Ancient equality against modern democracy: resources of critique in Hannah Arendt and Ellen Meiksins Wood

ABSTRACT

Increasing discontent with the current status of democracy has prompted a renewed interest in Athenian democracy. This article contributes with the first comparative analysis of two political theoreticians – Hannah Arendt and Ellen Meiksins Wood – whose reactivations of ancient political experiences significantly predate recent trends. Despite the fact that Arendt levelled fierce critique against the Marxist tradition of which Wood was a part, it is shown how both thinkers involved a close consideration of the relation between the social/economic and the political in their analyses; regarded Athenian forms of equality as the differentia specifica when measured against modern incarnations of democracy; committed themselves to the controversial move to grant slavery a marginal role in their analyses; turned to the American Revolution to discern the specificity of the ancient forms equality and modern democracy; and how both departed from the mainstream definitions of democracy as a list of institutions or a number of criteria. We argue that Arendt and Wood reach similar conclusions about the distinctive form of separation between the political and the social/economic in Athens, reach different conclusions about the distinctive forms of collapse and separation respectively in the modern epoch, but nonetheless unite in their critique of the American Revolution. On those premises, the central aim is to investigate how the reactivation of Athenian equality can serve as a resource for critique of three forms of equality that underpins democracy in the modern age, which we designate formal, distributive and imaginary equality.

KEYWORDS:

• Equality
• Athenian democracy
• modern democracy
• the American Revolution
• Hannah Arendt
• Ellen Meiksins Wood
• isegoria
• isonomia

Reactivating the ancient form of equality

There was a time when it was common to see scholars lamenting the contemporary lack of interest in Ancient Greek democracy. One might think of the work of the much-revered Moses I. Finley at the beginning of the 1970s (see Finley 1973, 23). However, this is no longer the case. Increasing levels of discontent with the current operations and iterations of democracy have spurred a renewed interest in ancient versions of democracy, especially in its Athenian form (Atack 2017, 576).¹ What is more, the increased attention given to the Athenian democracy of the Classical Period is not emerging from classicists; indeed, more often than not, it is being led by scholars aiming to offer new insights into the contemporary state of society and politics (Atack 2017, 583).

However, there exist important exceptions to the general post-war dearth of interest in Athenian democracy identified by Finley. Among these exceptions, the work of Hannah Arendt and Ellen Meiksins Wood stand out. Prima facie, the thought of Arendt and Wood might appear to be divergent. Although never directly aimed at Wood, Arendt levelled fierce critiques against Marx and the Marxist tradition of which she was a part. And in so far as Wood related explicitly to Arendt, she was depicted as a supporter of the ‘aristocratic myth’, stating that true politics existed in Athens, ‘allegedly because the labouring masses were virtually excluded from the “political space”’ (see Wood and Wood 1978, 80; see also Wood 1988, 40–41). But appearances as well as self-images can be deceptive. In spite of Arendt’s strictures on Marx, key aspects of her political thought can be thought of as engaging in an implicit dialogue with Marx’s problems, addressing similar problems but from different points of departure. Wood’s voice within the Marxist tradition, on the other hand, is a heterodox and somewhat uncommon one, as she focuses largely on the history of political thought and ascribes a greater degree of agency and impact to political forms than do the more orthodox versions of Marxism. Moreover, although neither Arendt nor Wood were classicists by training, both gave prominence to Athenian democracy and equality within their investigations of the modern world and the relation between the social and the political – a question that has haunted political thought ever since the notion that the goal of a political revolution ought to be the social emancipation of all human beings took root during the French Revolution in 1789 (see Koselleck 2004, 43–57).

Our aim is to examine how Arendt’s and Wood’s analyses of Athenian democracy, and its specific form of equality, condition their respective evaluations of modern democracy. In that way, we hope to initiate a first step in the direction towards a comparative analysis of the political theory of Arendt and Wood, which, as far as we are aware, does not exist despite intriguing overlap of historical and theoretical themes in their thought.

Yet, the examination of Arendt and Wood is not limited to a comment on their political theories as such. We also wish to open for an investigation of what we can learn by taking equality as a central element of the accomplishments and limits of democracy in the modern epoch and, by those means, offer the beginning of an alternative approach to the often-witnessed equation of democracy with a list of institutions or a number of criteria. Thus, we set out to identify and discuss the different ways in which Arendt’s and Wood’s reactivations of Athenian equality can serve as a resource of critique of what we will call three different forms of equality – formal, distributive and imaginary equality – that are entertained by and underpins democracy in the modern age, but not addressed directly by neither Arendt nor Wood. Nevertheless, the task is particularly suitable for the two authors, since both regarded the Athenian forms of equality as the differentia specifica of the ancient polis when compared to the contemporary state of affairs, as the political trait that marked the sharpest difference between the ancient and modern instantiations of democracy. Furthermore, both Arendt and Wood attempted to discern the specificity of this difference by analysing the American Revolution (specifically the Constitutional period). Lastly, both reached their conclusions by the controversial move to simultaneously grant slavery merely a marginal role in their analyses of Athenian democracy. Hence, existing differences aside, the thought of Arendt and Wood is suitable for the purposes of the article by virtue of the fact that they on several levels unite in their departure from the mainstream definitions of democracy as a list of institutions or a number of criteria to be fulfilled, and focus on different forms of equality.

None of these ambitions contain an attempt to judge whether the analysis of Arendt and Wood correspond correctly to the realities of the Athenian democracy or the American Revolution. Rather, the aspiration is to investigate what Arendt and Wood took these realities to be, and how their analyses can be used in a critique of the limits of the forms of equality that underpins modern democracy. Thus, borrowing a reflection of Arendt on Walter Benjamin’s historical method, our article could be considered an attempt to act like a ‘pearl diver who descends to the bottom of the sea, not to excavate the bottom and bring it to light but to pry loose the rich and the strange […] and carry them to the surface’ (see Arendt 2014, 205).

Without any claims to be exhaustive, and for the heuristic purpose to construct an anchoring point of the investigation, our first move will be to identify three forms of equality rooted in the modern age and contemporary democracy. Our next task will be to take on the conception of equality in the thought of Arendt and Wood, which will be done thematically. In a first step we will relate to the critique directed against both for failing to account for the institution of slavery in ancient Athens, try to explain why they did not ascribed slavery a central role in their analyses, and investigate their assessments of ancient equality. In a second step, we will investigate their analyses of the foundational characteristics of the modern epoch, via the concept of the social in the New World in Arendt and the idea of the separation between the political and the economic under capitalism in Wood. In a third step, we will analyse how their reactivations of the ancient form of equality conditions their critique of the American Revolution. In a fourth step, we activate the classical conceptions of equality as analysed by Arendt and Wood as two different fronts that have their historical roots in one political conception of equality, through which the modern forms of equality that we outlined initially can be assessed and criticized. We will end with a short summary, in which we also indicate some further implications of our results for contemporary discussions on the state of politics and society.

On three modern forms of equality

The problem of equality has occupied a great number of analyses in our age. According to three relatively recent diagnoses of the modern epoch, the roots of the problem of equality in its modern form ought to be sought at the end of the eighteenth century. For example, according to Jürgen Habermas (1996, 477–478), before the French Revolution, critique of social inequality could be limited to the questioning of political inequality, since arguments based on modern natural law ‘[…] provided a sufficient basis to plead for the equal liberties of constitutional democracy and bourgeois private law in opposition to the ancien régime’. When political inequality was challenged and, in many cases, successively also abolished, a relation between political equality and social inequality came to view as a result of ‘[…] the social effects of the unequal distribution of a non-political economic power’. That is, for Habermas a distinction between political and social equality represents a crucial characteristic of the time following the French Revolution.

Partly in contrast to Habermas, Raymond Aron (1968, 26–29) takes modern society to conform to two imperatives: a Promethian ambition to maximize the levels of production through the mastery of the forces of nature, and an egalitarian ideal of equal treatment of its members. On the one hand, the kinship between them consists in that ‘[c]onquest of the forces of nature rests upon science; scientific knowledge is theoretically accessible to everyone since it is the product of reason, which all men share. There is no basic inequality among individuals; all have a right to be citizens, to share the common good […]’ (Aron 1968, 26). On the other hand, however, the Promethian ambition ends up in contradiction with the egalitarian ideal, since it requires a hierarchy with superiors and inferiors in order to bring about efficiency in the organization, resulting in the failure of any effective stabilization of modern societies (Aron 1968, 28).

