Greek Literature Impacts To Political Thought (2015)

Greek Literature in Contemporary Political Theory and Thought
Greek Literature in Contemporary Political Theory and

Thought
Demetra Kasimis
Subject: Classical Studies, Ancient Prose Literature Online Publication Date: Feb 2015
DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199935390.013.40
Abstract and Keywords
This article explores the uses of Greek literature, philosophy, and politics in contempo
rary political theory. It explains that, since the second half of the 20th century, the study
and deployment of Greek texts in political theory has served four interrelated projects: (1)
to underscore political theory’s roots as an embedded and politically relevant practice; (2)
to show that the history of political thought may function as contemporary critique; (3) to
recover the spontaneity, plurality, and equality of classical politics for modernity; (4) and
to offer new resources for thinking about democratic equality and activity. The article
suggests that the question of how to recuperate the new political theoretical possibilities
posed by a polyvocal or deconstructed Plato remains an underappreciated but critical
question for political and democratic theory today.
Keywords: political theory, Greek literature, democracy, history of political thought, postwar thought, polis, Plato
1. Introduction
Contemporary political theory’s relationship to Greek literature has been marked by con
siderable, at times contentious, debate over the merits of turning to the past for thinking
politically in the present and the methodological assumptions that should govern this en
terprise. Whatever their differences in interest and emphasis, political theorists generally
endorse the view that Plato, Aristotle, Thucydides, and the dramatic poets are part of a
shifting canon of political thought and that their works have helped constitute our politi
cal vocabulary. The question of how to recognize this Greek presence and (whether to) re
main critical of it is nevertheless the subject of longstanding disagreement. Contempo
rary political theory’s relationship to classical Greek literature has thus frequently served
as a topos for conversations about what the humanistic study of politics entails.
Since the second half of the 20th century, the study and deployment of Greek literature in
political theory has served four interrelated projects: (1) to underscore political theory’s
roots as an embedded and politically relevant practice; (2) to show that the history of po
litical thought may function as contemporary critique; (3) to recover the spontaneity, plu
Page 1 of 22
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rality, and equality of classical politics for modernity; (4) and to offer new resources for
thinking about democratic equality and activity.
There are numerous academic contexts for the politically oriented study of Greek texts.
This article focuses on the relationship between the interdisciplinary Anglo-American sub
field of political science called “political theory” and classical Greek literature, of which
philosophy, poetry, history, and, to a lesser extent, oratory are all a part. Two critical ap
proaches characterize the orientation political theorists take to this expansive classical
Greek canon. One belongs to the “history of political thought,” a disciplinary subgenre fo
cused on narration and critical commentary on past political ideas and texts. The other is
explicitly present oriented and thematic in focus. Under this loose second grouping, polit
ical theorists treat Greek texts as new resources for thinking about a range of recurring
topics, from justice, pluralism, and civil disobedience to equality, citizenship, and power.
A theorist’s concern here would not be, say, how Antigone explores the gender politics of
the Athenian polis but whether it offers future possibilities for feminist agency in a con
temporary democratic state. Both approaches—with some exceptions (e.g., the Cam
bridge School of Intellectual History)—consider a nominal amount of comparison between
eras to be possible and illuminating because democracy and theory, as the Athenians
practiced them, are thought to share significant features with their modern namesakes.
While assertions of continuity across time and space have not gone uncontested in politi
cal theory, most practitioners recognize that the idea of an unbroken theoretical “tradi
tion” has helped constitute political theory’s self-understanding and thus warrants persis
tent critical examination.
The professional designations offered here are by no means precise or discrete. “Histori
ans” of ancient Greek political thought may exhibit minimal concern with contextualism
in their readings, and present-oriented political theorists may engage deeply with a Greek
text’s historical context and reception history. But the line between the history of political
thought and political theory tout court stands for more than a porous division of labor. It
should be understood as a living artifact, the effect of decades of disciplinary efforts to
stake out political theory’s identity both through and against its so-called Greek origins.
This permeable division of specializations rests precariously on the contested view that
theory and interpretation—of past thought in particular—are in fact distinguishable activ
ities. As an indication of scholarly emphasis, the distinction is illuminating. As a conceptu
al frame, it may exact interpretive tolls on conversations among political theorists work
ing on Greek thought. It is worth asking here whether this hierarchical division finds its
own origins in the challenge some behaviorists flung at political theorists in the second
half of the 20th century.
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2. The Deployment of Greek Literature in Post

