented them from giving full rein to their dominating tendencies (e.g., the “checks and balances” of the Roman mixed constitution, which has, I think, been much misunderstood by modern historians who point out, rightly, that Rome during Polybius’ lifetime was basically an oligarchy; but that is another topic) and will be unsuccessful insofar as it achieves full security (as is evident from the later books of Polybius’ Histories, or at least of what remains of them). The model may be historically implausible (in its assertion that typically tyrannies turn into aristocracies, and oligarchies into democracies, for example) but it is no more implausible than some of the rational choice models of political change in use today (which are useful too, I should note), and it has the added benefit of incorporating a plausible moral psychology. By contrast, Aristotle’s exhaustive description of political change in book V of the Politics, though empirically better informed and starting from a basically plausible principle about how the violation of norms about justice leads to political change (where justice is always understood as a form of equality, though differently in different regimes), seems to miss the forest for the trees. Aristotle spends too much time looking at purely accidental causes of political change (“exogenous shocks” in the contemporary economic jargon, such as foreign conquest or institutional drift), or exploring varieties of a single cause of political change (the attempts to dominate others by high-status individuals), whereas Polybius’ model almost begs to be formalized as a story about the interaction between tendencies to domination and tendencies to resent such domination in the absence of perfect memory about the consequences of domination, and it seems readily applicable to a variety of cases even when it cannot explain them completely. From this point of view, it does not surprise me that Polybius’ simplified story was much more influential, historically, than Aristotle’s complex and empirically informed catalogue of the causes of political change: it identifies a key cause of political change for ill, and suggests ready remedies (basically, keeping the fear of domination alive through “checks and balances,” a remedy that is mentioned by Aristotle as well, but only among many other suggestions, some major, some minor).

Reason and Persons in Classical Greece

In a post I wrote three years ago, before I abandoned this blog for the first time (in accordance with its name) I mentioned a passage in Plato’s Statesman (266e, if you must know) where the Eleatic Stranger, the main character in the dialogue, concludes a long discussion of what appears to be the “definition” of human beings with the claim that human beings are “featherless bipeds,” a definition that, if we are to judge by its presentation in Diogenes Laertius VI.40, achieved a certain kind of comic notoriety (see below). Only a few lines earlier the Stranger had suggested that an equally good definition of human being was the “two-legged pig” (266a5-b9; more precisely the two footed animal that is kin to the pig), and in the discussion leading to these odd conclusions the Stranger had explicitly argued that it is not a good idea to treat the human possession of rationality as the defining characteristic of human beings. To claim that human beings are distinct from other beings because of their possession of reason is to ignore the possibility that other animals might also be rational (cf. 263d, on the possibility of “rational cranes” [!]) and indeed to forget that divine beings are also rational (the rational cranes would be inappropriately “making themselves sacred” if they claimed to be special in virtue of their rationality). In sum, there is something much like “pride” in attempting to distinguish human beings from all other animals by the criterion of rationality, as the Stranger suggests in criticizing young Socrates (the main respondent in the dialogue; he is not related to the elder Socrates, who is the main character in most of Plato’s other dialogues) for his excessive haste in trying to separate human beings from all the other animals on that basis (262a; cf. also 263d).

I simplify a bit. The joke about humans and pigs rests on a comparison between the square root of four (likened to the nature of the pig) and the square root of two (likened to the nature of man – see Campbell, ad loc.) which has the effect of suggesting that in reality the natures of human beings and pigs are “incommensurable” even though the Stranger has just made them commensurable by a quirky mathematical “squaring” procedure (and even though, oddly, human nature is the one that turns out to be “irrational”). The claim that human beings are “featherless” uses a rare and poetic word (πτεροφυής, literally “feather-growing”) that points to a passage in the Phaedrus (251c) suggesting that human beings can “grow wings” and hence rise to gaze upon the forms of order – the good and the just, but especially the noble or the beautiful – even if they no longer have such wings. When my book on the Statesman comes out, you will be able to read my interpretation of these passages at excruciating length. Or you can consult my dissertation, if you are the hardy type and prefer the even longer version.

