Apathy: The democratic disease

Philosophy & Social Criticism

Volumn 30, Issue 6, 2004, Pages 745-768

  Green, Jeffrey E ^a  

^a HARVARD UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

Achilles; apathy; democracy; egalitarianism; isonomia; Plato; political participation

Indexed keywords

EID: 34248060010     PISSN: 01914537     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0191453704045763     Document Type: Article

References (53)

1. Bruce Ackerman, Social Justice in the Liberal State (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1980), p. 371.
2. Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), p. 38. (‘Domination consists in institutional conditions which inhibit or prevent people from participating in determining their actions or the conditions of their actions.’)
3. Jürgen Habermas, Between Facts and Norms, trans. William Rehg (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), pp. 120, 130.
4. Bernard R. Berelson, Paul F. Lazarsfield and William N. McPhee, Voting: A Study of Opinion Formation in a Presidential Campaign (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1954), p. 322.
5. Samuel P. Huntington, ‘The United States’, in The Crisis of Democracy, ed. Michel Crozier, Samuel P. Huntington, and Joji Watanuki (New York: New York University Press, 1975), pp. 113–15.
6. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract, III.15; ‘L'instant qu'un peuple se donne des représentants, il n'est plus libre’.
7. See, for example, Benjamin Barber, Strong Democracy, 4th edn (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), p. 91 (‘We see our choice as a choice between being citizens or being slaves’);
8. Peter Bachrach and Aryeh Botwinick, Power and Empowerment (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1992), pp. 32–3 (‘The illiberal and, indeed, antidemocratic propensity of ordinary men and women is an undeniable fact that must be confronted’).
9. Josiah Ober, for example, estimates that in 4th-century Athens, only 6,000–8,000 attended the Assembly out of a civic body of about 30,000; see his The Athenian Revolution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), p. 23.
10. Robert Dahl provides additional evidence supporting the suggestion that ‘there are grounds for believing that only a rather small minority of citizens attended the meetings of the Assembly’; see his Democracy and Its Critics (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989), pp. 11, 345.
11. Thomas Jefferson to Joseph C. Cabell, 2 February 1816;
12. see The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Andrew A. Lipscomb (Washington, DC: 1904), vol. 14, pp. 421–3.
13. Rousseau, The Social Contract, IV.1.
14. For an example of a political theorist leveling the charge of emptiness against defenders of an abstract participatory politics, see Hannah Pitkin, ‘Justice: On Relating Private and Public’, Political Theory 9 (1981): 327–52.
15. Homer, The Iliad, I, 490–2; trans.
16. A. T. Murray, rev. William F. Wyatt (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), vol. 1, pp. 49–51.
17. A. T. Murray, rev. William F. Wyatt, 1999), IX, 186–9. Twice in the first four lines of his re—emergence in Book Nine, Achilles is described as ‘being delighted’ (terpomenon) — a clear contrast to the rage and dissatisfaction that had characterized his initial conduct in Book One.
18. Homer, Iliad, IX, 427; XI, 784.
19. Homer, Iliad, IX, 318–20. ιση μοιρα μενοντι, και ει μαλα τις πολεμιζοι. εν δε ιη τιμη ημεν κακος ηδε και εσθλος. κατθαν ομως ο τ'αεργος ανηρ ο τε πολλα εοργως.
20. The centrality of the pursuit of fame to Greek culture persisted well beyond the archaic Greek civilization and the time of Homer. Solon was only expressing the norm when he wondered: ‘If the longing for fame were to be banished from life, what would be left worth having?’ Lucian, Anacharsis, 15f.;
21. cit. Jacob Burckhardt, The Greeks and Greek Civilization, ed. Oswyn Murray, trans. Sheila Stern (New York: St Martin's Press, 1998), pp. 389–90, n. 37.
22. Homer, The Iliad, VI, 208; XI, 784. Both Glaucus and Achilles are sent to war by their fathers with these words. Numerous commentators have identified this line as the most fundamental principle of Greek life. See, for example
23. Jacob Burckhardt, The Greeks and Greek Civilization, trans. Sheila Stern (London: HarperCollins, 1998), p. 140;
24. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1958), p. 41.
25. T. A. Sinclair, rev. and re-presented Trevor J. Saunders (London: Penguin, 1992), p. 60, 1253a7.
