Peasant-Citizen and Slave: The Foundations of Athenian Democracy. - book reviews

Peasant-Citizen and Slave: The Foundations of Athenian Democracy

I first came across Ellen Wood's work soon after I learned that I would be teaching a course on western intellectual heritage. I had certain qualms about this undertaking, about perpertuating an essentially conservative "invented tradition" and agenda in an arena of struggle, so I began to look for progressive works. I soon found Class Ideology and Ancient Political Theory which she wrote with Neal Wood. In it, they argued that the differences in the social and political thought of Socrates, Aristotle, and Plato reflected or resonated with their positions in a changing class structure. This was promising; it was just what I was looking for. Since then, I have read a lot of Ellen Wood's writings, and every time I have gained valuable new insights into the subjects she was discussing and analyzing. Her new book, Peasant-Citizen and Slave, is no exception to this rule; like her earlier works, it is packed with thought-provoking ideas.

The central thesis of Peasant-Citizen and Slave, according to the jacket, is that, "despite the importance of slavery in Athenian society, the most distinctive feature of Athenian democracy was the unprecedented prominence it gave to free labour." Besides slaves, there was a "citizen population of working peasants and craftsmen." This allows us to examine the structure and transformation of ancient Athenian society, while simultaneously avoiding overly simplistic constructions and representations of classical Greece: for example, that it was dominated by the slave mode of production; or, according to a revisionist view with currency in some quarters, that it marked the beginning of democracy--the West's really great contribution to world civilization. (1)

The opening chapter, "The Myth of the Idle Mob," outlines the invention of a tradition in the waning years of the eighteenth century and its subsequent history. It is a set of stories about how the industrious artisans and farmers of Athen were transfigured into a mob, clamoring for democracy, or into idle citizens who relied on the labor of slaves. Since the stories resonated with partisan views and were intended as direct interventions in the political debates and struggles of the time, they were controversial and hotly contested. (2) For the authors of these accounts, the history of Athens was a storehouse filled with lessons and precedents relevant for the present, rather than a collection of dead facts of interest solely to antiquarians thirsting to satisfy some personal or collective curiosity.

In the secon chapter, "Slavery and the Peasant-Citizen," Wood accepts Moses Finley's challenge to examine how slavery functioned in democratic Athenian society. She takes issue with Geoffrey de Ste. Croix's views concerning the importance of slavery in agricultural production. In The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), Ste. Croix argued that wealthy citizens extracted surplus labor from the slaves they deployed on large estates and that slavery was the dominant form of surplus extraction in a society where small, free producers were responsible for a substantial portion of production. At issue is the extent of agricultural slavery. Did less affluent citizens also use slaves on small landholdings? Were there other forms of exploitation as well? For instance, were relatively poor citizens, and perhaps even landless ones, also exploited by their wealthy compatriots as tenants, sharecroppers, or casual hired laborers? Wood develops an argument that the Attic countryside was a patchwork of small landholdings worked by independent peasant-citizen producers and their families, who belonged to communities and assisted one another in those tasks requiring large amounts of labor. Wealthy citizens typically owned scattered properties, worked by tenants or sharecroppers, rather than large estates worked by slaves. There were a few large estates, but they employed only a small portion of the Athenian slaves. Most slaves either performed various kinds of domestic service or labored in workshops or the Laurium silver mines, where their labor was indispensable for the social reproduction of Athenian democracy.

In chapter three, "The Polis and the Peasant-Citizen," Wood develops a second thesis: that the most distinctive feature of Athenian democracy was neither the leisured existence of its citizens nor their relegation of production to slaves, but rather that even the poor citizens were free and independent from the compulsion of their wealthy compatriots. During the sixth century B.C., roughly the time between the reforms of Solon and Cleistenes, the independent producers--peasants and artisans--were able to reassert ownership over their land and control over their own labor power. As a result, the wealthy citizens found it difficult to exact tribute from them, either in the form of surplus labor or product, in any regular or systematic manner; this created an incentive for them to seek an alternative form of exploitation, one based on slavery and dependent on the assistance or acquiescence of their subordinates in the newly constituted civic community. (3) This was the fundamental contradiction and weakness of Athenian democracy. While it diminished the power of the old aristocracy and its capacity to extort tribute, it simultaneously encouraged the growth of slavery as a source of revenue and the erosion of women's authority and power in the political sphere.

These relations established the organizational basis of Athenian democracy and laid the foundations for both its spatial arrangement and cultural form--a politicized countryside with village communities linked to an urban political and cultural center. As a result of this configuration and patterns of rural landholding and use, any growth in the city or its economy encouraged the expansion of slave-based production and necessitated "a supporting apparatus external to the polis: the 'empire' whose revenues allowed the democracy to live beyond its productive means and without taxing to the limit the labouring capacities of its citizens." However, the hegemony exercised by this Athenian empire was extremely fragile, since its army was composed of conscripted peasant-citizens rooted to their fields rather than professional soldiers. However, conscription was a disguised form of labor service, an indirect form of exploitation, as Ste. Croix put it, whose burden fell disproportionately on the subordinate classes.

