What form of singular rationality to identify behind the reform of Clisthene which marks for many the birth certificate of Greek democracy ? What social devices, what citizen experiences, what vernacular knowledge allowed this new political organization ?
The work, written in four hands by Paulin Ismard and Arnaud Macé, respectively historian and philosopher of antiquity, explores the arts of storage and classification that constitutes social practices widely shared in the civic body, and which would have made its vast reorganization by the reform of Clisthene in 508/507 before our era. This reform consisted in replacing the organization of the civic body in four tribes with a new system based on geographic distribution, in particular to prevent the return of tyranny.
It is a fascinating work on many plans, for those who know about this founding event as well as for the specialist, both the work takes a position clearly and in a documented manner. The city and the number replaces the reform of Clisthene in the context of different reorganizations of the civic body from the archaic era, effectively confronts the historical questions that its exact unfolding raises (p. 34-37), and puts us directly with the sources which document the social practices that are the sharing of a booty, the appearance of wrestlers in athletic competitions or the organization of an army. In doing so, the two authors build a “ realistic approach to reform », By making this vernacular knowledge the land of a rationality (p. 48-49). If the work very clearly explains the historiographical debates which underlie it and expands the debate to the very conceptions of political rationality, the reader or the reader will perhaps be tempted to find there matter, also, to understand the functioning of a democracy, the conditions of emergence of a political change or what makes civic cohesion, in a current way. Through the examination of the conditions of possibility of the reform of Clisthene, the work wonders how to conceive of the agency of the civic body as a whole in the emergence of democracy and the type of social anchor that requires deep political changes.
A reform by the number
We must start by recalling the content of Clisthene’s reform, which the book does briefly (p. 21-25 ; 144-152). Based on the pseudo-aristototus, the Constitution of Athenians21, the authors write (p. 21):
Clisthene would have targeted the mixture of the Athenian people (anamixis), so that more citizens take part in the Constitution (Politeia).
The reform consists in dividing the territory of attic into three geographically distinct zones, the mesogeum at the center, the Paraliawhich includes coastal and border spaces, andate (the city). These three regions are divided into ten zones, so as to compose thirty groups of dème, the trittyes. The ten tribes each composed of three trittyes of different regions form the framework of the selection of members of the two fundamental institutions for Athenian democracy that are the Helie (the Athenian courts) and the Ball (The Council of Five Cents), as well as parties, cults or a calendar. The Dème is the smallest territorial unit in which the ten tribes proceed which reorganize the entire plan of the city and found a real identity policyindividual and collective, while, in the time of tyrants, the four tribes were devoid of a territorial basic. This reorganization promotes, by the “ brewing », A greater civic cohesion. If it does not directly establish democracy, it responds at least to the fall of tyranny to prevent its return, reforming the basis of participation in political power and accession to charges.
The active role of the people
P. Lévêque and P. Vidal-Naquet, with Clisthene the Athenianwho helped erect Clisthene as “ founding hero of Athenian democracy “(P. 15), not only studied the pythagoric resonances of the reform (p. 48), but favored a reading” idealistic “, Which sees in it a theoretical plan whose practical application is second (p. 38-39), and” elitist By eluding any active participation of the people. The complexity and sophistication of this spatial reording of the whole city would thus betray a Pythagorean inspiration, modified in the recurrence of the three, the five and the ten (p. 46-48). P. Ismard and A. Macé question two ideas: the abstraction of the idea that the reform would proceed and the idea that Clisthene would have been alone at its origin.
In a way, we wish to look away from the storos of the agora as great speeches of PNYX and, by entering the stalls of the old Athens, observe sometimes very basic accounting operations. These indeed reveal practical forms of rationality illuminating the functioning of politics in the world of cities. (p. 16)
The authors begin by recalling the context of the reform, relying in particular on Herodotus: the elitism of the reading of Lévêque and Vidal-Naquet elude, after the fall of the last Hippias tyrant (in 510), the popular and collective resistance to the Spartan King and his Athenian ally, a supporter of the oligarchy, Isagoras. This popular effervescence in Athens puts the vertical dimension and the supposed character Ex nihilo of the reform of Clisthène (p. 32-39). What are the intellectual and political inspirations of this people who one might think is an actor of a complex and sophisticated reform ? If we want to take seriously this active role of demos In the reorganization of the city, according to P. Ismard and A. Macé must be attached to vernacular knowledge and community structures which ensure their transmission.