Pierre Rosanvallon (2013, 4, 10) instead focuses on the self-perception of the revolutionary actors in the American and French Revolution, and reach the conclusion that, for them, equality was a single unity and that the attachment of one or another adjective would have been unintelligible. Nonetheless, in his own analysis (Rosanvallon 2013, 7, 10–11), which he undertakes in consideration of what he takes to be a present crisis of equality that marks the beginning of the end of the era born in the late eighteenth century, three distinctions are put to work. In the American and French Revolution, equality was

[…] primarily understood as a relation, as a way of making a society, of producing and living in common. This relational idea of equality was articulated in connection with three other notions: similarity, independence, and citizenship. Similarity comes under the head of equality as equivalence: to be “alike” is to have the same essential properties, such that remaining differences do not affect the character of the relationship. Independence is equality as autonomy; it is defined negatively as the absence of subordination and positively as equilibrium in exchange. Citizenship involves equality as participation, which is constituted by community membership and civic activity […] Equality was thus conceived in terms of the relative position of individuals, the rules governing their interactions, and the principles on which their lives in common were based, and these concepts in turn corresponded to three possible representations of the social bond. The rights of man, the market, and universal suffrage were the underlying institutions. (emphasis in original, Rosanvallon 2013, 10)

While we will follow Habermas, Aron and Rosanvallon in their judgement of the centrality of equality in the modern age, and take seriously, as does Rosanvallon (2013, 10), the notion held by the American and French Revolutionaries that equality represented ‘[…] a democratic quality and not merely […] a measure of the distribution of wealth’, we will depart from their specifically chosen distinctions, even if some of them will inform our discussion. By implication, and in contrast to, albeit not necessarily in contradiction with, theories of democracy that propose a list of institutions or a number of criteria for the identification of democratic and non-democratic regimes, as defined by e.g. Joseph Schumpeter (1943) seminal study Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, we will distinguish three forms of equality that underpins and are nourished by democracy in its modern incarnations. That is, even if we in no way set out to construct our own grand theory of democracy, we do hold that the three forms of equality that we discern below are important elements of the forms of appearances of democracy since the late eighteenth century. We have chosen to designate the different categories of equality as forms, in order to avoid the common tendency to reduce them to the status of contingent and powerless ideas. While we do not wish to end up in the opposite side of the scale through a defence of an idealist position, our premise is that the forms of equality that we identify can be seen as actually existing conditions that have real effects, at the same time as they are not independent of social, economic, and cultural content. For example, even if it is true that the notion of the free will of the modern subject is an illusion, it is not an illusion that she nonetheless has to act as if she had a free will and take responsibility for her actions accordingly, and that this has real effects on society.

The first of the modern notions of equality that we identify might be called formal equality (see also Habermas 1996, 478, 415–417, 422). The formal, or bourgeois, form of equality, as well as its Marxist critique, is perhaps best described in On the Jewish Question, where Marx notes that:

The state abolishes, in its own way, distinctions based on birth, social rank, education, occupation when it declares that birth, rank, education and occupation, are non-political distinctions […] Nevertheless, the state allows private property, education and occupation, to act in their way, i.e. as private property, as education, as occupation, and to exert the influence of their special nature. Far from abolishing these real distinctions, the state only exists on the presupposition of their existence; it feels itself to be a political state and asserts its universality only in opposition to these elements of its being. (emphasis in original, Marx 1975, 153)

Formal equality in relation to the bourgeois state, which Marx takes to task in the above passage, spread throughout Europe in the nineteenth century and consisted of subjects considered as equals before the law, in a society based on merit rather than precedence. However much of an improvement this was considered to be by the labour movement and other movements, it was also assumed to obscure the substantial inequalities of civil society on which formal equality and bourgeois society were constructed. The fact that the formal notion of equality is indifferent to content, indicates that it solely represents a ‘horizontal’ dimension of equality and privilege, and that the main political problem, from its point of view, is the question of inclusion or exclusion.

Against the formal concept of equality, other competing notions have emerged. Among these, real equality, where ‘real’ alludes to the distribution of some good, has played a key role in Western political thought from the French Revolution onward. Early support for this form of equality appears in the Conjuration des égaux that emerged during the French Revolution, whose best-known representative is François-Noël ‘Gracchus’ Babeuf, who advocated a communal property where each and everyone have the right to the fruits of the earth. In the ‘Manifest des égaux’, he declared: ‘We consent to everything for it, to make a clean slate so that we hold to it alone. Let all the arts perish, if need be, as long as real equality remains!’ (Babeuf 1828, 132).²

The distinguishing feature of this ideal-typical form of equality is that the paramount aim of political action is to defend an equal distribution of resources. As Babeuf puts it in ‘Analyse de la doctrine’, which was pasted up around Paris in 1796, ‘The purpose of society is to defend this equality’, this ‘equal right to the enjoyment of all goods’.³ Consequently, we shall refer to this form as distributive equality. Although the Conspirators focused on the equal outcome of distribution of goods, the very distributive ideal as such is not reducible to material goods; indeed, not least during the postwar period it has been developed to include the distribution of virtually any form of goods (be they economic, cultural, or social capital, as Bourdieu would say).⁴ The main problem of the distributive form of equality lies in between access to resources and equivalence in outcome (see also Habermas 1996, 477–478; Rosanvallon 2013, 10).⁵

Beside these two, the formal equality of the bourgeois society as well as the demands for distributive equality, we would also like to distinguish a third form of equality. An early definition of this form of equality can be found in the second book of Alexis de Tocqueville’s De la démocratie en Amérique. It is a form of imaginary [imaginaire] equality, strong enough to counter the ‘wealth and poverty, command and obedience [that] accidentally put great distances between two men’, since ‘public opinion, which is based on the ordinary order of things, brings them closer to the common level and creates between them a kind of imaginary [imaginaire] equality, in spite of the real inequality of their conditions’.⁶ This impulse towards equality neither speaks the language of formal equality and inclusion, nor that of distributive equality and access to resources. Instead, it is a societal force asserting the conviction that everyone has the equal right to be seen and recognized in accordance with their self-perceived specificity, i.e. as they envision themselves, in virtue of being an example of mankind, regardless or even in spite of inclusion and access to resources. The expectation to be seen and addressed in their self-perceived specificity in turn signal an expectation of mutual recognition, which, at least if we are to believe Rosanvallon’s (2013, 261) – probably all too strong but nevertheless interesting – statement, ‘[…] marks the advent of a fully democratic age […]’ With the tendency towards increased equality of the imaginary form, individuals’ reliance on others (in the form of some source of authority) tends to decline, as they rather consider themselves individually as the most reliable source of meaning.⁷ For Tocqueville, this was a slow transformation in the way we approach one another in the modern world. The main problems of the imaginary form of equality are visibility and recognition.⁸

Slavery and equality in the analysis of Athenian democracy

Both Arendt and Wood deploy conceptions that can be placed within the notion of forms of equality in their critique of modern democracy, which will allow us to formulate a critique of the limits of the three modern forms of equality. However, we will begin our thematic investigation by an inquiry into one of the historico-theoretical elements that unites Arendt and Wood negatively, consisting in the fact that none of them – in spite of writing political theory – granted the existence of slavery a central role in their analyses of the Athenian democracy.

Expectedly, both have received criticism for their underestimation of, or even blindness before, the importance of slavery. For example, a number of commentators have criticized Arendt for her indifference to the institution of slavery in Athens, which some have explained to be a result of a more general elitism (see e.g. Brunkhorst 2001; Fenichel Pitkin 1981, 346; 1998, 17). One of the most penetrating critiques of Arendt’s almost complete – she does briefly touch on the issue slavery when discussing the American revolution – disregard of slavery in her political thought is Margaret Canovan’s analysis of the tension in Arendt’s political thought between her radically democratic ideals on the hand and aspects of her thought which create associations to an elitism ‘of almost Nietzschean intensity’ on the other hand (1978, 5–6).

As for Wood, Michael Jameson (1990; see also Cartledge 2002, 159, 162–163; Foxhall 2002, 216; Jameson 2002, 168–170, 172) has argued that two of Wood’s foundational historical premises are mistaken, although he agrees that the image of an ‘idle mob’ gaining access to politics solely because of the utilization of slaves is indeed a myth. According to Jameson, Wood (1) underestimates the importance of slavery in agriculture and (2) overestimates the number of subsistence ‘peasants’ among the poorer Athenians.

Our aim is neither to concur with the critique of the underestimation of slavery nor to defend Arendt and Wood on historical grounds. Instead, we want to investigate how they themselves would answer the question of why slavery ought not to be granted attention as one of the most founding attributes of Athenian democracy, and of what aspects they in fact identified as noteworthy in the Athenian experiences – two answers which, as we will see, turn out to be two sides of the same coin for both of them, but in different ways. Only in that way will we be able to understand their analyses of the difference between democracy in ancient Athens and in the modern world.