war Political Theory
As ahistoricist, positivist, and behavioral approaches to the social sciences gained trac
tion in politics departments in the 1950s, the appeal to scientific inquiry accompanied a
call to transform political theory. Theorists were urged to explain the relevance of their
subfield to colleagues who claimed the historical or philosophical analysis of politics did
not serve the discipline’s new aims of objective description and explanation of political
phenomena (Gunnell 1979). Some of behaviorism’s adherents thought it was possible to
conduct the empirical and normative study of politics without historical knowledge or
context. They called for a purely empirical science of politics that could deliver the kind
of “empirically verifiable generalizations” about human behavior—not action—common to
the natural sciences (Gunnell 1993, 255). A new hierarchy of academic specializations
emerged in which empirical explanations (“facts”) were not only distinguishable from the
oretical explanations (“values”) but logically preceded and determined theoretical inquiry
(Gunnell 1979).
Focused as it was on narrating past thought, political theory was an insufficient auxiliary
to the new social sciences. One problem was that it did not emulate the disciplinary an
cestors it claimed: at its “birth” in ancient Greece, wrote the political scientist David Eas
ton, political theory had reflected on “practical affairs,” but modern-day theorists pre
ferred to analyze the meaning and development of past political thought with little inter
est in its relation to the present (1951, 43, 42). “Why is it,” his controversial essay began,
“that today in political theory we must turn to the past in order to find inspiration and
genuine freshness” (1951, 36)? Political theory’s “impoverishment” was cast as a break
from its originary practice in ancient Greece, but enrichment could not come from a “his
toricist” recovery of those roots. Commentary on past political ideas was simply incapable
of stimulating the “revolutionary creative thinking” needed to address “the fundamental
change and widespread conflict” symbolized by the political violence of 20th century
(Easton 1951, 36, 42).
The most influential political theorists of this period shared the sentiment that modernity
was in crisis, but they suggested that behaviorism—which displaced human agency by re
ducing politics to abstract interests and deterministic forces—was just another one of its
symptoms. The new science of politics could thus never achieve the transformative
methodological and political awakening it sought. In a series of searing interventions into
the practices and politics of interpretation and criticism, Leo Strauss, Hannah Arendt,
and Sheldon Wolin variously defended the contemporary relevance of a political theory
deeply and critically conversant in the history of political thought and especially its ori
gins in classical Greek philosophy. Only the “exegesis, deconstruction, and reconstruction
of the tradition” (Gunnell 1993, 253) could provide the political theoretical perspective
needed for making sense of modernity’s violence, alienation, and individualism.
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Though Arendt would weather charges of nostalgia for years, all three postwar thinkers
self-consciously foregrounded the contemporary impulses driving their interests in an
cient Greek literature and politics. “We are impelled” to turn “toward the political
thought of classical antiquity,” Strauss wrote, not by antiquarianism but “by the crisis of
our time” (1964, 1). Focusing on what he called the moral and cultural relativism of the
West and its “uncertain purpose,” Strauss argued that the social sciences were bankrupt
for thinking about “political things as they are experienced by the citizen or states
man” (1964, 11, 2). Political scientists were wrong to seek an immediate connection to
politics by emancipating themselves from a deeply embedded political-philosophical tradi
tion (Strauss 1989, 50). Classical theory was by contrast “directly related” to “political
life” because it posed the questions raised “in assemblies, councils, clubs and cabinets”
from “everyday experience and everyday usage” (Strauss 1989, 51). For a discipline that
despite, or because of, its empirical emphasis had lost touch with any meaningful sense of
the “political,” Greek philosophy exemplified a much-needed politically relevant theoriz
ing.
But Greek philosophy was more than an exemplar. Its analysis was thought to reveal how
the field’s impoverished approach to politics reflected the alienation and detachment of a
particular cultural moment and, worse, helped naturalize it. If the so-called truths of the
modern scientific worldview now dominated the study of politics as “demonstrated in
mathematical formulas and proved technologically,” Arendt wrote, the present danger
was that political truths were no longer comprehensible in “normal expression in speech
and thought” (1958/1998, 3). Behaviorism’s reduction of political life was a sign of the
modern era’s larger inability to see political action for what it really was. This failure had
grave political consequences. Incapable of making sense of what was being done around
them as action, human beings experienced their “capacity to respond in kind” as already
thwarted (Tsao 2002, 118). A return to the ancient record would not only show this to be
the case; it would inspire theoretical orientations conducive of genuine political praxis.
To insist that Greek political philosophy was instructive and inspiring because it emerged
in response to the realm of practical political affairs was not the same as claiming that
ancient critics could or should inspire the theory and practice of democracy. Greek texts
played a key role in postwar political theory’s transformation, but, as the stark differ
ences between Strauss and Arendt showed, there was no agreement over the particular
vision of politics that classical Greek thought should support. Later political theory, by
contrast, would take a decisive democratic “turn” and seek resources for thinking posi
tively about democracy even in Plato. What united the postwar thinkers, however, was not
a particular interpretation of classical Greek thought but rather the awareness that the
value of contemporary political theory could no longer rest on a claim of Greek ancestry.
Genuine critique and political transformation depended on reimagining the terms of this
heritage and the authority it wielded: to do political theory meant thinking against the
tradition while using its conceptual tools (Pitkin 1998, 243).
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If current political theory (claimed it) had inherited its political concepts and approaches
from Greek thought, it was incumbent on political theorists to show how the careful study
of Greek literature could be both diagnostic and productive of present political thinking.
Wolin argued in this vein that political philosophers since Plato had thought of “harmo
ny,” “unity,” “temperance,” and “fixity” as the “most desirable attributes of a political
regime” and had conceptualized “political institutions, procedures, and activities” as a
whole system “dependent upon the performance of specified functions or
tasks” (1960/2004, 31). The purpose of measuring Plato’s influence this way was not to
demonstrate the eternal truth of Plato’s ideas but to suggest that political theory’s con
tours were largely the effect of a particular and persistent reception of Plato in the disci
pline. Many political theorists followed Plato, Wolin thought, when they sought to elimi
nate the conflict, ambiguity, and change that actually gave the political its distinctiveness
(1960/2004, 41).
The political theoretical study of Greek literature thus expanded to include critical recon
structions of the history of political thought, with great emphasis on how a reconsidera
tion of the meanings of “antiquity” and “modernity” could illuminate contemporary politi
cal theory and practice in unexpected ways. Such an activity was conceived as an exer
cise less in the application of Greek ideas than in education, disorientation, and revision
through textual exegesis. “We cannot reasonably expect that a fresh understanding of
classical political philosophy will supply us with recipes for today’s use,” Strauss cau
tioned. “Only we living can possibly find a solution to the problems of today. But an ade
quate understanding of the principles as elaborated by the classics may be the indispens
able starting point for an adequate analysis, to be achieved by us, of present-day society
in its peculiar character” (1964, 11).
One possible reason for this was that, according to Wolin, political theory was by defini
tion an activity of writing against its own tradition. He imagined political theory as one
long conversation between past and present, with each major political thinker innovating
on a previous one. The history of past thought was therefore not superfluous to contem
porary theory, as some political scientists had charged, but a constitutive part of the en
terprise. Their inheritance of a specific body of literature enabled political theorists to
frame “an old question in a novel way,” rebel “against conservative tendencies of thought
and language,” and “unfasten established ways of thought” in order to provoke contempo
rary reassessments (Wolin 1960/2004, 23). Seen in this light, the history of political
thought displayed recurring “problem-topics” but also variation and incongruity. Theo
rists may have used “the same concepts,” but they meant “very different things by
them” (Wolin 1960/2004, 24).
This cross-temporal, dialogical perspective served much more conservative aims in