In the final chapter, "Athenian Democracy: A Peasant Culture?", Wood adds an important comparative dimension to her analysis that permits her to incorporate the insights of writers examining other societies with weakly developed mechanisms for tribute extraction. She suggests that some of the more elaborated ideals of Athenian culture--e.g., freedom--have their origins in the experiences and aspirations of the small landholders, the group she calls peasant-citizens. She builds on the insights of Eric Wolf and Rodney Hilton that peasant smallholders wish to avoid entaglements with tax collectors, large landowners, and officials. Freedom, for the autonomous, self-sufficient peasant-citizens of Attica, meant that they did not have to work for somebody else. They were not subject to the whims of a master or lord; they belonged to a community that did not have a ruler; and their polis was not subject to another state. Freedom and autonomy, of course, were underlying currents in the epic poems, recited by Homer at a time when there may not have been state-based societies on the Greek mainland; they were central issues in the philosophical debates and theatrical productions that took place after class and state formation occurred. Wood is aware of this, and her work points, one more time, toward the opportunities for examining the complex interplay of class, culture, and philosophy in state formative situations. Why, for instance, was the Oedipus myth so important, and what lessons did it convey to Athenian audiences who watched different performances of the story? (4) The comparative dimension she brings to the study of classical antiquity quietly undermines notions about the uniqueness of the West; it allows us to deal in a meaningful way with questions like those posed by students in the Western intellectual heritage course I taught: "Was Aristotle really a Greek version of Confucius, and what are the social foundations of the similarities of the taoists, Gnostics, and Levellers?"

Some of the less well-developed aspects of Wood's argument concern the connections between citizenship and class, the intersection of class and gender, and the transformation of gender relations that accompanied the rise of Athenian democratic society. She recognizes these are important issues; to address them adequately would be another book. At various points, she distinguishes between those citizens who are direct producers and those who extract surplus from their compatriots and slaves. She also observes that the limitations imposed on the mobility of upper-class women--e.g., their obligations to marry close kin--and their resistance to it were not matched by similar restrictions on the activities of the sisters and wives of peasant-citizens, who went about their business as peasant producers, artisans, and shopkeepers. Here, her arguments can be complemented and strengthened by reference to recent works by Irene Silverbatt and Christine Gailey that deal with the intersection of gender, class, and state formation; these were not available to Wood when she was writing. (5)

One of the strengths of Peasant-Citizen and Slave is that it focuses attention on the connection between democracy and slavery in a society where the direct producers retained significant, but not complete, control over their labor and products, and where they allied themselves with their affluent kin to raid for slaves and to extract surplus labor from captives. The other great strengths of the book are its recognition that (1) significant social changes occurred in ancient Greece between 1200 and 300 B.C., (2) the various city-states of Greece and the eastern Mediterranean followed divergent roads of class and state formation during the first millenium B.C., which produced important differences in how class relations were structured, conceptualized, and discussed; and (3) at any moment during this period, the area was a political-economic and cultural mosaic composed of unique pieces that fitted together in a complex manner.

NOTES

(1.) Mason Hammond, "The Indo-European Origin of the Concept of a Democratic Society," Symbols (December 1985): 10-12.

(2.) Martin Bernal's Black Athena (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1987) covers some of the same terrain from a different perspective and with different emphasis.

(3.) Wood contrasts the Athenian state with its weakly developed mechanisms for tribute extraction from its own citizens with another, very different kind of tributary society--what she calls a "redistributive kingdom" in which the ruling class or the state had the capacity to extort surplus labor or product on a regular basis from its subjects. This is the Asiatic mode of production. She describes the Minoan and Mycenaean city-states, which dotted the Greek mainland and Crete toward the end of the second millenium B.C., as redistributive kingdoms. These Asiatic states fragmented during the eleventh century, as centralized power collapsed and local village communities and former officials struggled against one another to assert control over the means of production in particular regions. Their struggles were protracted and took various forms, judging by the accounts found in Hesiod and the Homeric epics.

(4.) Roger Stritmatter, "Oedipus, Akhenaton and the Greek State: An Archaeology of the Oedipus Complex," Dialectical Anthropology 12 (1987): 45-64, discusses the meaning of the Oedipus cycle and relates it and other cultural features to the processes of class and state formation that occurred in Athenian society.

(5.) Irene Silverblatt, Moon, Sun, and Witches: Gender Ideologies and Class in Inca and Colonial Peru (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987) and "Women in States," Annual Review of Anthropology 17 (1988); 427-60; Christine W. Gailey, Kinship to Kinghsip: Gender Hierarchy and State Formation in the Tongan Islands (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1987).

Tom Patterson is Professor of Anthropology at Temple University, where he engages in trade-union activity and teachers arcaheology and the social history of social theory and the social sciences.

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