erty as we understand it, but the fact that without owning a house
13. According to Gunnar Myrdal (The Political Element in the Development of
Economic Theory [1953], p. xl), the "idea of Social Economy or collective housekeeping (Volksivirtschaft)" is one of the "three main foci" around which "the political speculation which has permeated economics from the very beginning is
found to be crystallized."
14. This is not to deny that the nation-state and its society grew out of the
medieval kingdom and feudalism, in whose framework the family and household
unit have an importance unequalled in classical antiquity. The difference, how-
ever, is marked. Within the feudal framework, families and households were mu-
tually almost independent, so that the royal household, representing a given terri-
torial region and ruling the feudal lords as primus inter pares, did not pretend, like an absolute ruler, to be the head of one family. The medieval "nation" was a conglomeration of families; its members did not think of themselves as members
of one family comprehending the whole nation.
15. The distinction is very clear in the first paragraphs of the Ps. Aristotelian
Economics, because it opposes the despotic one-man rule (mon-archia) of the household organization to the altogether different organization of the polis.
16. In Athens, one may see the turning point in Solon's legislation. Cou-
langes rightly sees in the Athenian law that made it a filial duty to support par-
ents the proof of the loss of paternal power (op. cit., pp. 315-16). However, paternal power was limited only if it conflicted with the interest of the city and never
for the sake of the individual family member. Thus the sale of children and the
exposure of infants lasted throughout antiquity (see R. H. Barrow, Slavery in
the Roman Empire [1928], p. 8: "Other rights in the patria potestas had become obsolete; but the right of exposure remained unforbidden till A.D. 374").
r 2 9 i
The Human Condition
a man could not participate in the affairs of the world because he
had no location in it which was properly his own.17 Even Plato,
whose political plans foresaw the abolition of private property
and an extension of the public sphere to the point of annihilating
private life altogether, still speaks with great reverence of Zeus
Herkeios, the protector of border lines, and calls the horoi, the
boundaries between one estate and another, divine, without seeing
any contradiction.18
The distinctive trait of the household sphere was that in it men
lived together because they were driven by their wants and needs.
The driving force was life itself—the penates, the household gods,
were, according to Plutarch, "the gods who make us live and
nourish our body"19—which, for its individual maintenance and
its survival as the life of the species needs the company of others.
That individual maintenance should be the task of the man and
species survival the task of the woman was obvious, and both of
these natural functions, the labor of man to provide nourishment
and the labor of the woman in giving birth, were subject to the
same urgency of life. Natural community in the household there-
fore was born of necessity, and necessity ruled over all activities
performed in it.
The realm of the polls, on the contrary, was the sphere of free-
dom, and if there was a relationship between these two spheres, it
was a matter of course that the mastering of the necessities of life
17. It is interesting for this distinction that there were Greek cities where
citizens were obliged by law to share their harvest and consume it in common,
whereas each of them had the absolute oncontested property of his soil. See Cou-
Ianges (op. cit., p. 61), who calls this law "a singular contradiction"; it is no contradiction, because these two types of property had nothing in common in ancient
understanding.
18. See Laws 842.
19. Quoted from Coulanges, op. cit., p. 96; the reference to Plutarch is Quaes-tiones Romanae 51. It seems strange that Coulanges' one-sided emphasis on the underworld deities in Greek and Roman religion should have overlooked that
these gods were not mere gods of the dead and the cult not merely a "death cult,"
but that this early earth-bound religion served life and death as two aspects of the same process. Life rises out of the earth and returns to it; birth and death are but two different stages of the same biological life over which the subterranean gods
hold sway.
[ SO }
The Public and the Private Realm
in the household was the condition for freedom of the polls. Under
no circumstances could politics be only a means to protect society
—a society of the faithful, as in the Middle Ages, or a society of
property-owners, as in Locke, or a society relentlessly engaged in
a process of acquisition, as in Hobbes, or a society of producers,
as in Marx, or a society of jobholders, as in our own society, or
a society of laborers, as in socialist and communist countries. In
all these cases, it is the freedom (and in some instances so-called
freedom) of society which requires and justifies the restraint of
political authority. Freedom is located in the realm of the social,
and force or violence becomes the monopoly of government.
What all Greek philosophers, no matter how opposed to polls
life, took for granted is that freedom is exclusively located in the
political realm, that necessity is primarily a prepolitical phenome-
non, characteristic of the private household organization, and that
force and violence are justified in this sphere because they are the
only means to master necessity—for instance, by ruling over
slaves—and to become free. Because all human beings are subject
to necessity, they are entitled to violence toward others; violence
is the prepolitical act of liberating oneself from the necessity of
life for the freedom of world. This freedom is the essential condi-
tion of what the Greeks called felicity, eudaimmla, which was an
objective status depending first of all upon wealth and health. To
be poor or to be in ill health meant to be subject to physical neces-
sity, and to be a slave meant to be subject, in addition, to man-
made violence. This twofold and doubled "unhappiness" of slavery
is quite independent of the actual subjective well-being of the slave.