Strauss’s hands. Hedging even more than Wolin on the question of historical specificity,
Strauss advised readers to recognize the uniqueness of classical antiquity as they looked
for the transhistorical value of its rational inquiries. Strauss opposed what he called the
liberal and historicist position that there were no universal standards for political judg
ment. He celebrated instead Greek philosophy’s characteristic commitments—embodied
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in Socrates—to asking perennial questions, providing timeless meanings, and demanding

a “higher” orientation for politics. Classical authors were preferable, according to
Strauss, because they wrote about political life in terms of virtue, not interest, and truth,
not utility. If properly recovered, the universal values in Greek texts would remind the
moderns that there were indeed standards for discerning “the hierarchy of the various
types of genuine needs” in their communities (Strauss 1953, 3).
Nowhere was the subfield’s new emphasis on critical reconstruction more evident than in
Arendt’s novel engagements with Greek literature and politics. Like Strauss, Arendt
looked to classical authors to criticize the abstraction and relativism of the modern age.
But where Strauss seemed to think “one could improve modern democracy by viewing it
in the light of Plato’s or Aristotle’s ideal conceptions” (Kateb 1995, 41), Arendt saw Pla
tonic philosophy in particular as the origins of a still-dominant tradition in need of re
assessment and distancing. The classical search for universal truths to govern political
life was indeed a seminal moment in the history of political thought, but it was not clear
that modernity had in fact departed from this troubling tradition.
It was the Greek polis, not its critics, that appeared most instructive—though not neces
sarily imitable—in Between Past and Future (Arendt 1961/1993) and The Human Condi
tion (Arendt 1958/1998), Arendt’s most “Greek” work. Yet even there, her analyses of Pla
to and Aristotle were indispensible to the overall project, which announced its contempo
rary inspiration in the very first line: “In 1957, an earth-born object made by man was
launched into the universe” (1958/1998, 1). What did the fact that science had finally “re
alized and affirmed” the “first step toward escape from men’s imprisonment to the earth”
have to do with antiquity (1958/1998, 1–2)? The wish to escape the human condition—to
act as “dwellers of the universe” despite being “earth-born creatures”—was apparent in
Plato’s desire to transcend the political realm of appearances and opinions for the realm
of unchanging truth (1958/1998, 4). Although the modern age fixated on labor not philos
ophy, it had a similar effect of repudiating the public realm, where the spontaneous and
plural performance of human freedom was possible. Recasting the original conflict be
tween the philosopher and the polis in these terms was a key step toward illuminating
contemporary alienation and its political effects. Later democratic theorists would find
this oppositional framing helpful in their own critiques of liberalism.
The Human Condition traced modernity’s debasement of political action back to classical
philosophy, which “discovered” that the political realm could not provide for all of “man’s
higher activities” (1958/1998, 17–18; 1968, 47). As Arendt put it:
Escape from the frailty of human affairs into the solidity of quiet and order has in
fact so much to recommend it that the greater part of political philosophy since
Plato could easily be interpreted as various attempts to find theoretical founda
tions and practical ways for an escape from politics altogether”
(1958/1998, 222)
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This evaluation of the history of political thought found pithy expression in Arendt’s pref
erence for “political theorist” and her eschewal of “political philosopher,” a title Strauss
embraced. With this gesture, Arendt registered her departure from a philosophical ap
proach to politics that since Plato had imagined political activity as an obstacle to free
dom rather than its guarantor (1958/1998, 14).
Unlike her contemporaries, who mostly focused on reading Greek thought, Arendt’s study
and deployment of the Greeks for contemporary political theory was decidedly two-
pronged. In her critiques of liberalism and modern politics, she devoted attention both to
rereading Greek works of philosophy, poetry, and history and to recovering the uniquely
participatory aspects of their democratic context—an approach that would come to char
acterize much recent political theory on Greek thought, though with curiously little ac
knowledgment of its overlap with this feature of Arendt’s work.1
Pitting the philosopher against the polis was of course not new, but Arendt presented the
terms of the antagonism differently and in urgent tones. The theoretical tradition contem
porary political theory traced back to Plato was not simply critical of democracy. It was
antipolitical. Practical politics could “never lie in theoretical considerations or the opinion
of one person,” as philosophy since the Republic had supposed, because by definition they
went on “directly between men” (Arendt 1958/1998, 5, 7). Plato may have emphasized the
common benefits of the Callipolis, but “the Good at which the Platonic community aimed
was in no way dependent on the community, nor was it in any real sense a matter for po
litical decision” (Wolin 1960/2004, 47).
Chief among the insights aiding Arendt’s critical project was the view, now obscured by
the scientific turn, that everyday speech constituted political action in Athens. For the
Greek polis, the capacity for speech and action distinguished human beings from animals
and barbarians. This capacity needed particular conditions for its actualization, and so
the polis maintained a political sphere, distinct from the oikos, in which to realize its po
litical freedom in the presence of others (Arendt 1958/1998, 24). Modern society, howev
er, had dissolved this key distinction since the organizations that employed most people’s
time and attention were those through which they made their living (Tsao 2002, 117). A
constellation of modern developments, including the emergence of large-scale markets,
the commodification of labor, and “the growth of a spirit of conformism” that helped “re
duce human activity to scientifically predictable and administratively tractable ‘behav
ior,’” had broken down the old distinction between public and private, “giving rise to a
‘new realm,’ in which the labor and the life process, once confined to the household,” was
now “the focus of (what can no longer properly be called) public concern” (Markell 2011,
21).
Arranged this way, modern society could neither understand nor experience public free
dom as something separate from the necessities of the household realm (Villa 2001, 249).
If the significance of the polis-oikos erosion had been difficult for modern thinkers to
grasp, it was in part because it fit with the picture they already admired in ancient philos
ophy. Arendt’s critical reconstruction of the tradition revealed that the philosopher’s idea
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of freedom promised not only an escape from the necessities of life and compulsion by
others but also a “freedom and surcease from political activity” itself (1958/1998, 14).
Insofar as the distinct political space for realizing freedom in the polis depended on the
relegation of labor and bodily necessity to the hidden domain of slaves and women,
Arendt’s veneration of the polis seemed to some readers insufficiently sensitive to the in
justice of the polis arrangement. Notwithstanding this frequent critique, the Human Con
dition did not actually hold the ancient polis in unqualified esteem but rather referred to
the oikos as a condition of inequality (Tsao 2002). Had Arendt argued for the unique injus
tice of the classical arrangement, her comparison between the ancient household and
modern society would have lost much of its thrust. To call Arendt nostalgic was a way of
inoculating liberalism from The Human Condition’s critique: liberalism may have rejected
direct, participatory democracy, but so long as it did not embrace the slavery on which
classical direct democracy apparently rested, the modern liberal state could appear dif
ferently, if not more, egalitarian than the polis.
In the foundational conflict between the philosopher and the polis, Arendt and Strauss
took opposite sides. But both options (action or eudaimonia) were meant as alternatives
to the routinized, rationalized, and disenchanted politics of the modern era (Villa 2001,
247). Against Arendt, Strauss held that philosophy was relevant to and compatible with
politics even though it might be impossible to persuade “citizens that philosophy is per
missible, desirable, or even necessary” (1989, 61). The death of Socrates served to show
that the philosopher’s political responsibility to speak the truth to the community was
permanently risky. Nevertheless, the philosopher could not relinquish his responsibility to
speak the truth, Strauss thought. The delicate balance between that responsibility and
the desire for self-preservation meant that the philosopher might have to “conceal or ob
scure [the truth] through the use of secrecy and obfuscation”—including not only Socratic
irony but also the esoteric writing for which Strauss and some of his students are known
(Smith 2006, 164).
Whatever Strauss’s political beliefs, his interpretations of Plato and Xenophon on this
point opened the door for readers and politicians to locate in Greek literature—and espe
cially in the Republic’s “noble lie”—a precedent and justification for the use of mendacity
by elites for the supposed benefit of the whole. (The Republic suggested that those in
power could find a truth that “transcends the vagaries of time and place” [Jay 2010:
154].) The noble lie’s political utility had played a prominent role in Karl Popper’s
(1943/1966) denunciation of Plato as a proto-totalitarian two decades before Strauss’s
treatment of the Republic in The City and Man (1964). Although their assessments of the
Republic’s value for contemporary political thinking appeared fundamentally divergent,
together they conspired to limit the democratic possibilities of Plato’s thought for contem
porary political theory.
Strauss was not solely interested in Greek thought, nor was he the only political theorist
of his generation to develop sustained engagements with it. Yet while Arendt and Wolin
have remained significant influences on contemporary political theory, only around
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Strauss has a professional school of thought committed to studying ancient political texts
and especially Plato emerged in the field of political science. Strauss’s noted ties to neo
conservative American politics have shaped disciplinary perceptions of the political theo
retical study of Plato—in particular the view that outside their study in the history of po
litical thought, the dialogues are resources particularly suited to conservative political
projects (Allen 2006).
3. Historical Sensitivity and a Democratic Turn