Remarkably, for a long time the choice to attach little importance to the institution of slavery in ancient Athens appear to have been much less controversial than it seems to be today. According to Wood’s own historiographical exposé, an important shift in the image of Athenian democracy occurred around the turn of the eighteenth century (1988, 3; 1995, 187). Before, political philosophers such as Charles-Louis de Secondat Montesquieu, James Harrington, Niccolò Machiavelli and even Adam Ferguson (in 1767), would not hesitate to agree with Plato, Xenophon and Aristotle in accepting that most citizens of the Athenian democracy worked for a living, in contrast to slaves and the institution of slavery, which was regarded as a phenomenon of marginal importance. However, in the late eighteenth century, in connection with the Atlantic revolutionary events, the conditions of interpretation were transformed. Now, for philosophers, historians and politicians as distinct as Adam Smith, G.W.F. Hegel, John Gillies, William Mitford, Friedrich Engels, Karl Marx, and many more, the existence of widespread chattel slavery came to be viewed as the central characteristic of Athenian democracy and the key to explaining the absence of contemporary equivalents to the Greek notion of freedom. Within contemporary Marxism, Wood argues that notions such as the ‘slave mode of production’ and ‘slave society’ express the privileged role granted to slavery in the analysis of Athenian democracy (1988, 5–41).

Yet, even if Arendt and Wood share the assessment of the limited importance of slavery in their analysis of the Athenian democracy with each other and with the mainstream analysis before the Age of Revolutions, the reasons they offer for that choice have different sources and justifications. For Wood, the motives for only admitting slavery a marginal status in the analysis consist in historical arguments and claims of generalizations. To begin with, according to Wood, the insistence on slavery as the social foundation of democracy and the Greek notion of freedom that emerged in the late eighteenth century went hand in hand with the ‘myth of the idle mob’ (1988, 11). The image that came to circulate was one of a mob that employed slaves and as a result had so much leisure time that they could afford the luxury of politics. ‘The myth of the idle Athenian mob is then the age-old complaint of master against servant’, Wood writes, ‘but with the added urgency of a new social order, in which free and propertyless wage labour was becoming the dominant mode of work for the first time in history’ (1995, 200).

Moreover, Wood is not interested in denying the existence of chattel slavery and the historical fact of its relation to Athenian democracy, but she is concerned that the relation ought to be understood in a plausible manner, such that one does not disguise what was truly original in the ancient democracy. In contrast to the notion that the Ancient Greek state ought to be seen as ‘an association against a subjected producing class’ (Marx 1998, 40), Wood asserts that the tasks done by slaves was very heterogenous and that they simply were not to be found in any significant degree in agrarian production, at the same time as Athens was a predominantly agrarian economy (Wood 1988, 79; Wood and Wood 1978, 38, 79) However, the most important reasons for being sceptical to analyses that takes slavery to be the distinguishing attribute of Athenian democracy is, as we will see more in detail later, that it has displaced the ‘labouring citizen’ from the heart of the productive ‘base’, which is the social formation that Wood (1988, 80) takes to be the most noteworthy attribute of Athenian democracy.

For Arendt, the reasons can be traced to historiographical and politico-theoretical considerations, which, in contrast, mainly indirectly justifies the choice to only grant a marginal role to slavery. As Arendt herself as well as many of her interpreters has highlighted, her way of interacting with the past was mainly not an attempt to primarily give a historians account of what ‘really’ happened, but to use it as a resource for political thought (Buckler 2011, 44ff.; Demiryol 2018; Disch 1993; López Merino 2010; Novák 2010). With regard to the problem of slavery in e.g. America, Arendt (2006b, 60–62; 104) did not deny its relevance, but it was not what interested her, as it did not play a central role in the political reflections which she construed with the help of the revolutionary experiences during the second half of the eighteenth century (Kalyvas 2008, 191).

Arendt and Wood not only unite negatively in the limited role they ascribed to slavery in Athens, but also in that their answer to the question of what was extraordinary with the Athenian democracy is represented, at the most general level, by the difference or separation between the social/economic and the political that they saw emerging there. And for both, the Athenian experience of equality takes the centre of the scene when they reach such conclusions.

The Athenians used a variety of words for equality, all compounds beginning with iso (Hansen 2009, 109ff.). The conception of equality that Arendt found most significant in relation to the experience of the polis was isonomia. Isonomia literally means same (=iso) law (=nomos), and according to Arendt, it is indissolubly intertwined with isegoria: equality in access to freedom of speech (Arendt 2007, 124ff.). The Greek experience of isonomia and isegoria testifies to something stretching beyond equality before the law, but also ‘more […] than the levelling of class distinctions, more even than what is expressed in the phrase “equality of opportunity” […]’ (Arendt 2006a, 176). On the contrary, equality in Ancient Athens,

[…] far from being connected with justice, as in modern times, was the very essence of freedom: to be free meant to be free from the inequality present in rulership and to move in a sphere where neither rule nor being ruled existed. (Arendt 1998, 33)

For all Greek philosophers of the Classical Period, notwithstanding how much they wanted to turn their backs on political life in polis, as Arendt asserts, they ‘took for granted […] that freedom is exclusively located in the political realm, that necessity is primarily a prepolitical phenomenon, characteristic of the private household organisation’ (Arendt 1998, 31). A distinguishing feature of the private sphere, oikos, was that coexistence here was subordinated to human needs and the necessities of life. As such, it stood in stark contrast to the form of non-obligatory coexistence among equals [homoioi] in the public sphere, what was later defined in Latin as inter homines esse. Whereas the command as a communicative mode served to structure the oikos, persuasion was the specific form of communication in the public sphere. Persuasion is at least the noun that most closely corresponds to the specifically political form of speech to which peithein referred.⁹ In Arendt’s reading of the political experiences of the Classical Age, people had ‘the daily experience […] of moving from a “natural” realm of hierarchy and coercion to an artificial realm of equality, speech, and persuasion’ (Villa 2008, 340). For Arendt, it is on the basis of this clear distinction and separation – between the necessity structuring oikos and the freedom of the public sphere – that the ancient ideal of isonomia nourished.

The outlined distinction in Athenian political life, between the order of necessity in the private sphere, and the isonomia and isegoria that structured the public sphere, ties in closely with the distinction that Arendt constructs between liberation and freedom. A frequent misunderstanding, Arendt argues, regarding the very notion of politics, is that it is necessary since man is not self-sufficient (Arendt 2007, 115). Contrary to what is sometimes assumed, this was not what Aristotle – ‘providing not so much his personal opinion as he was reflecting a view shared with all other Greeks of the period’ – referred to when designating man as a zoon politikon (Arendt 2007, 116). The specificity of Aristotle’s concept was not that men have to live together out of necessity, but that they ‘can live in a polis’ (Arendt 2007, 116; cf. Arendt 2006b, 9). And the difference between the polis and other constellations for living together is represented precisely by the freedom practiced in the former. Freedom must thus be conceived of as an end in and of itself.

The political ideal of freedom that Arendt induced from the Athenian experience must therefore be firmly distinguished from both the problem of free will, inherited from the Christian tradition, as well as from what Benjamin Constant called the freedom of the moderns; in contrast to both of these conceptions of freedom, the Athenian experience testifies to the form of freedom instantiated when men gather in order to confront common problems: ‘Man is apolitical. Politics arises between men, and so quite outside of man. There is therefore no real political substance’ (Arendt 2007, 95).

Freedom can therefore, in contrast to the hierarchic order of oikos, be defined ‘negatively as not being ruled or ruling’, i.e. as liberation, and positively ‘as a space which can be created only by men and in which each man moves among his peers’ (Arendt 2007, 117). In uniting their forces, the practice of freedom is rendered possible, and men can collectively interrupt the processual circularity that surrounds them in nature: the cosmic order and the automated processes that previous political actions have initiated.

According to Arendt, it is not the hierarchic order, and notably not the element of slavery, that ought to attract our interest when turning our attention to the Athenian polis, but rather the spaces in which men moved among peers and practiced freedom. Obviously, these spaces presupposed liberation. This, however, was a problem bracketed by Arendt, in accordance with the way in which she engaged in history writing as a political thinker rather than as a historian.

Like Arendt, Wood understands the relation between isonomia and isegoria as an inseparable one. But in Wood’s work, it is the notion of isegoria – the equality of all in public speech – that most clearly distinguishes the political history of Athenian democracy from contemporaneous civilizations existing at that time as well as from our own time (1995, 215). And again, like Arendt, Wood emphasizes that the Athenian form of equality, and especially isegoria, has no parallel in our own political vocabulary:

Freedom of speech as we know it has to do with the absence of interference with our right to speak. Equality of speech as the Athenians understood it had to do with the ideal of active political participation by poor and working people. (Wood 2008, 39)

Wood thus connects the equality principle of isegoria to existing social property relations, as do Arendt indirectly with the notion of liberation. However, if liberation represents a kind of a unexplored black box in the thought of Arendt, Wood devotes a concrete historical analysis to the question of how the political reality of isegoria was made possible by the social and political revolution that preceded Athenian democracy, and was manifested by the emergence of what she calls the peasant-citizen. Hence, isegoria is intimately connected to the specific social conditions of the democratic polis in which producers also became rulers. In this sense, isegoria is also inseparable from the conception and reality of freedom, of eleutheria (Wood 1988, 181; 1995, 129–30; Wood 2002a, 20–21).