Thus, a poor free man preferred the insecurity of a daily-changing
labor market to regular assured work, which, because it restricted
his freedom to do as he pleased every day, was already felt to be
servitude (douleia), and even harsh, painful labor was preferred to
the easy life of many household slaves.20
20. The discussion between Socrates and Eutherus in Xenophon's Memora-
bilia (ii. 8) is quite interesting: Eutherus is forced by necessity to labor with his body and is sure that his body will not be able to stand this kind of life for very
long and also that in his old age he will be destitute. Still, he thinks that to labor is better than to beg. Whereupon Socrates proposes that he look for somebody
"who is better off and needs an assistant." Eutherus replies that he could not bear servitude {douleia).
[ 31 ]
The Human Condition
The prepolitical force, however, with which the head of the
household ruled over the family and its slaves and which was felt
to be necessary because man is a "social" before he is a "political
animal," has nothing in common with the chaotic "state of nature"
from whose violence, according to seventeenth-century political
thought, men could escape only by establishing a government that,
through a monopoly of power and of violence, would abolish the
"war of all against all" by "keeping them all in awe."21 On the
contrary, the whole concept of rule and being ruled, of govern-
ment and power in the sense in which we understand them as well
as the regulated order attending them, was felt to be prepolitical
and to belong in the private rather than the public sphere.
The polls was distinguished from the household in that it knew
only "equals," whereas the household was the center of the strict-
est inequality. To be free meant both not to be subject to the
necessity of life or to the command of another and not to be in
command oneself. It meant neither to rule nor to be ruled.22 Thus
within the realm of the household, freedom did not exist, for the
household head, its ruler, was considered to be free only in so far
as he had the power to leave the household and enter the political
realm, where all were equals. To be sure, this equality of the
political realm has very little in common with our concept of
equality: it meant to live among and to have to deal only with one's
peers, and it presupposed the existence of "unequals" who, as a
matter of fact, were always the majority of the population in a
city-state.2a Equality, therefore, far from being connected with
21. The reference is to Hobbes, Leviathan, Part I, ch. 13.
22. The most famous and the most beautiful reference is the discussion of the
different forms of government in Herodotus (iii. 80-83), where Otanes, the de-
fender of Greek equality (isonomie), states that he "wishes neither to rule nor to be ruled." But it is the same spirit in which Aristotle states that the life of a free man is better than that of a despot, denying freedom to the despot as a matter of
course {Politics 1325a24). According to Coulanges, all Greek and Latin words which express some rulership over others, such as rex, pater, (max, basileus, refer originally to household relationships and were names the slaves gave to their
master (op. cit., pp. 89 ff., 228).
23. The proportion varied and is certainly exaggerated in Xenophon's report
from Sparta, where among four thousand people in the market place, a foreigner
counted no more than sixty citizens (Helknica iii. 35).
[ 32 ]
The Public and the Private Realm
justice, as in modern times, was the very essence of freedom: to
be free meant to be free from the inequality present in rulership
and to move in a sphere where neither rule nor being ruled
existed.
However, the possibility of describing the profound difference
between the modern and the ancient understanding of politics in
terms of a clear-cut opposition ends here. In the modern world,
the social and the political realms are much less distinct. That
politics is nothing but a function of society, that action, speech,
and thought are primarily superstructures upon social interest, is
not a discovery of Karl Marx but on the contrary is among the
axiomatic assumptions Marx accepted uncritically from the politi-
cal economists of the modern age. This functionalization makes it
impossible to perceive any serious gulf between the two realms;
and this is not a matter of a theory or an ideology, since with the
rise of society, that is, the rise of the "household" (oikia) or of economic activities to the public realm, housekeeping and all matters pertaining formerly to the private sphere of the family have
become a "collective" concern.24 In the modern world, the two
realms indeed constantly flow into each other like waves in the
never-resting stream of the life process itself.
The disappearance of the gulf that the ancients had to cross
daily to transcend the narrow realm of the household and "rise"
into the realm of politics is an essentially modern phenomenon.
