Chapter 14. The Judgment of Athena

If Athens was not by his own definition anarchist, Murray Bookchin is not an anarchist.

Whatever it was, Athens was exceptional. Most of the Greek city-states were oligarchies. Indeed, in an atypically accurate statement which refutes his whole theory of urban destiny, Bookchin says that city-states naturally tend toward oligarchy.[884] The Director Emeritus errs in claiming that Aristotle (and Plato!) approved of democracy in the right circumstances. Aristotle clearly stated his preference for “polity,” described as a mixture of democracy and oligarchy. He disapproved of democracy, as M.I. Finley puts it, “on principle.” What’s more, he thought Athens was democracy at its worst, the worst being lawless democracy based on vulgar people, merchants, and the multitude of laborers.[885] Socrates and Plato, and lesser Athenian intellectuals, were anti-democratic. For Plato the worst form of government was tyranny followed by “extreme” — i.e., Athenian — democracy. If for Plato democracy was not the worst form of government, neither was it the best — that would be monarchy.[886] The only possible exception to the anti-democratic consensus might be Herodotus (his is the earliest extant use of the word democracy), who was not Athenian, and he’s not a clear case.[887]

“It is curious,” writes A.H.M. Jones, “that in the abundant literature produced in the greatest democracy in Greece there is no statement of democratic theory.”[888] Nothing curious about it: no Athenian democrat was up to the job. Athenian democracy has found its critics among those who knew direct democracy by direct experience, and it has found its champions among those who have not. (Since writing the previous sentence, I found that Hegel agreed with me: “Those ancients who as members of democracies since their youth, had accumulated long experience and reflected profoundly about it, held different views on popular opinion from those more a priori views prevalent today.”[889] I have several times had such agreeable experiences in writing this book.)

Every Greek would have agreed with M.I. Finley that “Athens had gradually stretched the notion of a direct democracy (as distinct from a representative system) about as far as was possible outside utopia.”[890] Something else every Greek would agree with is that the Athenian polis was a state. Plato thought so. Aristotle thought so.[891] And Aristotle even reveals the source of confusion on that score: it is “our use of the word polis to mean both the state and the city.”[892] It’s impossible to cite more than a small fraction of the historians, philosophers and social scientists who have considered Athens, as a polis, a state, because they all do.[893] That is also the Marxist position.[894]

In Chapter 13, I use eight requisites which, if present together, denote a Commune according to the Director Emeritus. As best I can tell, anyway. Considering how much he talks about the Commune, Bookchin is very reticent about the specifics. It is not always clear which features of the Athenian polity he considers constitutive of direct democracy. I will show that, with respect to every one of these eight criteria, Athens did not meet it, or barely and debatably met it, or met it formally by means divesting the institutions of democratic content. Athens was not a Commune; it was not even close.

But even before entering into those specifics, Athens must be disqualified as a democracy, and even as an urban society, because it was founded on a nonpolitical, biological, animalistic basis. The turning point of human history, as Bookchin so often reminds us, is the urban revolution against the mindless exclusivity of kin organization, with the polis in the urban vanguard and Athens the first and finest example. The city

[...] exorcizes the blood oath from the family with its parochial myths and its chauvinistic exclusivity, while retaining or reworking its concept of socialization... The municipal space of Athens, in effect [sic], was expanded to create a largely civic citizenry [?], unencumbered by the mindless tribal obligations and blood oaths that impeded the rights of the stranger but in a form that wore the symbols and enjoyed the prestige of tribal tradition.[895]

It is not so. The Athenian polis was based on the blood oath. The Athenian body politic was defined by heredity just as surely as any other aristocracy, and as exclusively as any, even the Brahmin caste. By a law moved by Pericles himself — Pericles, whose funeral oration is the supreme expression of Athenian democracy — the citizen body was restricted to current citizens and their descendants. At the same time, it was made illegal for an Athenian to marry a foreigner; thus their children would be bastards as well as noncitizens, and the noncitizen spouse would be sold into slavery. According to Plutarch, many lawsuits over legitimacy ensued, and over 5,000 unsuccessful claimants to citizenship were sold into slavery, 14,040 having passed the test.[896] This had unswerving citizen support; introduced in 451/450 B.C., reaffirmed (after irregularities during the Peloponnesian War) in 403–402 B.C., and further buttressed during the fourth century by ancillary legislation and procedural innovation.[897]

When an Athenian male turned 18, he applied for ratification of his citizenship to his deme (local district), in which membership was likewise hereditary. Citizens felt race pride, like the two con-artists in the “Birds” of Aristophanes who congratulate themselves: “we are/Family-tree perfect: Athenians/For generations, afraid of no one.” Or the “Wasps”: “We are the only/Aboriginal inhabitants — the native race of Attica,/Heroes to a man, and saviors of this city.”.[898] Athens took its racism seriously. In 403/402 B.C., after the overthrow of the Thirty Tyrants put in power by Sparta, the assembly voted down a bill to extend citizenship to the slaves who had helped to overthrow the tyrants: “Allowing slaves to be citizens would deny the linkage between patriotism and citizen blood.”[899]

We have already seen what the Director Emeritus means by the blood oath (Chapter 9). If it means that relatives jointly swear to defend or avenge family members, then I am unaware of any primitive societies which have or ever had this practice. They may exist, but this is not the normal practice of kin-based societies. Your kin are the people you can take for granted. It’s when people are unrelated that they may feel the need for an artificial support for their solidarity, such as medieval townsmen entering into a conjuratio, as the Director Emeritus has described (Chapter 13). Besides, the point of an oath is to intimidate the oath-taker with supernatural sanctions, which is irrational,[900] whereas trusting one’s blood relatives is often a rational course of action, and that is not how the pineapples are supposed to line up according to Book’s gutter Gemeinschaft/Gesellschaft schedule. Athenian racism really renders further discussion unnecessary: nonethless I proceed to consider the case for Athens as a Commune.

