The Pursuit of Equality in the West

Aldo Schiavone, Jeremy Carden

• Verlag: Harvard University Press
• Jahr: 2022
• ISBN:
  9780674275713
• Thema: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Thema: Democrazia

One of the world's foremost historians of Western political and legal thought proposes a bold new model for thinking about equality at a time when its absence threatens democracies everywhere. How much equality does democracy need to survive? Political thinkers have wrestled with that question for millennia. Aristotle argued that some are born to command and others to obey. Antiphon believed that men, at least, were born equal. Later the Romans upended the debate by asking whether citizens were equals not in ruling but in standing before the law. Aldo Schiavone guides us through these and other historical thickets, from the first democracy to the present day, seeking solutions to the enduring tension between democracy and inequality.Turning from Antiquity to the modern world, Schiavone shows how the American and the French revolutions attempted to settle old debates, introducing a new way of thinking about equality. Both the French revolutionaries and the American colonists sought democracy and equality together, but the European tradition (British Labour, Russian and Eastern European Marxists, and Northern European social democrats) saw formal equality—equality before the law—as a means of obtaining economic equality. The American model, in contrast, adopted formal equality while setting aside the goal of economic equality. The Pursuit of Equality in the West argues that the United States and European models were compatible with industrial-age democracy, but neither suffices in the face of today's technological revolution. Opposing both atomization and the obsolete myths of the collective, Schiavone thinks equality anew, proposing a model founded on neither individualism nor the erasure of the individual but rather on the universality of the impersonal human, which coexists with the sea of differences that makes each of us unique.

· CHAPTER ONE · THE GREEK ALTERNATIVE

Nature or Politics?

Anatomies

The beginning of our journey takes us far back in time. The setting is the eastern shores of the Mediterranean, in the decades between the sixth and fifth century BC, when the outline began to form of what would later be called, in a way as suggestive as it was overstated, the “Greek miracle”: an age of great innovations, when features took shape that would leave their mark on the whole of the ancient West.

As far as is known, reflection on equality first began to crystallize in relation to one of the most significant events of this period: the birth of the polis; that is, of the city as a politically organized body that we would call sovereign—though the ancients themselves had no such concept.

In the new communities, whose independent existence often stemmed from the crumbling of vaster territorial entities, in Greece and along the coasts of Ionia colonized by the Greeks, the experience of complete political autonomy led the inhabitants to form very close ties among themselves. Reciprocal and equal, these bonds were not just between the old aristocracies, but also included people of humbler stock—peasants, artisans, shopkeepers, traders, seafarers—and prompted a distribution of government tasks that involved the whole community, rather than just being concentrated in tight-knit oligarchies or in the hands of a monarch.

The poleis regenerated from this new sociality quickly became the context for a peculiar management of power, which was soon called “democracy”—a word that Aeschylus, in The Suppliants, written in Athens probably around 460 BC, already showed that he knew, working deftly around the terms forming it: demos and kratos—people and power, combined in a previously unimaginable short circuit.¹

In the newly refashioned cities there was plenty of discussion (and writing too): more complex modes of social organization and of the division of labor freed up, albeit for just a few, time and resources to devote to activities that we would describe as intellectual. People began to publicly ask questions about themselves, the value of their choices, the characteristics of the societies that were developing, the mysterious regularity of nature, and the hidden meaning of life and of the world. They debated the exact significance of the peculiar symmetry between citizens induced by democratic politics, and what the limits were of this condition.

Parity within the bounds of one’s own circle had already long been common among various aristocratic groups at the time—as is clearly shown, for example, in Homer’s poetry. But something different was emerging now: the democracy taking root in centers along the coasts of the Aegean was at once the presupposition and the result of a leveling not limited to a narrow circle of important families but extending to the whole social fabric of the city. It is in this framework that we come across an announcement that has reached us mutilated and decontextualized but which, due to the essentiality of its content, has been part of European and Western history ever since: in a certain sense, the point of origin of the path we are trying to reconstruct.

Expressed in it, probably in highly assertive and polemical terms—whether for the first time exactly we do not know, but undoubtedly in an already very definite and complete way—was a radical idea, that of equality as a “natural” feature of the human; and some decisive implications of this discovery were clearly set forth:

We know them and we respect them [perhaps: “our customs, our laws”: the integrations to render this incipit are conjectural and controversial]; but those of people who live far away we neither know nor do we respect them. Thus in this regard we have become barbarians towards each other, since, in nature at least, we are all fitted similarly by nature in all regards to be both barbarians and Greeks. It is possible to observe what is necessary by nature for all human beings and what they possess in relation to their needs in conformity with <the same> needs, and in all this none of us can be defined as either b<arbaria>n or Greek. For we all breathe into the air through our mouth and nose; <we laugh when we are happy in our mind> or we weep when we are grieved; we take in sounds by our hearing, and we see by means of light with our eyes; we do work with our hands and we walk with our feet.²

It is possible, as has been suggested, that these words were paradoxical or even provocative, and that their author was not exactly a friend of democracy, whose limitations and incompleteness he wished to denounce.³ But no attempt to piece together a background can extinguish the objective force of this thought, presented with the impact of a drastic pronouncement open to all “human beings.”⁴ The boundaries of citizenship in the new poleis were breached in a single blow; the declaration went further even than the whole sum of their inhabitants, to include nothing less than the entire human species.

---

Writing in this fashion, around 430 BC, in a work consisting of various books and probably entitled On Truth, was a man devoted to “philosophizing,” as Pericles, the great Athenian politician, put it in those same years. His name was Antiphon, and his words have survived in a fragment known to us through two of the Oxyrhynchus Papyri.

