The Tragedy of Political Theory

The Road Not Taken

J. Peter Euben

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780691023144, 9780691078311
• eBook ISBN: 9780691218182
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ancient & Classical Philosophy

In this book J. Peter Euben argues that Greek tragedy was the context for classical political theory and that such theory read in terms of tragedy provides a ground for contemporary theorizing alert to the concerns of post-modernism, such as normalization, the dominance of humanism, and the status of theory. Euben shows how ancient Greek theater offered a place and occasion for reflection on the democratic culture it helped constitute, in part by confronting the audience with the otherwise unacknowledged principles of social exclusion that sustained its community.


Euben makes his argument through a series of comparisons between three dramas (Aeschylus' Oresteia, Sophocles' Oedipus Tyrannos, and Euripides' Bacchae) and three works of classical political theory (Thucydides' History and Plato's Apology of Socrates and Republic) on the issues of justice, identity, and corruption. He brings his discussion to a contemporary American setting in a concluding chapter on Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 in which the road from Argos to Athens, built to differentiate a human domain from the undefined outside, has become a Los Angeles freeway desecrating the land and its people in a predatory urban sprawl.

PART I

INTRODUCTION

ONE

Conventions and Misgivings

IN ITS CHOICE and treatment of texts and in its respect for Athenian democracy, this book is somewhat conventional. Usually such conventionality coincides with an indifference to the distinctiveness of the modern (or postmodern) self and discourse, to recent developments in literary theory, and to the undemocratic aspects of Athenian society. For those concerned with such issues, the continued privileging of classical texts, the disregard of the vast transformations of social scale during the last three hundred years, and the silence about the subordinate status of women, slavery, and class warfare in “democratic” Athens virtually guarantees that the privileged texts will be misunderstood or misappropriated and that a vision of political community and political theory will be perpetuated that has more to do with fantasy than reality. If we are to live in this world rather than some other, we need ideals, methods, theories, and practices appropriate to it rather than some world that is certainly past and probably never was.

Skepticism about the contemporary significance of classical texts does not necessarily deny the relevance of classical political theory to the polis or other post-classical but premodern political societies. Nor does it necessarily deny the democratic polis’s moral superiority relative to other less democratic contemporary regimes or denigrate the beauty of Greek poetry, the originality of Greek philosophy, and the pleasure of reading Plato and Aristotle. But such skepticism does insist that the admirable features of the polis were distinctive to it as a historical form and rejects the idea that Greek poetry, philosophy, or political theory is adequate (or even relevant) for understanding, let alone living in, the modern nationstate. Although it may be true that no man or woman who is ignorant of classical texts can call themselves educated, it is certainly true that if those texts form the core of that education, such men and women will be illiterate.

This plausible view is held by most social scientists and some political theorists for whom “the” world begins with Locke or Marx. But there are other theorists who share some of these views because they want to redress (or undress) the romanticized celebration of Athens and the uncritical veneration of Plato and Aristotle. For them social history is a way of debunking the myth of Athenian participatory democracy and of putting the two great classical theorists “in their place” (in both senses of that phrase).¹

While the study of classical texts may be losing its place among social scientists and political theorists, it retains its hold among literary theorists and philosophers, whether structuralist, hermeneutical, or poststructuralist. Some of the most “radical” literary theorists remain deeply engaged with “texts” such as the Phaedrus, Symposium, and Poetics if only by way of critique and with the sophists by way of alliance. For such thinkers this book is conventional not in its choice of “authors” but in its treatment of them. They would, no doubt, regard my selective reliance on Vernant, Vidal-Naquet, Goldhill, Segal, and Zeitlin, as well as my analysis of Foucault and occasional references to Derrida, as domesticating radical interpretative strategies for conventional ends.²

In this first chapter I want to look at these criticisms with the help of an essay by Stephen Holmes that appeared in the American Political Science Review in 1979, a more recent book by Michael Ignatieff entitled The Needs of Strangers, and a selective survey of the work of Michel Foucault. I choose Holmes and Ignatieff because—despite their different sensibilities, subjects, and intended audiences—they both regard continued deference to the classical polis (especially its participatory ideals) and to classical political theory as anachronistic³ and nostalgic. For them my choice of texts simply perpetuates myths that must be overthrown. I choose Foucault because his critique of humanism challenges not so much my choice of texts as the themes I address and the way I address them.