From the late 1960s through the 1990s, the methodological challenges posed by histori
ans associated with the Cambridge School of Intellectual History, along with the recep
tion of Jean-Pierre Vernant’s structuralism in Anglo-American classics, inspired some po
litical theorists to attend rigorously to the political and historical contexts in which a
Greek text was produced and set. Whether they relied on classical scholarship or attempt
ed to reconstruct their own contexts for reading, political theorists began interpreting
Greek texts as historical performances. A major feature of this contextualist turn was at
tention to the range of cultural practices and rituals that helped constitute Athenian polit
ical life (Connor 1987; Ober 2008). Vernant called on readers to foreground the historical
production of Greek tragedy in their interpretation of tragedy as a literary work. Against
Levi-Strauss, whose canonical reading of Oedipus separated the play from its historical
contexts, Vernant transposed the myth onto an Athenian setting where it invited a critical
exploration of democratic institutions (Vernant 1988). The approach, which could extend
to the analysis of other classical genres, suggested that interpreting Greek literature in
volved a reckoning with the political realities in which it was produced.
Historical sensitivity to Athenian poetic production and its relationship to the cultural life
of the polis enabled readers to locate critical figurations of those practices in classical
texts and then use them to question the meanings traditionally attributed to the activities
of philosophy and democratic citizenship. Though Strauss and Arendt had incorporated a
range of classical genres into their work, their critiques of contemporary political theory
and practice focused on rereading philosophy. To the extent that the new historical angle
placed greater emphasis on the democracy’s civic festivals, tragedy, and other discursive
modes appeared to be underexploited sites of political theorizing that, unlike philosophy,
embraced the inevitable conflict (Euben 1986) and uncertainty (Castoriadis 1997)
thought to characterize political life.
Political theorists’ engagements with this new terrain built on some concerns of the post
war deployments of Greek literature. Despite criticisms of philological and historical inac
curacy (Euben 2003), Arendt’s work attended to etymology, cultural practices, and an ex
pansive classical canon. Her illumination of the material conditions of democratic citizen
ship defamiliarized the polis and presented it as an exemplar through and against which
to think political action anew. When later political theorists incorporated these lenses of
analysis, they did so much more systematically than Arendt and often to opposite conclu
Page 9 of 22

sions, of which the most striking was that Plato’s thought offered positive resources for
democratic theory.
Critical of the stark antidemocratic characterization of ancient political philosophy and