Policy-Making Assembly. Athens, of course, had an assembly which met often, but the evidence of its influence over policy is “slender.” It shared a substantial amount of this authority with another body. The council (boule) of 500 met whenever the assembly did not, that is, nine days out of ten — and on assembly days after the meeting — about 275 out of 354 days. Its most important function was to prepare the agenda for assembly meetings to which no proposal could be added from the floor. Except for the generals (see below), nobody outside the council had a right to address it or move proposals, nor could there be proposals from the floor of the assembly. One of Robert A. Dahl’s five requirements for democracy is that the body of citizens (in his word, the demos) should have exclusive control over the political agenda.[901] The council could always prevent assembly action; it had, in effect, an anticipatory veto power over all legislation.[902]

This arrangement might raise fewer objections on democratic grounds if the assembly elected the council; but it did not. Council members were nominated annually from men aged 30 and over not in the lowest income class, from those who put themselves forward, by the demes (see below) grouped in tribes for this purpose. Demes were units of local government wherein membership was hereditary, and because they were of very disparate sizes, the council was malapportioned.[903] At least twice the number of officeholders required were supposed to be nominated, thus providing for alternates.

The final decision was by lot conducted by the outgoing council, which usually amounted to deciding which nominees would be council members and which would be substitutes.[904] Thus council members were chosen by a combination of local election and sortition, but not by the assembly. The Director Emeritus is thus twice incorrect in saying that each tribe selected its council members by lot.[905] In the initial phase, selection was by election, and in the final phase, the outgoing council, not the tribe, conducted the lottery. In any event, the council members were not answerable to the assembly; they could not be recalled or mandated. They were, in a word, representatives.[906]

Council membership was limited to citizens 30 and over and from the top three of the four income classes (what are these doing in a Commune?). It is not clear how strictly the income limitation was enforced, but the age limitation substantially restricted participation. Over 60% of Athenians, and one-third of Athenians reaching adulthood, never lived to age 30.[907] The significance of this fact has escaped the attention of historians who claim that almost all citizens could expect to serve on the council sooner or later. For many of them it was sooner or never. Despite the alleged “emergence of the city, followed by the increasing supremacy of town over country and territorial over kinship ties,”[908] the council, like the court system, was something of a gerontocracy, which Bookchin would have to consider a biological institution, like the family.

Anyone who has ever been involved with a parliamentary body appreciates the tremendous importance of setting the agenda. Scarcely less important than power over what goes on the agenda is power over the order of business. That can influence the outcome and, in at least two situations, absolutely determine it: when the meeting adjourns before decision, and in those circumstances where the Voter’s Paradox (discussed in Chapter 17) creates a situation of a closed cycling majority.[909] The assembly was passive; the council took the initiative: “Certainly the assembly had sovereign power and consented to or dissented from the motions put before it, but this final responsibility is not the same as effective power to initiate the policy.”[910]

With, to be sure, several important exceptions, the council exercised the powers of the assembly between meetings. The exceptions included limitations on imprisonment without bail, on the death penalty, on the imposition of large fines, and on war and peace. Otherwise the council could promulgate decrees on its own authority, of which the assembly ratified about half. In addition, assembly decrees might authorize the council to make additions and amendments.[911] The council exercised comprehensive supervision over the many boards of officials. “It is impossible to give a full account here of all the Council’s administrative duties and powers,” writes a recent historian of Athenian democracy:

It was involved in the control of all sanctuaries in Athens and Attica and the running of many of the religious festivals; it had the duty to inspect all public buildings, most notably the defenses of the city and the Piraeus; it was responsible for the navy and the naval yards, for the building of new vessels and the equipping and dispatch of fleets, and it had oversight of the cavalry. It acted as administrator of the public finances in collaboration with various other boards; and, last but not least, it had daily responsibility for foreign policy.[912]

Bookchin’s depiction of Athenian government as the work of part-timers and amateurs begins to look misleading. Council members may not have been the trained career professionals of an ideal-type Weberian bureaucracy, but for a year they were paid, full-time legislators and administrators. [913] A bureaucracy of amateurs is still a bureaucracy. They might be reelected once, and in any given year, 100–125 of them would have had previous council experience.[914] Bookchin’s distinction between policymaking and administration is not as sharp as he announces it. Denounce it though he will, the “melding” of policy and administration is normal in public administration.[915]

The judicial system is another branch of administration with a popular character but not responsible to the assembly. 6,000 judges were elected from the demes for one year of paid service. Eligibility was as for the council: at least 30 years old and not poor. On a daily basis, if there was business for them, they would be impaneled in “batches of hundreds” of jurors, usually 200–1,000, to hear cases.[916] Decision was by secret ballot, without deliberation, and there was no appeal from the jury’s verdict. Without going into the details of this system, it may be noted that there was no due process as we would understand it. The parties made set speeches as best they could. They could not normally employ advocates, although they could hire speech-writers. The parties might question each other, but they could not testify themselves. There was no cross-examination of nonparty witnesses. The only witnesses were, in our terms, character witnesses, friends and family vouching for the virtue of the party they advocated for.[917] Slaves might testify — but only if they had been tortured (I’m not making this up). There were emotional appeals to the jury, as in modern systems, but unrestrained by the court. Aristophanes shows us a dog put on trial for stealing a Sicilian cheese; the bitch has her puppies whine for her.[918] There was no one to instruct the jurors in the law, because the presiding officers were as ignorant as they were.

