6 - The human measure: the Greek invention of political theory, c. 500–400 BCE

Summary

They that are discontented under a monarchy call it tyranny, and they that are displeased with aristocracy call it oligarchy; so also, they which find themselves grieved under a democracy call it anarchy.

(Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, 1651)

Debates about government and the state go back to the very beginnings of extant Greek literature in c. 700. What concerns me here, though, is a narrower and sharper definition of political theories properly so called, according to which they ‘are, by and large, articulate, systematic, and explicit versions of the unarticulated, more or less systematic and implicit interpretations, through which plain men and women understand this experience of the actions of others in a way that enables them to respond to it in their own actions’ (MacIntyre 1983).

The moment dividing such articulate, theoretical systematisation from implicit practical interpretation is hard to pin down precisely, but its terminus post quem (earliest possible date of invention) was the pioneering intellectual activity, from the first half of the sixth century on, of the Milesian School of historia (‘enquiry’; historiê in Ionic Greek dialect), represented above all by Thales, Anaximenes and Anaximander, all of Miletus. In Homer we found political thought, of a sort, but no polis to provide its context. In Hesiod we found both the polis and a more developed form – and in a more precise sense – of political thought. The beginnings of the transition from political thought to theory may perhaps be traced as early as the Athenian Solon in c. 600 bce (see Vlastos 1946, Irwin 2005 and Lewis 2006), though he looks backwards rather than forwards, partly for intellectual, and partly for political, reasons.