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Republics Ancient & Modern, Vol. 1: The Ancien Régime in Classical Greece

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Paul Rahe's Republics Ancient and Modern was originally published in hardback in one volume. For the paperback version published in 1994, he has chosen to split his work into three volumes. Each volume deals with one of the three major time periods on which his work focuses. The first volume deals with the classical Greece city states.
Rahe has two main purposes in these books. His first purpose is to debunk the idea that the American founders were heavily influenced by the classical republican tradition. In fact, Rahe argues that the Constitution was designed in opposition to classical republican ideas.
His second purpose is a methodological one. Rahe is heavily influenced by Leo Struass. It shows in his basic thesis of the war between the ancients and the moderns and it shows in his attempts to reveal the esoteric in many of the writers he discusses.
It also shows in his rejection of historicism and other modern historical methods. Which brings me to one thing that I admire about Rahe. He obviously has methodological bones to pick with Quinton Skinner and the Cambridge School, and with the Marxist approach of, say, the early Eugene Genovese. But he has also read deeply of these and many other writers with whom he disagrees and has learned from them all. Rahe is at one and the same time a very generous and opinionated scholar. And he is phenomenally learned.
In this volume he discusses Homer, Hesiod, Xenophon, Lycurgus, Socrates, Aristotle, Plato, Polybius, Thucydidus, Euripides, Cicero, Plutarch, Aeschylus, Demosthenes, Herodotus, Isocrates, Pericles, Pindar, ad infinitum. He has read them all, absorbed them all and compared them all.
He then seems to have absorbed anything ever written about all of them. It is overwhelming.
Rahe wants to argue that life in classical Greece was the result of two main influences. The Greeks believed that human beings are political animals possessed of a capacity for logos. In other words, we can reason together and come to agree on what we feel to be "the good, the just and the advantageous". To the Greeks of the democratic city-states, politics was about the communal discourse sustaining the "concord regarding loved things held in common" (Augustine's phrase which is a leitmotif for Rahe). This concord has to be seen as an end in itself, it is not some sort of false consciousness used to legitimate the hegemony of a ruling group.
The other main influence on the Greek city states was the fact that they were nearly always in a state of war (with each other or those pesky Persians) or preparing for war. Thus the Greeks had to foster "homonoia" or "like-mindedness" or solidarity. The way that they came to do this was through both a paideia (education or character formation) and a system of dispersing honor or recognitions.
Rahe takes Sparta as his case study for his argument. He does so because up until the last century or so, most students of ancient Greece recognized Sparta as being the most representative of the city-states. In many ways, it was what the other city states like Athens or Cornith hoped to achieve.
The end result was an obsession with honor, virtue and with largeness of soul. Everything was subordinate to the requirements of the city. This included family and personal liberty. Liberty for the Greeks was the right to participate in the politics of the city state and to vie for glory. They would never consider allowing someone who was opposed to war to not serve in the ranks of the army. Two of the consequences which Rahe explores was the subjugation of women and the embrace of slavery. Slavery freed the citizen from having to be involved in the making of money.
The personal property of the citizen was not personal. It was expected that it would be used for the good of the city. A man who came from a wealthy family might earn the gratitude of other citizens by providing them with the necessary armaments of the hoplite (foot soldier). They strove to minimize civil strife and to make sure that everyone within the city thought as much alike as was possible. They used pederastry as a means to indoctrinate young men into armed service. As those young men grew older they then would come to take younger men as lovers and so on.
These relationships would then be abandoned in their thirties for married life. But even after marriage, the men were expected to spend most of their time with their hoplite units.
Rahe explains how all this helped to generate the Greek disregard for commerce and for technical innovation. He also talks about the importance of their religion in maintaining the community. He brings out the underlying irony of the basic Greek presumption of humans as being rational political animals. This presumption encouraged the development of philosophy which served to critically undermine many of the institutions of the city state. Socrates was executed for good reason. Or so the Athenians believed.
Throughout this volume, Rahe is throwing in Hamilton, Adam Smith and many others into the mix. In fact, I started to notate some of my underlinings with "DBAM" to indicate a passage that noted a difference between the ancients and the moderns. For example,in discussing the attitude of the Greeks toward technological progress, Rahe notes that they viewed it "with a jaundiced eye" because a science pledged to make life easier was a science that would make "soft men" (p.74). To someone like Adam Smith or James Madison, that was exactly the argument in favor of such a science.
I am not a student of ancient Greece. I came to read Rahe to understand more about the founding fathers of this country. But I think that what he has achieved in this first volume of this work is altogether brilliant.
In fact, my major complaint is that it isn't long enough or detailed enough. He sometimes states that he disagrees with another scholar (in his very extensive notes) without going into the dispute thoroughly enough. Another complaint (more of an annoyance)is that he seems to expect the reader to have a rich classical library close to hand. In many of his notes, he will say something like "Consider this passage from Plato's Republic in light of what Cicero had to say here and don't forget that Polybius said something in this book that must be compared with what Xenophon had to say in that passage. After absorbing all that, read what Augustine had to say in this part of The City of God. And then you will see that I am right." Okay, he doesn't ever really say anything like that last part but it is there sometimes between the lines. (See, I am turning into a little Straussian).
But seriously folks, I cannot imagine that anyone has done a better job of explicating how their knowledge of the Ancient Greeks effected the founding fathers. Rahe has given us something strong and rich- not only a good look at what life was like in ancient Sparta but how that effected the men and women who created this country.
In my review of volume 2, I will speak a little more to Rahe's method.

