Class Struggle in Ancient Greek Democracy

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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.