In fact, the Draconian innovation of written law, hailed by the Director Emeritus, sometimes failed to provide the legal certainty claimed as its great virtue. A party relying on a law had to prove it as a fact; it was not assumed that the law, being written, was known to everyone. Evidently there were cases of the law being faked, as “a law prescribed death as the penalty for anyone found to have presented a non-existent law.”[919] There was no right to counsel. Juries expected litigants to speak for themselves unless they were utterly incapable, and it was a crime to represent another professionally, i.e., to practice law.

It was an all-amateur legal system. But while there were no lawyers, there were “sycophants,” individuals who brought frequent groundless prosecutions to obtain either blackmail money or 20% of any fine imposed.[920] They are reminiscent of our ambulance-chasers. Finally, some of the punishments prescribed were cruel and unusual. The painless, peaceful death of Socrates was exceptional. The usual methods of execution were extremely brutal. An early form was “precipitation,” where the condemned was thrown off a precipice and left for dead. That is cruel enough, but as the Athenians became more civilized, their punishments became even more brutal. In the method favored later, the condemned was fitted with a heavy iron collar and clamped to a pole in a standing position to suffer a lingering death by starvation, exposure and something like crucifixion, only it lasted longer. Some of the Samian prisoners were tortured in this way for ten days and then their tormentors grew impatient and bashed their heads in.[921] Contemporaries judged the Athenian legal system harshly. Plato and Aristotle divided democracy, like monarchy and aristocracy, into good and bad variants. The bad variant was where the rule of law did not prevail. They considered Athens the worst kind of democracy, the lawless kind.[922]

Conclusion: a substantial share of policymaking authority was exercised by a full-time council which, as Aristotle stated, represented an oligarchic element, a check on the assembly.[923]

Face-to-Face Assembly Meetings. “Face-to-face” is an expression beloved of Bookchin, among too many others, but his use of it is fraught with confusion. Is he talking about a face-to-face assembly or a face-to-face society? Properly the phrase refers to a local community in the anthropological or sociological sense — something social, not political. It was originally applied by Peter Laslett to the pre-industrial English village community; later it was extended to other localities, like urban neighborhoods, where people know each other.[924] Band societies are such communities. So are tribal societies, as the Director Emeritus has observed.[925] So were the pre-industrial English villages studied by Laslett, with populations in the hundreds.[926] Aristotle thought the optimum population of a polis is one in which the polis can be taken in at a single view. The urban architect Constantinos Doxiadis points out that prior to the 18^th century, in 99% of cities one could walk from the center to the periphery in ten minutes. Laslett himself, in working out the meaning of a face-to-face community, stated that a polis never had more than 10,000 citizens and often only 1,000[927] — obviously overlooking Athens.

Thus the face-to-face model is “an absurd model” for Athens, with its population of 250,000–300,000. In an article on the origins of the Athenian polis, Ian Morris states that Athens was no face-to-face society. As early as 500 B.C., the population was probably 25,000, rising to 30,000 by 450 B.C. Historian Josiah Ober, in a generally sympathetic account of Athenian democracy, points out that Athens was neither a village nor (had he been reading Bookchin?) a confederation of villages. He puts the citizen population at 20,000–40,000.[928] Even Ober’s lower figure is far beyond a size at which everyone knows, or at least knows of, everybody else. A passage from Thucydides reveals just how impersonal life was in Athens. In 411 B.C., a coup installed an oligarchy, the Thirty, which held power for eight months. Thucydides gives one reason why the pro-democratic majority acquiesced in the collective tyranny: “They imagined that the revolutionary party was much bigger than it really was, and they lost all confidence in themselves, being unable to find out the facts because of the size of the city, and because they had insufficient knowledge of each other.”[929]

Was the assembly, then, a face-to-face gathering? Not to nearly the extent that, say, the United States Congress is, but not since the Anti-Federalists has anyone thought the size of the legislature was critical to its democratic character.[930] A highly sympathetic account of the assembly acknowledges that “in an assembly attended by 6,000 citizens it was impossible to have an open discussion.” Robert Michels made the same point about assemblies on that scale.[931] That would be like calling the fans at a major league baseball game a face-to-face group because, if gifted with hawklike vision, almost everyone would be in a line of sight from everyone else. But the crowd cannot deliberate, and the only decision it ever makes is when to do “the wave.” Aristotle asked, “For who can be the general of such a vast multitude, unless he have the voice of Stentor?”[932] If each of 6,000 citizens attending a 12 hour assembly meeting speaks, he will speak for an average of 12 seconds (but it was rarely 12 hours, as the meeting almost always adjourned by noon).[933] Obviously a handful of people did the talking; the rest were, at best, represented by the speakers. Less than one hundred full-time politicians (rhetores) dominated the debates.[934]

Conclusion: Athens was neither a face-to-face society nor a face-to-face democracy.

