Chapter 1 : 
Land and City
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People :
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Author : Murray Bookchin

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1. Land and City

 
Cities play an indisputably dominant role in modern life. They visibly
decide the development of modern society. It would thus seem that once
urban communities arose, they quickly achieved a leading position and, like
our own cities, entered into an overbearing antagonism with the
countryside.

But there was a time when urban life was either subordinated to or in
balance with the countryside. The development of social relations through
much of precapitalist history’did not definitively depend upon the
development of city life until the late Middle Ages, when cities became the
precursors of an authentic bourgeois economy. It is easily forgotten that
most of human history is occupied with women and men as food cultivators,
and that the social wealth of the past came primarily from agricultural
pursuits. Moreover, agrarian society was itself the product of a long and
complex evolution, involving different forms of land tenure and social
relations. From the more or less communal forms of horticulture practiced
by early clans and tribes, agrarian society advanced through the Asian land
system with its paramount monarchies to feudalism and to an agricultural
society based on an independent peasantry. The problems of this long period
were, primarily agrarian problems and the greatest economic weight lay not
in cities but in the countryside, or at least among social classes based on
the land.

All cities constitute an antithesis to the land. They are a break in the
solidity of agrarian conditions, a germ of negalion in the agrarian
community. At the same time, however, rural life summons forth the city
from its own inner development as a division of labor between crafts and
trade on the one hand, and relatively self-sufficient agriculttural
communities on the other. The emerging city begins by reflecting the social
relations in the countryside so that there are different cities more or
less corresponding to different forms of agrarian society. In various
phases of social development, the City is raised from a distinctly
subordinate position to one of equilibrium with the countryside and may
remain so for long periods of time or, after overstepping the limits of its
rural base, finally yield to the hegemony of the land when the two become
clearly incompatible. Viewed over most of precapitalist history, city life
did not have as complete an urban basis as it seems to have today. Urban
centers were largely the foci of surrounding agrarian relations. They were
horticultural clan cities, Asian cities. Feudal cities, and even peasant
and yeoman cities. Urban life could be clearly understood only by searching
back to the economic relationships that prevailed in the agricultural
environs. Although city life acquired social forces of its own and often
entered into contradiction with the land, the agrarian economy established,
the historical limits for almost every Urban development.

This can be demonstrated quite clearly by a number of examples, An
illustration of the earliest cities can be drawn from descriptions of the
Aztec “capital” of Tenochtitlan, encountered by Spanish conquistadores
only three centuries ago. At first glance, the community is deceptively
similar in appearance to a modern city. Although architecture and the
design of life were “exotic,” the dimensions of the city, the height of
its structures, and the lateness of its discovery by white men seem to
place it closer to the end rather than the beginning of urban history.
According to George C. Vaillant, to the Spanish invaders who first saw it,
“in contrast to the drab towns and tawny bills of Spain, Tenochtitlan
must have appeared a paradise, for its green gardens and white buildings
were set in the midst of blue lakes, ringed by lofty mountains.” [2]
Vaillant quotes Bernal Diaz, one of Cortes’s soldiers:
 

 
Gazing on such wonderful sights, we did not know what to say or whether
what appeared before us was real, for on one Side in the land were great
Cities and the lake itself was crowded with canoes, and in the causeway
were many bridges at intervals, and in front of us stood the City of
Mexico.[3]
 

 
But Diaz was not a provincial gazing spellbound at a cosmopolis, nor were
the towns of Spain merely villages by comparison with Tenochtitlan. A
closer, perhaps intellectually more ruthless view suggests that the
brilliance of the Mexican city consisted largely of externals The city’s
resemblance to a modern urban center rests on its lofty religious
structures, its spacious plazas for ceremonies, its palaces and
administrative buildings. Looking beyond these structures, the city in many
respects was very likely a grossly oversize pueblo community

It would be difficult to understand clearly the nature of Tenochtitlan
without directing attention to the clan structure and horticultural basis
of Aztec society. Although the city was unusually large for such a
traditional society, the horticultural activities of the clans reached
directly into the urban community. Together with religious and military
affairs, the coordination of clans for social and economic activities
formed the major interest of the city’s governing bodies. So complete was
the integration of land and city, indeed the supremacy of agrarian
interests over uniquely urban ones, that the Aztecs never quite developed
money. Exchange normally proceeded on a barter basis — that is to say, on
a village basis — ’equalized, by cacao beans when the value of one
commodity exceeded that of another. The city dweller was born into a
complex body of social relationships that essentially developed from life
on the land. His position in society was defined by hereditary roots in
groups of kinfolk and blood relationships. The clan formed the matrix of
the Aztecs civic, social, and cultural life.

The city, to be sure, differentiated a sizable portion of the populace from
their older agrarian elan ties, creating craftsmen and traders. But these
groups were also obliged to participate in the traditional social scheme,
formally duplicating relationships developed in the countryside. Vaillant
observes:
 

 
The opening of intertribal contact through settlement and warfare and the
growth of material and ritualistic wants led to the establishment of a
class, the pochteca. whose members traveled all over Mexico, exchanging
local for foreign produce. [4]
 

 
The pochteca, however, “had their own god, and apparently lived in a
special quarter” in a manner similar to other clans in the community.
They held a position within the city or as part of it, not as its leaders;
they did not represent the city like the burghers in the medieval towns and
the modern bourgeoisie.