But regardless of these complications, throughout the dialogue human rationality is clearly presented as something deeply problematic, and certainly not as something that unambiguously marks the boundary between humanity and animality. Though the dialogue appears to be explicitly concerned with the question of what is a human being from 261b to 266e, the Eleatic never gives a simple and satisfactory answer to this question, much less asserts that that human beings are “rational animals;” on the contrary, his answer(s) merely emphasizes the physical differences between animals and humans (their featherlessness, lack of horns, etc.) . In the extraordinary myth that the Stranger makes up shortly after that discussion (my favorite in all of Plato, a story about a time when life ran “backwards”) he speaks about talking animals and attributes rationality not only to human beings but to a number of other embodied, animated creatures, including the universe as a whole (269d), which is indeed described as a kind of rational “animal.” To the extent that human beings have reason, the myth implies, it is divided into a multitude of forms of knowledge or arts which serve to make up for physical deficits that most animals do not have, rather than integrated into a genuine wisdom that truly differentiates us from them. Moreover, these arts are likened to the things that came out of Pandora’s box (274d-e; cf. Hesiod Theogony 536ff, Works and Days 42ff), increasing our physical powers (and hence allowing us to defend ourselves from wild animals) but not necessarily our ability to rule ourselves in a wise and reasonable way (but on the contrary creating the possibility of warfare and other political conflicts). Art or knowledge, in other words, is not for the most part presented as what distinguishes us from other animals but as the adaptive mechanism that enables us to survive as animals (just as horns or hooves are some of the adaptive mechanisms that allow animals to survive as animals).

Thus, whatever one may think of Plato’s ultimate views, it is not clear that he was overly concerned with saying that human beings are distinguished from animals on the basis of their rationality, or that he thought that the question of what distinguishes human beings from animals is easily answered by a formula. Moreover, it is not clear that Plato and later Ancient Platonists, in comparing human beings to pigs (or birds, for that matter) simply assumed that pigs were especially risible or low, as Stephen Clark points out in a lovely piece that is unfortunately inaccessible to anyone without access to a good research university library (“Herds of Free Bipeds”, 1995). On the contrary, there is some evidence that they considered that “curious, naked omnivore” (Clark’s words) worthy of respect. (And Plato perhaps followed the Pythagoreans in thinking this, but who knows?) . If the Eleatic points to the continuity between human beings and other animals, he does not necessarily imply that this is a sufficient reason to think that human beings are of little interest or importance, though he does suggest that we should not be too quick to assume our superiority.

To be sure, Aristotle and the Stoics are perhaps more concerned than Plato with distinguishing humans from other animals, and more definite about the essential difference between humans and animals; indeed, for the Stoics, the definition of human being as the “rational animal” would become a sort of commonplace (see, for example, Chrysippus, On Emotions, of which the relevant extant fragment is found in Galen [=SVF 3.462]). But contrary to popular belief, Aristotle himself, working in the shadow of Plato, never did clearly define human being as the rational animal: the passage normally and erroneously quoted to this effect (Metaphysics Z.12, 1037b13-14) actually has him saying that human being is the “two-footed animal” (τὸ ζῷον δίπουν), as if quoting Plato’s Statesman. This is not to say that Aristotle did not believe human beings were rational (he clearly thought that an important feature of human beings was their capacity for rational deliberation), or that they were not “higher” in some sense than other animals (he does say elsewhere that plants and animals exist “for the sake of” human beings, generating a natural hierarchy of beings which is not quite as easy to find in Plato). Yet it does suggest that Aristotle did not think that the question of the definition of human beings vis à vis other animals was the most important question we could ask about the nature of human beings. Indeed, to the extent that Aristotle is preoccupied with the question of human nature, he tends to emphasize that human beings are preeminently political animals (Politics 1253a1-4), a characteristic which they share with cranes, wasps, ants, and bees (History of Animals I.i.11), even if they are more political than these other animals. The important differences between human beings and animals do have something to do with the human capacity for reasoned speech (which only humans truly have, according to Aristotle), but these differences are ultimately best understood as differences of degree rather than of kind, for other animals have a capacity for communicative speech (though not reasoned argument or logos) and social or political life as well as human beings.