Such a gulf between the private and the public still existed some-
how in the Middle Ages, though it had lost much of its significance
24. See Myrdal, op. cit.; "The notion that society, like the head of a family, keeps house for its members, is deeply rooted in economic terminology. . . . In
German Volksivirtschaftshhre suggests . . . that there is a collective subject of economic activity . . . with a common purpose and common values. In English,
... 'theory of wealth' or 'theory of welfare' express similar ideas" (p. 140). "What is meant by a social economy whose function is social housekeeping? In the first
place, it implies or suggests an analogy between the individual who runs his own
or his family household and society. Adam Smith and James Mill elaborated this
analogy explicitly. After J. S. Mill's criticism, and with the wider recognition of
the distinction between practical and theoretical political economy, the analogy
was generally less emphasized" (p. 143). The fact that the analogy was no longer used may also be due to a development in which society devoured the family
unit until it became a full-fledged substitute for it.
[ 33 ]
The Human Condition
and changed its location entirely. It has been rightly remarked
that after the downfall of the Roman Empire, it was the Catholic
Church that offered men a substitute for the citizenship which
had formerly been the prerogative of municipal government.25 The
medieval tension between the darkness of everyday life and the
grandiose splendor attending everything sacred, with the con-
comitant rise from the secular to the religious, corresponds in
many respects to the rise from the private to the public in antiq-
uity. The difference is of course very marked, for no matter how
"worldly" the Church became, it was always essentially an other-
worldly concern which kept the community of believers together.
While one can equate the public with the religious only with some
difficulty, the secular realm under the rule of feudalism was in-
deed in its entirety what the private realm had been in antiquity.
Its hallmark was the absorption of all activities into the household
sphere, where they had only private significance, and conse-
quently the very absence of a public realm.26
It is characteristic of this growth of the private realm, and inci-
dentally of the difference between the ancient household head and
the feudal lord, that the feudal lord could render justice within
the limits of his rule, whereas the ancient household head, while
he might exert a milder or harsher rule, knew neither of laws nor
justice outside the political realm.27 The bringing of all human
25. R. H. Barrow, The Romans (1953), p. 194.
26. The characteristics which E. Levasseur (Histoire des classes ouvrieres et
le de Findustrie en France avant 1789 [1900]) finds for the feudal organization of labor are true for the whole of feudal communities: "Chacun vivait chez soi et
vivait de soi-meme, le noble sur sa seigneurie, le vilain sur sa culture, le citadin danssaville" (p. 229).
27. The fair treatment of slaves which Plato recommends in the Laws (777)
has little to do with justice and is not recommended "out of regard for the
[slaves], but more out of respect to ourselves." For the coexistence of two laws, the political law of justice and the household law of rule, see Wallon, op. cit., II, 200: "La loi, pendant bien longtemps, done . . . s'abstenait de penetrer dans la famille, ou elle reconnaissait l'empire d'une autre loi." Ancient, especially
Roman, jurisdiction with respect to household matters, treatment of slaves,
family relationships, etc., was essentially designed to restrain the otherwise
unrestricted power of the household head; that there could be a rule of jus-
tice within the entirely "private" society of the slaves themselves was unthink-
[ 34 ]
The Public and the Private Realm
activities into the private realm and the modeling of all human
relationships upon the example of the household reached far into
the specifically medieval professional organizations in the cities
themselves, the guilds, confreries, and compagnons, and even into the early business companies, where "the original joint household
would seem to be indicated by the very word 'company' icmn-
panis) . . . [and] such phrases as 'men who eat one bread,' 'men
who have one bread and one wine.' "28 The medieval concept of
the "common good," far from indicating the existence of a politi-
cal realm, recognizes only that private individuals have interests
in common, material and spiritual, and that they can retain their
privacy and attend to their own business only if one of them takes
it upon himself to look out for this common interest. What dis-
tinguishes this essentially Christian attitude toward politics from
the modern reality is not so much the recognition of a "common
good" as the exclusivity of the private sphere and the absence of
that curiously hybrid realm where private interests assume public
significance that we call "society."
It is therefore not surprising that medieval political thought,
concerned exclusively with the secular realm, remained unaware
of the gulf between the sheltered life in the household and the
merciless exposure of the polls and, consequently, of the virtue of
courage as one of the most elemental political attitudes. What
remains surprising is that the only postclassical political theorist
who, in an extraordinary effort to restore its old dignity to poli-
tics, perceived the gulf and understood something of the courage
needed to cross it was Machiavelli, who described it in the rise
"of the Condottiere from low condition to high rank," from
privacy to princedom, that is, from circumstances common to all
men to the shining glory of great deeds.29
able—they were by definition outside the realm of the law and subject to the
rule of their master. Only the master himself, in so far as he was also a citizen,
was subject to the rules of laws, which for the sake of the city eventually even
curtailed his powers in the household.