alert to acute issues of historical specificity, many political theorists returned to Plato and
Aristotle in order to expose this entrenched picture as unduly hostile, sweeping, or
anachronistic (Salkever 1991; Saxonhouse 1996; Monoson 2000; Wallach 2001; Frank
2005; Tarnopolsky 2010). By directing attention to the material conditions of Athenian
politics, this work raised implicit questions about the dominance of constitutional and in
stitutional approaches to democracy in political theory.
Political scientists often took for granted the notion that a democratic regime was
(pre)constituted by its institutions and procedures, but this idea was incompatible with
the case of Athens and the theoretical approaches of Greek literature. The persistent
modern translation of politeia as “constitution” did more than reveal the privileged posi
tion of an institutional or procedural lens in modern political thinking. “This inexplicable
sign of ignorance or incomprehension,” wrote Cornelius Castoriadis, “made it impossible
to appreciate that a politeia was both a city’s political institution and “the way people go
about common affairs” (1997, 278). As Derrida had written about the word pharmakon in
Plato studies, the typical translation of politeia “obliterate[d] the virtual, dynamic refer
ences to the other uses of the same word in Greek” (1972/1981, 98) Politeia’s translation
canceled out “the resources of ambiguity” and made more “difficult, if not impossible, an
understanding of the context” in which the lived experience of citizenship was a critical
node of political theoretical analysis (1972/1981, 97). Law and procedure could never
predetermine politics in the classical view because they were always subject to an unpre
dictable and risky process of contestation and revision by the people (Castoriadis 1997).
As Wolin put forth in his Greek-inspired “aconstitutional” theory of democracy, political
science would do better to think of democracy as “resistant to the rationalizing concep
tions of power and its organization which for centuries have dominated western thinking
and have developed constitutionalism and their legitimating rationale” (1994, 37).2
A serious engagement with classical scholarship and an analysis of a wider range of clas
sical sources, including poetry, oratory, myth, and history, demonstrated that Athenians
understood and enacted democracy through a number of political practices not captured
by the constitutional frame. Nicole Loraux’s groundbreaking work The Invention of
Athens (1986) introduced Anglo-American political theorists to the epitaphios logos, a
genre Athenians used to develop their ideas of the model city. These underappreciated
speeches of public mourning were critical discourses that revealed the democracy’s para
doxical commitments (e.g., to the heroic individual and the community, to earned and in
herited virtue) and its attempts to unify the polis amid internal and external divisions con
tinually threatening its stability (Loraux 1986). The funeral orations depicted in Thucy
dides and Plato and the burial practices invoked by Antigone now offered some political
theorists alternative languages for evaluating the role eulogy and lamentation played in
contemporary democracy (Stow 2007; Honig 2013).
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Perhaps more important still, the deeper appreciation of Athenian civic practices allowed
for an engagement with the literary and historical features of Plato’s work, which was
shown to draw on formerly underrecognized democratic language, imagery, and practices
(Vidal-Naquet 1986; Nightingale 1995; Ober 1998; Allen 2000, 2010). If Plato’s distinctive
practice of philosophy appropriated aspects of such popular institutions as the
democracy’s parrhēsia (Foucault 2001) the antidemocratic characterization of philosophy
and Plato may have obscured more than it illuminated about the Platonic project (Mono
son 2000). Arendt found the theatrical in the dialogical and public character of the Greek
polis. Political theorists now saw it reflected as well in the performative features of Pla
tonic philosophy. As J. Peter Euben observed,
Plato’s debt to theater is not a debt to some arbitrary aesthetic invention but to
the social institution of his culture, which means that his attitude toward tragedy
is a way of locating him in the intellectual traditions and political practices that
defined Athenian democracy.
(1990, 236)
Efforts to situate Plato more firmly in his political realities, or show that Plato situated
the dialogues there, did more than discredit a Cold War picture of Plato. They drew atten
tion to Plato’s possibilities as a political thinker (Wallach 2001; Allen 2006) to theorize
with rather than only against. To approach Plato as “an ‘immanent’ critic of a corrupt
Athenian democracy” (Tarnopolsky 2010, 16, emphasis added) was to see in his work not
an unconditional rejection of democratic rule but still-relevant meditations on the circum
stances in which democracy reneged on its own political commitments to equality, discus
sion, and freedom. This Platonic corpus was polyvocal. It could serve as the origins of a
deliberative tradition committed to objective rational agreement (Urbinati 2010) at the
same time that it offered a powerful argument for the necessary role emotions played in
political judgment (Tarnopolsky 2010). One could locate a foundational moment of sexual
difference in the Timaeus (Butler 1993) and a “feminist” argument uncoupling sex from
the eligibility to rule in the Republic (Vlastos 1997).
If the flip side of the antidemocratic characterization of philosophy had been the celebra
tion of the polis as an antipode to the modern liberal state, then this polis also needed re
consideration. The nostalgic version of Athens, for which Arendt and others had come to
stand (Euben 2003), tended to emphasize the city’s participatory citizenship, which rest
ed on an unprecedented decoupling of rule and wealth. Yet interest in the city’s egalitari
an aspects seemed to come at the price of understanding not that the city also used sex-
and blood-based exclusion to constitute citizenship, as historians had long documented,
but how these strategies of exclusion worked alongside the city’s more inclusionary no
tion of citizenship (Loraux 1993; Kasimis 2013). Focused on the category of woman, Lo
raux shed light on how Athenian founding stories, like the exceptionalist myth of au
tochthony, were not only important contexts for the interpretation of Athenian imperial
ism and identity but also objects of criticism in the Athenian corpus itself (Loraux 1993).
If political theorists sometimes dismissed classical authors as elitist or chauvinist, they
Page 11 of 22

risked overlooking their critiques of democracy’s tyrannical, aristocratic, oligarchic, im