For Wood, the inability of the aristocracy to dominate the peasantry by direct force in the previous social formation constituted the background to the first relatively well-documented moment in the evolution of Athenian democracy and the birth of the peasant-citizen: the reforms of Solon (c.638–c.558 BC) and of Cleisthenes (c.570–c.508). Whether the motivations of Solon and Cleisthenes were democratic or not are not the principal concern for Wood; instead, she focuses on the fact that they solved the problem of uprising peasants by weakening the aristocracy. Solon abolished various forms of appropriation that existed through the medium of political power or personal dependence, such as the widespread institution of debt bondage, while at the same time the civic community was strengthened by the extension of political rights and the elevation of the individual citizen at the expense of traditional principles of kinship, birth and blood (Wood 2008, 32; Wood and Wood 1978, 21, 33, 34). Cleisthenes changed the organization of the polis when he replaced the political functions of the four tribes, dominated by the aristocracy, which had been the traditional basis of political organization – for instance, in the conduct of elections – with ten new, demes, based on complex and artificial geographical criteria (Wood 2008, 35; Wood and Wood 1978, 25). The demes cut across tribal and class ties and strengthened the community of citizens. ‘It was in the deme that the peasant-citizen was truly born … ’, and it was here, Wood continues, ‘that the traditional barrier between producing peasant village and appropriating central state was most completely broken down; and the new relation between producing classes and the state extended to other labouring citizens too’ (2008, 36).

According to the assessment of Wood, it was the social formation of the peasant-citizen that made Athenian democracy truly unique. For the purpose of displaying the exceptionality of the peasant-citizen, Wood offers a specific theoretical-historical characterization of non-capitalist societies in which peasants were the predominant producing class. Here appropriation – by landlords directly or through the medium of the state – has typically taken the form of ‘politically constituted property’ understood as appropriation accomplished through mechanisms of juridical and political dependence, by direct coercion – forced labour in the form of debt bondage, serfdom, tributary relations, taxation, corvée, etc. (Wood 2002a, 24; 2002b, 76, 95–6; Wood 1995, 188). These societies were thus structured by a division between rulers and producers.

As described above, Athenian democracy and the peasant-citizen were results of the abolition of the existing division between producers and rulers: producers became rulers precisely when one’s economic position no longer determined one’s political position (Wood 1995, 189; 2002a, 24). In fact, at bottom what distinguished democrats (such as Protagoras, whose argument – as constructed by Plato in the dialogue with the name of the Sophist himself – is the only systematic argument for democracy to have survived) from anti-democrats (such as Plato himself) was the question of whether one ought to accept ‘the advice of smith and shoemaker on political matters’ (Plato 2001, 78–9, 82–3, 84). Thus, the fundamental question was whether to support or condemn the division between producers and rulers. Those who spoke against the division defended the principle of isegoria, the principle of equality of all in speech, of the possibility for a smith and a shoemaker to make a difference in the political sphere, which presupposed eleutheria (Wood 2008, 39).

By understanding isegoria and eleutheria on the premises of an analysis of the abolition of the division between rulers and producers, Wood can suggest a preliminary answer to the question of whether, against the backdrop of the exclusion of women and slaves from the polis, it is at all reasonable to call the Athenian polis ‘democratic’:

Athens was a democracy in the sense – and only in the sense – that the Greeks understood the term, which they themselves invented. It had to do with the power of the demos, not only as a political category but as a social one: the poor and common people. (1988, 38)

Wood therefore also argues that the Aristotelian definition of democracy – as it differs from oligarchy – expresses the essential character of the Athenian democracy:

[…] the real thing in which democracy and oligarchy differ from each other is poverty and wealth; and it necessarily follows that wherever the rulers owe their power to wealth, whether they be in minority or majority, this is an oligarchy, and when the poor rule, it is a democracy […]. (Aristotle 1932, 211)

For Aristotle, power rooted in poverty or wealth is the essential criterion for the analysis of a political regime. According to Wood, Athens was a democracy through the union of labour and citizenship in the form of class rule, the rule by the demos consisting of a majority of producers (2008, 39).

The enhanced strength of the myth of the idle mob and of slavery as the foundation of Athenian democracy at the end of the eighteenth century meant that it became increasingly harder for the peasant-citizen to catch the eye of the contemporary observer of the Athenian polis (Wood 1988, 11). Against this background, Wood is critical of the claim that the specifically Greek notion of freedom presupposed the absolute servility of the slave and its sharp contrast to free persons (1988, 128). Rather than the existence of slavery as such, it was the liberation of the peasantry that ‘wiped out a whole spectrum of dependence and left behind the stark dichotomy of freedom and slavery, the one an attribute of citizens, the other a condition to which no citizen could be reduced’ (Wood 2008, 29). By implication, in a fundamental way, eleutheria signifies the freedom from the necessity to work for another – not freedom from labour in the form of leisure time, but the freedom of labour to take part in politics (Wood 2008, 29; Wood and Wood 1978, 40).

It is important to be precise here. Wood can agree with Arendt that in Athenian democracy, citizenship was dissociated from socio-economic status (owners of property, of some property, or of no property at all were granted citizenship without distinction), which also meant that political equality came to coexist with class inequality, or with the hierarchical structure of oikos. However, to the extent that the class of primary producers constituting the majority of the demos also had access to the conditions of labour and subsistence, they were not forced to enter a relation of subordination for earning their livelihood from a master (Wood 1988, 55, 56, 61; 1995, 202; 2002b, 20–1). Hence,

[…] the distinctive characteristic of Athenian democracy was not the degree to which it was based on dependent labour, the labour of slaves, but on the contrary, the extent to which it excluded dependence from the sphere of the production, that is, the extent to which production rested on free, independent labour to the exclusion of labour in varying forms and degrees of juridical dependence or political subjection. (Wood 1988, 82)

In other words, the inclusion of the labourer in the demos simultaneously represented the exclusion of dependent labour (e.g. slavery) from the sphere of production. This meant that the changing political status of citizenship directly affected the relations between classes: ‘Democratic citizenship in Athens meant that small producers were to a great extent free of the extra-economic exactions to which direct producers in pre-capitalist societies have always been subject’ (Wood 1995, 202). The Athenian polis thus comprised a protection for labour against the threat of extra-economic appropriation of the superior classes at the same time that it actually modified socio-economic inequality by reducing it. Democracy in that way was more substantial than formal. Needless to say, a political change – widening the reach of citizenship to also include slaves and women – would imply nothing less than a social revolution in this context (Wood 1988, 115, 117–18; 1995, 202; Wood and Wood 1978, 41). By implication, Athenian democracy represented a separation between the economic and the political in the sense that socio-economic position did not determine political status and privilege.

Thus, in consideration of the separation between socio-economic position and political status and privilege, the analysis of Wood accordingly seems to be compatible with the argument of Arendt, stating that man could move freely in the polis as a result of the separation of it from the hierarchic order of the oikos, with the significant difference that Wood unpacks and analyses what Arendt leaves unexamined and bracketed. However, on the other hand, according to Wood’s analysis Athenian democracy also represented a deeper unity between the economic and the political insofar as it designated rule by the labouring class and in the sense that it actually modified the economic conditions. When we now turn to their analyses of the modern epoch, Wood and Arendt will prove to reach opposite conclusions about the social/economic and the political. Whereas Arendt argued that the new world is represented by a hybrid bastard, in which the oikos and polis has been collapsed in the social, Wood instead holds that the main characteristic of capitalism has been the separation between the social/economic and the political.

The social and the political: hybrid bastard vs. separation

According to Arendt, the ancient idea of isonomia came to be contradicted by the emergence of a new sphere, unknown before the modern period: the social. The specificity of the social emerges from the fact that activities that had hitherto been confined to the sphere of necessities – oikos – in the early modern period increasingly became the chief aim of society as a whole: the emergence of a society structured as a nationwide administration of housekeeping. With the modern world, a society of jobholders developed, in which ‘[…] the fact of mutual dependence for the sake of life and nothing else assumes public significance’ (Arendt 1998, 46).

