Even today, Athenian democracy exerts a great fascination because it is the first in world history in which equality and freedom were realised as fundamental principles of a political order, democracy. The principle of equality manifested itself in the participation of all adult male citizens in popular assemblies, the administration of justice and the possibility of electing officials. With his reform in 508/7, Cleisthenes enabled members of the peasant class, the zeugítai, to participate directly in political deliberations as members of the council. Pericles also admitted them to the archonship and thus to the Areopagus. Athenian democracy was characterised by the fact that, as a result of these reforms, all citizens were able to exercise political rights directly, regardless of wealth, education or origin. In his comprehensive presentation of Athenian democracy, the ancient historian Jochen Bleicken rightly emphasised that, in contrast to this, the value of the freedom of the citizen could not be measured by institutional facilities, as freedom had always existed (at least since Solon’s abolition of debt slavery). It was only in the course of the 5th and 4th centuries that the Athenians became aware of the value of freedom.[1] Equality could be a political demand, freedom was not and could not be. The value that the Athenians placed on freedom can therefore only be determined discursively, in Athenian self-descriptions.
Naomi T. Campa’s book is concerned with a more differentiated analysis of what freedom meant in classical Athenian democracy and what value contemporaries attached to eleuthería. Parallel to the democratic constitution, she argues, a concept of freedom emerged in the course of the 5th and 4th centuries that distinguishes Athenian democracy from other polities. Here, freedom structured civic identity, ensured autonomy for free citizens and enabled them to act ‘however they wished’. This concept of freedom differs fundamentally from the theoretical concepts of liberalism and republicanism, which saw a tension between positive and negative freedom. The realisation of individual freedom in thought and action was restricted by a government that wanted to enforce state goals and coexistence free of conflicts. In ancient Athens, on the other hand, the rights of the individual were protected to a high degree, and ideologically there was no contradiction between the freedom of the individual and the government. In antiquity, it was not a question of the way in which a government was allowed to restrict individual freedom and how individuals could be protected from interference in their rights by an authority, because ideally, in Athenian democracy, all political and jurisdictional decisions were directly attributable to the entirety of free citizens. According to the Athenians’ self-descriptions, individuals and society mutually strengthened each other in their ability to act, because the individual citizen as kúrios in his house was simultaneously involved in all political and jurisdictional decisions.
In order to grasp the specific understanding of freedom in Athenian democracy more precisely, Campa draws on the concept of freedom of the political philosopher Isaiah Berlin, who distinguished between positive and negative freedom in his 1958 inaugural lecture at Oxford, ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’, in which he analyses the concepts of freedom of Immanuel Kant and other philosophers of the Enlightenment.[2] According to this, negative freedom means ‘freedom from’, positive ‘freedom to’. Freedom in the positive sense is the ability to act unhindered, and freedom is considered to be when nothing and no one interferes with one’s own actions. To ensure that ‘natural’ freedom in the sense of the Enlightenment does not lead to social chaos, negative freedom is needed as protection against transgressions that impair individual freedom. The philosophers of the Enlightenment—and Isaiah Berlin following them—saw a tension between positive and negative freedom that had developed historically.[3] Campa adopts this approach and bases her investigation on the question of whether Athenian democracy granted its citizens positive and negative freedom and whether there was a tension between them. With her conclusion ‘Freedom as autonomy for Athenians was not opposed to government since it was their own freedom that underpinned their government and their government that under-pinned their freedom’ (p. 174), Campa formulates a viewpoint that Isaiah Berlin had assumed to be possible only for early historical societies.[4]
Campa gets to the bottom of the specific form of freedom in Athenian democracy by examining the contexts in which unhindered action was formulated in a political context in writings from the late 5th and the 4th centuries. It is significant that freedom is equated with the possibility of ‘being able to do whatever one wishes’ or ‘being able to live however one wishes’, which expresses personal autonomy. Alongside the rather rarely attested krateín or dúnamai, kúrios is the term used in the writings to express personal, but also political agency, ‘power’. The personal freedom of each kúrios and the ability to do whatever one wishes went hand in hand with the political power of all Athenian citizens. ‘The citizen as his own master in public and private life fashioned the contours of democratic ideology and practise’ (p. 166).
In her introduction, Campa outlines the problem and the aim of the study. In order to determine the nature of freedom in the democratic thinking of the classical period, Campa first turns to the evidence for the phrases to do ‘whatever one wishes’ and to live ‘however one wishes’ under the heading ‘Democratic Eleuthería as Positive Freedom’. Their occurrence in connection with democratic principles shows that positive freedom in the sense of Isaiah Berlin was a central aspect of the citizen’s identity. The comparison with slaves in particular shows that ‘the defining and distinctive feature of democratic freedom was the insistence on the self as master of action’ (p. 15). Ancient historians judged that in Athens the citizen had the ability ‘to act on one’s volition, and thus that eleuthería was considered by Athenians to be positive freedom, or individual autonomy’ (19). Critics such as Xenophon or Aristotle indirectly confirmed this fact, even if they negatively assessed the far-reaching positive freedom as boundless and as the arbitrary rule of the masses. In this and the following chapters, Campa restricts herself to discourses on political freedom. She deliberately refrains from analysing institutional or legal mechanisms that secured the freedom of the citizen. She therefore only briefly touches on dokimasía, excluding lawsuits against public officials for bribery or inactivity in office (argía) or laws limiting abduction (agagogé), binding (déein) or other forms of self-help.[5]
In the following chapter ‘Oratorical Ambiguity’, Campa examines the findings on the basis of court speeches. Analysing the semantic meaning of the phrase ‘to do whatever one wishes’ confirms that it can be used to describe the status of a free citizen. Having to submit to the will of another, on the other hand, was perceived as a form of slavery and incompatible with democratic freedom. Campa prudently and with due caution discusses restrictions on this freedom, for example in the case of partial or complete disenfranchisement through the punishment of atimía, but also through the rule of law, which in the opinion of the speakers should be recognised. The citizen in Athens would therefore have been granted the highest degree of negative freedom. All these evidences would emphatically express the value placed on positive and negative freedom as a fundamental principle of the democratic order.
