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
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