26. Arendt, for example, limits her conception of agonistic politics to the self-oriented pursuits of display, the drive for recognition and immortalization, and the performance of great words and speeches. She suggests that legislation is somehow non-agonistic. She speaks, for instance, of the tremendous influence within Greek antiquity of ‘the so-called agonal spirit, the passionate drive to show one's self in measuring up against others that underlies the concept of politics prevalent in the city-states. An outstanding symptom of this prevailing influence is that the Greeks, in distinction from all later developments, did not count legislating among the political activities’ (Human Condition, p. 194). Against Arendt, I suggest that legislation is a modern—day example of the agonal spirit, perhaps a more sublimated form than the pursuit of glory, but an intensely competitive practice nonetheless.
27. As an example of the search for a non-agonistic brand of politics, see Iris Marion Young, ‘Communication and the Other: Beyond Deliberative Democracy’, in Democracy and Difference: Contesting the Boundaries of the Political, ed. Seyla Benhabib (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), pp. 120–35.
28. Jacques Derrida, Politics of Friendship, trans. George Collins (London: Verso, 1997), p. 104.
29. Max Weber, ‘Politics as a Vocation’, in H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (eds), From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), pp. 115, 125.
30. Homer, Iliad, IV, 186, 209.
31. Solon, W 34: Early Greek Political Thought from Homer to the Sophists, ed. and trans. Michael Gagarin and Paul Woodruff (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 27.
32. Plato, Republic, 561c-d. Here I follow the translation of G. M. A. Grube and C. D. C. Reeve (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1992), p. 232. These lines recall Achilles. In his apathy in Book Nine, Achilles drinks and plays the lyre. At other times, he is engaged as a soldier committed to a life of struggle, striving for distinction on the public stage. Sometimes he plays the role of a politician, participating in assemblies, and deliberating over the common good. Like the democratic person, Achilles fluctuates endlessly in his commitments. At one moment, Achilles chooses the short life of glory, then he rejects this choice, then he returns again to battle. Achilles wavers between going home and staying at Troy, an uncertainty that leaves him in a nether—region of idleness and neglect. Sometimes he speaks of the equality of all humans — rejecting the distinction between Greek and Trojan, the brave and the cowardly, the honored and the low—while at other times the reality of these divisions propels him to action. The one difference is that Achilles seems to have avoided the pleasant happiness which Plato assigns to the democratic individual.
33. Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, II.37.
34. Plutarch, ‘Is “Live Unknown” a Wise Precept?’, in Moralia, trans. Benedict Einarson and Phillip H. De Lacy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967), vol. 14, p. 232, 1128–30. Plutarch says, ‘But not even the author of the precept wished to be unknown, as he made the very statement to escape from being unknown, dishonestly courting fame as a person of no ordinary wisdom by his advice to seek obscurity’; 1128B.
35. The remnants of Seneca's treatise stand as an extended version of Epicurus' short phrase and, as such, journey into the paradoxical realm of anti-politics. Seneca embraces retirement from public life so that one can concern oneself fully with the more significant and valuable matters of philosophy. In retirement, the wise man will investigate ‘what lies beyond this world’ and seek ‘knowledge of things immortal’. Yet, if the value of what lies beyond the world, and thus beyond politics, is what leads the philosopher away from politics, Seneca cannot persist in the unworldliness of what he describes, and he goes on to justify the retreat from public life on the basis of its public benefit. Seneca introduces the usefulness of political silence. ‘What is required, you see, of any man is that he should be of use to other men — if possible, to many; failing that, to a few; failing that, to those nearest him; failing that, to himself.’ By this, Seneca means not only to justify political silence on the basis of the corruption of political regimes, but also to demand of retirement from public life that it produce advantages for the common good. Retirement, Seneca says, has a duty to display itself, thus recalling the agonal urge to distinguish oneself in public that is central to war and politics alike. ‘Virtue is an incomplete and feeble good when wasted on a retirement without activity never displaying what it has learned.’ When he cites the philosophers Zeno and Chrysippus, who accomplished more in retirement than they would have done had they ‘commanded armies, held public office, and passed laws’, Seneca at once de-values public service in comparison with the private pursuit of philosophy yet relies on a notion of the common good to explain what makes philosophy superior to politics. Seneca supports retirement from political life not out of an incapacity to think in terms of benefit and harm, but because the common advantage can be secured by such a retreat. John M. Cooper and J. F. Procope (eds), Seneca: Moral and Political Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 172–80.