The reason for bringing all of this up is that I’ve been recently invited to respond to a paper by a colleague on conceptions of human beings and freedom in both the East (primarily India) and the West (including several conceptions traceable to ancient political thinkers like Plato and Aristotle). The paper claims that most of the “Western” conceptions of human being fail to define human beings properly, since they use criteria that are shared by other animals (like some forms of rationality and language, which are shared with the great apes), something which may in fact be true of some of these conceptions. But it seems to me that at least Plato and Aristotle were not overly concerned with precisely distinguishing human beings from other animals. In particular, I would argue that for Plato the idea that human beings are rational is a kind of hypothesis or aspiration, not a well established fact; the interesting question, for him, is what follows from our being rational (if in fact we are), or from our lack of rationality for our ability to rule ourselves wisely, not the question of whether we are the sole rational animals. Much less hinged on determining whether or not reason is the distinguishing mark of the species than in determining what the possession of reason implies for our ethical, moral, and political lives; and the nature of reason was itself put in question. (And also: the classical thinkers were much weirder than we give them credit for. The fact that they have been absorbed for so long into the history of Western thought should not prevent us from seeing them as just as foreign than the Indian thinkers that my colleague studies; they came, after all, from a world that was very different from ours in every important economic and social respect, and that world was full of gods and demons).

The transformation of this line of thought into a mere formula – that man is the rational animal – closed off some of the avenues for thinking about the nature of human and animal rationality that were still open to Plato and Aristotle. Much later on, however, Kant would turn the idea of man as the rational animal upside down to emphasize that what mattered for moral and political thought was not human being but rational being: the categorical imperative and other moral laws apply to rational beings, not just human beings, and Kant does not assume that there is only one kind of rational being. And similarly, in contemporary times, many ethical thinkers (such as Peter Singer) suggest that whatever characteristic is important for ethical or moral life, it is important across all beings sharing it, whether or not they are human; what matters is not the question of who is a human being, but who is the subject of ethical concern (a feature of Singer’s thought that accounts for its apparent callousness: some human beings lack the requisite characteristic, whereas some animals have it).

These thinkers take, in their different ways, the Eleatic’s critique of Young Socrates seriously: being excessively concerned with distinguishing human beings from animals (as some of the 20^th century existentialists were, by the way) bespeaks a kind of unjustified “pride.” Though humans and other animals are clearly different, it is all too easy to take excessive pride in whatever difference is found (tool use, language, reason, “freedom,” etc.) and hence set ourselves up as “sacred” without justification (as the cranes in the Eleatic’s view). It is too similar to the same processes that lead us to identify with this or that nation (as the Eleatic indicates by using examples of “nationalist” classification in his criticism of young Socrates: 262d-263a), those arbitrary lines that distinguish among human beings on the basis of their ability to “interbreed” (the joke is too complicated to explain here). And perhaps we can go further today, in the shadow of Darwin: most truly significant distinctions between humans and others are ultimately matters of degree. If human beings and other animals are all ultimately related in a web of descent with very fuzzy borders, it may not make sense to try to fix these frontiers and erect imposing border control regimes. That only encourages unclear thinking.

To be sure, there will be differences between “us” and other living beings; but it may make little sense to determine the meaning and moral consequences of these differences a priori. I do not know how we are to relate to elephants, or whales and dolphins, or the great apes, all beings that are political animals in the strict Aristotelian sense of the term, displaying language enough, and family structures, and politics and war enough (I’ve just been reading about hierarchy in the forest); or how we may need to relate to AIs one day perhaps, or indeed to ourselves, in all our multifarious variety of our social forms. But I do suspect that to attempt to find something that strictly distinguishes us from these other beings as if that characteristic were of ultimate importance, is to fall into young Socrates’ error. What distinguishes us from other similar beings may not be the most important thing about us; it may just be our featherlesness.