I wanted to love this book. It directly addresses a topic that has been vexing since I began studying ancient Athenian democracy in earnest this past year: Why were classical Athenians – both individually and collectively – capable of both genius and stupidity? How could the same people who created the Parthenon and theatrical tragedy and philosophy and art also liquidate the adult male population of Melos and banish or execute their country’s most capable leaders? Plutarch himself noted that Athens tended to produce men of remarkable excellence and remarkable evil, just “as the country produces the most delicious honey and the most deadly hemlock.” Moreover, surveying the political landscape in 2018 America, I can’t help but wonder: Is there something inherent in democracy that makes it prone to both greatness and depravity?
Eli Sagan, girls-coat-manufacturer-cum-political-philosopher, writing in waning years of the Cold War, claims to have an answer, and it’s steeped in Freudian psychology. “Every normal person,” Freud writes, “is only normal on the average. His ego approximates to that of the psychotic in some part or other and to a greater or lesser extent.” So, too, with the nation-state, according to Sagan, all of which are literally paranoid, “to one degree or another,” as he paraphrases Freud. “Every society is paranoid, and has succeeded to a greater or lesser degree in overcoming the paranoid position.” The world, therefore, and those who people it, are inherently untrustworthy. “Conspirators and traitors are everywhere,” he writes. “There is no loyal opposition.” Thus, the “quintessential overriding concern” of the paranoid position is: “Who is controlling whom?” There are only two kinds of people (or city-states): masters and slaves. From this rather Hobbesian worldview (and Hobbes, it must be noted, translated Thucydides into English), the world is a scary place; political opponents are all conspirators and traitors; tolerance in nearly any form cannot be abided. “When the paranoid position regresses in the direction of paranoia itself,” Sagan says, “the impulses of self-destruction become stronger and stronger.” When the democracy’s natural urge to conquer falls on hard times, it is a short path to self-immolation as rival political factions seek to eradicate one another, usually as a form of scapegoating.
It’s not a terribly complex argument, but Sagan’s writing makes it feel more complicated than it is. His chapters are too long by half and often highly repetitive. It feels as though the editors could have excised hundreds of pages from the manuscript without losing any of the main points. Who knows, perhaps they did and saved us from a thousand-page tome.
That said, Sagan is at his best when recounting the story of Athenian democracy, rather than playing at Freudian psycho-strategic-analysis. Socio-economic class tensions lay at the foundation of civil conflict in the ancient world, although Sagan is quick to dismiss classical Marxist explanations. Ancient Greece in the 590s BC, much like Rome in the 490s BC, featured a downtrodden caste of impoverished small landholders perennially threatened with insolvency and debt-slavery. The Greeks dealt with the issue more quickly and efficiently than did the Romans. In Rome, land-poor citizens plagued the history of the Republic. Sagan writes that after Solon the cry for land redistribution and the cancellation of debts was never raised again in Athens. In one fell swoop, Solon politically empowered the non-noble rich. Meanwhile, it took Rome 200 years to work out its non-democratic, slightly modified aristocratic solution to social conflict.
Sagan writes that Solon was no ideologue, but rather held an ideal close to our own in contemporary America: liberal, bourgeois, democratic. He abolished debt slavery and reordered society from one classified by birth to one structured by wealth. He is the one who created the deliciously descriptive top producing class “pentakosimedimnoi” (“the five-hundred-bushel-men”) and allowed them, along with the Hippias, who combined numbered no more than 5% of Athenian society, to control the top political positions. Solon’s was “the first bourgeois revolution,” according to Sagan.
In Greek tradition, Zeus imparted to all men “the qualities of respect for others and a sense of justice.” Sagan writes that all democratic societies rest on this myth, that mankind is evenly endowed with the capacity “for justice and moderation and holiness of life.” Yet, he notes that Athenian democracy was based on wealth and, by extension, merit. The people reign, but they do not rule; the elites do. The people’s main role is to decide which people among them take charge. “Every radical democracy has been a monied society,” Sagan writes, and “historically there seems to be a close connection between middle class society and moderate and radical democracy.” Indeed, he says, “Athens in the fourth century was the great middle class society.”
But there is nothing guaranteeing the rule of the elites. In fact, there is nothing preventing the people from becoming a “collectivized monarch,” Sagan writes, not only exercising sovereignty but also acting “as a collectivized person suffering from the same anxieties, ambivalences, and disabilities as any one human being.” One could certainly argue that this is precisely what happened to Athens in the Peloponnesian War after the death of Pericles, the fateful decision to invade Sicily in 416BC being the most obvious example.
Society, he says, is like a child whose primitive aggression and anxiety require sublimation before it can develop into a mature adult. “A stable Republican society requires a simple, but enormously difficult, psychological maneuver: the renunciation of violence as a political means within the polis, the sublimation of primitive aggression into intense, nonviolent competition.” By such a definition, contemporary American society has overcome “the paranoid position,” but just barely, and there’s nothing ensuring that it will last indefinitely. “The Honey and the Hemlock” really got me to think – and read slowly and carefully. It’s not a book for everyone, and even those best suited for picking it up will likely find it to be tough going. Sagan, it seems to me, asks all the right questions, and does reasonably well in addressing them with his own unusual brand of Freudian analysis.
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