Few if Any Elected or Appointed Officials. Finley states that “there was no bureaucracy or civil service, save for a few clerks, slaves owned by the state itself, who kept such records as were unavoidable, copies of treaties and laws, lists of defaulting taxpayers, and the like.”[935] That is the traditional story, but the situation rewards closer examination. As Finley also says, Athens employed financial and engineering experts. Treasurers of the Delian League (which was turned into the Athenian Empire) were probably elected.[936] Ambassadors and official negotiators were elected. So were holders of certain technical jobs, like architects; certain religious officiants; and the secretaries and treasurers of various boards in charge of funds. Since state and church were one, there were cults whose funds were under public control.[937] There were enough of these offices for Aristophanes to complain of placemen and sinecures.[938] Even taken together, these positions might be considered minor exceptions. But there are, in addition to the council, three major exceptions to assembly sovereignty: the generals, the police, and the demes.

The assembly annually elected a board of ten generals (strategoi), and they were the most powerful men in the government. It was in this capacity that Pericles and his successor Cleon dominated the assembly. In a state which was at war, on average, two out of every three years,[939] the Generals had considerable power, and it was not limited to strictly military matters:

[T]he Board of Generals must, at any rate in the fifth century, have exercised de facto a considerable power. Its members were not only supreme in military matters; they had the functions of a treasury as well as those of a war-office, and were concerned in raising the funds which they required. They had charge of foreign affairs; and they must even have exercised some sort of discretionary power, in order to discharge their duties of preventing and punishing treason, and protecting the democratic constitution. They were appointed by election, and not by lot; on them depended much of the security of the Athenian democracy; and they supplied along with the Council something of that executive strength which a democracy particularly needs.[940]

In a departure from usual Athenian practice, generals might be reelected, and some of them were, year after year, like the wealthy aristocrat Pericles,[941] who served without interruption for 15 years. In the fifth century, generals largely overlapped with the career politicians, the rhetores or demagogues who drafted, moved and debated bills in the assembly. Often the rhetores were formally trained in “rhetoric.” The ruling elite was invariably drawn from the wealthy and well-educated.[942]

In addition to the centralized state focused on council and assembly, Athens had units of local government: the demes, which were numerous enough (there were over 100) to be true face-to-face assemblies. Most of the demes were individual villages outside the walls — a reminder that only one-third of the citizens lived in the city. In size they ranged from 130 to 1,500, resulting in extreme malapportionment. In direct contradiction of the ex-Director’s central theme — that cities in general, and the polis in particular, phased out “the biological facts of blood, sex, and age” — deme membership was hereditary.[943]

The elected demarch, who presided over the deme assembly, had several executive functions: renting out deme property, policing religious practices and rituals, collecting the tax on non-demesmen owning land in the deme, listing the property of public debtors, and — very important, where citizenship is so highly valued — judging who in the deme was an Athenian citizen. The demarch, then, was “little more than an executive cog in the machinery of central government.” And yet he was not accountable to the assembly. If we are surprised to hear of “central government” at Athens, it is because the glorificatory accounts like Bookchin’s ignore the part of the state that was genuinely local and face-to-face — and its democracy was representative, not direct.[944] The demes, grouped in tribes, nominated the Council candidates by vote. As Robin Osborne, the expert on the demes, writes: “Through the demes, what was in theory a direct democracy was in practice a subtle representational one.”[945] An innovation of Cleisthenes, “these new demes formed the groundwork of the Athenian state in the fifth century.”[946] The principles of the groundwork of the Athenian state, then, were blood and representation. The power of the hereditary demesmen and the elected demarchs, taken in conjunction with the power of the elected Generals, establishes that Athens was not a direct democracy “as such,” as the Director Emeritus might say: it was in substantial part a representative democracy also.

Finally, Athens had that quintessential state institution, a police force. As Friedrich Engels (no less) relates:

Thus, simultaneously with their state, the Athenians established a police force, a veritable gendarmerie of foot and mounted bowmen — Landjaeger, as they say in South Germany and Switzerland. This gendarmerie consisted — of slaves. The free Athenian regarded this police duty as being so degrading that he preferred being arrested by an armed slave rather than perform such ignominious duties himself. This was still an expression of the old gentile [= clan] mentality. The state could not exist without a police force, but it was still young and did not yet command sufficient moral respect to give prestige to an occupation that necessarily appeared infamous to the old gentiles.[947]

Barely mentioned by Athenian apologists like Zimmern, never mentioned by Bookchin, the police were numerous and ubiquitous: “The ‘Scythians’ as they are called from their usual land of origin, or the ‘bowmen’ from their special weapon, which incidentally makes a convenient cudgel in a street brawl. There are 1200 of them [another estimate is 300], always at the disposal of the city magistrates. They patrol the town at night, arrest evil-doers, sustain law and order in the Agora, and especially enforce decorum, if the public assemblies or the jury courts become tumultuous.”[948] The use of foreign slaves (equipped with bow, whip and saber) as a public force anticipates the Janissaries of Turkey and the Mamlukes of Egypt. In our time another dubiously democratic city-state, Singapore, uses foreigners — Gurkhas — as its political police. Here the Athenian penchant for amateurism and taking turns has slammed to a stop.