I choose him for two less obvious reasons. One has to do with certain affinities between Foucault and Greek tragedy, affinities that provide a contemporary introduction to my argument about tragedy and theory. The principal object of this book is to consider Greek tragedy insofar as it provides a preface for understanding classical political theory and to suggest that the tragedians and these theorists provide in turn a ground for contemporary theorizing. Once more Foucault is useful. I do not think contemporary political theory can ignore Foucault’s critique of theorizing, most dramatically symbolized by the transformation of theōria, theatron and its cognates (seeing, beholding, gazing, viewing, spectating, and sight) into “le regard” (the gaze), a technique of power-knowledge whereby administrative elites manage their institutional populations. Despite this transformation, aspects of Foucault’s critique of theorizing are anticipated in Greek tragedy and in the classical theorists he criticizes. Where they are not, Foucault may be right in his criticisms or the disparity may indicate why and how “we” need to move beyond as well as with genealogy.

My aim in this chapter is mostly preparatory. I want to situate my argument and approach within a contemporary debate in order to defuse (but not refute) the disparagement of classical politics and theory, thereby creating a space for the themes presented in chapter 2 and elaborated in chapters 3 through 9. At the very least, I want to indicate that my “traditionalism” is chosen rather than inadvertent and to ask whether the antitraditional emphasis on “decentered” play and genealogy are sufficient for the living of a political life. I am not sure critics are attentive enough to the practical implications of what it means for “us” to believe that we are the creators of our own purposes, values, and natures, and whether they are as appreciative of the mythopoetic Nietzsche as the deconstructive Nietzsche.

The whole issue of conventionality and tradition, of academic insiders and outsiders, becomes complicated when a thinker like Foucault becomes an academic industry and a “sign” of being at the forefront and on the cutting edge. Determining what is and is not the cutting edge, radical, new, anti-traditional, and nonconventional becomes itself radically uncertain if Tocqueville is right that it is an American tradition to be antitraditional.⁴ If he is right, then being radical in the sense of embracing what is new and antitraditional may be as American as apple pie. This paradox is, of course, too neat and too self-serving: the academy is notoriously persistent in assuming that the world divides itself into academic disciplines and is largely unrepentant in its deference to canonical texts. But the paradox does at least confuse any easy opposition between conventional and whatever it is conventions are opposed to.

STEPHEN HOLMES is perturbed by, even contemptuous of, the persistent influence of principles derived from classical political theory on contemporary political theorists. Despite the massive transformations in the underlying structure of European society, most notably the presence of social differentiation and the distinction between state and society, many of us—whether conservative, neo-Marxist, or liberal—remain in thrall to an image of the polis and to classical thinkers who are peripheral at best and positively pernicious when taken seriously as political or theoretical exemplars. “The principles of Greek politics become flagrant and despotic archaisms when transported, even with the best of intentions, into the institutional context of modern society.” Given this, we need to demythologize the old res publica conception of politics lest it serve, as Constant warned, to overlegitimate a technically efficient bureaucratic agency with police power and to consecrate the tyranny of the political.