"The Ancien Regime" by Paul A. Rahe is a remarkably astute, compelling and thought-provoking analysis of the political economy of ancient Greece. Written as the first of three volumes about the development of Western political thought and practice, Mr. Rahe's assiduously researched book is intended for educated readers interested in an in-depth, comparative study of ancient and modern republics.

Perhaps the most striking aspect of Mr. Rahe's book is how alien ancient Greece was from today's world. Mr. Rahe explains how the Greeks wanted war, not peace; fanaticism, not religious freedom and moderation; consensus, not political expression; insularity (xenophobia), not cultural exchange; poetry, not business; mathematics, not technology; slavery, not human rights; and so on. Mr. Rahe emphasizes how ancient Greece represented a stage in human development where the ethos of the warrior society, as exemplified by Sparta, reigned supreme.

Mr. Rahe explains how the sublimation of the individual to the social needs of the Greek city-state was not theoretical; it was a matter of life and death at a time when the threat of war constantly loomed. In that context, the Aristotlian concept of education as a lived experience is crucial to understanding how the public sphere was defined. Mr. Rahe writes that direct participation in the democratic process was central to the life of Athens' free citizen, who as a 'political animal' could exercise logos and contemplate 'the advantageous, the just, and the good' for the society in which he lived.

Therein lies the rub. Whereas Mr. Rahe rejects class struggle as a tool for assessing an ancient society so unlike our own, is it really that difficult to see how the Augustinian 'concord concerning loved things held in common' that Mr. Rahe cites as the central premise for defining a community might not have been shared in equal measure by the women and slaves of the ancient republic? Indeed, the freedom to engage in politics was made possible only through the unrewarded labors of the oppressed classes who provided for the Athenian and Spartan city-state's material needs. It seems to this reader, at least, that Mr. Rahe could profit by including the struggles of the majority population (as hinted at in Aristophenes' comic play Lysistrata) into his analysis.

Setting this minor concern aside, on the whole Mr. Rahe is an intellectual tour de force. He possesses a deep knowledge of the Western tradition that has few peers. The subsequent volumes in the series build upon the first to present a progressively fascinating story that will introduce you to key insights and ideas from the many dozens of thinkers and philosophers who have shaped the world as we know it today. Whether or not you agree with Mr. Rahe that our modern democracy has been corrupted by a "drift toward a species of soft, administrative despotism", you will be richly rewarded for taking the journey with him.

I highly recommend this book as well as the exceptional Republics Ancient and Modern, Volume II: New Modes and Orders in Early Modern Political Thought and Republics Ancient and Modern, Volume III: Inventions of Prudence: Constituting the American Regime to everyone.