Although a centralized monarchical “capital,” Tenochtiilan was managed
by four executive officers and a variety of nobles who adjudicated disputes
between the clans and cared for military affairs. Within this
infrastructure, from the lowest lineages to the highest, power was a
function of a very complex social stratification. Vaillant notes that the
 

 
continual election of such high officers of the same family or lineage,
when democratic procedure obtained elsewhere, is harder to explain.
Tradition is strong in primitive communities, and a family that produced
one effective man might in the next generation produce another.[5]
 

 
More recent evidence reveals that the “democratic procedure” to which
Vaillant gives so much emphasis had in fact waned to a point where the city
council of Tenochtitlan, once a fairly democratic body composed of clan
loaders, was appointed by the monarchy and largely controlled by the ruling
stratum, By the time of the Spanish conquest, Aztec society had become a
highly complex hierarchy of nobles and commoners, a hierarchy Still based
on kin ties and superimposed on a clan structure, but one that may have
been drifting toward art increasingly territorial form of social life. How
fair the society might have developed in this direction — or, quite
possibly, in the direction of a rigid centralized structure similar to the
“state communism” of the Inca empire — will never be known. The
Spanish conquest brought the Aztec development to an end and completely
demolished its internal Structure.

This urban society, viewed from the standpoint of its clan relationships,
may have existed for centuries in Mesoamerica before it was encountered by
white men. The Aztec and Inca empires seem to have marked the culmination
of the Indian urban tradition in the Americas, perhaps its outermost
limits. Generally, throughout Mesoamerica, as one city arose, another
declined in eminence; a continual rising arid falling of cities was the
rule. Once the old administrative structure was demolished in a given area
— perhaps owing to land exhaustion or war — the city disappeared, only
to reappear elsewhere when Favorable conditions for urbanism developed.
These cities arose, flourished, and often vanished without abolishing the
clan structure.

It is fair to say that the American Indian city up to the Spanish conquest
was essentially rooted in the clan or in similar kinship structures. As
time passed and as populations increased, a tendency emerged to extend the
“plan of government” (to borrow Lewis H. Morgan’s phrase) from clan
to tribe and from tribe to tribal federation. This tendency must be seen as
a quantitative linking of clan to clan, a colonization by social affinity
of relatively self-sufficient, socio-natural organisms along increasingly
hierarchical lines. Attempts to relate the Aztec and Inca empires to the
historical city and landed aristocracy of Europe, despite their many
similarities, are often misleading. An American Indian analog to the
historical cities of Europe and the Mediterranean basin would be meaningful
if clan society had so completely decomposed that it yielded a class
society based on territorial rather than kinship ties and eventually on the
private ownership and control of social wealth. No such qualitative
transformation actually occurred in Mesoamerica before the conquest.
Generally, where the pressures of scarcity and survival abated in parts of
Indian America, there emerged a fairly unified community, often
superficially urban in character, that tended to integrate rather than
exacerbate internal divergences. “There was little to harass the
individual intellectually or economically,” observes Vaillant,
 

 
Existence was subject to divine favor, and a man fared much as did bits
fellows. Large as some towns were — Mexico City [Tenochtitlan] had
300,000 people — the sense of community was strong. Freedom of thought,
individual liberty, personal Fortunes, were nonexistent, but people lived
according to a code that had worked well and continuously for centuries. An
Aztec would have been horrified at the marked isolation of an
individual’s life in our Western world. [6]
 

 
Viewed from the base of society, the clan established the limits of this
type of urban life. The city was the product of the clan and was seen as
the shelter of the clan’s federative tendencies.



History, conceived as the account of conflicting social interests, begins
when the external means for expropriating material surpluses (notably, war
and pillage) are internalized as systematic modes of exploitation,
restructuring the clan and transforming social life from within.
Society’s transcendence of the clan is the greatest and most significant
Single development of the ancient world. Humanity is exiled from a
harmonized universe to the realm of social contradiction, where the
problems of material want are Fell as harsh antagonisms between one stratum
and another. Society becomes one-sided and incomplete, disrupting the
balance within the human community and between humanity and the natural
world. Mankind is propelled on a restless journey to round out social life
on a higher equilibrium. It should not surprise us that the internal
reworking of the clan, and later, its complete destruction, involves a more
decisive technological revolution than any development known before. The
division of tabor expands and new strata are set apart from agricultural
work, each of which crystallizes into a social class with special interests
that are often in sharp opposition to the interests of other classes.

So far removed, as yet, are the early cities from the urban mainstream of
history that changes in clan society arise from technological developments
in the countryside rather than in the towns, notably the domestication of
animals and the discovery of plow agriculture. With this new mode of
agriculture, the clan ceases to be a precondition for social life. To have
eliminated the clan in Indian America would have completely disrupted the
material basis of society: without a highly dedicated, socially responsible
labor force that alone could have provided the intensive cultivation
required by maize and by a technology that had not advanced beyond the hoe
and human muscle power, it is doubtful if the substantial material
surpluses needed to sustain large cities would have been available in
Mexico and Peru. Indian food cultivation on such a scale was possible only
under social conditions in which people related to each other as kinfolk
rather than isolated urban citizens. The significance of the clan structure
becomes all the more evident if we hear in mind that food cultivation in
areas like the Peruvian Andes depended in large part on terracing barren
mountainous regions with soil painstakingly collected from distant
lowlands. As Edward Hyams observes, owing to the fact that
 

 
they were Forced, in the Andes ... to create their soils in order to
expand, ... they were forced to retain ... the ancient structure of
society, at least in so far as it related to systems of land-tenure and
land working. In the absence of machinery or of an advanced slave-owning
economy, large works of terracing, or reclamation and of irrigation can
only be carried out by communal efforts and common labor.... There has
probably never been, unless under European Feudalism, a system in which
agricultural practice and social organization were so locked together in a
perfect artifact of the mind and spirit And nothing makes this clearer than
the results which followed the imposition of the European system and
religion on the Andeans. The soil was not directly attacked for the
Spaniards were at first interested only in gold, but the social organism
was destroyed and at once the soil itself began to die. [7]
 