perial, and patriarchal dimensions (Loraux 1986; Saxonhouse 1992, 1996; Balot 2001;
Wallach 2001; Frank 2005). Restored to a moment “between polis and empire,” for in
stance, the metic Aristotle turned out to be much more ambivalent about the imperial
conquest and Greek hegemony he was often enlisted to support (Dietz 2012). Overall, the
diversified political theoretical record has challenged the broad impulse to see Greek lit
erature as the unequivocal ground for political positions modernity either disavowed or
celebrated.
At the same time that questions of historical specificity have gained traction in some cir
cles, most theorists writing on the Greeks in recent decades have oriented their readings
around questions of democratic equality and action. What this democratic turn means for
present-oriented political theory is frequently different from the historically sensitive
project of looking at the democratic possibilities of a thinker like Plato—and may even
work against it. Efforts to find instructive explorations of pressing democratic questions
in classical Greece tend to take two, though by no means discrete, forms. One looks to
tragedy, a genre seemingly more polyvocal and thus better suited to an antistatist, eman
cipatory politics than Greek philosophy. The other expresses the postwar interest in figur
ing the polis as a productive counterexample to liberal and deliberative conceptions of
theory and politics.
Largely symptomatic of Hegel’s reception of the play, few Greek texts have proved as
generative for new thinking about contemporary politics as Sophocles’ tragedy Antigone.
For over half a century, Antigone has figured largely in debates about civil disobedience
(Walzer 1970), pluralism (Nussbaum 1986; Connolly 2008), mourning (Butler 2004; Honig
2013), and most strikingly feminism and political action. Among feminist critics, there has
been little agreement about how to categorize Antigone’s challenge to Creon’s edict, with
the effect that Antigone has frequently represented competing conceptions of feminist
agency and political resistance. Through her identification with the “private” sphere of
kinship, Antigone stood in Jean Bethke Elshtain’s reading for an antistatist politics giving
“voice to familial and social imperatives and duties” (1982, 307). Mary Dietz countered
that rather than mobilize Antigone to “reverse the existential priority of the public realm
over the private realm,” Antigone should be read as a citizen acting in opposition to a par
ticular kind of politics of authoritarian rule (1985, 22, 29). In her reading of the play, Ju
dith Butler revisited the question of Antigone’s resistance to ask in what sense the hero
ine could be said to stand outside the political order she defied. Antigone’s Claim (2000)
took aim at the dominant Hegelian reception of the play when it noted that “every inter
pretive effort to cast a character as representative of kinship or the state tends to falter
and lose coherence and stability” (2000, 5) The reason for this faltering, Butler argued,
was that there was “no kinship without the support and mediation of the state and no
state without the family as its support and mediation” (2000, 5). By foregrounding the
question of kinship and its political contingency in the play, Butler’s reading firmly estab
lished Antigone in the political sphere and marked a shift in political theoretical interpre
Page 12 of 22

tation (Holmes 2012), whereby Antigone was no longer defined by her exclusion from the
public realm but exemplary of transgressive, political action (Honig 2013).
In the second half of the 20th century, the desire for an Archimedean point from which to
theorize politics, which Arendt originally attributed to Plato, found renewed expression in
the liberalism of John Rawls, who ground just institutions in rational, objective, and unan
imous agreement (Rawls 1971). The newer debates around liberalism subtly recast some
of the conflicts Arendt had set up between Plato and Athens. The postwar theorists ex
plored liberalism’s abstraction through an immediate consideration of Athenian thought
and politics. Now the debt to Plato and the polis was more presumed than critically exam
ined, a sign that the postwar opposition had become more or less entrenched.
Rawls’s philosophical experiment put forward an “original position,” in which abstract

and ideal agents were imagined to negotiate principles of justice from behind a “veil of ig
norance.” From there, they were unable to “choose principles of justice that [would] ad
vance their own particular interests or reward their own particular talents” and could
guarantee a just outcome by rendering the site of original political negotiation “safe, cal
culable” and closed off from future contestation (Honig 1993). Having canceled “the un
predictability of plural interaction that constitutes the proprium of politics,” liberalism re
placed it with the predictability of order (Cavarero 2002, 512). Such distance from the
world presumed that philosophy’s task was to stand apart and provide criteria for judg
ment. But as a blueprint for politics, it was as vulnerable to Arendt’s critique as the Re
public had been. Here, as in Arendt’s Plato, the founding principles of justice were settled
ahead of time and politics became “the application of rules to particular cases by judges
and administrators, and the following of rules by citizens generally” (Rawls 1971, 199).
Rawls’s theory relegated disagreement to the private realm. Despite his theory’s commit
ment to pluralism, those who deviated from the norm would have no resources through
which to assert their difference; their inequality could not be justified.
To critics, liberalism’s neat vision of politics was fundamentally opposed to autonomy and
equality in spite of its legal guarantees to the contrary. Athens provided a powerful coun
terexample for illustrating that politics was not reducible to institutions and their proce
dures but rather consisted in “the activity and struggle around the change of the institu
tions” (Castoriadis 1997, 274), those practices Rawls’s theory depoliticized and displaced.
The poleis “do not stop questioning their respective institutions,” wrote Castoriadis. “The
demos goes on modifying the rules under which it lives” (1997, 275). In Athens, only the
movements of “self-institution”—enactments, not assertions, of the creed that “we posit
our own laws”—made a people autonomous. And on this “active participation” also de
pended equality, so that it was not only “the granting of equal passive ‘rights’” but their
repeated performance that (re)secured equality for citizens (Castoriadis 1997, 275).
Theorists of “agonistic” politics pointed out that, in celebrating consensus, liberals like
Rawls and deliberative democrats like Habermas advanced a negative view of contesta
tion as a disruptive, irrational, and unpolitical act (Mouffe 1993). They countered by af
firming the central political importance of two ideas implicit in the Greek notion of agon—
Page 13 of 22

