Difference between revisions of "The Primacy of Politics in Classical Greece"
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| − | [https://www.jstor.org/stable/1862553 "The Primacy of Politics in Classical Greece"], by Paul A. Rahe, ''The American Historical Review,'' Vol. 89, No. 2 (Apr., 1984), pp. 265-293. | + | [https://www.jstor.org/stable/1862553 "The Primacy of Politics in Classical Greece"], by Paul A. Rahe, ''The American Historical Review,'' Vol. 89, No. 2 (Apr., 1984), pp. 265-293. Here are various sentences, not consecutive: |
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| + | The citizen intent on mentioning the good things in life can think only of eros, poetry, and politics while the slave in precisely the same situation ponders nothing but subsistence and the pleasures of filling his belly. The root of servility was taken to be an obsessive and degrading love of mere life. | ||
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| + | Privacy is privative and that a life centered on domestic concerns-on Mr. Dooley's family quarrels and his drinking bouts, on love, marriage, and the never-ending struggle to make ends meet-is a life of deprivation. | ||
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| + | This is the theme of Hannah Arendt's The Human. Condition (Chicago, 1958). | ||
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| + | To suppose, as many scholars have, that political liberty was for the ordinary citizen of the Greek p6lis merely or even primarily instrumental is to surrender to the very incredulity that so blinded Mr. Dooley. | ||
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| + | Much the same outlook colored the Greek view of poverty. What the Greeks feared most from penury was not the discomfort but the indignity, not the lack of security but the loss of independence. | ||
| − | + | In Greece a proud straitened circumstances was able to choose day labor over begging, but, for the sake of his freedom, he was expected to sacrifice every prospect of receiving support when weak and no longer fit for work and to prefer the instability of the labor exchange to dependency bred of prolonged employment in the service of another.45 To be brief: the ancient hierarchy is the reverse of the modern. The Greeks did not value political freedom for the sake of life, liberty, and property; they valued the last three for the sake of the first.}} | |
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| − | + | Of citizens of modern democracies he writes: | |
| + | {{Quotation| They possess freedom of speech, but the very size of the polities in which they reside generally robs that speech of consequence. As a result, the citizens develop a taste for domesticity. They are quick to resent any invasion of the broad realm of privacy that the regime guarantees them.}} | ||
Revision as of 16:43, 13 October 2020
"The Primacy of Politics in Classical Greece", by Paul A. Rahe, The American Historical Review, Vol. 89, No. 2 (Apr., 1984), pp. 265-293. Here are various sentences, not consecutive:
The citizen intent on mentioning the good things in life can think only of eros, poetry, and politics while the slave in precisely the same situation ponders nothing but subsistence and the pleasures of filling his belly. The root of servility was taken to be an obsessive and degrading love of mere life.
Privacy is privative and that a life centered on domestic concerns-on Mr. Dooley's family quarrels and his drinking bouts, on love, marriage, and the never-ending struggle to make ends meet-is a life of deprivation.
This is the theme of Hannah Arendt's The Human. Condition (Chicago, 1958).
To suppose, as many scholars have, that political liberty was for the ordinary citizen of the Greek p6lis merely or even primarily instrumental is to surrender to the very incredulity that so blinded Mr. Dooley.
Much the same outlook colored the Greek view of poverty. What the Greeks feared most from penury was not the discomfort but the indignity, not the lack of security but the loss of independence.
In Greece a proud straitened circumstances was able to choose day labor over begging, but, for the sake of his freedom, he was expected to sacrifice every prospect of receiving support when weak and no longer fit for work and to prefer the instability of the labor exchange to dependency bred of prolonged employment in the service of another.45 To be brief: the ancient hierarchy is the reverse of the modern. The Greeks did not value political freedom for the sake of life, liberty, and property; they valued the last three for the sake of the first.
Of citizens of modern democracies he writes:
They possess freedom of speech, but the very size of the polities in which they reside generally robs that speech of consequence. As a result, the citizens develop a taste for domesticity. They are quick to resent any invasion of the broad realm of privacy that the regime guarantees them.