 
With the discovery of the plow and the broadcast sowing of hardy grains in
the Near East — as well as the general application of animal labor to the
tilling of the land — agriculture became extensive rather than intensive.
Food cultivation now required a fraction of the work needed to achieve
corresponding outputs in the Americas. But if the elan was no longer a
limit to further social changes, neither was it, at least initially, an
obstacle. Indeed, it persisted as a basic form of social relationship and
labor mobilization well into historical times. Here, were would do well to
emphasize that humanity does not casually change its social structures,
particularly if they have been sanctified by millennia of development and
the weight of tradition. Retrospectively, we might comfortably entertain
many alternative’s to the historical development that actually occurred,
perhaps to suggest more rational and humanistic lines of social evolution.
But if nothing else, history teaches us that old institutions are rarely
changed until their possibilities have been largely exhausted. Clan society
was especially durable. Even where it exists today, it remains the most
stable form of human association thus far developed. Perhaps no institution
following it Fostered as deep a sense of solidarity, mutual aid, and
supportive comfort to the individual. Owing to their natural basis in
kinship ties, clans proved to be the most intimate and perhaps satisfying
social forms devised by humanity. Accordingly, the clan tended to
perpetuate itself against compelling social forces that easily overwhelmed
or drastically altered other Forms of human association.

At first, the new plow and field economy did not appreciably alter the
social Forms based on the hoe and gardening economy of an earlier epoch.
The evolution of one system into another, in Fact, proceeded so subtly and
organically that it is often difficult to delineate the social distinctions
between the two. Variations occurred in communal property and in the old
nature religions, but communal systems of property persisted For a long
time under new forms of social administration. Even the clans lingered on
vestigially, if not intact, well into advanced historical periods. Formally
speaking, the successors of the traditional clan system emerged when tribal
chiefs, prominent warriors, or a consolidated priestly caste succeeded in
becoming the solo proprietors of the land. They seasonally allocated plots
for cultivation among the clansfolk, and collected agricultural surpluses
presumably for use by the community as a whole. The change from the old
social forms to the new assumed the character of a shift in emphasis rather
than a total rupture with the past — a change in the original communal
system that seemed to consist in enlarging its social functions and
dimensions.

In time, however, the clan form was so thoroughly divested of its original
content as the determining factor in social Life that it became little more
than a device for allocating labor and resources. Claus lost virtually all
of their influence in the administration of the community. In the hands of
ruthless authorities, clans often became the instruments of their
self-exploitation and plunder, The change from older equalitarian relations
in Egypt and Mesopotamia to new systems of exploitation and class
stratification was not quite accepted passively by the oppressed; indeed,
the archaeological record attests to widespread popular revolts and
interregnums of social disorder in which futile attempts were made to
restore the old order of things. Interestingly, apart from separatist
tendencies and uprisings by conquered populations, no internal social
conflicts of such magnitude are known t o the civilizations of Indian
America, for the preoccupation of dominated tribes in this region was not
with the social structure as such, notably its clan form, but with the
tribute which was claimed by domineering tribes such as the Aztec rulers of
Mexico.

We owe largely to Marx the term “Asian land system” as the designation
of a mode of agriculture in which land is still inalienable, indeed
communally worked, but its management is controlled by a powerful state
apparatus. [8] Possibly the most archaic of class societies, its elements
tend to appear whenever tribal society has begun to disintegrate and the
need for viable clan structures has been removed by the economic
development of the community. The Asian land system appears not only in
early Egypt and Mesopotamia, but in a nascent form when agrarian kingships
were established over the Greek, Roman„ and German tribes during the era
of their settlement on the land. In all such cases, we see evidence that
society is trying to formulate a compromise between a time-honored
tradition that land is inalienable and belongs to the community as a whole
with new tendencies toward private proprietorship in land or, at least,
control of agricultural surpluses by a privileged stratum. Within these
archaic parameters, exploitation of human by human emerges even before
private property in land and resources has been firmly established. With
the Asian land system, we encounter a society that enjoys a durability
comparable to that of the clan structure: in Egypt, Mesopotamia, India, and
China, it remained the basis of social relations For thousands of years;
indeed, apart from Mesopotamia;, it was not substantially eroded until:
fairly modern times. Nor is it difficult to understand why these
civilizations, largely alluvial ones, failed to advance into propertied
forms of Society, Irrigation, by virtue of its technical requirements,
festers cooperative if not public forms of agricultural management.[9] In
the ancient world, a world stilt heir to social ownership of land and a
communal organization of labor, a society based on irrigation necessarily
retained elements of the archaic clan and tribal structure, albeit in a
highly centralized statist framework. Insofar as the cultivation of food
required the coordinated management of water resources and an extensive
system of canals, any regional particularism — much less any development
of private property — would have vitiated the success of agriculture.
Christopher Dawson observes:
 