We have the hypothesis that the existence of a culture of numbers, diffuses in a diversity of social practices, makes it possible to understand both the conception as the speed and the success of a reform such as that of Clisthène. (p. 54)
The authors invite us with clarity to explore the Counter culture of ancient Greece (“ chip culture “), Characterized by a” Practical continuum Who is the subject of a concrete operation materialized by the bonelet, the dice or the token (p. 56-61). The journey of ancient tactical treaties or the obligatory reference to the war poet, Homer, shed light on the practical mathematics which innervate the warlike operations which can, complicated, be transposed to the civic order (p. 61-69). Wondering how to conceive of the agency of demos Athenian, the work questions beyond the only antiquity, and also raises the question of the social anchoring of political changes. In this, the four -handed work follows the individual work of the two authors, for example P. Ismard on the role of community structures for Athenian democracy or A. Macé on the notion of “ common “, Also specialist in Plato.
“” Pluralizing and stagging the common experience »»
The work details the operation of three games which reflect in the Laws de Plato The project of public math education. Far from the “ qualitative flavor of numbers That would deploy a mysticism of the number or a numerological approach which deploys an axiology of the numbers, these games proceed rather from a “ Elementary calculation art », On which military art can be based as well as the ordering of the political community. The authors place these three games under the aegis, respectively, of Ulysses, Agamemnon and Nestor. The first operation consists of a distribution (of food shares) which incorporates a possible variation of the dividend without changing the divider, which can involve the basement of certain units to ensure equal shares. The second game is to appear two to two (as we would make the wrestlers compete) and the third to “ distribute the elements of a heterogeneous group to make them homogeneous subgroups (Such as a generic combat structure could combine chariot conductors and variable quality infantrymen). After having clarified the possibilities of combining these three operations (p. 91-99), the authors detail various cities reforms in the archaic era, so as to find these same operations and from the precedents to the reform of Clisthene:
By replacing the gesture attributed to Clisthene in continuity of those of the reformers of Cyrene, Eretrie, Corinth or Thessaly, we understand that it pursues a history, that of the application to the city of an art of the number whose simplest operations are those of the roders of Homeric men. In short, Clisthene explores the different ways in which we can combine division, distribution and matching operations to produce civic recompositions, the principle of territorial division establishing itself as a powerful brewing tool. (p. 155)
The use of the number to reorganize the city is not necessarily linked to the democratic form of the regime, but is observed both in Plato and in the historic city of Corinth in the archaic era: according to the authors, these operations isolate a “ more fundamental level than the choice of a type of diet (P. 127), since it was taken up for non -democratic regimes. This reorganization can nevertheless be the condition of possibility. Is it to defend that democracy only supposes secondarily certain institutions or methods of designation ? Upstream, at least, we can identify civic recomposition and brewing practices (anamixis) of the body of citizens: democracy would be in a sense only a particular case of storage, ordering of men. The brewing that these vernacular knowledge seem to have normalized acts as the “ matrix (P. 162) of a civic mobilization within different institutions.
Limit and unlimited
Against an elitist reading, the authors interpret the emergence of politics as an autonomous dimension based on a progressive sedimentation of social practices which constitute for example civic identity. The same regulatory standards would be at work on one plan as on the other.
In its epilogue, the work goes so far as to further expand this debate: if we identify in practical thought the ferment of the reform of Clisthene, would not be found all the tradition of thought which sees in the social structure the empirical genesis of cosmic representations ? In reality, P. Ismard and A. Macé contest the unconscious character of such a projection: the practices of the number studied, on the contrary, establish a form of agentity of the social body. Their conclusion opens on the multiplicity of objects that have been able to inform analogies capable of deciphering the world around us: but what makes the social world is not the only key to reading the concepts of ancient thought (p. 172-173). This brief epilogue seems a well -limited format to sketch perspectives as wide as to group together the cosmology of Anaxagore, Platonic ontology, Platonic and Aristotelian policies, or even Aristotle’s biology. The art of combining would be “ the implicit, and too little known framework, of a large part of the Greek knowledge ». By distinguishing itself from Vernant and an undoubtedly too unequivocal analysis framework, should we maintain the ambition of a unified reading key ? Above all, in the case of Anaxagore, Plato and Aristotle, the differences are not more significant than the common matrix when it has acquired such generality ?
These questions are nevertheless only reappeared all the interest raised by an abundant and precise and documented work. By focusing the question of the emergence of democracy around citizenship and the concrete social matrix which allows crystallization, this book goes far beyond the only context of Clisthene the Athenian.