File spoon-archives/bhaskar.archive/bhaskar_1996/96-10-21.081, message 42


From: root-AT-central.susx.ac.uk
Subject: Re: Aristotle/class. Ellen M. Woods the Peasant-Citizen
Date: Wed, 2 Oct 1996 22:05:01 -0500 (CDT)


   I'm not sure what the relevance of this is to Bhaskar, but
certainly none of the topics touched on in reference to Greece can
be explored without reference to Ellen Meiksins Wood, *Peasant-
Citizen and Slave: The Foundations of Athenian Democracy*. Its
Table of Contents alone is illuminating:
    1. The Myth of the Idle Mob
    2. Slavery and the Peasant-Citizen
    3. The Polis and the Peasant-Citizen
    4. Athenian Democracy: A Peasant Culture?

    In chapter 4 the subheadings are:

        The Greek Concept of Freedom
        The Athenian Attitude to Labour
        Rulers and Producers: The Philosophical Subversion of
            Athenian Democracy
        Technological Stagnation?
        The Cultural Vitality of Athens: A Contradiction Between
            'Base' and 'Superstructure'?

Some passages from the last chapter:

        The bad reputation inflicted on this loose collection of
    thinkers [the Sophists], principally by the writings of Plato,
    should not detract from their importance as expressions of
    Athenian cultural vitality, nor from the the ground-breaking
    ideas which at least some of them produced. With no common
    doctrine and little to unite them except that they were paid
    teachers (something which Plato particularly held against
    them from his disdainful aristocratic vantage point) together
    they bespeak the intellectual liveliness of Democratic Athens...

        It is as if one can trace the evolution of democracy in
    the development of Greek philosophy, from the early natural
    philosophers and their search for absolute and universal
    truths in nature and the cosmic order, to Protagoras, the
    first important and probably the greatest Sophist, for whom,
    in the absence of absolute knowledge, in a world of flux
    and uncertainty, man must be the "measure of all things.'
    His pedagogical project was truly a curriculum for the
    democracy: not an education for the attainment of philo-
    sophical wisdom but one designed, as Plato has him say in
    the dialogue *Protagoras*, 'to make good citizens.' Nevertheless
    ...his project ... raised new questions which were to set
    the agenda for philosophy. . .

    ...even Plato, the severest critic of Athenian democracy,
    was a quintessential creature of the democracy. Greek
    philosophy, and with it the foundations of the Western philo-
    sophical tradtion, are often credited to his invention....
    but he was dealing with questions raised by the Sophists and,
    like them, he was responding to the exigencies of the times.
    He devoted much of his life to countering the view enunciated
    by Protagoras that ethical and political values, though no
    less binding for lacking a foundation in some universal
    transcendental standard, are conventions, the common currency
    of civilized life, in a world where 'man is the measure of
    all things.'

Earlier in the chapter she had quoted a passage from Mencius:

    ...Those who work with their minds rule, while those who
    work with their bodies are ruled. Those who are ruled
    produce food; those who rule are fed. That this is right
    is universally recognized everywhere under Heaven.

And she concludes the book:

    Plato was anything but a peasant or craftsman; but it is
    difficult to imagine his invention of philosophy without
    the provocation offered by peasant-citizens and all their
    'banausic' compatriots, whose very political existence
    challenged eternal verities, the truths and values
    'universally recognized everywhere under Heaven' -- at
    least, almost everywhere.

Incidentally, I would be willing to argue that Ellen Wood's
*The Retreat from Class: A New 'True' Socialism* is the
most important political work since Lenin's State and Revolution.

    Carrol Cox




   

Driftline Main Page

 

Display software: ArchTracker © Malgosia Askanas, 2000-2005