 
The conversion of the jungles and swamps of the prehistoric valley into the
rich cornlands which made Egypt the wonder of the world was only
accomplished by ages of communal coordinated effort The prosperity of the
country depends, not as in northern lands on the industry of the individual
peasant and his family, but on the organized labor of the irrigation dykes,
and on the fertilizing waters of the annual inundation, for land in itself
is valueless apart from the water which is supplied by the Nile and the
irrigation canals. From the earliest times the measurement of the Nile
flood and the maintenance of the irrigation works has been the primary duty
of every Egyptian Government. The ancient Egyptian year began on July 19,
the day that the inundation reached the neighborhood of the head of the
Delta, and as early as the First Dynasty the annual taxation was fixed
according to the level of the river, for the yield of the following harvest
depends entirely on a good Nile.... Hence the power which regulates and
controls the inundation is the master of the life and property of the whole
population, arid the principle of compulsory public labor — the corvee
— which elsewhere appears as a tyrannical infringement of the rights of
the individual, is in Egypt the necessary condition of all economic
life.[10]
 

 
Irrigation, by necessitating coordinated communal labor, Fostered state
centralization and bureaucratization. As early as the first Dynasty in
Egypt, we learn from the historical record of the existence of a vizier,
chancellor, chamberlain, master of ceremonies, royal architect.
Superintendent of Inundation, and so forth, down to a Keeper of the
King’s Cosmetic Box — in short, a wide spectrum of office holders,
selected largely from the leading families of the valley, who remind us
more of royal courtiers and bureaucrats than independent feudal nobles. In
Egypt, apart From claims made by the priesthood, the land belonged to the
Pharaoh. It was essentially in his name that local governors collected
tribute and tuxes in kind, which were thereupon stored in royal warehouses.
The peasantry, largely bound to the soil, was either left with a residue of
its produce or rewarded in kind from the public Fund. In Mesopotamia, these
privileges were preempted by priestly corporations, later to be transferred
to the person of a monarch who enjoyed an authority not dissimilar from
that of the Pharaonic power. In the course of time, this highly centralized
system broke down before the assault of the landed nobility, but it was
almost invariably reconstituted again, depending upon the vigor of
successive dynasties and usurpers. The Asian land system remained the baste
social form of Near Eastern and Oriental civilizations until modern times.

These agrarian societies are the key to understanding ancient city
development, for they not only advance but also limit the evolution of
urban life. Agrarian interests, owing to the centralized power and wealth
they command, subordinate the city to the land. Although many large and
ornate cities arose in Mesopotamia (and, to a lesser extent, in Egypt),
these urban communities did nut come into lasting balance with she
authority exercised by lauded classes. Commerce, crafts, anti new
industrial techniques were numerous, but these were placed in She service
of the agrarian strata. Urban wealth, instead of returning to a local
bourgeoisie in the form of capital accumulation, was expropriated by
monarchies, slate bureaucracies, and local governors. Capital formation, in
effect, was largely circumscribed and essentially arrested. The emergence
of an independent bourgeois class was blocked by taxes, imposts, and
state-owned enterprises.

The scale on which industry and commerce was plundered can be dealt with
Only summarily. As Late as Ptolemaic times, the Egyptian economy was
snarled in over two hundred taxes. The internal market of the valley was
effectively limited by a 10 percent sales tax, a 5 percent tax on home
rents, an inheritance tax and, except for privileged strata, a poll tax.
Wealthy classes were commonly burdened by costly liturgies and by
obligations to give “crowns” to the monarchy. Commodity taxes were
imposed not only at ports and frontier routes, but also at the borders of
provinces. Virtually all handicrafts and professions were licensed by the
state. Royal monopolies were established in the production of oil, papyrus,
textiles, and in mining and banking, while state enterprises competed with
the private sector in industries such as dyeing, leather, cosmetics,
perfumery, glass, pottery, and beer.

The economic controls exercised by the Ptolemaic pharaohs differed little
in principle from the regulations and Imposts that burdened commerce and
industry in nearly all the agrarian civilizations of the Near East and the
Orient, The first waves of commodity production, so essential to the
development of an authentic urban society, were thus scattered by the
massive boulders of lightly knit, state-managed agrarian economies.
Allowing for a few exceptions, City life became an ornament of agrarian
kingly power and the product of agricultural superfluity, not unlike the
huge monuments, temples, and mortuaries whose construction absorbed the
surplus labor and resources of Egypt and Mesopotamia. Within this social
arrangement, capital accumulation, which later formed the basis for an
independent bourgeoisie and for an industrial economy in Europe, was
virtually impossible under the Asian land system. While weathered by time,
the granite structure of this system never Fractured or shattered. For
thousands of years after the dawn of history, it persisted with surprising
endurance — while men elsewhere picked up the main thread of social
development and advanced to more promising and flexible urban forms.



After the first millennium B.C. a new agrarian system and a new mode of
urban life began to emerge on the northern shores of the Mediterranean Sea.
Pastoral tribes, filtering into the Greek promontory, conquered and
gradually mixed with preexisting stable agricultural communities, rapidly
developing away from tribal society. Hellenic society, allowing for its
many unique qualities, in its own way recapitulates the evolution of
agrarian kingships from communal relations to a loose kind of feudalism,
passing through social forms not unlike the Asian land system. That this
phase emerged prototypically is attested by a good deal of evidence from
archaic Creek culture. The legendary figure of Theseus seems to group under
a single name a number of Hellenic chieftains who organized the Creek
tribes into federations somewhat reminiscent of early Nilotic society.
“The first unquestionable fact which meets us in the life of this new
kind community is that it was originally governed by kings,” observes
William F Fowler.
 

