>On size of a state. I
>recall that Aristotle wanted to be able to call citizens to
>meetingsand have them able to show up. Didn't someone recently
>write about small being beautiful?
Actually, on this question, we have yet to progress beyond Aristotle, in thought and practice. Is democracy -- the rule of the many -- incompatible with any kind of mediation, representation, etc.? If so, only small town meetings of the Aristotelian kind could be truly democratic, and even then, there would be a problem of coordinating decisions made by different towns, which would inevitably introduce a form of mediation, representation, etc. In anarchism, there is a dream of pure direct democracy with _no_ mediation, which I don't think is compatible with modern industries and internationalism.
>In his attitude to women Aristotle was conservative
>compared to Plato
According to many historians of ancient Athens, Athenian women experienced the lowering of their status and the narrowing of the scope of freedom of action as Athens came to practice male-dominated democracy. Free Spartan women, for instance, had more freedom than free Athenian women, though Athens was more democratic than Sparta. For instance, Ellen Meiksins Wood writes in _Peasant-Citizen and Slave: the Foundations of Athenian Democracy_ (London: Verso, 1988):
***** The Smallholders' Regime and the Subordination of Women
The other major form of dependence in the democracy, the subordination of women, can perhaps also be illuminated by considering it in the context of the peasant regime. There is, of course, nothing unique in the democracy's exclusion of women from the political sphere, nor did the subordination of women originate with the democracy. Nevertheless, it remains a remarkable feature of Greek history that the position of women seems to have declined as the democracy evolved, and that in non-democratic states -- notably Sparta and possibly the Cretan cities (if the laws of Gortyn are any indication of a more general disposition in Crete) -- they enjoyed a more privileged status, especially in their rights of property. For example, while Athenian heiresses (_epikleroi_) were obliged to marry the next-of-kin in order to preserve the family property, Spartan women could inherit in their own right. And while aristocratic women in Athens were increasingly confined to their quarters in the home as the aristocratic household economy gave way to the 'city-state' and indeed to a decline in the unchallenged superiority of the aristocracy in general, their Spartan counterparts experienced a degree of freedom which deeply offended non-Spartan Greeks.
Here some cautions must be introduced. The privileged position of Spartan women, for example, is unlikely to tell us much about their helot subordinates; conversely, the limited freedom and mobility of aristocratic women in Athens were not matched by comparable restrictions on poor women, who in practice had considerable freedom of movement, to go about their necessary business, perhaps sometimes to labour as artisans and shopkeepers. In other words, class distinctions must be made. And care must be taken not to misconstrue the meaning of female privilege in a case like Sparta, where unusual freedom of women was the obverse of a uniquely dominant male ethos, the product of the proverbial Spartan militarization of all social life in what amounted to a permanent military occupation by the Spartiate community of an exploited subject people, the helots, and to a lesser degree the _perioikoi_. The result of this garrison state was to subordinate family life to the male community of the mess, the bonding of age-groups and the soldiers' solidarity. If Spartiate women were unusually free, it was as a mirror image of the dominant male community, imitative of and always subordinate to it -- even if the military preoccupations of the men had the effect of devolving upon women a unique degree of participation in the control of landed property.[55]
It may be necessary to qualify the proposition that the status of women in general declined with the advent of democracy, especially since we know so little about the condition of women of subordinate classes in earlier times, and not a great deal about them even in a democratic age. We may accept that the deterioration in the status of aristocratic women had ideological consequences in the cultural derogation of women in general.[56] But we can make no safe assumptions about the peasant household, or about the effects of the democracy on its patriarchal structure.
Such qualifications notwithstanding, there remains something to be explained, even if we confine ourselves to the one well-documented fact which is most commonly accepted as testimony to a decline in the status of women in general, that is, their effective deprivation of property rights. It is far beyond the scope of this study to speculate about the origins of women's subordination or sexual divisions of labour; but taking as a point of departure a society in which male dominance, the patriarchal family, patrilineal descent and patrilocal marriage were already well established, as they were in most parts of Greece, there may still be something to add to the already substantial literature on the status of women in ancient Greece concerning the tendency of the democracy to reinforce and aggravate some of these patterns. In particular, it is worth considering how the liberation of the peasantry and the emergence of the peasant-citizen may have contributed to the restriction of women's property rights.
One general point needs to be stressed at the outset. In pre-capitalist societies where powers of appropriation are typically grounded in juridical privilege and political authority -- the 'power over men' which commands the services of labourers in various conditions of juridical dependence or political subjection -- there is a premium on political rights without parallel in capitalist societies. In capitalism, claims on the labour of others rest on the property of the capitalist and the propertylessness of the labourer and can coexist with formal juridical/political freedom and equality -- even to the extent of universal suffrage. In pre-capitalist societies political rights are, as it were, a scarce resource, and there is an absolute limit on their distribution, a very restrictive limit beyond which the extension of citizenship endangers the very foundations of the social order and its system of appropriation. Political rights are in class-divided pre-capitalist societies are by definition exclusive. The exclusion of pre-capitalist peasant-producers from full political rights, if not as universal and complete as the exclusion of women, certainly counts as a general rule -- a rule spectacularly breached by Athenian democracy.
But if the exclusion of women from politics belongs to this general picture of political exclusiveness, it remains to be said that political rights have throughout most of human history tended to be male prerogatives -- for whatever reason. The prestige attached to that political rule has in turn reinforced the dominance of the male in the household, even one whose own political rights have been severely restricted or confined to his village community. In the peasant family, the political elevation of the male has intersected with other factors disposing the household to a strongly hierarchical and perhaps coercive structure, not the least of which is the household's dual function as a 'home' and the principal unit of production at the same time; more particularly the productive unit which must answer to the exploitative demands of landlords and states.[57] The organizational requirements of exploitative production, which tend toward a coercive hierarchy, may help to explain the especially pronounced patriarchal structure so often observed in peasant households.