It goes without without saying that the slave police stood ready to repress revolt. In “Lysistrata,” when the women staged a sex strike (is this the first General Strike?) and occupied the Acropolis, it was the Scythian police who were routed trying to retake the place.[949] It is where a regime seems to act out of character that one should look for its secrets. The Athenians did not trust each other with police powers because they would put them, as they put everything, to political use. It’s happened in other urban democracies, namely, American cities — whose police traditionally were also foreign-born, tools of the political machine, and disrespected by the citizens. Nearly all discussions of the Athenian polity assume that it lacked that state requisite, a distinct coercive force. Here it is: “Athens was no different [from other states], having a prison and prison officials, the Eleven, who were responsible for some aspects of the public order. The Eleven had at their disposal a group of public slaves who functioned inter alia as prison attendants, executioners, and police.”[950]

Conclusion: Without denying the assembly’s broad power, so much authority was vested elsewhere, in critical matters (law enforcement, the military, foreign affairs, initiating legislation) and other areas less critical but still important (local government, citizenship, religious practice), that Athens could not be said to have been governed in substantially all important respects by the assembly.

At Least a Substantial Minority of Adult Males are Enfranchised. One estimate of population in fifth-century Athens is 250,000 to 300,000. That includes 30,000 adult male citizens, 25,000 metics, and 80,000 slaves, as well as the women and children of citizens. Citizens were thus not more than 30% of the adult male population,[951] and 12% of the total population, probably less — evidently enough to satisfy Bookchin, but others might find that rather small for the exemplary direct democracy of all time. If we count the subject people of the over 200 cities in the Athenian Empire (see below), who had no political rights in Athens, then the Athenian citizen body appears in its true character as a narrow oligarchy.

At Least a Substantial Minority of Citizens Attend the Assembly. There were 20,000–40,000 citizens eligible to attend the assembly. Bookchin always says 40,000 to make Athens look less oligarchic, but it was probably much less, and by the close of the Peloponnesian War it was certainly much less, 21,000–25,000. A recent estimate of how many usually attended the assembly is approximately 6,000, which was also the quorum for certain decisions (for most decisions there was no quorum). That is also the number of people who could find room on the Pnyx, the hillside which was the usual meeting place. Another estimate is that one-seventh to one-fifth of the citizens attended.[952] Thus the typical assembly meeting involved 2%-2.4% of the entire population, excluding powerless imperial subjects. It is easy to consider this system an oligarchy.

How many have to participate to make participatory democracy meaningful is of course somewhat arbitrary and subjective. Bookchin, normally so loquacious, is silent on this crucial issue, but what he calls “the zeal with which the Greeks served their communities”[953] is not conspicuous at Athens. I find 15–30% of eligibles to be startlingly low, considering the inducements to attend. The Athenian citizen’s vote counted for far more than anyone’s vote in a modern representative democracy. The anti-individualist public-service ideology encouraged attendance, which in theory was compulsory. Many citizens were free for assembly meetings and other political responsibilities because their slaves relieved them of the need to work. Slave ownership was very widespread above the pauper class: it is said that “every Athenian citizen tries to have at least one slave.”[954]

In theory, attendance was compulsory, but attendance must have fallen to what was considered too low a level, judging from what was initiated at the beginning of the fourth century B.C: payment for attendance. The majority attended because they were paid to. Payment was instituted, according to Aristotle, because previously “the people would not come.”[955] One fourth-century politico, Demades, sounding like a Tammany ward heeler, called the payments “the glue of the democracy.”[956] Bookchin opposes both compulsion and payment to secure attendance, so in this respect he concedes an Athenian departure from democracy. He says that citizens were paid to participate only “in the declining period of the polis.”[957] Yes, but before that they had to be compelled, which is no better. Either way, the point is that most Athenians were at no time civic-minded enough to exercise their democratic birthright without extrinsic inducement, and usually not even then. In their indifference to politics, they resemble the citizens of all states, always and everywhere.

Nonprofessional Army or Militia. Athens had a nonprofessional army, all right: it had a conscript army. And beginning after the Peloponnesian War, Athenian male citizens aged 18–20 underwent compulsory military service and performed garrison duty.[958] Thereafter they were called up as required, up to age 60, an age attained by very few. The conscripts were paid. No doubt most of them went to war willingly to protect their privileges, but the fact remains: military conscription is the essence of statism and the antithesis of anarchy.