 
The thing was expressed by various words — Basileus, Archon. Pyrtanis,
[and among the Latins] Hex, Dictator — but, so far as we know, it was
always I here in the childhood of the ancient State. Tradition, both in
Greece and Italy, always told of a time when the essential acts of
government were performed either by or under the authority of a single man;
and in this case we Can be sure that tradition was right. Both Thucydides
and Aristotle accepted it; at conservative Sparta the king himself survived
throughout her history; and at Athens and Home kingship left traces behind
it when it had vanished... [11]
 

 
Indeed, archaic Greek society found its esthetic inspiration in an
Orientalized art so alien to the sculpture which nourished during the later
classical period that it seems difficult to believe that the people who
produced the rigid, overstylized Apollo of Tenea could have shared any
historical relationship to those who sculpted the figures which adorned the
temples of Periclean Athens.

Yet we know that the relationship existed and we must find our explanation
for the differences between the two periods in the geography of southern
Europe, The rugged mountain terrain of Greece made it virtually impossible
to achieve the degree of political consolidation and centralism which so
conspicuously distinguishes the high Asian and Near Eastern civilizations.
Early Hellenic communities, like their Asian counterparts, invested land
ownership in chieftains, but the centrifugal forces which episodically
shaped Asian societies along feudal and particularistic lines became, in
Greece, the dominant factors which guided the development of the political
structure. By Homeric times, feudal vassalage rather than a highly
centralized state had become the basis of Greek federation. George Thompson
doubtless gives us an accurate picture of Homeric life when he notes that
the Creek king
 

 
lives in s palace on some rocky eminence, surrounded by the dwellings of
his vassals. The relation between king and vassal is such as we find in
similar conditions among the primitive Germans 2,000 years later In reward
for military service, the vassal holds in fee the rule of some portion of
the conquered territory, and in return he takes up arms for the king when
called on to do so. Such was the relation of Bellerophon to the King of
Lycia, of Phonix to the father of Achilles; and we remember how Odysseus
endeavored, but in vain, to evade military service. The vassal is entitled
to be consulted on matters of policy and to feed at the royal table. There
are many such councils in the Iliad, and in the 
Odyssey the offense of the suitors lies in their abuse of a recognized
privilege. Finally, each vassal stood in the relation of king to vassals of
his own, Odysseus was a vassal of Agamemnon’s, but to the princes of
Ithaca he was king. [12]
 

 
If the investiture of control over tribal lands in the person of agrarian
monarchs tends to disintegrate into feudalism unless the kingly authority
is reinforced by the social need to coordinate a complex irrigation system,
so feudalism, in turn, tends to give way to independent peasant communities
based on small-scale food cultivation, especially after commodity
production emerges in an agrarian society. The towns, freeing themselves
from the waning authority of the territorial lords, reaches back into the
countryside to replicate the same economic conditions which prevail in
urban marketplaces and workshops. Commodity relations and trade turn the
vassal and serf into independent peasants, the agrarian analog of the free
urban craftsman and master. This basic social tendency, as we shall see
later, was to be followed in late medieval Europe. In ancient Greece and
Italy, the development was considerably modified by the impact of
successive tribal invasions From the north and by the settlement of
craftsmen and traders from the more advanced Mediterranean civilizations.
The northern invaders reduced the older, preexisting agricultural
communities to the Status of serfs, while the conquerors often acquired a
quasi-peasant status, free in name if not in fact. Peasant and serf worked
the land side by side, each shading socially into the other’s position.
In time, a yeoman society of landed freeholders began to crystallize from
the fluid, often tumultuous conditions of a disintegrating system of feudal
land-tenure. A new kind of city now emerges, a city that forms the
political, cultural, and commercial center of free farmers and craftsmen
— each independent and producing primarily for the other in a remarkably
well-balanced economy.

By the sixth and fifth centuries B.C., a number of Greek cities already
began to resemble, at least superficially, the modern image of an urban
community. Athens, the Hellenic city with which we are most familiar,
probably supported some 30,000 male citizens (and if we add their women and
children, a total of 150,0001, perhaps 100,000 slaves, and an estimated
35,000 metics, or free aliens. During Athens’s classical period, the
city’s population may have well exceeded a quarter of a million.
Generally, we must conceive of the new Greek cities as independent urban
entities, freed from the suzerainty of territorial lords and landed
magnates. (This fact decisively distinguishes the Greek city-states or,
more accurately, poleis From the Cities of the Near East and Orient.) Urban
life now exists as an end in itself, not as a supplement to a rural
society, and enjoys art autonomy that would have been inconceivable within
the framework of the earlier Asian land system.