The two premises of Greek political thinking that draw Holmes’s ire are the supposition that “the state can be ‘humanized’ as a dialogue, family or emotional communion with a ‘true’ and therefore unifying purpose” and the proposition that “individuals, being thoroughly ‘political animals,’ can fully realize themselves in political participation.” More specifically, he wants to debunk Aristotle’s “notorious” claims that the polis is prior to the individual, that human beings are born for citizenship in a city-state, that ethics and politics coincide, and that “political science” studies everything of human value. Whatever plausibility these ideas may have had in and for the polis, they necessarily lead to “personal and governmental deformations when revived in highly differentiated and rapidly changing modern societies.” Thus it is “irrational and patently absurd” to claim that politics now can “solve all our problems and make us feel free and in touch with ourselves.” It is pointless to juxtapose an ancient regime and a modern one and “solemnly ask which is better.” Because ancient regimes and modern systems of government present solutions to very different problems, such evaluative comparisons are, to say the least, “notably unilluminating.”⁵

Holmes’s object then is to break the spell and the influence of classical politics and political theory, to redirect our gaze and our reading from Athens and Sparta, Plato and Aristotle, Strauss and Arendt to contemporary modern societies and to Weber, Durkheim, and Simmel. His effort to change who we read and why we read them is political as well as theoretical, his means rhetorical as well as rational.

One of the striking aspects of the essay is its self-conscious escalation of language and the heightened drama such an escalation creates. To take the “obsolete,” “out of step,” “worn out,” “notorious” premises and principles of Greek political thinking seriously is “irrational,” “patently absurd,” “ludicrous,” “bizarre,” “wildly implausible,” “flagrantly archaic,” and totalitarian. Like Locke, Holmes would turn the paternal king into a lion-wolf, devouring the young it supposedly nourishes. He would force us out of our reverence and reveries to confront the problems of modernity rather than allowing us to turn away from them on the authority of writers and images drawn from a premodern culture.

Much could be said about Holmes’s general argument and the view of politics and theory advocated, presupposed, or implied by it. One might take issue with the literal reading of texts,⁶ with the ungenerous reading of Arendt,⁷ with his exaggeration of claims then dismissed as absurd,⁸ or his confident assertions (usually prefaced by “in fact”) such as that the private-public distinction is “too crude to help us understand ourselves.”⁹ One might wonder about what Holmes thinks of Tocqueville’s belief that taking politics away from Americans would be taking away half their lives and about his admittedly selective reading of Weber and Durkheim. In their work (as in Marx’s), one can find arguments and sensibilities that undercut the moral force of arguments Holmes makes on their behalf and with their authority. For instance, Weber’s discussion of rationalization and bureaucracy suggests (as do some of Marx’s writings on capitalism’s destruction of all previous forms of community) a fundamental homogenization of society that is both a product and foundation for the social differentiation Holmes thinks definitive of modernity. It may be that differentiation vitiates differences and that, “absurd” as it sounds, Athens may have been a more diverse society than the modern capitalist state. And if “modernity” is hegemonic (which arguments like Holmes’s may help bring about), then it may not be absurd or reductivist to regard it as a whole prior to (or at least importantly determinative of) the parts. Certainly there are anthropologists, philosophers, and literary theorists who believe that “culture” precedes individual life and action, that it constitutes the terms in which we make ourselves and conceive the world, such that the political self is a cultural construct, subject to discursive practices.¹⁰

Nor is it absurd to wonder whether we can thrive or should adapt to the (presumed self-evident) “realities” of modernity if we look at what seems to be its cost—a cost that a reading of Weber, Durkheim, and Simmel informed by a reading of Plato and Aristotle, as well as Strauss and Arendt—can help disclose. It is at least worth asking whether the modern state does not sustain what modernization was thought to transcend: religious cults, drug abuse, alcoholism, child abuse, wife beating, teenage suicide, and communicative mush. Thomas Pynchon captures these costs brilliantly in his image of wrecked cars and wrecked lives, the endless trade-ins of “motorized metal extensions of themselves, of their families and what their whole lives must be like . . . frame cockeyed, rusty underneath, fender repainted in a shade just off enough to depres...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Part I: Introduction
• Part II: Greek Tragedy and Political Theory
• Part III: Political Theory and Greek Tragedy
• Part IV: Conclusion
• Index