The Plebeian Experience

A Discontinuous History of Political Freedom

Martin Breaugh, Lazer Lederhendler

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN:
  9780231520812
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Social History

How do people excluded from political life achieve political agency? Through a series of historical events that have been mostly overlooked by political theorists, Martin Breaugh identifies fleeting yet decisive instances of emancipation in which people took it upon themselves to become political subjects. Emerging during the Roman plebs's first secession in 494 BCE, the plebeian experience consists of an underground or unexplored configuration of political strategies to obtain political freedom. The people reject domination through political praxis and concerted action, therefore establishing an alternative form of power.

Breaugh's study concludes in the nineteenth century and integrates ideas from sociology, philosophy, history, and political science. Organized around diverse case studies, his work undertakes exercises in political theory to show how concepts provide a different understanding of the meaning of historical events and our political present. The Plebeian Experience describes a recurring phenomenon that clarifies struggles for emancipation throughout history, expanding research into the political agency of the many and shedding light on the richness of radical democratic struggles from ancient Rome to Occupy Wall Street and beyond.

PART I

WHAT IS “THE PLEBS”?

1

HISTORICAL GENESIS OF THEPLEBEIAN PRINCIPLE

Besides, how shall the people, if it cannot form true judgments, be able rightly to direct the state?

—Euripides, The Suppliants

WHAT DO THE TERMS “PLEBS” AND “PLEBEIANS” SIGNIFY? THE choice of a term specific to Roman antiquity may in some ways appear anachronistic or even quaint, especially when one seeks, as we do, to characterize a modern political actor. Yet it is possible to delineate a “political history of the plebs” from the Roman Republic to nineteenth-century Europe that coincides with those moments when revolt and freedom manifested themselves. The political history of the West thus includes events where the plebs demonstrated its strength and political capacities in order to transform the dominant political order. A “plebeian principle” has thus been asserted within our political tradition. The phrase “plebeian principle” should be understood in the general sense ascribed to it by Pierre-Simon Ballanche, that is, a principle of action that offers human beings an emancipatory goal and serves as a principle of historical intelligibility.¹

Through a study of these historical manifestations it is possible to outline a political history of the plebs and to highlight its distinguishing features. In the course of its many struggles, the plebs indeed advocated social and political approaches and aspirations. The feeling of revolt, which was often the initial force driving plebeian demands, seems to have worked in tandem with a will to broaden the public sphere through the adoption of a more inclusive politics. It is here that the plebs set in motion an experience whereby political freedom came to the community. Through certain eminently plebeian political experiences, we will more specifically explore the relationship between the plebs and the communalist (i.e., relating to a politics of the people) and agoraphile (i.e., relating to political freedom) traditions.

By examining four plebeian political experiences, we will be able to situate the establishment of a plebeian principle in Western history. The necessary point of departure is ancient Rome, more exactly the Roman Republic (509–27 BCE). We will then discuss the Ciompi revolt in Florence (1378) and the revolt of the carnival—the plebeian festival par excellence—in Romans, France (1580). Finally, we will consider Masaniello’s Neapolitan rebellion (1647). Our intention, however, is not to circumscribe and exhaustively investigate every plebeian political experience; it is, rather, to analyze the historical construction of the plebeian principle. The selected experiences will make it possible to see how a plebeian political practice was instituted through the rejection of domination and the attempt to set up, by means of concerted action, an alternative power.

If this chronology stops on the eve of the eighteenth century, it is not because the plebeian principle disappeared at that moment. We hope to demonstrate, quite to the contrary, that the many experiences of the plebs continued until the nineteenth century and perhaps have done so even to this day. Consequently, we propose to analyze the resurgence of the plebeian principle at three key moments in modern history: the French Revolution, the making of the English working class, and the Paris Commune of 1871. Our project involves bringing to light the presence of the plebeian principle in each of these events. For now, however, we will begin by delineating the main features of these experiences so as to elucidate the historical genesis of the plebeian principle, starting with the birth of the plebeian experience in Rome.

THE ROMAN REPUBLIC: THE FIRST PLEBEIAN SECESSION (494 BCE)

The Roman Republic spanned a tumultuous period at the cusp of two major eras of Roman civilization: the Kingdom and the Empire. The conflictual nature of the Republic arose in particular from the political division of Roman society between the patricians, who controlled the levers of political and economic power and enjoyed religious status, and the plebeians, who had neither political and economic power nor any religious recognition. However, as noted by the historian Jean-Claude Richard, the patrician-plebeian duality did not exist from the very beginnings of Rome,² even though this notion was firmly implanted in the Roman imaginary, especially during the Empire.³ The reason was that when Rome was founded the plebs did not constitute a political actor but would become one only under the Republic. It came into being, in other words, through a political experience. Thus, the plebs was not an objectively constituted actor within the political and economic reality of Rome.