But the Hellenic cities are not truly modern cities in the political and
social sense of the term. As civic structures, they differ profoundly not
only from Asian cities but from the metropolises and even smaller cities of
our own era. What Strikes us at once about Athens, the most advanced of the
Greek cities, is that civic activity involves an exceptionally high degree
of public participation. All the policy decisions of the poiis are
formulated directly by a popular assembly, or Ecclesia, which every male
citizen from the city and its environs (Attica) is expected to attend. The
execution of the Ecclesia’s decisions falls to the authority of the
Council of Five Hundred, composed of elected citizens from all parts of
Attica, who, in groups of fifty, rotate their office every tenth of the
year. The practical aspects of urban administration are ordinarily
delegated by election or lot to public boards, not to a professional
bureaucracy — notably to nine Archons, ten elected Strategoi or generals,
boards of finance, education, dockyards, and so forth. Inasmuch as all the
civic agencies of Athens are reconstituted every year, it would seem that a
sizable number of ordinary citizens participate in tine executive bodies of
the city at any given time, William Fowler estimates that in the days of
Pericles, 1,900 citizens out of an adult population of 30,000 men were
actively engaged in the service of the city, thereby rendering wide public
participation an inherent feature of urban administration:
 

 
Now if we take this in connection with the universal right of citizens to
take part in the Ecclesia, and of those over thirty years of age to sit as
jurors in the courts, it becomes at once plain that the Athenian people did
actually conduct its own government, and that the State was a true
democracy. Here is no privileged class, no class of skilled politicians, no
bureaucracy: no body of men, like the Roman Senate, who alone understood
the secrets of State, and were looked op to and trusted as the gathered
wisdom of the whole community. At Athens there was no disposition, and in
fact no need, to trust the experience of any one. each man entered
intelligently into the details of his own temporary duties, and discharged
them as far as we ran tell, with industry and integrity. Like the players
in a well-trained orchestra, all contrived to learn their parts and to he
satisfied with the share allotted to them. [13]
 

 
But the administrative aspects of Athenian civic life capture only an
aspect of the well-rounded, balanced, and intensely social nature of what
Edith Hamilton has so aptly described as “the Greek Way.” For centuries
afterwards, men were to leek hack to Attica where, for a brief period,
there flourished a community whose development was not to he excelled over
the course of later history. What immediately catches the eye in a study of
Hellenic society is the rich flow of Athenian life — its all-encompassing
rationality and its human scale. The “Men of Marathon” take up arms
against the Persian invaders of their country with the same readiness that
they take up the scythe in harvesting their farms. They nourish their minds
with the same fortitude that they do battle in the mountain fastnesses of
their land. Hellenic mythology, unequivocably naturalistic under the bright
Mediterranean sky, gracefully intertwines with the monumental oaks of Attic
tragedy; the Hellenic mind, cultivated in the most demanding schools of
speculative reason, never fails to pause — almost childishly — to
marvel at the physical beauty of the land and sea, and. above all, at the
supple form of man. whose destiny in Athenian literature mingles a
philosophical pathos with serene dignity.

Athenian life, during its finest moments, formed a totality that was
sustained by the balance And unity of the polis
 itself To a Greek, it
would have seemed preposterous that mind should be separated from body, art
from society, man from nature, culture from politics. The polis was the
man; the man, the polis. To he exiled from the polis was to suffer an
extinction more horrifying even than death. The Hellenic citizen was
nourished by his community like a tree by the soil. So inseparably wedded
were men and society that a social sunlight permeated everything Greek. We
never fail to marvel at how remarkably welt the satires of Aristophanes
read to this very day, how advanced they are over so much of our own
contemporary literature of the same genre, how unexcelled they are in their
energy; how refreshing their earthiness and realism, how generous their
humanity, and how subtly philosophical their nuances, Yet these plays were
political works — courageously incisive satires of the outstanding
politicians of the day and savage commentaries on immediate civic problems.
They Owe their unexcelled position in western literature to the clear
rationality of the Greek mind, to the essentiality of all relations in the
polis, to a candor toward life (hat chased away the false shadows of
introspection and the shams of neurotic esthcticism.

From the totality of the polis arose the Greek view, which Paul Landis so
eloquently describes in his discussion of the Athenian drama:
 

 
An attitude toward life at once honest and so intelligent that the minds of
men, however far they may be deceived by Fancy or philosophy, must always
return to it at the end. By virtue of something that looks almost like
racial genius the Athenians of the fifth century succeeded in looking upon
life with a level gaze. They faced it neither with bravado and bluster, nor
with fear and trembling; not with an ignorant assumption of power over it,
nor with an equally ignorant and cowardly feeling of inferiority...
 

 
The message of the Athenian drama is
 

 
this honest intellectualism, this passion for truth, this serene and level
gaze on life — and this has always been the modern spirit....It is the
struggle to free the intellect, to tear from it the veils of hope and fear,
so that it may look clearly and unafraid upon the face of life and know it
as it is, terrible and pitiful and glorious and utterly nonsensical.[14]
 

 
That Hellenic society was scarred by slavery and by a severely patriarchal
dispensation fur women need hardly be emphasized. These cruet features it
shared with all city states I hat began to duster along the shores of the
Mediterranean Sea — features that were part of the general barbarism of
the epoch. But they do not explain why the polis succeeded so admirably in
transcending that barbarism, indeed, the horrors which were to follow in
the wake of the 
polis’s decline, notably the emergence of the Roman Imperium and the
early Middle Ages. Lest we lose all sense of perspective toward urban
development, we must never fail to focus on the essentials which produced
so advanced a society as the Athenian polis. The civic spirit of Athens has
its source in yeoman virtues, not in slavery or patriarchal ism, Athenian
internal unity stems from men of strong character who were indomitable in
their social allegiances and rounded in their urbanity because they had
firm ties to the soil and were independent its their economic position.
Labor and land, town and country, men and society were joined in a common
destiny In bourgeois society the community dissolves into competing monads
and is pervaded by spiritual mediocrity directly as the material being of
man is rendered enslaved, insecure, and one-sided. In the polis, the
community achieves unity and flourishes spiritually as the material being
of man achieves relative freedom, independence, and roundedness. In
bourgeois society, the commodity, which mediates all human relations, not
only “unites” society in a cash nexus and minute division of labor, but
at the same time separates man from the instruments of production, labor
from creativity, object from subject, and eventually man from man. In the
polis, the relative independence of the individual makes it possible to see
the true dependence of man on the community, completely identifying the
Athenian with his society.

