The Cares of a Corporate Self

Here, finally, the book turns to consider what is more conventionally called Athenian “government,” namely the activities of Demos, the council of 500, and the sundry poliadic “officials.” As the chapter stresses, Demos, the ultimate rule-making agency in Attica, was fundamentally different from a modern “state” in at least three ways. The first of these differences concerns their respective quiddities as social objects. Whereas a modern state is conventionally seen as a machine-like material assemblage of practices and individual persons, Demos was a kind of deathless corporate person in its own right, one that both pre-existed and outlived the particular individuals who happened to embody it at any given time. Second, by comparison with the conspicuously activist, highly interventionist states of modernity, Demos was a peculiarly inert kind of agency. In its primary incarnations in assembly meetings and law courts, its function was to serve as a purely deliberative rule-making body, in that it materialized to produce binding resolutions to issues raised by “civilians,” whether they were its assembly “advisors” or the prosecutors in court cases. Third, given that Athenian households were assumed to be largely responsible for governing themselves, both individually and collectively, the competence of Demos was necessarily limited. Essentially, it was responsible for producing binding decisions only on those matters which households could not already manage for themselves, like polis-wide cults, diplomacy, and warfare. In short, to summarize chapters 12-14, demokratia in Attica was not a modern-style “state-centered” form of rule. It was an ongoing exercise in self-management by the unitary social body of Demos, whether acting as its constituent parts or as the totality of the whole.