Class Struggle in Ancient Greek Democracy

这个项目将把阶级置于古希腊民主历史重建的中心。它认为，阶级动态--植根于希腊城市的经济和职业结构，并表现为表征这些城市的社会、政治和文化对立--是理解希腊民主政体的出现、性质和发展的基础。无论是政治斗争的直接证据还是当代的政治反思，这种观点在我们的资料来源中都有很大的用武之地。例如，阶级在亚里士多德对当代政治的分析中起着核心作用。在他看来，任何城邦的公民可以分为两部分，富人和穷人，再根据职业进行更复杂的细分，他将任何给定城市的宪法与其公民的社会经济组织紧密联系在一起。因此，对于这位敏锐地观察他那个时代的政治的人来说，从阶级的角度思考希腊政治是不可或缺的。然而，大多数研究古希腊政治的现代学者几乎都放弃了阶级作为一个解释性概念，更不用说社会和经济史学家了。这个项目的论点是，一个更灵活的阶级概念，将最好的马克思主义历史学与最近的社会学研究结合在一起，使我们能够将这个概念放回亚里士多德放置它的地方：分析古希腊政治和社会的核心。该项目将探索希腊城邦阶级关系的经济基础；不同群体的文化品味和社会生活，以及它们是如何相互对立的；以及这些阶级对立如何结合到特定的政治偏好中，特别是意识形态和制度选择上。它的目的无非是对古希腊城邦社会和政治的驱动力进行革命性的重新构思。

This project will put class at the centre of the historical reconstruction of ancient Greek democracy. It contends that class dynamics - grounded in the economic and occupational structures of the Greek cities, and manifesting themselves in the social, political, and cultural oppositions that characterised them - are fundamental for understanding the emergence, nature, and development of Greek democracies. This perspective finds much purchase in our sources, both in direct evidence for political struggles and in contemporary political reflection. Class, for instance, plays a central role in Aristotle's analysis of contemporary politics. In his view, the citizenry of any polis could be divided into two parts, the rich and the poor, with further, complex subdivisions based on occupation, and he tightly links the constitution of any given city to the socio-economic organisation of its citizenry. For this keen observer of the politics of his day, then, thinking about Greek politics in terms of class is indispensable. Yet class has been all but abandoned as an explanatory concept by most modern scholars of ancient Greek politics, not to mention by social and economic historians. It is this project's contention that a more flexible notion of class, integrating the best Marxist historiography with recent work in sociology, allows us to put this concept back where Aristotle placed it: at the heart of the analysis of ancient Greek politics and society. The project will explore the economic underpinnings of class relations in the Greek city-states; the cultural tastes and social lives of different groups, and how they were structured in opposition to one another; and how these class oppositions coalesced in certain political preferences and in particular ideological and institutional options. It aims to achieve nothing less than a revolutionary reconceptualisation of the driving dynamics of the society and politics of the ancient Greek city-states.