PolisandOikos: The Art of Politics in the Greek City-State

Abstract

The Greek city-state has traditionally been viewed as an entity that was divided into two distinct spheres (oikos and polis) and governed by two distinct arts (oikonomia and politikê technê). The aim of this article is to show that this image of the Greek city-state is not very accurate. The relationship between the oikos and the polis was not exclusive in classical poleis. Particularly in Athens during the democratic period, the polis was depicted as a family writ large, and to the extent that oikos was seen as an entity of its own, it was a part of the polis, not excluded from or opposed to it. My aim is to show that the art of the household and the art of politics were not distinct arts as has been claimed in modern political theory. Furthermore, although the collapse of the classical city-state during the Hellenistic era entailed a privatization of the household, it was not until modern times, from the late eighteenth century onwards-when the concept of the natural right to life and property became firmly established in juridical and political discourses-that the private sphere attained genuine autonomy.

The ‘government of men’: Moving beyond Foucault’s binaries

“…However, if Sparta may be seen as another exception, even in Athens the city-citizen game took more complex forms that cannot be reduced to the formula of legal/sovereign power ruling over a territory. A large body of recent scholarship, nicely summarized by Ojakangas (2020), demonstrates how the social life of the Greek polis (including Athens), as with many other agrarian societies, was heavily regulated, making the boundaries of the public and the household very malleable. The existence of a huge network of offices and magistracies highlights the "remarkable determination of the Athenians to govern every aspect of polis life and hence to expose the polis to the governance of the entire demos" (Pownall, 2013, p. 291).…”