The phenomena that Arendt covers under the conceptual umbrella of ‘the social’ are many and varied, and it is one of the more controversial concepts in her oeuvre; Seyla Benhabib identifies no less than at least three different possible interpretations of the social in Arendt’s thought (Benhabib 1996, 138ff.). The two exemplifications of the social in On Revolution – where she argues that this phenomenon became manifest both in the American and the French Revolution, although in various guises, and with varying degrees of intensity – do not amount to a conclusive definition of the concept. Indeed, her idea of the social provoked much critique following its first appearance in The Human Condition.¹⁰ In the latter, Arendt defines the social as a new sphere that emerges with the territorial state and the ruler’s propensity to conceive of it as a national household.¹¹ The social is depicted as a form of ‘bastard hybrid’ of the public and private spheres, where what used to be deemed private issues became primary concerns of the public sphere (Villa 2008, 341).

The concept of the social reappears in a somewhat different form in On Revolution (1963). In the reception of Arendt, the general focus has been on her emphasis on how the social question undermined the French Revolution by turning hunger and suffering into the main concerns of the revolution. The problem with bringing these categories into play in political life, according to Arendt, is that they open up the way for a permanent revolution by aiming at something that is virtually impossible to achieve, at least not without imposing draconian measures, and as such the social question can be seen to have paved the way for la Terreur (Arendt 2006b, 79–81). Another and less often highlighted manifestation of the social, which Arendt accentuates in the same book, is how private concerns, as we shall see in more detail in the next section, successively undermined the American Revolution too, by distorting the very meaning of the constitutionally guaranteed pursuit of happiness.¹²

One piece of documentation in which Arendt discerns the dichotomy between the political and the social with particular clarity is a transcribed discussion between her and a number of other prominent intellectuals a few years before her death in 1975.¹³ In this context she defined political issues as those regarding which ‘we cannot figure out with certainty’ what is right, and social issues as those of an essentially administrative character (Arendt 1979, 317). Questions worthy of the public sphere are therefore those for which there are no clear or readily available answers, i.e. they remain open questions. As a result, there are political dimensions to nearly all questions that relate to collective life (Arendt 1979, 315ff.).

While Arendt reaches the conclusion of collapse and hybrid as regards the relation between the political and the social as the difference between polis and oikos is dissolved, Wood instead finds separation to be the founding feature of the modern epoch and, specifically, of capitalism. With the help of the analysis of the ancient democratic class rule, Wood tries to discern the specificity of democracy in modern times thus:

It is true that modern democracy, like the ancient, is a system in which people are citizens regardless of status or class. But if class makes no (legal) difference to citizenship in either case, in modern democracy the reverse is also true: citizenship makes little difference to class. (Wood 2008, 40)

As observed above, citizenship leaving class untouched was not (and could not be) the case in the democratic polis, where political rights had far-reaching effects on the relations between rich and poor, since appropriation depended on political and legal status and power (Wood 1995, 213). Similarly, lords and peasants in the feudal context could not have enjoyed equal juridical status without negating the feudal system itself (Wood 1991, 175). In both cases, juridical and political difference and sameness comprised the substance of property relations, meaning that there could not have been any ‘formal’ democracy without revolutionary changes.

The condition of possibility of ‘formal’ democracy is to be found in the new possibilities of appropriation offered by capitalism, which, in Wood’s view, is a system of appropriation that does not directly depend on legal inequalities or the inequality of political rights. One of the properties that are unique to capitalism is the separation between the economic and political, which means that the appropriation of surplus labour takes place in the economic sphere by economic means – even though the coercive force of the ‘political’ sphere is necessary to sustain private property and the power of appropriation in the last instance. That is, surplus appropriation is completed through methods conditioned by the separation of the producer from the conditions of labour, and by the private property of the appropriator in the means of production. By implication, the labourer is free in the sense that she is not in a relationship of juridical or political dependence or servitude. Capitalism differs from pre-capitalist forms of production insofar as the latter are characterized by ‘extra-economic’ modes of surplus extraction, political, legal, or military coercion, traditional bonds or duties, etc., which demand the transfer of surplus labour to a private lord or to the state by means of labour services, rent, tax, and so on (Wood 1981, 80–2, 86; 1996, 218; 2002a, 64–65; 2002b, 177).

Consequently, against the background of the specifically Western, feudal, pre-capitalist formation, the separation between the economic and the political transferred power from the identity between the political and the economic and the power of lordship to the economic sphere of private property (Wood 1995, 208; 2002b, 167). One of the results of that separation and transference was the possibility and – in combination with the struggle of subaltern groups – the actuality of a historically unsurpassed distribution of rights and freedoms, since these political forms could be formally isolated and abstracted from relations of power and property, leaving economic power intact (Wood 1981, 80–2, 86; 1986, 138; 1988, 120, 145–9; 1990, 72). Hence, under capitalism, just as in Athens, the age-old relation between rulers and producers has been broken down. However, it was as an aggregate of isolated individuals, ‘ … without property and abstracted from communal solidarities, that the “labouring multitude” finally entered the community of citizens’, and, as Wood continues,

… the historical presupposition of their citizenship was the devaluation of the political sphere, the new relation between the ‘political’ and the ‘economic’ which had reduced the salience of citizenship and transferred some of its formerly exclusive powers to the purely economic domain of private property and the market, where purely economic advantage takes the place of juridical privilege and political monopoly. (1995, 211)

The limits of the American Revolution

Until now, we have seen Arendt and Wood reach similar conclusions about the distinctive form of separation between the political and the social/economic in Athens (albeit with the qualification of a deeper unity in Wood), and different conclusions about the distinctive forms of collapse and separation in the modern epoch. Interestingly, their different analyses of the modern epoch notwithstanding, we will now see them coming closer each other again as regards their assessments of the American Revolution.

According to Arendt, one of the defining characteristics of the French Revolution, and one that clearly distinguishes it from the experiences of political freedom in the Classical Age, was the revolutionaries’ tendency to conflate liberation with the practice of freedom.¹⁴ Liberation, in contrast to the practice of freedom as outlined above, has a goal: e.g. to liberate a political entity from a foreign or domestic oppressor, or to eradicate poverty. In order to achieve these goals, means need to be mobilized. In this way, liberation is conceived of in terms of a relation between means and ends. However, once the conditions for a public sphere have been fulfilled, the means-end structure that initially rendered it possible turns into one of its major threats.

This is a tension that Arendt for example discusses in her account of the paradoxes of the relation between homo faber, i.e. man as a fabricating being, and the public sphere:

[…] while only fabrication with its instrumentality is capable of building a world, this same world becomes as worthless as the employed material, a mere means for further ends, if the standards which governed its coming into being are permitted to rule after its establishment. (Arendt 1998, 151)

With the rise of a social sphere, it is thus not only man as an acting being, as a bios politikos, or zoon politikon as Aristotle put it, that vanished, but also the third form of activity delineated by Arendt: namely work, the activity of homo faber.¹⁵ Labour refers to man’s metabolic interaction with nature, and is as such an activity that humans share with all other animals. In contrast, the product of work is made to resist the ravages of time, and is thereby essential for the maintenance of a shared world, a public sphere, in which action can take place.¹⁶ Work provides men with a space in which they can overcome the transience of their animalistic, process-like dwelling on earth, and thus opens up the way for a repetition of the miraculous event that inaugurated our entering into the world: a repetition through which we confirm that we have been born and that we shoulder responsibility for the world into which we have been born (Arendt 1998, 175ff.).¹⁷ Put differently, the practice of freedom requires some form of stability that buttress up and maintain the public sphere – physical spaces as well as institutions – that both mediate and protect the conditions of freedom.

These conditions, however, is a dimension that marks a tension that strikes at the core of the modern revolutions with their ‘pathos of the new’. This tension, this constitutive aporia of modern revolutions according to Arendt, which arguably could be extended to and levelled against modernity itself, can be formulated as follows: to the degree that revolutionaries are successful in institutionalizing the ‘pathos of the new’, they will inevitably institutionalize an energy that will weaken the very institutions on which human freedom depends, and that they initially wanted to construct.¹⁸ Thus, the very spirit that nourishes a revolution therefore immediately becomes a threat if the source from which it emerged is not kept in check.

In an illustrative distinction between the American and the French revolutions, Arendt argues that Jefferson’s attitude towards the revolutionary spirit changed after the experiences of the French Revolution. In 1787, before ‘the Terror’, Jefferson wrote to a colonel in the United States from Paris that ‘the tree of liberty must be refreshed, from time to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure’ (Thomas Jefferson, quoted in Arendt 2006b, 225). Then, after the revolution, he shifted towards a much clearer emphasis on and identification with the constructive work of ‘founding anew and building up’, in contrast to the liberating practice of tearing down (Arendt 2006b, 226).