28. W. J. Ashley, op. cit., p. 415.
29. This "rise" from one realm or rank to a higher is a recurrent theme in Machiavelli (see esp. Prince, ch. 6 about Hiero of Syracuse and ch. 7; and Discourses, Book II, ch. 13).
[ S5 ]
The Human Condition
To leave the household, originally in order to embark upon
some adventure and glorious enterprise and later simply to devote
one's life to the affairs of the city, demanded courage because only
in the household was one primarily concerned with one's own life
and survival. Whoever entered the political realm had first to be
ready to risk his life, and too great a love for life obstructed free-
dom, was a sure sign of slavishness.80 Courage therefore became
the political virtue par excellence, and only those men who pos-
sessed it could be admitted to a fellowship that was political in
content and purpose and thereby transcended the mere together-
ness imposed on all—-slaves, barbarians, and Greeks alike—
through the urgencies of life.31 The "good life," as Aristotle called
the life of the citizen, therefore was not merely better, more care-
free or nobler than ordinary life, but of an altogether different
30. "By Solon's time slavery had come to be looked on as worse than death"
(Robert Schlaifer, "Greek Theories of Slavery from Homer to Aristotle," Harvard Studies in Classical Philology [1936], XLVII). Since then, philopsychia ("love of life") and cowardice became identified with slavishness. Thus, Plato could believe he had demonstrated the natural slavishness of slaves by the fact
that they had not preferred death to enslavement (Republic 386A). A late echo of this might still be found in Seneca's answer to the complaints of slaves: "Is freedom so close at hand, yet is there any one a slave?" (Ep. 77. 14) or in his vita si moriendi virtus ahest, servitus est—"life is slavery without the virtue which knows how to die" (77. 13). To understand the ancient attitude toward slavery,
it is not immaterial to remember that the majority of slaves were defeated ene-
mies and that generally only a small percentage were born slaves. And while
onder the Roman Republic slaves were, on the whole, drawn from outside the
limits of Roman rule, Greek slaves usually were of the same nationality as their
masters; they had proved their slavish nature by not committing suicide, and
since courage was the political virtue par excellence, they had thereby shown
their "natural" unworthiness, their unfitness to be citizens. The attitude toward slaves changed in the Roman Empire, not only because of the influence of Stoicism but because a much greater portion of the slave population were slaves by
birth. But even in Rome, lahos is considered to be closely connected with un-glorious death by Vergil (Aeneis vi).
31. That the free man distinguishes himself from the slave through courage
seems to have been the theme of a poem by the Cretan poet Hybrias: "My
riches are spear and sword and the beautiful shield. . . . But those who do not
dare to bear spear and sword and the beautiful shield that protects the body fall
all down unto their knees with awe and address me as Lord and great King"
(quoted from Eduard Meyer, Die Sklaverei im Altertum [1898], p. 22).
[ 36 ]
The Public and the Private Realm
quality. It was "good" to the extent that by having mastered the
necessities of sheer life, by being freed from labor and work, and
by overcoming the innate urge of all living creatures for their
own survival, it was no longer bound to the biological life process.
At the root of Greek political consciousness we find an un-
equaled clarity and articulateness in drawing this distinction. No
activity that served only the purpose of making a living, of sus-
taining only the life process, was permitted to enter the political
realm, and this at the grave risk of abandoning trade and manufac-
ture to the industriousness of slaves and foreigners, so that Athens
indeed became the "pensionopolis" with a "proletariat of con-
sumers" which Max Weber so vividly described.32 The true char-
acter of this polls is still quite manifest in Plato's and Aristotle's
political philosophies, even if the borderline between household
and polls is occasionally blurred, especially in Plato who, proba-
bly following Socrates, began to draw his examples and illustra-
tions for the polls from everyday experiences in private life, but
also in Aristotle when he, following Plato, tentatively assumed
that at least the historical origin of the polls must be connected
with the necessities of life and that only its content or inherent
aim (telos) transcends life in the "good life."
These aspects of the teachings of the Socratic school, which
soon were to become axiomatic to the point of banality, were then
the newest and most revolutionary of all and sprang not from
actual experience in political life but from the desire to be freed
from its burden, a desire which in their own understanding the
philosophers could justify only by demonstrating that even this
freest of all ways of life was still connected with and subject to
necessity. But the background of actual political experience, at
least in Plato and Aristotle, remained so strong that the distinction
between the spheres of household and political life was never
doubted. Without mastering the necessities of life in the house-
hold, neither life nor the "good life" is possible, but politics is
never for the sake of life. As far as the members of the polls are
concerned, household life exists for the sake