Finally, precisely because in bourgeois society man has “mastered”
nature without rationally coordinating his social life, consciousness has
only to reflect society as it exists to yield the most catastrophic as well
as the most inane results. The untutored act of thought is brought to the
service of horrors that the blindest Forces of nature could never yield.
The more passive thought remains in the face of conditions it can no longer
comprehend, the more actively demoniacal it becomes merely by acquiescing
to the status quo. In the polis, thought reaches sublime height s of
philosophy, poetry, and art if only because of the solidarity. Freedom, and
independence it affords the individual, an independence rooted not only in
civic conditions but also in material ones.

Classical Athenian drama ends not with another Aeschylus, whose tragedies
dwell on the consolidation of the polis, but with Aristophanes, whose
savage mockery voices the tragic apprehension of social dissolution. The
irony of Greek conditions, here, acquires its adequate form, for the very
forces that produce the Hellenic yeomanry — the “Men of Marathon” —
lead to their extinction. Given the limited material basis of Hellenic
society, the aristocracy which emerges from tribal life cannot he replaced
by the yeoman without also creating favorable conditions for a new and more
pedestrian aristocracy — the aristocracy of trade, usury, and wealth.

This crisis was by no means new lo Greek society. As early as the time of
Hesiod, during the eighth century B.c., merchants and usurers began
encroaching on the smallholding, consolidating farms into estates, and
reducing many citizens to debtor-slaves. In the two centuries that separate
Hesiod from Cleisthenes, Attica was torn by intense social struggles, later
to be paralleled closely by similar conflicts in the early Roman Republic.
In contrast to Rome, whose pillaging expeditions abroad reinforced the
power and wealth of the nil trig classes, Attica’s crisis remained
largely internalized and the polis was able to arrive at a more rational
solution of its problems. Whereas Rome rapidly succumbed to the latifundia
system (a plantation form of agriculture administered by wealthy land
magnates and worked by slave gangs), Attica returned again to the
small-holding. Solon, Pisistratus, and Cleisthenes divided the large
estates among the dispossessed and allowed a limited margin of independence
to its craftsmen and traders, Pisistratus, after his second exile,
ruthlessly uprooted the big landowners. Their estates were confiscated and
divided among the peasantry, dispossessed agricultural laborers, and the
Athenian poor Cleisthenes completed this immense work: he put down all
attempts at an aristocratic restoration and juridically established the
Athenian democracy which was to pass into history as the political model of
the classical polis.

Was it indeed “something that looks almost like radical genius,” as
Landis would have it, or was it perhaps more mundane factors that guided
the Athenians to so rational a disposition of their social problems? That
the Creeks were, in Marx’s words, the “normal children” of early
history can be partly accounted for by the weight of their tradition and by
their geographic setting. Athenian society was not so far removed from its
tribal origins, nor so muddled by the rubbish of history, that it lacked a
clear, direct, and humanistic view of its social problems. The memory of
its primitive democracy was strong enough to find a more secular
fulfillment in the establishment of the Ecelesia, Close to nature, situated
in a hospitable climate, neither so rich as to yield oppressive standards
of opulence nor so poor as to be strangled by oppressive poverty,
decentralized by a mountainous terrain but repeatedly invigorated
culturally by the sea, Attica remained remarkably flexible and generously
susceptible to the civilizing crosscurrents of the age. Accordingly,
Athenian leaders were favored by every opportunity to act with wisdom —
to reconcile and fund the interests of the community into a common and
harmonizing social perspective, H. D. F. Kitto is only just when he sharply
contrasts the course followed by Solon, Pisistratus, and Cleisthenes with
that of modern Europe: in Athens, the reconciliation of the community to
new social demands occurred at a high point of social vigor, when all
strata of the polis were able to contribute vitally to the community; in
Europe, it occurred after the complete exhaustion and decay of the old
society, when little remained of earlier traditions. Hellenic society
resolved its problems rationally; Europe, as yet, has not freed itself from
blind and demoniacal social forces.

Owing to the fact that Athenian society was based on a yeomanry and on
small agricultural holdings, town and country were brought into delicate
balance. In turn, the preservation of this balance depended upon the
internal self-sufficiency supplied by the division of labor between urban
and rural society. The polis flourished only as long as one did not
outweigh the other. To the Creeks, this social equilibrium was summed up by
the term autarkeia: a concept of wholeness, material self-sufficiency, and
balance that is the core of the Hellenic outlook. But this outlook did not
prove impervious to the powerful economic Forces which were gathering in
the Mediterranean basin and gradually restructuring Creek society. With the
expansion of handicrafts and commercial contact with the outside world, the
nascent Hellenic bourgeoisie became increasingly powerful and began to
alter the balance between town and country on which the unity of the polis
depended. Athenian interests now graduated from a local scale to encompass
the Mediterranean area. The polis was becoming a cosmopolis, a change that
brought it into conflict with the self-sufficient small-holding, not to
speak of Greek communities abroad. In 434 B.C., with the outbreak of the
Peloponnesian War, Periclean Athens embarked upon a disastrous struggle for
hegemony over other Greek cities and for a commanding position in the
Mediterranean trade. The war lasted some thirty years, laying waste to
Attica’s farms and exhausting her resources. “The Peloponnesian War,”
observes Kitto, “virtually saw the end of the city-state as a creative
force fashioning and fulfilling the lives of all its members.”[15]
Although the Athenian economy recovered from this conflict, Athens ceased
to be a stable small-holders’ community’ designed to meet local needs.
Attic agriculture now became oriented toward the Mediterranean trade.
Wealth and property were amassed in fewer and fewer hands;, political life
became increasingly devitalized and corrupt until the independence of
Athens was swept away by a Macedonian phalanx.