The problem of maintaining the public spirit that once mobilized people to take action against the British Crown was a perennial concern for Jefferson; although the revolutionaries had erected a constitutional framework and had established institutions for maintaining the ongoing deliberation of public affairs, these very same institutions were also a hindrance to popular participation due to their representative character. By implication, the very townships and meeting halls that had served as spaces for interaction before the liberation, fell into ruin. Indeed, Arendt goes so far as to argue that ‘one might even come to the conclusion that there was less opportunity for the exercise of public freedom and the enjoyment of public happiness in the republic of the United States than there had existed in the colonies of the British America’ (2006b, 227). Intriguingly, Arendt thus articulates a critique against the institutional design in the American Revolution, which, as we shall see, in a number of relevant respects coincides with the critique of Wood. In emphasizing the representative form, and in one way locating power within the people, but at the same time inhibiting them from practicing freedom and acting as citizens, the revolutionaries paved the way for precisely the form of political apathy that political thinkers have been warning against since the emergence of the representative form of democracy. Put differently, how would people be able to develop Jefferson’s version of the Machiavellian principle to love one’s country more than they love themselves, if their country could not be made as present to them as their own affairs? Regardless of how successful the revolutionaries were in building in the famous ‘checks and balances’ to restrain the potential excesses of various political bodies, as well as their controls to prevent the public realm from trespassing on the private, they failed to create a framework for maintaining that which they had struggled for: public freedom (Arendt 2007, 244). Therefore, Arendt argues,

[…] it was in fact under the impact of the Revolution that the revolutionary spirit in America began to wither away, and it was the Constitution itself, this greatest achievement of the American people, which eventually cheated them of their proudest possession. (2007, 231)

By failing to create and entertain constitutional forms through which the public spirit nourished in the townships and the town-hall meetings, hereby detracting non-professionals from engaging in public affairs, they also paved the way for private interests to play a greater role in politics; in short, it marked a shift ‘from a civic republican self-understanding to a liberal (and increasingly economic)’ one (Villa 2008, 343). In contrast to the idea of isegoria, where the public illumination, the ‘very visibility to which it exposes all those who enter it’, and as such serves as a remedy for the privatization engendered by the liberal ideal of freedom, the representative model directly invited it (Arendt 2006b, 245).

Thus, Arendt argues that the social served as an undermining force in both the American and the French Revolution, albeit manifesting itself in somewhat different guises: ‘the social question interfered with the course of the American Revolution no less sharply, though far less dramatically, than it did with the course of the French Revolution’ (2006b, 129). But whereas Arendt saw the social poison entering the French revolution through the immense destitution to which considerable portions of the population were subjected, she held that the spirit of the American Revolution, and hence the public life from which it drew strength, withered away more slowly, as it was successively drained of its energies through the ambiguous right ‘to pursue happiness’ (Arendt 2006b, 117ff.). This clearly did not occur as a result of some fatalistic speech act in the constitution; rather it can be seen to have emerged through a profound ambivalence that it at least signalled, namely the tension between private and public happiness:

But the rapidity with which the second meaning was forgotten and the term used and understood without its original qualifying adjective may well be the standard by which to measure, in America no less than in France, the loss of the original meaning and the oblivion of the spirit that had been manifest in the Revolution. (Arendt 2006b, 123)¹⁹

According to Wood, rather than a collapse of oikos and polis into each other, resulting in collective action that did not distinguish between liberation and the practice of freedom, it was the separation between the economic and the political as it appeared hand in hand with capitalism that offered the advocates (that is, the anti-democrats) of the division between rulers and producers a new solution to their problem. If earlier answers to the problem of appropriation could be seen as attempts to circumscribe the active but exclusive citizen body, the separation now opened the door for a solution in which the demos could be widened while simultaneously deprived of its power and activity. It is in this context that Wood regards the American revolutionary experience as decisive (1995, 208, 213). As she writes, the Federalists might have wished

[…] to create an exclusive political nation, aristocracy of propertied citizens, in which property – and specifically landed property – remained a privileged juridical/political/military status. But economic and political realities in the colonies had already foreclosed that option. Property had irrevocably discarded its extra-economic ‘embellishments’, in an economy based on commodity exchange and purely ‘economic’ modes of appropriation, which undermined the neat division between politically privileged property and disenfranchised labouring multitude. And the colonial experience culminating in revolution had created a politically active populace. (Wood 1995, 214)

The solution came to involve a distinctly American innovation, without historical precedent: ‘representative democracy’. For Wood, as for Arendt, what is at stake here is not simply the conventional distinction between direct and representative democracy. Instead, the central issue was the notion of isegoria and its relation to eleutheria. While the principle of isegoria meant that the smith and the shoemaker personally could act politically, the notion of representation – as explicitly articulated in platonic language of, for example, Alexander Hamilton – meant that ‘shoemakers and blacksmiths are represented by their social superiors’ (Wood 1995, 215). Hence, in a similar vein to Arendt, Wood stresses how Hamilton, like anti-democrats before him, assumed that the labouring multitude must find its political voice in its social superiors. In that way, despite two different analyses of the modern epoch in terms of collapse or separation of oikos and polis, both Arendt and Wood identify how the practice of sharing collective action is circumscribed by the invention of representative democracy.

Moreover, Wood also observes that Madison and the federalists in general – again explicitly – held representation to be a method not of implementing but of avoiding, or at least circumventing, democracy. Hence, representation was not a consequence of a large republic; on the contrary, a large republic was wished for so that representation would be unavoidable. The Federalists saw representation as a filter – that is, the very opposite of isegoria. Consequently, in its federalist form, representation ‘meant that something hitherto perceived as the antithesis of democratic self-government was now not only compatible with, but constitutive of democracy: not the exercise of political power but its relinquishment, its transfer to others, its alienation’ (emphasis in original, Wood 1995, 216).

While Cleisthenes made the local deme the basis of Athenian citizenship in response of pressures from below, the Federalists did their best to shift the focal point of politics from the local to the federal state so as to avoid the threat from the masses (Wood 1995, 219). In other words, anti-democratic alienation of political power was now proposed under the political label of democracy (Wood 1995, 217). ‘Not only did the “Founding Fathers” conceive of representation as a means of distancing the people from politics’, Wood writes in a summary of her argument, they also ‘advocated it for the same reason that Athenian democrats were suspicious of elections: that it favoured the propertied classes. “Representative democracy”, like one of Aristotle’s mixtures, is civilized democracy with a touch of oligarchy’ (ibid.). Moreover, while democracy for the Ancient Greeks designated class rule, rule by the poor, the American redefinition meant that not only was democracy, from then on, emptied of social content, but also that there would be no incompatibility between democracy and rule by the rich.²⁰ The basic precondition for this situation, in which the rich minority were to rule in the name of democracy, which earlier had meant rule by the majority including the poor, was the possibility to ‘displace democracy to a purely political sphere, distinct and separate from “civil society” or the “economy”’ (Wood 1995, 223–4).

Democracy devoid of social content presented itself as a windfall for the Federalists, who, because of the revolutionary conjuncture that had involved the subordinated classes, could no longer reject the ancient notion of democracy as class rule in the name of an opposing political ideal, as in the name oligarchy. But since they could use the name of democracy itself, the problem was dissolved. In this sense, the Constitutional debates and the Federalist papers, Wood argues, represent an exceptional historical moment, in which one can observe the transition from the traditional open indictments of democracy to the modern naturalization of democracy for all political purposes – including the essentially anti-democratic motivations, according to the older meanings of the term. Just consider, Wood writes:

[…] the significance of the appeal to Roman symbols – the Roman pseudonyms adopted by the Federalists, the name of the Senate, and so on. And consider the Roman eagle as an American icon. Not Athens but Rome. Not Pericles but Cicero as role model. Not the rule of the demos but SPQR, the ‘mixed constitution’ of the Senate and the Roman people, the populus or demos with rights of citizenship but governed by an aristocracy. (1995, 225; see also Urbinati 2012, 616)

The counter-revolutionary and anti-democratic redefinition of democracy during the American Revolution thus came to set the terms for political struggles of democracy from that point forward.

Contribution to the critique of the modern forms equality

Although Arendt and Wood without a doubt tackle the ideals and realities of isonomia and isegoria from different angles, we have attempted to show how they, their disparate points of departure notwithstanding, develop arguments that run parallel and converge at certain points, and which, when juxtaposed, appear to suggest something of a kinship or affinity (if perhaps an unexpected one). Such thematic similarity will also be exposed when we now will attempt to contrasts their way of apprehending the Athenian forms of equality with the three different modern forms of equality that we identified in the beginning of the article.

As indicated in the opening section, we believe that the main differences between Arendt and Wood can be seen as different windows opened on to the phenomenon of equality, rather than necessarily contradictory responses. That is, one might better understand the differences between them in terms of the specific questions they sought to answer: where Arendt mainly directs her interest towards the inner room of the political, Wood is primarily focused on the intersection of the political and the economic. From here, they share the notion of a separation between the political and the social/economic in the Athenian case, they disagree on whether the modern age ought to be characterized in terms of collapse or a new and unprecedented form of separation, and then, nevertheless, reach a similar critique of representative democracy.

