Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Timeline
- CHAPTERS AND NARRATIVES
- 1 Meaning in context: how to write a history of Greek political thought
- 2 The Greek invention of the polis, of politics and of the political
- Narrative I The prehistoric and protohistoric Greek world, c. 1300–750 BCE
- Narrative II The archaic Greek world, c. 750–500 BCE
- Narrative III The classical Greek world I, c. 500–400 BCE
- Narrative IV The classical Greek world II, c. 400–300 BCE
- Narrative V The Hellenistic Greek world, c. 300–30 BCE
- 9 (E)utopianism by design: the Spartan revolution, 244–221 BCE
- Narrative VI ‘Graecia capta’ (‘Greece conquered’), c. 146 BCE – CE 120
- APPENDIX I Selected texts and documents
- APPENDIX II The ‘Old Oligarch’: a close reading
- Bibliographical essay
- References
- Index
9 - (E)utopianism by design: the Spartan revolution, 244–221 BCE
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Timeline
- CHAPTERS AND NARRATIVES
- 1 Meaning in context: how to write a history of Greek political thought
- 2 The Greek invention of the polis, of politics and of the political
- Narrative I The prehistoric and protohistoric Greek world, c. 1300–750 BCE
- Narrative II The archaic Greek world, c. 750–500 BCE
- Narrative III The classical Greek world I, c. 500–400 BCE
- Narrative IV The classical Greek world II, c. 400–300 BCE
- Narrative V The Hellenistic Greek world, c. 300–30 BCE
- 9 (E)utopianism by design: the Spartan revolution, 244–221 BCE
- Narrative VI ‘Graecia capta’ (‘Greece conquered’), c. 146 BCE – CE 120
- APPENDIX I Selected texts and documents
- APPENDIX II The ‘Old Oligarch’: a close reading
- Bibliographical essay
- References
- Index
Summary
The idea of a perfect and immortal commonwealth will always be found as chimerical as that of a perfect and immortal man.
(David Hume, History of Great Britain, 1754–62)UTOPIANISM ANCIENT AND MODERN
Under the former Soviet-backed regime, the Hungarian writer György Konrád published in 1985 a stinging polemic against the intrusion of the State and of reason of state into every sphere of existence in ‘Mitteleuropa’. He entitled it Antipolitik. The ancient Greeks too had their exponents of anti-politics, although their targets and attacks were, of course, radically different. Indeed, the critical and reflexive nature of the Greek tradition of political thought, from its inception in the poems of Homer and Hesiod onwards, had always encouraged resistance to the dominant constructions of politics as the true end of man and of the polis as the unique source of the truly good life. Broadly speaking, negative reactions took one of two forms: either advocacy of a total withdrawal from politics into a privatised existence beyond the reach of the polis, or the imagining of alternative political Utopias.
The surviving evidence for the withdrawal syndrome is largely Athenian, partly because ancient democracy was premissed on endless open debate but also because Athens' radical form of democracy aroused fierce opposition from its articulate anti-democratic critics (Ober 1998). Virulently opposed to the ideal of democratic participation advocated famously in the Periclean funeral speech in Thucydides, they redescribed such participatory politics as polupragmosunê or ‘meddlesomeness’, an excess of engagement in pragmata (affairs of state) by the unfitted masses (Rahe 1992: 224 & n. 8).
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Ancient Greek Political Thought in Practice , pp. 110 - 119Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2009