struggle and a concern for the “other,” without whom an agon could not take place (Con
nolly 1991; Honig 1993; Mouffe 1993). What followed from depoliticizing contestation, ag
onists suggested, was a reality in which some claims of injustice and inequality would al
ways go unrecognized as political demands—a problem that signaled to some an irrecon
cilable difference between a liberal politics and democratic politics (Chambers 2013, 10).
The realities of postcolonialism, migration, and postnational citizenship made it clear that
the question of which claims counted as political demands was also a question of speech
—or whose counted as such. As Arendt argued by way of the Politics, “Wherever the rele
vance of speech is at stake, matters become political by definition, for speech is what
makes man a political being” (1958/1998, 3). But what of those persons whose capacity
for logos was denied? The possession of logos might be the mark that distinguished the
political animal from all others, but Aristotle’s idea could also be wielded as a political
tool for excluding persons whose speech was polemically interpreted as mere (animal-
like) sound. Crossing national boundaries in the discipline, French philosopher Jacques
Rancière’s influential Disagreement (1999) revisited not the polis per se but Aristotle’s
“celebrated lines” to ask just how given or legible the sign of logos was (Chambers 2013,
96ff). “If there is someone you do not wish to recognize as a political being,” Rancière ex
plained, “you begin by not seeing them as the bearers of politicalness, by not understand
ing what they say, by not hearing that it is an utterance coming out of their mouths” (Ran
cière 2001, par. 23). If the distinction between phônê and logos was not prepolitical or
pregiven, it was drawn, redrawn, and thus always contestable. With this foundational
Aristotelian binary unsettled, political theorists began exploring its wider implications for
questions of immigration and noncitizen activism (Beltrán 2010; Frank 2010): democratic
politics actually occurred when persons excluded from logos contested the line that poli
ties used to render them illegible (Rancière 1999, 22).
Whether looking to explain or unsettle the political present, many of the aforementioned
engagements with the Greeks have tended to leave the critical reconstruction of the his
tory of ancient political thought to the “historians” of political thought. Whereas much
historically sensitive work sought to question the oppositions (e.g., philosopher vs. polis,
ancient vs. modern democracy; antipolitical vs. embedded Plato) they inherited from the
postwar period, explicitly contemporary political theory has been slow to incorporate the
implications of these challenges into their readings of Greek thought and politics. Like
wise, historically sensitive readings of Greek literature have not, as a rule, engaged in the
kind of large-scale contemporary critique central to the major postwar engagements with
the history of political thought.
This shift, though not universal, risks reinscribing the distinction between theory and in
terpretation that some postwar theorists sought to polemicize and subvert. In different
ways, Arendt, Strauss, and Wolin insisted that the narration of past texts and the theo
rization of contemporary politics were unavoidably imbricated critical practices. The
years since the “historical turn,” however, reveal an increasing division of labor along
those lines. If earlier theorists stressed the importance of analyzing Plato and Aristotle as
the origins of a wayward philosophical tradition, it was because they held that contempo
Page 14 of 22

rary critique required a radical and simultaneous reconstruction of the tradition that was
said to bequeath the discipline’s core theoretical nodes and concepts. Recent political
theory has tended to bifurcate this practice in the study of the Greeks even when present
ed with alternative theoretical models from other fields.
Though not always recognized as a political thinker, Jacques Derrida pursued the political
theoretical project of rewriting the tradition by mobilizing classical texts “in an ongoing
dialogue with the present” (Leonard 2010, 3). His forty-year engagement with antiquity
demonstrated that “the urgency of the now [could] be best addressed” by a “radical re-
reading of the foundational texts” (Leonard 2010, 2), which he performed famously in his
seminal essay on antiquity, “Plato’s Pharmacy” (Derrida 1972/1981), and elsewhere con
nected to such explicit political issues as immigration in contemporary Europe. Attending
carefully to the Greek in “Pharmacy,” Derrida emphasized close textual engagement. He
tracked the term pharmakon to show that Plato’s “text” could not be reduced to a system
of hierarchically ordered oppositions, as generations of readers had presumed. The dis
tinctions Plato drew engaged in a kind of textual play that rendered their meanings unsta
ble. If, at the apparent instruction of the dialogues, translation and interpretation fre
quently closed down this play, then readers were complicit in claiming a certain kind of
Platonism. This Platonism tethered them further to the traditions of antiquity and moder
nity that Derrida’s deconstructive strategy of reading sought to diagnose and ultimately
explode.
4. Greek Literature and Contemporary Political

Theory at the Postmillennial Juncture
Whether the realization is cast in terms of pluralism or conflict, political theory’s sense
that “ends collide” in this world both across “comprehensive conceptions” and “within
them” has deepened since the discipline crossed the millennial mark (White 2002, 474).
This urgent realization cannot be captured by metanarratives aimed at reconciliation. At
the same time, “the scale and power of a globalized market” and increasing flows of peo
ples and ideas across national borders are challenging the nation-state as the traditional
unit in which democratic ideals can be realized (White 2002, 475) and suggest that the
thought and politics of classical Greece may hold new relevance in a postnational condi
tion. Feeling the need to radically rethink the spaces of democratic life and account for
the “strange multiplicity of voices and activities without distorting or disqualifying
them” (Tully 2002, 537), some political theorists have already looked to Athens and its lit
erature for provocative explorations of plurality, marginality (Rancière 1999; Butler 2000;
Euben 2003; Markell 2003; Honig 2013), and political inertia (Lane 2012).
In the postwar period, the question of Greek literature’s relevance to contemporary politi
cal theory pressed some theorists to think about their enterprise as a historical-critical
practice and enabled the discipline’s appreciation for the past’s power to disorient in the
present. Some political theorists continue these efforts at reconstructing the tradition by
bringing an acute historical specificity or hermeneutic lens to their textual exegesis. Oth
Page 15 of 22