The point of departure for the formal conception of equality is the individual and her right to be included as neither less nor more than any other member of the state or of humanity; at the forefront stands her individual right against society. For both Arendt and Wood, the drawback with this form of equality lies primarily in the insufficiency that stems from its individualist and abstract starting point.

The weaknesses of this version of equality, from Arendt’s perspective, become clearer when we contemplate the distortions of the ‘right to pursue happiness’. In failing to create an institutional framework for the maintenance of the political impulses that had nourished the revolt against the colonial power, and instead creating a representative order, the ‘founding fathers’ paved the way for a gradual intrusion of the social; as a consequence, they dashed the hopes of attaining a more qualified understanding of the ‘pursuit of happiness’, thereby prioritizing the bourgeois at the expense of the citizen (Arendt 2006b, 131).²¹ By implication, equality proper cannot be conceived of in individual terms: the very question of inclusion and exclusion is rooted in modern conceptions of justice, which, though not irrelevant, will lead us astray if we take them as our point of departure for understanding public freedom. Indeed, in virtue of being premised on the idea of the sovereignty – of the individual as well as the state guaranteeing it for her – this conception of equality is a central clue for understanding precisely the loss of political freedom in modernity: ‘if men wish to be free, it is precisely sovereignty they must renounce’ (Arendt 2006a, 163).

Along the same lines, albeit from a different perspective, Wood is at pains to show how the putative ‘representative’ democracy primarily served to circumscribe the creation of an institutional framework for the rule of the producing classes by emptying it of social content. Democracy had been defined by anti-democratic actors in such a way that it alienated power rather than served to foment it; the isegoria of the people was forced to cede to the benefit of the wealthy classes, as they promoted the oxymoronic representative democracy for the very same reasons that the citizens of Athens were suspicious of any notion that resembled such a form. As Wood observes, the liberal conception of freedom, i.e. protection of the individual from the state, is rooted in the world of lordship, and the problem of exclusion and inclusion is rooted in a world of privilege that was circumvented by the separation between the economic and the political and the possibility of inclusion isolated from social effects. Due to this separation, inequality and unfreedom of capitalist property relations at bottom represented the realization, rather than the perversion, of the inclusion in political freedom and equality within the capitalist mode of production, (see Wood 1986, 147).²² Hence, an uncritical defence of inclusion in the form of freedom and equality, and the implied notion of exclusion as a perversion of their ‘true’ essence, lead us astray, since the essence of formal equality in fact is substantial inequality. That is, one could easily imagine a situation in which perfect inclusion in the form of freedom and equality coexists with continuing or even deepening inequality of power and rule by the few.

Regarding the conception of distributive equality, again the critiques from both authors have distinct origins. For Arendt, the problem with the distributive aspect of equality is primarily that it turns politics into an administrative issue: when public debates become flooded by issues such as who should have what and when, the dialogues regarding common affairs – the problems shared by citizens qua members of a political community – simply disappear. And by leaving aside the open-endedness of political issues that address shared problems, a fundamental element of the public sphere itself is diminished, namely the narrative textures and dynamics that the public sphere – qua precisely public – is meant to nourish. As noted above, for both Arendt and Wood, collective freedom is instantiated through the practice of isegoria and isonomia. Distribution is certainly not irrelevant to this end, but it is subsumed under the category of liberation and not the practice of freedom, the very exercise of isegoria as citizens partaking in public affairs.

Wood’s critique of the distributive wing of equality would take aim at its quantitative characteristics, emphasizing the qualitative power-aspect of isegoria at the intersection between liberation and the practice of freedom, to use Arendt’s terms. One of the most important points about Athens, according to Wood, is not the quantitative differences in distribution, but the fact that Athenian democracy was structured around an influential and independent class of producing citizens with access to their own means of production. If they had been entitled to exactly the same amount of resources as the landowning class but were not independent, they would surely have been wealthier, but they would still have been dependent. And it was precisely this form of dependency that could drive a labourer to accept a lower payment in order to avoid binding himself to a contract circumscribing his independence.

Now, in a number of relevant respects, both Arendt and Wood could be seen as providing qualifications of the two forms of equality discussed so far. As to what concerns the third, imaginary form of equality, where visibility and recognition are at stake, this is arguably the form that stands in starkest contrast to – and indeed directly contradicts – the political ideal promoted by Arendt. By emphasizing the only common natural characteristic that we all share – namely the abstract sameness we would share in a condition of being conclusively stripped of all defining traits, our raw state as Susan Buck-Morss (2009, 133) puts it – this form explicitly contradicts the boundaries within which politics take shape, at least according to Arendt. Politics, the practice of isegoria and isonomia, is incomprehensible without presupposing our individual differences, as the public sphere is assumed to offer a space in which individuals come together to discuss shared problems and to protect their freedom. Indeed, as Canovan (1992, 243) has emphasized, this idea of unity in difference is at the very heart of the political ideal structured around isegoria and isonomia. In emphasizing our abstract sameness, the imaginary form of equality undermines the political ideal by precluding the exclusion that any political community by necessity presupposes, insofar as it requires that we maintain a common public sphere to which citizens gain access via liberation from our private differences.²³ What is more, we would argue that it also nourishes a self-centred form of spirit by way of stressing each every person’s right to be seen and recognized in accordance with their self-perceived individuality, in virtue of being an abstract human being. By contrast, the specificity of the political form of equality is that we artificially create a sphere characterized by the practice of freedom, through which – by joint action – we can transcend our condition of abstract human beings and act as political equals.

From the perspective of Wood, the imaginary form of equality could be challenged in its denying of the collective identity of the very social force that created the revolutionary changes in the Athenian context, and which constituted the presupposition for isegoria, and therefore was a precondition for the specificity of the political system. The imaginary form of equality proclaims the political in the name of ‘we, the human beings’ detached from any existing imbalance in power, and the founding fathers announced the political in the name of ‘we, the people’ emptied of social determinants. In contrast, as confirmed by supporters and opponents alike, the Athenians were identified as ‘we, the independent peasant-citizens’ taking part in power without being dependent on a superior class.

In all these cases, an aspect uniting Arendt and Wood is that they, in contrast to the three modern forms of equality, accentuate the relational attributes of their reactivations of the ancient form of equality – either as regards the dynamics of the public sphere as such or the power relation at the intersection between the economic and the political. The question of inclusion and exclusion in the formal equality of the members of the state and of humanity can only be answered in the static and absolute terms of yes and no; the question of access to and dispersion of resources in the distributive form of equality can only be answered in the static terms of degrees and in the last instance likewise with the absolute terms of yes and no; the question of recognition and visibility can only be answered in the absolute terms determined by each and everyone’s experience of emotional satisfaction and in the last instance likewise with the static and absolute yes and no. Equality in the relational terms proposed by both Arendt and Wood would be unintelligible if answered in static terms and can only be seen as a part of a greater analysis and assessment of political actions.

Final remarks

The meaning of equality has been intensively disputed since the explosion of the American and the French revolution. Since this rapidly transforming phase in the history of America and Europe, a wide array of understandings of the concept of equality has emerged. We have juxtaposed the work of Arendt and Wood in respect of their understandings of the political and social revolution in Athens, and the ways in which they mobilized these experiences in order to delineate the limitations of modern conceptions of equality, here compressed in the three outlined forms of equality that underpins and are nourished by modern democracy. Arendt’s main point could be expressed in the importance of envisioning isonomia and isegoria as two ideals instantiated in the practice of freedom. Wood, on the other hand, emphasizes how the Ancient Greek ideas of eleutheria and isegoria must be understood as bound up with the specific property relations that emerged in the period. The very idea of eleutheria stipulated that citizens were free in virtue of not being dependent on other people’s means of production for their survival, which in the context of a class society comes to mean class rule.