Richard defines the plebs as a “heterogeneous mass comprised of elements exterior to the [patrician] elite and which emerged from non-being in the early years of the 5th century.”⁴ The plebs was characterized by the great diversity of its makeup. These disparate elements, united in miscellany, alterity, and plurality, came from outside Rome’s dominant elite. The heterogeneity here was twofold, applying to both the plebs’ constitution and its relationship to power. The distinction and the opposition between plebs and patricians remained in some ways irreducible and marked out a definite separation between the two orders. Significantly, Richard stresses that the plebs “emerged from non-being,” thereby underscoring the plebs’ constructedness and, hence, its creativity, since it took an active part in its own emergence as a political subject. Furthermore, the plebs asserted itself politically, moving from the category of nonbeing to that of full-fledged human being. Its existence thus grew out of its active participation in political life. By divorcing itself from the physical imperatives of the species, the plebs took on the political condition specific to humankind. Max Weber confirms the hypothesis of the political character of the plebs: “The conflict of orders in the Early Republic was a social struggle only in so far as it concerned debt law . . . otherwise it was a political struggle.”⁵

“Heterogeneous,” “exterior,” emergence from “nonbeing”: these are among the constitutive elements that a preliminary definition of the plebs brings to light. But before going any further, it would be appropriate to determine the ideological and material conditions that allowed the plebs to appear precisely at the time of the Roman Republic.

On the ideological level, Roman political practice during the Republic was structured by libertas. This notion, characterized by a degree of ideological elasticity, may refer to a number of things: political rights, equality among citizens, a fairer distribution of wealth, etc. But libertas can be summed up as the capacity to have rights and the absence of political subjugation.⁶ The importance of libertas was such that it shaped not only political practice but also the other core political ideas of Rome, such as civitas and res publica. Indeed, it represents one of the founding concepts of Roman political institutions.⁷ In Rome, libertas did not have the status of a natural right; it was an acquired right that could be lost, particularly through enslavement. On the other hand, it was possible for everyone, including slaves and excluded individuals, to acquire libertas and thereafter enjoy political rights;⁸ hence the importance of such a notion, which, by its very nature, was subject to fluctuations within the Roman political sphere. The conventionality of libertas enabled its extension within the Republic.

Libertas indicated, in sum, a person’s status in Rome. It overlapped—and to some extent blended with—the notion of civitas, which designated a person’s rank according to his relationship to the political community.⁹ Libertas and civitas were interrelated inasmuch as the range and scope of libertas varied in accordance with the political structure prevailing in Rome.¹⁰ The Roman who enjoyed maximum libertas was necessarily endowed with the status of civitas. At the same time, for there to be civitas, free political institutions were needed. Libertas granted the right to act within inclusive political structures.¹¹ It was therefore linked to the citizen’s autonomy, which was realized thanks to political institutions that were free and able to accommodate the citizens’ participation. The political conditions for freedom had to prevail in order for libertas actually to take shape. That is why libertas appeared in Rome after the fall of the monarchies, once the Republic was established.

The res publica, another key concept of Roman political practice, designates a regime granting everyone an active share in political life. It was premised on the participation of the people in public affairs but without affirming the principle of government by the people.¹² In fact, ordinary citizens made up only one component of the Roman Republic’s political sphere, in which patricians and others invested with authority and dignity always played a predominant role.¹³ Concerning the res publica, libertas guaranteed that Roman political institutions were truly free and republican. The res publica could not truly be the “public thing” without libertas, that is, without the enjoyment of certain political rights and the absence of different forms of subjugation.