Federation with Other Cities. Athens belonged to a federation in only an ironic sense. She emerged from the Peloponnesian War as the head of the Delian League (478/477 B.C.), an anti-Persian defensive alliance which Athens, as treasurer and by far the strongest military power, converted into a tributary empire in 454 B.C. When the allied cities (there were almost 200 of them) revolted or fell in arrears on their tribute payments, they were subjugated.[959] In 452 B.C., Athens appropriated the league treasury, providing funds for general purposes including the major public works program which built the Parthenon and employed many poor citizens.[960]

A federation is voluntary by definition. The Athenian empire was not confined to states whose membership was initially voluntary. Athens added others by outright conquest. The most famous example is Melos, an island which maintained its neutrality during the Peloponnesian War for 16 years until Athens sent an army and fleet to compel submission. In the famous dialogue with the Melians, the Athenian representatives claimed no right but the right of the stronger: “Our opinion of the gods and our knowledge of men lead us to conclude that it is a general and necessary law of nature to rule whatever one can.” When the Melians refused the ultimatum, the Athenians besieged the Melians — starving them out, as Aristophanes casually remarks — until they surrendered; then they killed the men, enslaved the women and children, and planted a colony of their own.[961]

A cardinal principle of federation is nonintervention in the internal affairs of the members. Athens actively intervened to support or install democratic, i.e., puppet regimes, installed garrisons, and sent out officials to guide the local magistrates and archons. According to a contemporary critic known as the Old Oligarch, “they realize that it is inevitable that an imperial power will be hated by its subjects ... that is why they disfranchize the respectable element and fine, exile or kill them, but support the masses.” In the imperial context, “democracy” meant rule by the pro-Athenian faction: “the word demokratia in the fifth century had emotive force but little empirical content.”[962] The Athenians were not always welcomed as liberators; oligarchy must have had some popular support if most city-states were oligarchies. In 441 B.C., Athens seized Samos, took hostages, and installed a democracy. Soon the Samians revolted and set up an oligarchy. After an eight-month siege, Athens reconquered the island and imposed democracy again. Ironically, then, the oligarchic revolt had popular support.[963] This was positive freedom at its most muscular. This was not without precedent. In the anti-Persian revolt of the Ionian cities which brought on the Persian Wars, the revolutionaries often replaced democracies with tyrannies. When the Persians regained control, they ousted the tyrants and restored democracy![964]

To speak of an “Athenian empire” (his ironic quotation marks) is, according to the Director Emeritus, “overstated.”[965] Tell it to the Melians. Other Greeks spoke of the “rule” (arkhe) of the Athenians over their ostensible allies. The Athenians themselves were unapologetic, not shysterly about their imperialism. Pericles, the principal architect of empire, was frank about its nature: “Your empire is now like a tyranny: it may have been wrong to take it; it is certainly dangerous to let it go.” He should know: he raised the tribute by 33%. His successor Cleon, also a general, told the assembly “that your empire is a tyranny exercised over subjects who do not like it and who are always plotting against you.”[966] Thucydides, relating the various reasons Athenians supported the disastrous Sicilian expedition, mentions that “the general masses and the average soldier himself saw the prospect of getting pay for the time being and of adding to the empire so as to assure permanent paid employment in future.”[967] The citizens were regularly reminded of their imperialism: every year, during the Great Dyonisia festival when the tragedians competed, “there was a display of the tribute that had been paid by the subject states in Athens’ empire.”

Athenian domination went well beyond exploitation: “In addition to their military and financial responsibilities, fifth-century Athens required the states it ruled to adopt its coinage, present legal cases to its juries, and even to honor its deities and make religious contributions to Athens as if [they were] its colonies.” Athens planted some 10,000 colonists amid the territories of their subjects or where the original inhabitants had been, like the Melians, exterminated: thus “the most naked kind of imperial exploitation directly benefited perhaps 8–10 per cent of the Athenian citizen body.”[968]

So far, with little help from Bookchin, we have toiled to measure Athens by his own standards of direct democracy, and found it more or less wanting in every way. But he is not the only one with ideas about what a democracy should be. He invokes Rousseau’s “praise of the Greek popular assembly based on face to face democracy.” No such praise is to be found in Rousseau. Like Machiavelli before him, Rousseau “was seized by a fervid passion for the Spartans which led him to deploy the Athenians as a foil to their legendary virtues.” Rousseau, the great (and almost the only) theorist of direct democracy, thought that “Athens was in fact not a Democracy, but a very tyrannical Aristocracy, governed by philosophers and orators.”[969] As I am not a democrat, I am not putting forward my own requirements, but rather address a point which democrats have usually considered essential.

I refer to individual rights, especially freedom of speech. There was no individual freedom in ancient Greece. Most scholars agree that the ancient Greeks had no rights as we understand them and no conception of rights, much less natural or constitutional rights. Indeed they had no concept of the individual — as even the Director Emeritus comes close to admitting — in this respect resembling some primitive peoples, such as the Jívaro headhunters.[970] There was almost no “negative freedom.”[971] There was formal protection against only a few flagrant abuses, such as execution without trial.[972] In principle, the state was absolute. The best example is ostracism, by which a citizen, without any charge of wrongdoing, could be exiled by majority vote (by secret ballot, unlike usual Athenian practice). With, no doubt, some bias, Aristotle stated that ostracism removed those superior in virtue, wealth and abundance of friends, or some other kind of political strength. Plutarch says it was applied to those “whose station exposed them to envy.” In the American system this is known as a bill of attainder and it is unconstitutional. Ostracism could be imposed almost frivolously. Aristides the Just was ostracized by citizens who were tired of hearing him called “the Just.” Victor Ehrenberg has written: “When we read the names of Aristeides, Thermistocles, Cimon, etc., scratched on ancient potsherds, often wrongly spelt, we may be excused from casting some doubt on the propriety of popular sovereignty.”[973] As Benjamin Constant observed, ostracism rests on the assumption that society has total control over its members. As a modern scholar also observes, “ostracism symbolizes the ultimate power of the community over the individual and the individual’s relative lack of rights against the community.”[974]