Rather than stressing the two authors’ different points of departure, we have sought to demonstrate how their critique and forms of reactivations converge in their underscoring of the specifically political ideals of isonomia and isegoria, as well as how these ideals conditioned not only the public sphere, but also what came to be known as civil society. To both thinkers, the Athenian political and social revolution rested on a dissociation between economic position and political citizenship (and, in Wood, a specific form of unity too); for both, the emergence of modern society is concomitant with an inverse tendency, whereby the expanding capitalist economy has increasingly conditioned political life, thereby fomenting the emergence of a public sphere which increasingly has taken on the guise of a gigantic household. According to Arendt, this was due to a conflation of the public and the private in the emergence of what she calls ‘the social’. For Wood, this was the upshot of a separation between the economic and the political in a form of appearance made possible by capitalism. From the perspective of both, a focus on slavery in Athens would also risk to result in one-sided analyses of the present. For Arendt, slavery would redirect focus from and distort the significance of the practice of freedom in the Athenian polis and the lack of it in the modern age, since the labour of slaves essentially was rooted in the endless repetition of the life process. For Wood, slavery was a result of the distinguishing characteristics of Athenian Democracy in that it was excluded from polis as the division between rulers and producers was broken, rather than its foundation. By implication, an analysis granting the problem of slavery in Athens a role as protagonist would also risk to accept the modern notions of equality in terms of exclusion, inclusion and visibility as the centre of the investigation of the modern age, and thus distort the fact that democracy now neither is incompatible with the rule of the rich, nor with the absence of the practise of freedom.

However, there exist one tension between Arendt and Wood that we cannot omit, one which we already have come across in the analysis. If Arendt is interpreted as stating that the conflation between liberation and the practice of freedom implies that an analysis investigating the problem of liberation per definition is distorted, then the two accounts are irreconcilable. Another, and arguably more constructive, approach would be to read Arendt the way that she approached history herself, and utilize her theorization as a resource of critique without conniving at social conditions and processes of liberation, despite the fact that she herself either ignored them or emphasized how they had contributed to the distortions of modern political life; put differently, to engage with Arendt’s political thought with and against her. If so, one could also argue along the analysis of Wood, that in order to understand the specificity of Athenian democracy, or any other political formation, when measured against other political and social conjunctures, one must investigate both liberation and the practice of freedom, so that one does not resort to distorted images of false preconditions, such as the aristocratic myth of the idle mob. An expansion of the comparison initiated here, in which one continues to let Arendt provide the soil in which Wood can flourish and vice versa, has every promise of providing fruitful insights into these problems, and thereby encourage a structural critique of the modern political system and its forms of equality and freedom against a background of historically specific property relations.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Tomas Wedin received his PhD in December 2018 at the Department of Literature, History of Ideas, and Religion, University of Gothenburg, and is currently a postdoc fellow at École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), Paris. His doctoral thesis concerns educational politics in post-WWII Sweden and the aporias of equality. Recent publications include: ‘In Praise of the Present’, History of Education 46.6 (2017): 768–787; ‘Educational Equality: A Politico-Temporal Approach’, Journal of Philosophy of Education 53.2 (2019): 248–272.

Carl Wilén is a PhD Candidate at the Department of Sociology and Work Science, University of Gothenburg. He is currently researching the relation between the content of labour and abstract politico-juridical forms in the Haitian Revolution (1791). Recent publications include: Wilén Johansson, Evelina. and Wilén, Carl. ‘Resistance, Materiality and the Spectre of Cartesianism. A Contribution to the Critique of Feminist New Materialism’, Journal of Resistance Studies 4.2 (2018): 54–83.

ORCID

Tomas Wedin http://orcid.org/0000-0001-5083-4546

Carl Wilén http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1408-2866

Notes

1 See, for example: Cartledge (2016); Fuller (2015); Hanink (2017); Hennig (2017); Mitchell (2015); van Reybrouck (2016); Graeber (2013).

2 Nous consentons à tout pour elle, à faire table rase pour nous en tenir à elle seule. Périssent, s’il le faut, tous les arts, pourvu qu’il nous reste l’égalité réelle!.

3 As the Conspiracy puts it in ‘Analyse de la doctrine’, which was pasted up around Paris in 1796, ‘Le but de la société est de défendre cette égalité’ [...] ‘droit égal à la jouissance de tous les biens’ (Babeuf 1828, 141; 137).

4 In the wake of Ronald Dworkin’s seminal articles ‘What is Equality, part 1 and 2’ in 1981, a virtual explosion of competing understandings of distributive equality has occurred within political philosophy (see Anderson 1999; Brighouse and Swift 2006; Cohen 2001; Crisp 2003; Dworkin 1981a, 1981b; Persson 2001; Rawls 2002; Satz 2007; Scheffler 2003; Walzer 1983; Williams and Clayton 2002, 2004).

5 Note, however, that Rosanvallon’s discussion about equality as distribution is limited to distribution of wealth, whereas we invoke a broader notion of distribution.

6 ‘la richesse et la pauvreté, le commandement et l’obéissance mettent accidentellement de grandes distances entre deux hommes” [...] l‘opinion publique, qui se fonde sur l’ordre ordinaire des choses, les rapproche du commun niveau, et crée entre eux une sorte de d’égalité imaginaire, en dépit de l'inégalité réelle de leurs conditions’ (Tocqueville 1981, 226).

7 How this impulse comes hand in hand with a new form of individualism has been analysed by e.g. Gauchet (2005); Dumont (1992); Manent (2012); Manent (2007).

8 With regard to this form of equality, Elisabeth Anderson’s in many regards illuminating critique, in ‘What is the Point of Equality’, of the rather narrow outlook of the debate that ensued after Dworkin’s seminal articles, with its limited focus on equality as competing patterns of distribution, appears to take a middle course between distribution of goods/welfare and recognition. As Anderson writes, ‘democratic equality, in focusing on equality as a social relationship, rather than simply as a pattern of distribution, at least enables us to see that we have a choice between redistributing material resources and changing other aspects of society to meet the demands of equality’ (see Anderson 1999, 336). Thus, despite her very clarifying reflections, they lack entirely the political outlook that we maintain is essential for understanding the limitations of the outlined ideal-typical variations on the modern form of equality. Cf. also Fraser (1996).

9 And whose relevance is indicated by the fact Athenians even had a temple dedicated to the goddess of persuasion, Peitho (see Arendt 2007, 7).

10 For attempts to tackle it in a more constructive fashion, see Benhabib (1996); Fenichel Pitkin (1998); Reinhardt (1997); Villa (2008); Wedin (2018).

11 In a way that closely resembles Foucault’s writings on biopolitics (cf. Foucault 1997, 2004).

12 For an intriguing and – with regard to Arendt’s own political thought – immanent critique of Arendt’s comparison between the two revolutions, see Disch (2011).

13 Such as Mary McCarthy, Richard Bernstein, Hans Jonas, Hans Morganthau as well as C.B. MacPherson.

14 This is a recurrent issue throughout On Revolution, but the second section in the opening chapter is particularly revealing. Hanna Fenichel Pitkin has made a similar point in underscoring how Arendt is one of few political thinkers to firmly distinguish between liberty, which tends towards liberation, and freedom with its bent towards politics (see Fenichel Pitkin 1988). The tension is also discussed in Arendt (2018), as well as in Wedin (2018).

15 In The Human Condition, Arendt distinguishes between three forms of active life (vita activa: labour, work and action, as in contrast to the inner life of vita contemplativa). Where Aristotle, on which Arendt here draws, distinguished between three different free ways of life [bioi]: beside bios politikos, which for Aristotle was a necessary but subordinate form of bios; bios theoretikos (the highest form); and bios apolaustikos (the lowest of the three). See Aristotle (2004, 25).

16 The notion of the world is yet another crucial concept in Arendt’s thought. It refers both to the physical and cultural webs that extend over generations, and to that shared space in which men can meet and transcend the transience of the cyclical life-process.

17 Arendt’s interlacing between nativity, action, and the world is further elaborated in her essay ‘What is Freedom’ (in Arendt 2006a).

18 The pivotal distinction here is probably not to be drawn between those who intended to make a revolvo, which both the North American revolutionaries and their British predecessors in the seventeenth century falsely believed, and those who, such as Robespierre, set out to create something new, but rather on the outcome of revolutions. As Arendt puts it, the American revolutionaries were wrong historically, but right politically. And in this latter sense, there are good reasons for understanding all modern revolutions precisely as modern – non-repetitive – phenomena. With modern revolution we refer to Koselleck’s distinction in Koselleck (2004, 43–57); see also Arendt (2006b, 85).

19 However, even from the beginning, argues Arendt, this tendency loomed large over the revolution in America, as ‘the survival of the spirit out of which the act of foundation sprang, to realize the principle which inspired it … was frustrated almost from the beginning’ (see Arendt 2006b, 115).

20 Which could be compared with Arendt’s emphasis on the fundamental ambivalence of the ‘pursuit of happiness’.

21 The formal concept furthermore hinges on another of Arendt’s main targets in her essay ‘What is Freedom?’, and that is the idea of sovereignty, which she argues is devastating for the development of a public spirit (see Arendt 2006, 142–69).

22 By contrast, Arendt argues that the liberal concept of freedom, with origins in Hobbes’ uncompromising political science of sovereignty and will, emerged fully first with the full-scale expansion of the social in the nineteenth century (see Arendt 2006a).

23 Along the lines of Cynthia Farrar’s argument (see Farrar 2007, 179).