In the chapter ‘Power and the Citizen’, Campa enquires into the power to act that results from freedom of action and is expressed in the ancient texts with kúrios as a marker of power. In a zero-sum game, power could be shared between authorised actors, so that ideally the united citizenry and the laws are seen as acting harmoniously and symbiotically. The evidence from court speeches and philosophical writings showed that there was a close conceptual link between empowerment and citizenship. The term kúrios reflects a ‘popular analogy between the household and the city’. Invectives in court were often accompanied by the accusation that the opponent was making the existing laws ákuroi, thereby depriving the courts of their power and acting to the detriment of his fellow citizens, whose autonomy he was restricting and who therefore did not deserve the (negative) freedom that belonged to the citizen. The courts in particular were therefore arenas for a discourse on power, both of the individual and of the jurors as a whole. ‘The laws empower the people who empower the laws’ (p. 127). Campa follows these remarks with a fifth chapter, ‘The Powerless and Unfree: A Case Study’, in which she analyses the pseudo-Demosthenic speech Against Neaira as a case study for the use of kúrios and ákuros. A conclusion, an index locorum and a general index conclude the work.
By concentrating on the semantic content of freedom, expressed in the phrase ‘whatever one wishes’, and of kúrios as empowerment, Campa has presented an analysis focussed on two essential probes in order to grasp the specific meaning of freedom in ancient Athens. The study is oriented towards the parameters of Isaiah Berlin’s concept of positive and negative freedom and identifies the specifics of the ancient concept of freedom in a methodologically and conceptually reflective manner. Her approach is philologically precise, her analysis of research wide-ranging as far as English literature is concerned. It is disconcerting, however, that contributions that have appeared in other languages are ignored. Important publications on the understanding of freedom in Athenian democracy, on kurieía in the oikos or on the critics of Athenian democracy have not been consulted,[6] which also applies to relevant articles that have dealt directly with her topic.[7] Nor does the reader learn that the results that Campa arrives at in her convincing analyses have already been set out in essential points in Jochen Bleicken’s work on Athenian democracy, an important contribution that Campa unfortunately did not refer to.[8]
Notes
[1] Jochen Bleicken, Die athenische Demokratie, Paderborn etc. 1986; 4. Aufl. 1995, 367.
[2] Isaiah Berlin, Two Concepts of Liberty, in: I. Berlin, Four Essays On Liberty, Oxford 1969, 118-172 (and in: Liberty: Incorporating Four Essays on Liberty, Oxford 2002, 166-217).
[3] Isaiah Berlin, Zwei Freiheitsbegriffe, in: Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie 41, 1993, 741-775, here 743-752.
[4] Berlin 1993, 750: „The freedom which consists in being one’s own master, and the freedom which consists in not being prevented from choosing as I do by other men, may, on the face of it, seem concepts of no great logical distance from each other—no more than negative and positive ways of saying much the same thing. Yet the ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ notions of freedom historically developed in divergent directions […], until, in the end, they came into direct conflict with each other.“
[5] On dokimasía in ancient Greece, see Christophe Feyel, Δοκιμασία. La place et le rôle de l’examen préliminaire dans les institutions des cités grecques, Nancy 2009.
[6] Wilfried Nippel, Antike oder moderne Freiheit? Die Begründung der Demokratie in Athen und in der Neuzeit, Frankfurt am Main 2008 (engl.: Ancient and modern democracy. Two concepts of liberty?, New York 2015); Elke Hartmann, Geschlechterdefinitionen im attischen Recht. Bemerkungen zur sogenannten kyrieia, in: Elke Hartmann et al. (eds.), Geschlechterdefinitionen und Geschlechtergrenzen in der Antike, Stuttgart 2007, 37-54.
[7] Ivan Jordović, Platons Kritik des demokratischen Konzepts der Freiheit zu tun, was man will, in: Ivan Jordović, Uwe Walter (eds.), Feindbild und Vorbild. Die athenische Demokratie und ihre intellektuellen Gegner, Berlin / Boston 2018, 183-208; vgl. auch Egon Flaig, Totalitäre Demokratie. Eine Spurenlese zum Verhältnis von Freiheit und Gesetz, in: ibid. 269-310, or Robert Muller, La doctrine platonicienne de la liberté, Paris 1997.
[8] Bleicken ebd. 366-370 and 633-638.