Antiphon lived in Athens—at the height of the democratic experience—and his master had probably been Anaxagoras, who came from Clazomenae on the coast of Asia Minor: a man of learning versed in the doctrines of the Ionic physics that had accompanied the establishment of popular governments on the Asian side of the Mediterranean.

An Ionic inspiration—the intellectual environment between Miletus and Abdera—shines through in Antiphon’s text: the naturalism supported by the empirical observation of reality typical of early Greek science, which had yielded the conceptions of Thales, Anaximander, and Leucippus, and would run through to Democritus. A universe that is now almost lost to us (something can be intuited through Lucretius), due to the drastic selection made in late antiquity when saving classical texts—a choice dominated by the Christian canon, which, by no longer transcribing works deemed incompatible with the new religion, effectively consigned them to oblivion—like those of the early Ionic scholars, too imbued with materialism. Their analytic force can be almost only detected in an indirect way, through the screen of Platonic and Aristotelean writings that would intercept and readapt their memory. But unfortunately, here too we are conditioned by a thick filter erected by the two philosophers, who forced the richness and originality of that tradition into the categories of the metaphysical and spiritualistic turn that distinguished Greek thought from Plato onward (we shall see an example shortly).

To push his reasoning to its most extreme consequences, Antiphon evoked an alterity well known to fifth-century Athenian culture, constitutive of the Greek certitude of their own superiority: we, the Greeks, on the one hand, and the barbarians on the other. A contrast based on a primary negation, a path of self-recognition determined above all by exclusion, in opposition to the other: not slaves, not women, not peoples unable to speak a Greek dialect.

Instead, Antiphon stripped those differences of meaning, erasing them completely, and in so doing reached the horizon of an absolute inclusion: the space of the universally equal (the philosopher did not mention women, but he probably included slaves in his formulation, though whether here or in another text we cannot say, as we shall see more clearly further on—they must also have fallen within the scope of the equality he imagined). Every identification obtained solely through opposition was superseded at a stroke, to the point of including within the same field also what appeared at first sight to be completely extraneous to it: the barbarian, or the slave, recognized as being perfectly equal.

Any distinction constructed on the basis of social conventions, however deep rooted, was cancelled out by the evidence of a more important uniformity, founded on objective recognition of fundamental characteristics shared by all human beings, distinguished by the same anatomy and the same functioning of the body. Such uniformity had to come first, because—and this was the real heart of Antiphon’s reasoning, implicit but crystal clear—everything belonging to the world that we would call social-historical should be related—and to a certain extent subordinated—to the natural-biological datum. The corporeality of bare existence was elevated in this way to the measure of every human relation. Not just the common functions of survival (breathing), but also those enabling sociality and community life (seeing, moving, working, laughing, crying), performed by means of the same anatomical base (the mouth, nostrils, feet, eyes, hands), make humans entirely similar; and from this Antiphon derived consequences that could connect nature and society, observation of reality and the correct formation of the rules that should guide all dealings between human beings.

The affirmation, as formulated, had the effect of bringing life—grasped in its barest essentiality—directly into politics (the declaration inevitably had political implications), projecting the materiality and functionality of bodies not only onto the social profile of the polis, but even onto relations between different peoples commonly perceived as opposites. And life was brought in not as an inert object over which to exercise an omnipotent command—the unquestionable authority of the law, of nomos—but rather as the unbreakable foundation of collective action: an intent that, with time, would become the genetic feature of all democratic radicalism.

---

In Antiphon’s interpretation, the experience of politics—whatever the philosopher’s actual position within it—was evoked and, as it were, placed between parentheses, while it was the discovery of the natural character of equality that was placed in the foreground. As if, to truly comprehend its import, it was necessary to give that idea a completely external grounding with respect to the constitution of the polis. To conceive it as evidence of a nature pushed beyond itself and interpreted as norm and as destiny—an attitude also known to Greek thought irrespective of this particular vision. And it was the conquest of a prepolitical horizon that made it possible to arrive at that otherwise precluded universality which, once achieved, had a socially and culturally explosive significance.

The boundaries of nature, in fact, did not coincide with those of the polis. The discovery of equality held true also and indeed above all outside the city; it could go beyond the specifically political sphere to include the whole species, precisely because the affirmation was not the outcome of an achievement within a particular community, but reflected a natural input, a kind of primary self-recognition of the human as such.

What weight and value Antiphon really gave to the proclamation of this boundless unity is not known. It is likely that he himself thought it wise not to exaggerate its significance, sterilizing its practical and political meaning, reduced to a declaration of principle, perhaps even with paradoxical overtones, and without any immediate consequences for the established order of an entire civilization.

The fact remains, however, that it is impossible to erase the effect of destabilizing relativity that the affirmation—whatever its intention—ended up radiating. A whole system of persuasions was called into question and oscillated dangerously, observed with the estranged gaze of someone judging it in the light of another truth.

Cities of Equals

In the Greece of the second half of the fifth century BC, Antiphon’s pronouncement was an isolated, though, as we shall see, not forgotten case. From what can be reconstructed, it would appear that no one developed his strand of thinking directly, though someone must have picked up on it.

Equality was discussed, though above all in relation to a different and less radical version—narrower, but more widely shared. A paradigm directly linked this time to politics and to the democratic turn being experienced by the Greek world. It too was destined to have a very long history.

A trace of it can be found in a well-known passage from Herodotus, written in the second half of the fifth century and drawing probably on a source that should once again be linked to Ionic thought. The historian expounded, in the shape of a dialogue, a kind of elementary theory of forms of government, setting them against each other in the search for the best one. His classification would prove very influential and long-lived, from Plato to Aristotle to Polybius and all the way through to the founders of modern political science—Machiavelli, Hobbes, and others.⁵

In the tale the comparison was developed enigmatically by three Persian men of learning.⁶ Each one defended...