The Discovery of Freedom in Ancient Greece by Kurt Raaflaub , Renate Franciscono (review)

Abstract

[MWS 6.2 (2006) 305-311] ISSN 1470-8078 Book Reviews Kurt Raaflaub, The Discovery of Freedom in Ancient Greece (trans. Renate Franciscono; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, rev. edn, 2004), pp. 427. ISBN 0226701018. $55.00. When Max Weber wrote in his celebrated lecture on the decline of the ancient world that the problems of the ancients and the moderns were so different that there was nothing to be learned about our current situation from ancient history, he can surely not have been thinking about the concept of freedom or liberty. Anglophone and non-Anglophone political thinking continues to derive much sustenance for its central concern with the nature of individual and collective freedom from an engage ment with the ancient world, especially that of Greece and Rome. For the former, many find themselves attracted to Hannah Arendt's interpretation of the political nature of Greek eleutheria, culminating in her radical conclusion that, simply put, freedom is politics. In a different but related fashion, much recent work in the history of political thought and normative political theory has utilized the classical Roman law distinction between the liber and servus, the freeman and the slave, to illustrate a specifically republican conception of freedom that moves beyond the celebrated dichotomy of Isaiah Berlin's famous two concepts of liberty—the negative freedom from constraint, or the positive freedom of self-realization. Equally, studies of ideol ogy combine various debates about the practical structure of Greek democracy itself, with specific empirical questions about the construction and extent of the democratic process and the institutions that upheld it, building on the work of such writers as Mogens Hansen and Josiah Ober, to name but two scholars well known to English language readers. Kurt Raaflaub has been a central protagonist in debates about the nature of freedom in ancient Greece for at least two decades (this book was originally published in German in 1985), and has long been concerned with delineating precise moments in the evolution of the concept. In this newly revised translation, he offers a wealth of detail and rigorous argu mentation, suggesting ultimately, in what amounts to a defence of historical context, that the concept of freedom needs to be studied and accounted for in each period of its evolution separately and distinctly, using both direct sources as well as those sources which intimate or seem to suggest a concern with something like freedom even before the concept itself was actually born. Raaflaub suggests that this is his torically justified on the grounds of plausibility, though some will doubtless wonder about the utility of such an argument in the light of the predominance of particular modes of interpretation of the history of ideas in the course of the post-war period. Ultimately, he concludes, there was no 'political concept of freedom' before the fifth© Max Weber Studies 2006, Department of Applied Social Sciences, London Metropolitan University, Old Castle Street, London El 7NT, UK. 306 Max Weber Studies century, and moreover, that 'The idea of a citizen's freedom within his community, initially seen in contrast solely to his oppression by tyranny, was given a positive content and associated with a constitution even much later' (p. 250). Thus, what is also being argued here is that the discovery of freedom is almost coterminous with the discovery of the political itself, in a recognizably modern sense, an argument which dovetails somewhat with the suggestions of Christian Meier in particular, whose work he extensively engages with. Much like the Roman arguments that have been resuscitated in recent years, though, for Raaflaub, the Greek conception of freedom becomes politically important when considered in terms of its antonym, namely servitude or the loss of political freedom. Subjection to a tyrant here, was the first formulation of what would become servitude. Its political character emerged through the challenge to tyranny from the whole of the population, not just the aristocrats, for if only the latter could fight tyranny then their interest in power could only hinder the development of a political concept of freedom. This too was tied up with something Weber was also quite concerned with, the idea of debt bondage. Solon's reforms, which abolished...