Rome is little more than an epilogue to Athens. It is easy enough to draw
parallels between the Latin development and the Hellenic: Camillus for
Solon, the Gracchi for the Pisistradae, Cicero for Demosthenes. But however
much Latium seems to follow in the wake of Greece From tribalism to
feudalism and then to a community of independent farmers, the two diverge
on the issue of public control over the administrative organs of society.
In contrast to the Ecclesia and Council of Five Hundred, the Roman Senate
develops into a specialized professional body, divorced from the populace.
It becomes a legislative aristocracy. Moreover, unlike Solon and
Pisistratus, Camillas and the Gracchi fail to restore the small-holding as
a viable economic basis for the Roman city-state. The Greek polis, once it
declined, could no longer be duplicated by other communities within the
social framework of antiquity. Its passing bears witness to the fact that
the elements which produced the polis had been exhausted. Indeed, the
complexities of Mediterranean society were already present wills the
consolidation of Latium and the historic preeminence of the Roman
city-state.

Once trade and the free cities acquired cosmopolitan proportions, two
alternatives confronted the ancient world: either mercantile relations
would expand to a point that would produce an authentic capitalist economy
or the cities would become parasitic entities, living in vampire fashion on
tho agricultural wealth of the older social system in the Near East and
North Africa. The realization of the first alternative was almost
completely precluded by the nature of Mediterranean economic life. Trade,
while growing considerably, could never reach sufficient proportions to
transform Mediterranean society as a whole. There was simply not enough
quantity, as it were, to produce a change In quality. Although commerce
managed to undermine the small-holding, which gave way to large-scale
agriculture in Latium, the free cities were too few in number and much too
weak economically to dissolve the self-contained wealthy land systems of
the Near East and open them as commercial markets. The Asian land system
imposed the same limits on the development of capitalist production abroad
which confronted its domestic commercial strata at home. Owing to its
solidity, it dosed off the only potential market of sufficient dimensions
that might have transformed mercantile capitalism into industrial
capitalism. Ancient trade remained primarily a carrying trade, a cement
between the Free cities and economically impenetrable societies based on
time-honored agricultural ways.

The “Fall of Rome” can be explained by the rise of Rome, The Latin city
was carried to imperial heights not by the resources of its rural environs,
but by spoils acquired from the systematic loo Ling of the Near East,
Egypt, and North Africa, The very process involved in maintaining the Roman
cosmopolis destroyed the cosmopolis. Every attempt on Rome’s part to
exact Further tribute from her colonies involved increasing coercion and
expenditures, which in torn required more tribute. A point was finally
reached where the negative aspect of this escalating development
predominated over the positive: the costs of maintaining the city began to
outweigh what it received. As the needs of die city and its urban
satellites began to rise far out of proportion to the How of tribute,
impoverishment and demoralization also increased; local taxation strangled
domestic economic life, the urban population began to drift into the
countryside, and the city’s birthrates declined. Rome could no longer be
maintained as a viable entity. The imperial eagles migrated from the west
to the east, from the artificial center of administration to the sources of
real wealth, Constantinople replaced Rome as the authentic center of the
empire and Italy now lay at the feet of the barbarians. Having passed
beyond its domestic limits, Rome “fell” in the sense that the city
contracted to its Own agrarian base — and declined even more as a result
of the enormous urban heights from which it had fallen.

What earlier historians once described as Europe’s “dark ages”
comprise a sweeping readjustment of urban life to the only agrarian
possibilities which lay at hand. Under the Roman empire, town and country
had entered into sharp contradiction with each other. Lacking an adequate
agrarian and industrial basis of its own. Rome had swollen to enormous
dimensions around a system of plunder and parasitism. The city had turned
upon the Land and introduced inefficient — even destructive — forms of
agricultural exploitation, such as slave-worked latifundia owned by
absentee proprietors. Not surprisingly, Rome succumbed to these internal
weaknesses when the parasitic system overreached itself and began to
acquire less than it lost. By slowly abandoning a slave-worked agriculture
for a feudal one. Italy simply returned to the only stable agrarian forms
which could satisfy her needs. The “Fall of Rome” as a city, quite
aside from the destiny of the empire, was a local “retrogression.”
Indeed, apart front Roman Europe, no such retrogression occurred elsewhere,
No doc lino of urban life occurred in the Near East, where agricultural
resources were adequate for the development of large cities Similarly in
North Africa, In these areas, the free cities patterned themselves on
preexisting agrarian social forms and essentially became the urban
creatures of the Asian land system. As to the central and northern areas of
Europe, where Germanic peoples were emerging from tribalism and agrarian
kingships, the development of feudalism was a logical extension of the
course followed by tribal communities in early Greece and Latium. With the
rise of feudal society, the European continent was thrown back upon its own
mainsprings, A new relationship between land and city began to emerge, one
that initiated an authentic development toward more advanced social
relationships,


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