In Athens, the law may permit this or that privilege from time to time, but there is no notion of a claim to an entitlement as against the state. What at first glance looks like a right, the honor (time) of holding office, is more like a duty.[975] And that is the secret of the Athenian state and its law: it proceeds from the assumption that the citizen exists to serve the state, not the state to serve the citizen. Thucydides has the Corinthian delegation to the Spartans say about the Athenians, “as for their bodies, they regard them as expendable for their city’s sake, as though they were not their own.” Similarly, freedom of speech means freedom to speak in the assembly. In contrast, most of our rights are instrumental for the accomplishment of our diverse nonpolitical ends.[976] Socrates was not the only philosopher to be silenced. The philosophers Anaxagoras, who was Pericles’ teacher, and Protagoras were ostracized. The books of Anaxagoras were ordered burned in the agora — the earliest known case of book-burning.[977] Even Aristophanes was prosecuted for slandering Pericles’ successor, Cleon. The prosecution of Socrates for the vague and undefined crime of “impiety” was not exceptional. Athenian democracy recognized no rights of conscience. Whether Socrates was guilty as charged is, for present purposes, beside the point, which is: disbelief in the traditional gods was a capital crime.[978]

As for the extreme patriarchal dimension of the Athenian state and society, it would take a book to describe it. Happily, that book has already been written: The Reign of the Phallus by Eva C. Keuls. I am sometimes dubious, at best, about what is supposed to be feminist scholarship, but this one’s a slam dunk. The plentiful illustrations alone, which rarely appear in print and never massed as they are here, would indict the Athenians as phallocrats even without any text. I’ll just quote the first sentence of the book:

In the case of a society dominated by men who sequester their wives and daughters, denigrate the female role in reproduction, erect [!] monuments to the male genitalia, have sex with the sons of their peers, sponsor public whorehouses, create a mythology of rape, and engage in rampant saber-rattling, it is not inappropriate to refer to a reign of the phallus. Classical Athens was such a society.[979]

Without having undertaken systematic comparative history, my casual opinion is that I know of no Western society in any period which was as oppressive and devaluing of women as Murray Bookchin’s Athens.

The reader who has persevered this far is in for a real treat: Murray Bookchin’s own arguments why Athens was not a state. Finding even as many as I did was what the ex-Director used to call (one of his redundant tautologies) arduous toil. He has usually been offhanded or dismissive, as if there were no serious issue about Athenian statism. Some of the following comments possibly were not even intended to be arguments. With him it’s hard to tell.

Athens had a “state” in a very limited and piecemeal sense. Despite its governmental system for dealing with a sizable slave population, the “state” as we know it in modern times could hardly be said to exist among the Greeks, unless we are so reductionist as to view any system of authority and rule as statist. Such a view would grossly oversimplify the actual conditions under which people lived in the “civilized world.”[980][Why the quotation marks? Is Athens uncivilized?]

Of course the state as we know it in modern times did not exist in ancient times. The question is whether Athens was a state, not whether it was a modern state. The subject, “state,” takes several predicates: archaic state, patrimonial state, nation-state, capitalist state, city-state, feudal state, degenerated workers’ state, modern state, even “theater state”[981] and — why not? — post-modern state. If calling Athens a state grossly oversimplifies the living conditions of its people, than calling any political system a state grossly oversimplifies the living conditions of its people. The word “state” is not designed for characterizing living conditions. There are other words for that. And the implication that the “governmental system” was only for controlling the slaves is false.

Whether authority and rule are statist depends on what you mean by authority, rule, and state. The implication is that Athens had authority and rule, but no state. Something is missing. But what? The Director Emeritus does not say. Elsewhere, he makes clear that domination and rule are the same thing, namely, hierarchy, which in turn is the same thing as the state![982] All he is doing is chasing his tail.

To consider Athens a state, “we would have to assume that the notion of a state is consistent with a body politic of some forty thousand male citizens, admittedly an elite when placed against a still larger population of adult males possibly three times that number who were slaves and disenfranchized resident aliens. Yet the citizens of Athens could hardly be called a ‘class’ in any meaningful sense of the term.”[983]

Apparently, the number of enfranchised Athenian citizens is, absolutely or relatively, relevant to whether they are the citizens of a state. Bookchin gives no reason why. He cannot mean 40,000 is too large, because the enfranchised citizen population of India is hundreds of millions, yet India is a state. He cannot mean that 40,000 is too small, because the Spartiate class in Sparta at its peak numbered barely 5,000,[984] yet Sparta was a state. Unless Bookchin were to take the position that Sparta was not a state, in which case none of the Greek cities were states, and Hellenic civilization was entirely anarchist. But in fact the Director Emeritus has referred to the Spartan State.[985] There have certainly been many ruling elites, taking in several thousand years and most parts of the world, which numbered less than 20,000–40,000, and there have been many that numbered more. The English electorate in 1704 was 200,000, or about one in thirty of the population — a manageable number in more ways than one. In pre-contact Nigeria, the kingdom of Shani consisted of three towns and the population of the town-state of Gulani was 2,000–3,000.[986]

This line of argument is also dispositive if relative numbers are determinative. The only possible meaning then is that when 25% of a body politic is enfranchised citizens, that is too large for the polity to be a state. But again, in the modern world, universal suffrage is indeed universal, so there are today much higher proportions of citizen voters in all the democracies, which are states.