In democratic Athens, then, it is possible that two countervailing pressures were at work in determining the condition of women. On the one hand, to the extent that the burden of exploitation was lightened by the political status of the working farmer in the democracy, some of the pressures for a hierarchical and coercive household regime may have been alleviated. On the other hand, the privileged political status of the male widened the gap between men and women, and perhaps pressures for the cultural devaluation of women were reinforced as the extension of citizenship carried with it a concomitant ideological impulse to harden the remaining principles of exclusion....[W]e can perhaps reformulate the question to ask how the transformation in the function of the peasant household -- the change in its economic role as peasants were liberated from traditional tributary relations -- affected the property rights of women in general.
Let us begin with the peasant household as the principal unit of production, drawing on the labour not only of the household head but of his family. It stands to reason that the condition of the household and the roles of its various members will vary according to the demands placed upon its labouring capacities. The dependent peasant household which must produce not only for its own consumption but to create the wealth of landlords and states will face more onerous demands on the labouring capacities of all its members than will the free peasant household subject to limited claims on its labour by landlords and states -- or at least this is so unless and until the free farmer is subjected to a new kind of demand, the competitive pressures of a capitalist market. The Attic peasant household was subject to limited external demands, with restricted claims on its labour from landlords and states and with no competitive market....
However, if the external demands on the productive capacities of the peasant household were limited in Athens, the peasant family faced another stringent pressure: the need to protect the family property...In a sense, the burden of conservation lies even more heavily on the free smallholder than on the dependent peasant....Land without dependent labourers attached to it was of little value to [the lord]....Peasants with free claims to land presented a different problem for the landlord, one resolution of which was the exploitation of their weakness and economic vulnerability to the point of dispossession, whether through debt, foreclosure, purchase or outright expropriation. The free peasant must then conserve his property against the threat of dispossession, and also against excessive morcellization -- or at least he must strike some kind of balance between the need to provide for his children...and the need to keep the property sufficiently intact to preserve its viability....
...The restrictions on women's property rights appear to have had 'one good result':
"If property is fairly widely distributed in the first place, and if...marriage is patrilocal, so that the girl leaves her father's clan and, taking with her whatever she possesses either as dowry or in her own right, goes to join her husband's family, then to keep women propertyless may well help to prevent property from accumulating too rapidly in the hands of the richer family....At Sparta, the fact that daughters could inherit in their own right and that the _patrouchos_ did not have to marry the next-of-kin must have played a major part in bringing about the concentration of property in a few hands which reduced the number of adult male Spartan citizens...from eight or nine thousand to hardly more than a thousand by the date of the battle of Leuctra in 371 BC....In Athens...there could be no such thing as a daughter inheriting in her own right, and the _epikleros_ had to marry the next-of-kin and thus keep the property in the family...." [58]
In other words...Athenian democracy, in its disposition of property rights as in its political institutions or its military arrangements, was uniquely determined by the logic of the smallholders' regime....This is the context in which the status of the Attic women must be situated. Women have always served a multiple function in the peasant economy, as producers, reproducers and conservers of family property; but the balance and form of these various roles has varied according to the prevailing modes of appropriation....The condition of the Athenian women, in an already patriarchal setting, was undoubtedly shaped by the peculiar balance of her functions in the peasant household, the subordination of her continuing role as producer to her roles as reproducer of citizens, and above all as conserver of family property, in a society where peasant strategies of self-preservation were unusually prominent in custom, politics, and law. (115-120)
[55] Cf. Oswyn Murray, _Early Greece_, p. 169. Murray points out that the subordination of Spartan women to the male ethos is dramatically illustrated by marriage customs: for example, a man could 'lend' his wife to another on the suggestion of either man involved, 'showing the dominance of the relation between the two men'; the marriage ceremony involved a ritual seizure of women, who had her head shaved and was required to dress as a man while she awaited the bridegroom; and so on. [56] See, for example, Monique Saliou, 'The Processes of Women's Subordination in Primitive and Archaic Greece', in S. Coontz and P. Henderson, eds. _Women's Work, Men's Property: The Origins of Gender and Class_ (London: Verso, 1986), pp. 169-206....See also J.P. Gould, 'Law, Custom, and Myth: Aspects of the Social Position of Women in Classical Athens,' _JHS_ 100 (1980), pp. 38-59....A general treatment of the condition of Greek women can be found in Sarah Pomeroy, _Goddesses, Whores, Wives, and Slaves: Women in Classical Antiquity_ (NY: Schocken Books, 1975) [57] On the peasant household as 'both an economic unit and a home', see Eric Wolf, _Peasants_ (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1966), p. 13. [58] G.E.M. de Ste Croix, _Class Struggles in the Ancient Greek World_ (London, Duckworth, and Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1981), p. 102 *****
Rights of smallholding peasants and gender equality, in the context of pre-existing subordination of women, were inversely related in ancient Greece; this historical fact may explain the difference between Plato and Aristotle on the question of gender and democracy, with the wee bit more democratically-minded Aristotle more emphatic about women's inferiority than the vocal advocate of aristocracy Plato. This is an important question to consider, for Marxists and other leftists who must reconcile the city and the countryside while upholding gender equality.
Yoshie