ers show their debt by deploying the polis as the strange-yet-familiar antipode to logocen
tric, authoritarian, and procedural conceptions of politics. The postwar theorists, howev
er, also held that Greek thought could not provoke new insights into aporias of democra
cy, action, and equality unless the same theorists diagnosed the terms of their Greek in
heritance as they read. To embrace the full thrust of this insight is to ask how today’s po
litical theorists may have come to domesticate the postwar picture of Greek literature and
politics.
Political theorists’ desires to find new insights in the practices and values of classical
Athens have often been accompanied by a broad and comforting impulse to trace the limi
tations of modern abstract and universalizing theories to the city’s purportedly
staunchest critic. Despite the polyvocal Plato that emerged from the previous decades of
historically sensitive work, the Plato that haunts contemporary democratic theory is still
frequently the originator of antidemocratic, foundationalist, essentialist, and conservative
political projects (Cavarero 2002; Lane 2001). This figure, however, does not generally re
flect conversations ongoing in the history of political thought.
Democratic theorists have grown increasingly alert to the “remainders” of politics—

whether those refer to persons who do not meet the requirements of the orders in which
they are living or those who, like Butler’s Antigone, do not fit dominant norms of kinship.
This strategy for reading and thinking about politics may be partly inspired by Derrida’s
deconstruction, which invites the reader to see the aporias, deadlocks, contradictions,
and exclusions that constitute a text, a political order, or an inherited tradition. Yet most
political theorists writing through or on the Greeks have yet to embrace the radical chal
lenge deconstruction directly posed to the sedimented interpretation of Plato. In light of
Derrida’s impact on the discipline of political theory and its related fields (Laclau and
Mouffe 1985; Spivak 1988; Butler 1990; Douzinas et al. 1991; Norval 2008), this reluc
tance is revealing. While a thinker like Rancière might show the fluidity of Aristotle’s dis
tinctions, his ascendant work in the field remains invested in a decidedly un-deconstruct
ed Plato—a figure who, despite his use of dialogue, stands for a logocentric philosophical
project wholly antithetical to the model of contestation that agonists pursue (Chambers
2013; Rancière 2006).
Are Plato’s rigid hierarchies, oppositions, and logocentrism Plato or Platonism? Though
for Derrida it would be “misguided” to “insist on an opposition between Plato and the tra
dition of reading Plato” (Leonard 2005, 196), much is at stake in marking this distinction.
If “Derrida is anxious to uncover the history of reading which has made the Platonic text
the ‘origin’ of Platonism,” it is to show that Plato’s text only becomes part of a “philosoph
ical system” once the reader puts “a stop to the polysemy and ‘open-endedness’ of the
Platonic text.” Derrida’s approach holds the reader responsible for fixing a certain ver
sion of Platonism (Leonard 2005, 195, 200).
Historically sensitive interpretations of Plato and Aristotle, new understandings of Greek

political concepts, and a greatly expanded political theory canon of Greek literature have
altered the terms of political theory’s Greek inheritance since the postwar juncture. Yet
Page 16 of 22

contemporary political theory has not often recuperated these new interpretive possibili
ties for democratic theory and in particular those posed by a polyvocal Plato. The danger
implicit in overlooking this more complicated Plato is that contemporary political theory
risks reproducing the rigid oppositions it often questions—not between the political and
unpolitical but between the political and the depoliticized. As future generations pose
questions about political theory’s critical practice and seek instructive explorations of re
curring political questions in Greek literature, they might seek a different angle of vision.
They might ask not how are we the receivers of Plato’s tradition but Plato ours.
Acknowledgments
My thanks to Brooke Holmes, Sara Monoson, John Wallach, Melissa Lane, Paul North, El
la Myers, Larry George, Philip Baker, Christopher Skeaff, Kevin Wallsten, and Vassilis
Lambropoulos for their helpful comments.
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Notes:
(1) An exception to this tendency among political theorists focused on Greek thought is J.
Peter Euben’s Platonic Noise (2003).
(2) Melissa Lane has recently argued, however, that there is still value in thinking of po
liteia as constitution but more broadly as a “specific kind of ordering and structure” that
applies to “natural bodies as much as to political bodies” (2014: 60−61).
Demetra Kasimis
University of Chicago
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Greek Literature Impacts To Political Thought (2015)

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Greek Literature in Contemporary Political Theory and Thought

Greek Literature in Contemporary Political Theory and

Abstract and Keywords

date: 22 October 2021

date: 22 October 2021

2. The Deployment of Greek Literature in Post­

date: 22 October 2021

date: 22 October 2021

This cross-temporal, dialogical perspective served much more conservative aims in

date: 22 October 2021

in Socrates—to asking perennial questions, providing timeless meanings, and demanding

date: 22 October 2021

date: 22 October 2021

date: 22 October 2021

3. Historical Sensitivity and a Democratic Turn

date: 22 October 2021

Critical of the stark antidemocratic characterization of ancient political philosophy and

date: 22 October 2021

date: 22 October 2021

risked overlooking their critiques of democracy’s tyrannical, aristocratic, oligarchic, im­

date: 22 October 2021

Rawls’s philosophical experiment put forward an “original position,” in which abstract

date: 22 October 2021

date: 22 October 2021

4. Greek Literature and Contemporary Political

date: 22 October 2021

Democratic theorists have grown increasingly alert to the “remainders” of politics—

Historically sensitive interpretations of Plato and Aristotle, new understandings of Greek

date: 22 October 2021

Allen, D. 2010. Why Plato Wrote. Malden: Wiley-Blackwell.

Butler, J. 2000. Antigone’s Claim. New York: Columbia University Press.

date: 22 October 2021

Cavarero, A. 2002. Politicizing Theory. Political Theory, 30(4): 506–532.

Chambers, S. 2013. The Lessons of Rancière. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Connolly, W. 1991. Identity/Difference: Democratic Negotiations of Political Paradox. Itha­

Derrida, J. 1981. Dissemination. Trans. Barbara Johnson. Chicago: University of Chicago

Euben, J. 2003. Platonic Noise. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

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