36. Epictetus, The Discourses, trans. Robin Hard (London: Everyman, 1995), pp. 248, 250 [IV.4.i, ii, xxiii].
37. Pindar, however, does refer to the threefold distinction between the rule of the one, the few, and the many. Pythian Odes, 2.86–8.
38. Herodotus, Histories, III.80.
39. See, for example, Aristotle, Politics.
40. Gregory Vlastos, ‘Isonomia’, American Journal of Philology 74 (1953): 337.
41. Ober, for example, locates a key source of democratic power in the popular control of public speech and places great emphasis on the fact that elites operating within the Athenian Assembly could always be shouted down by the assembled citizens (The Athenian Revolution, pp. 23–4).
42. Also see R. K. Sinclair, Democracy and Participation in Athens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), chapter 4, for the argument that the Assembly maintained true sovereignty under the Athenian democracy.
43. Some commentators have suggested that the polis was in fact understood to represent the character of the people. Hansen, for example, claims that ‘in a democratic polis, especially Athens, government and citizens largely coincided, primarily through the institution of the Assembly of the People, and the dominant ideology was that the polis was the people (demos): it manifests itself, for example, in all surviving treaties, where the state of Athens is called ho demos ho Athenaion, “the people of the Athenians”.’ Mogens Herman Hansen, The Athenian Democracy in the Age of Demosthenes, trans. J. A. Crook (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), p. 59. This view does nothing to challenge the fact that individuals were not understood to embody the interests or character of the people and that politics, insofar as it is devoted to the selection of leaders, was not conceived as representative in the most literal sense of the word.
44. See, for example, Aristotle, Athenian Constitution, XLIV.4, LXI.1. Ober, however, downplays the significance of the popularly elected military and financial officers: ‘Although annually elected (rather than lotteried) generals (in the fifth century) and elected financial magistrates (in the fourth century) were indeed important players in the government, they had limited decisionmaking power.’ Athenian Revolution, p. 25.
45. Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, II.37. Aristotle reports that in the time of Solon all magistrates were chosen by lot from an elected short list (Athenian Constitution, VIII.1) and that from the period between 487 and 403 BC archons were selected by lot from an elected short list (Athenian Constitution, XXII.5).
46. Moreover, Gagarin and Woodruff note that ‘individual merit was undoubtedly a factor in the advance screening of candidates for selection’ in their Early Greek Political Thought, p. 94.
47. And Hansen reports that in Athens ‘after selection [by lot] the candidates all had to undergo dokimasia, which, after 403/2, was reformed so as to give the People's Court the opportunity to reject on the spot anyone who might be suspected of oligarchic tendencies’; Athenian Democracy, pp. 236–7.
48. Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, II.65.9.
49. ‘Old Oligarch’, I, 2. Here I follow the translation of Gagarin and Woodruff in Early Greek Political Thought, p. 134.
50. Thucydides, for example, notes the tendency of party leaders engaged in factional strife to rely upon the ‘fair-sounding names’ of isonomy and aristocracy to designate what was really democracy and oligarchy. History of the Peloponnesian War, III.82.8.
51. The Federalist Papers, ed. Jacob E. Cooke (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1961), no. 51 [James Madison].
52. Michael Sandel, for example, worries that contemporary American democracy suffers from ‘the fear that, individually and collectively, we are losing control of the forces that govern our lives’. Democracy's Discontent (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), p. 1.
53. Aristotle, Ethics, 1133a.13–31. Aristotle remarks that a political or commercial association ‘is formed not from two doctors but from a doctor and a farmer, and in general from parties that are different and not equal, but which must be equated’. Aristotle at once recognizes the fundamental importance of equality to the political enterprise, yet also that this equality is of a limited nature, for it depends on preserving the significance of inequality outside the realm of law. It is precisely this extra—nomotic inequality that the apathetic Achilles cannot recognize and which, consequently, de-motivates his interest in politics.