Aristippus in and out of Athens

Abstract

This article has two purposes. The first is to show how some of the central principles of classical Greek political theory became anachronistic as a result of massive transformations in the underlying structure of European society. These principles, it is argued, were originally dependent on an empirical premise that the polity is a “whole” encompassing individual “parts,” or (stated differently) that the polity is identical with total society. This whole/part schematization of the polity seemed plausible in the ancient city since most sectors of polis life had political connotations or overtones. The same schema, however, became an archaism in modern Europe, chiefly because of the emphatic emergence of a distinction between state and society–one aspect of a more general increase in the structural differentiation of society. The second and closely related purpose is to explore the feasibility of a claim once advanced by Benjamin Constant: that the organizational transformations involved in the modernization of European society have created a novel rhetorical opportunity, the possibility of defending tyranny in the name of freedom and democracy.