CITIZENSHIP AND MANHOOD

In Book 3 of his History, Thucydides describes a civil war gripping the city-state of Corcyra in 427, but this event inspires him to sketch out a portrait of factional strife between democrats and oligarchs everywhere in Greece where Athenian–Spartan hostilities provoked “the same human nature” (3.82.2) to acts of hostility and brutality (82.1, 82.3 and 83.1). His portrait highlights several variations on the basic script “how citizens deliberate,” and the cumulative effect of this script's several tracks dramatizes how citizens individually and in factions can assume performative attitudes toward one another which produce (in Taylor's terms) “webs of interlocution” and a “for-us” public space that is actually degenerative to city-state community. By this I mean that, in these quickly sketched variations, deliberating citizens believe they are following a familiar script to achieve the consensus necessary for dikê and nomos, but in reality their deliberations sabotage the goals of the script in question and push their communities beneath the threshold of statehood. The tracks include: “forming an alliance” (82.1–3); “interpreting the habitual meanings of language” (82.3–4); “evaluating the deliberator” (82.5–6); and “how to achieve consensus” (82.6–7).

If it is true that these citizens show how a city-state can fall beneath the threshold of statehood when they depart from the goals of deliberation, then it's reasonable to ask whether as deliberators they push themselves beneath the threshold of citizenship itself. What might it mean to regress from the ability to speak, think, and respond like a citizen?