Finally, whether or not the Athenian citizenry was a “class” is irrelevant to whether or not the polity was a state. The American electorate is not a class, but America is a state.

We would also have to assume that the notion of a state is consistent with a consciously amateur system of governance, based on almost weekly popular assemblies, a judicial system structured around huge juries that represent the assemblies on an attenuated scale, the selection and rotation of civic officials by sortition, that is, the use of the lot, and the absence of any political professionalism or bureaucratism, including military forces that are authentic militias of armed citizens instead of professional soldiers.[987]

The presence of some oddball features does not imply that a polity is not a state. Some other indubitable states have had consciously amateur systems of governance. As discussed in Chapter 13, colonial America employed such systems. To a slightly lesser extent, so did medieval England, whose system was so decentralized and participatory that one historian calls it “self-government at the king’s command” and considers it proto-democratic.[988] There was no police force, and local face-to-face judicial institutions like tithings and hundreds performed most of the day-to-day work of social control.[989] There was no well-defined judicial hierarchy.[990] Juries were not as large as at Athens, but they were impaneled often, for a variety of purposes. The preeminent royal courts at Westminster had only twelve judges. Parliament rarely convened, and in the earlier part of the period it did not exist. There were no tax collectors and, usually, no taxes. There was no capital city; the king, like his judges, perambulated. The military, when it was raised, was a combination of feudal levies and mercenaries under the amateur leadership of feudal lords. Except for the central courts and the Exchequer, there was almost nothing in the way of a central administration. Clearly this was not a state “in the modern sense,” but no one has ever doubted that it was a state.

Despite slavery, imperialism and the degradation of women, “by the same token, we cannot ignore the fact that classical Athens was historically unique, indeed unprecedented, in much of human history, because of the democratic forms it created, the extent to which they worked, and its faith in the competence of its citizens to manage public affairs.”[991]

Read one way, the argument is that a social organization which is historically unique, or perhaps very historically unique, is not a state. But every state is historically unique. Athens was freakish, all right, but so was Sparta, whose government — drawn from a hereditary military class living off a class of state serfs — consisted of a popular assembly, a council of elders, magistrates (ephors), and two kings! As one of its historians remarks with some understatement, “the political development of Sparta was abnormal.” David Hume wrote: “Were the testimony of history less positive and circumstantial, such a government would appear a mere philosophical whim or fiction and impossible ever to be reduced to practice.” Nonetheless, Bookchin confirms that Sparta was a state.[992]

Read another way, the claim is that Athens was not a state because it had democratic institutions; these institutions worked; and the citizens believed in them. In other words, a democracy is not a state. But that begs the question, which is precisely whether a democracy is a state. The rest is verbiage. That governmental institutions work effectively does not make them democratic. The Chinese mandarinate and the Prussian civil service functioned effectively in the service of states. Victorious armies, be they Roman, Mongol, Napoleonic or Nazi, have been effective, but they served states. Finally, to believe that a polity is democratic does not mean that it is democratic. Many people believe that the United States government is democratic, but according to the Director Emeritus, it is not.

Statecraft refers to “armies, bureaucrats, judicial systems, police, and the like.”[993]

With the debatable exception of bureaucracy, Athens had all these institutions “and the like.” Even if, as Bookchin claims, there are “degrees of statehood,”[994] Athens exhibits a high degree of statehood. We considered states which had less of these enumerated attributes than Athens did. Zululand, Norway, and Mongolia lacked bureaucrats, judicial systems and police, but they were states. Colonial America lacked bureaucrats, police and armies, but it was part of an imperial state. Statecraft does not refer to armies, bureaucrats, judicial systems and police. Statecraft refers to “the art of conducting State affairs; statesmanship.”[995] It refers to the behavior of government officials, not to the institutions of government, whatever they might be.

Perhaps the basic flaw in the system is ideological. For the ancients — for the Athenians — there was no connection between freedom and equality. In this respect it is interesting that Bookchin, when he identifies “the most basic principles” of leftism, or the “fourfold tenets” of anarchism, omits equality.[996] It is not something he often discusses. Even while trumpeting his renewed allegiance to leftism, he neglects its fundamental value. Indifference to equality accounts for his indifference to Athenian racism, slavery, patriarchy, imperialism, and even poorly attended assembly meetings, be they in ancient Athens or in tomorrow’s Communes. What he really wants is not democracy, except as a mystifying façade, but rather a meritocracy of mouth.

The time has come for the judgment of Athena. As even Bookchin concedes, where there is rule, there is a state. Aristotle confirms in several places that democracy is a system in which the citizens rule and are ruled in turn: “One principle is for all to rule and be ruled in turn.”[997] Anarchism is the refusal of both roles. As it is phrased in a poem by John Henry Mackay and quoted approvingly by Emma Goldman:

I am an Anarchist! Wherefore I will
Not rule, and also ruled I will not be.[998]

Athens was a state. In fact, I agree with Hans Gerth and C. Wright Mills: Athens was a totalitarian state![999] — but I’ll demonstrate that some other time. For now, just this: Murray Bookchin is a statist.