Yet the advent of the plebs did not result exclusively from an ideological mutation that placed libertas at the heart of politics. It was also the product of a particular economic situation. It must be stressed at the outset that, as noted by the historian H. Mouritsen, the thesis of the preponderance of the clientela system—a network of plebeian economic dependence on the patricians—has today been put in doubt by scholars of the Roman world.¹⁴ The lack of empirical evidence for the existence of a system of economic and political subordination of the lower to the upper class renders such a view of Rome untenable.¹⁵ Already in the nineteenth century, the historian Fustel de Coulanges stated, “the plebeians were not the clients; the historians of antiquity do not confound these two classes. . . . In Dionysius of Halicarnassus we read, ‘the plebeians left Rome and retired to Mons Sacer; the patricians remained alone in the city with their clients.’”¹⁶ Max Weber also underscores the difficulties concerning the distinction between plebs and clients in Rome.¹⁷ Without claiming to resolve this interpretive issue, one can nevertheless posit that the clientela network did indeed exist in Rome but did not affect the majority of plebeians.

The secondary nature of the clientela does not, however, imply that the plebs enjoyed an enviable economic position. On the contrary, deprivation, famine, housing shortages, and high mortality rates were, among other ordeals, the plebs’ daily lot.¹⁸ Extremely harsh living conditions within a more open political context than had been the case under the monarchy, led to the “birth” of the plebs as a political subject.¹⁹ Libertas, “precisely because it was such a fundamental tenet of the identity of the Roman state,” allowed “all political agents [to] draw moral capital from it and exploit it for their own purposes.”²⁰ Ideology and the economic juncture opened a gap in the political domination prevailing until then in Rome. The plebs constituted itself by exploiting that gap. The first plebeian secession (494 BCE) paralyzed the economic life of the Eternal City.

There were three plebeian secessions in Rome. The first, however, stands out as the founding event because this was the moment of the plebs’ advent as a political subject. Its significance can also be attributed to its becoming a point of reference for certain political ideas and practices that followed.²¹ This, at least, is what remains to be assessed at the conclusion of our investigation.

Regarding the background to the first plebeian secession in Rome, the debt problem, according to Livy, was the root cause of major political upheavals in the early years of the Roman Republic.²² The destitute were liable to lose their status as free men and become slaves because of unpaid debts. This state of affairs seemed all the more unjust because plebeians were required to defend the Roman Republic by serving in the army. This paradoxical situation—defense of Rome’s liberty against exterior threats but domestic subjection—engendered “internal dissension” between patricians and plebeians that made conflict between the orders inevitable. The plebeians, Livy writes, “complained loudly that after fighting foreign wars for liberty and empire, at home they were oppressed and made prisoners by their own fellow citizens; and that the freedom of the plebs was more secure in war among the enemy than among their own countrymen.”²³

One incident that was especially scandalous from the plebs’ perspective sparked off a riot in Rome. At the forum, an old man living in misery recounted how he had been forced to sell the family’s land and all his possessions. Despite having served heroically (he had been a brilliant commander of a Roman century), “he had been dragged by his creditor not just into slavery, but into a place of punishment and torture.”²⁴ This old man embodied the plebs’ intolerable situation, and the treatment he received provoked violent disturbances.

When the Volsci launched a surprise attack against Rome, the patricians were terror-stricken. To fight simultaneously on two fronts, external and internal, would no doubt mean the ruin of Rome. The plebeians, on the other hand, greeted the news of the aggression with joy: “For them, it seemed like an intervention of providence to crush the pride of the Senate.” Taking advantage of the situation to apply pressure against the patricians, the plebs encouraged its members to refrain from joining the army, a tactic that forced the Senate to prohibit penalties against Roman citizens who were unable to pay their debts. Livy suggests that this was a compromise aimed at alleviating domestic strife and thus ensuring Rome’s victory against its external enemies.²⁵

Rome’s ensuing victory emboldened the patricians, who immediately clamped down on debtors, including veterans. “Men previously bound over, were in consequence of judgements, abandoned to the mercy of their creditors, and others, previously free, were bound over in their turn.” The veterans tried to avoid these stringent decrees by appealing to the consul who had issued the recent edict against imprisonment for indebtedness. But the antidebtor furor was overwhelming, and the consuls could do no better than to adopt a position of neutrality. Livy explains that because “they knew now that it was idle to look to the consuls or the Senate for relief,” the plebs resorted to direct action aimed at disrupting the legal proceedings against debtors. By drowning out the consul’s pronouncements with their shouts, they enabled the debtor to claim ignorance of his sentence.²⁶

The threat of a new attack against Rome forced the patricians to press the plebeians into taking up arms in defense of the Republic. But the plebs refused to ser...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Epigraphs
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Part I: What Is “The Plebs”?
• Part II: The Question of the Forms of Political Organization
• Part III: The Nature of the Human Bond
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index