west

From Plato To NATO:

The Grand Liberal Narrative: The Greeks and the West?

By David Gress



One fundamental difference in political philosophy between Greeks and the modern West was described in 1819 by

the French philosopher Benjamin Constant, in his essay On the Liberty of the Ancients Compared to that of the

Moderns.46 Constant wanted to show that modern liberty, as represented by the French and American Revolutions

and by the liberal movement of his own day, marked a genuine advance in human civilization. A century before he

wrote, the so-called Quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns had pitted those who sought truth in ancient learning

against those who believed in progress, discovery, and the scientific method. The moderns won, and they produced

the European and American Enlightenment. But the victory of the moderns persuaded people to stop looking to the

Greeks and Romans for reliable information about science and society. More important, the moderns fatally

undermined the prestige of the West's own Christian past, the Middle Ages, as a source of superior knowledge.

Consequently, the Enlightenment was above all an attack on Christian political, social, and moral ideas. The resulting

crisis of belief led Goethe to propose the cult of Greece as the new religion of the West. Constant was among those

disturbed by this cult, which threatened to disparage or obscure the real achievements of the liberal Enlightenment

and of the French and American Revolutions. He launched a new attack of moderns against ancients, not against

those who were too respectful of medieval Christianity, but against those who, in their search for the timeless wisdom

of Greece, ignored the real progress toward liberty and democracy of their own contemporaries.

To demonstrate that modernity was superior, Constant showed in his essay that in ancient Greece, liberty meant

"the right of governing the State by taking a direct part in its administration. Rights of individuals were unknown . . .

As a citizen, the individual could decide on peace and war; he was entitled to judge and to control the administration;

as a subject of the State he had simply to make his conduct conform to the standard imposed by the State. The citizen

is sovereign in public affairs, a slave in private matters."47 Constant summarized the idea of freedom in Greece as

"the division of power between all the citizens of a country," and modern liberty as the individual's "secure right to

his personal pursuits," and, one might add; interests and beliefs.

The ancient Greeks defined freedom as the right to participate in government, not as the right to choose and pursue

your own private goals. This fundamental difference was starkly illustrated in the most famous criminal case in Greek

history, the trial of Socrates the philosopher in 399 B.C.

Those who saw the trial as an example of democratic excess missed the most important points about it. First, one

of the two charges against Socrates was blasphemy. It was because they thought he was denying the common gods

and hence the legitimacy of the city that the Athenians put Socrates on trial, not because of his moral philosophy.

Second, the trial did not demonstrate that Athenian democracy had gone overboard, because, as Pericles said, "we

consider a man who does not share in political life not as someone who minds his own business, but as a useless man.

"48 If Socrates used his time in philosophical investigations rather than in serving the city, he was a traitor. To see the

trial as an example of democratic excess was to equate Athenian and modern democracy and hence to misinterpret the

Greeks. Finally, the Athenians did not intend to kill Socrates. In fact, the evidence indicates that they wanted to make

an example of a man they found politically and theologically dangerous, in the hope that he would shut up and go

away. His own actions made the outcome inevitable.

At the time of his trial, Socrates was seventy years old, a great age in ancient Greece, where life expectancy was

around forty. Until the 1960s, every schoolchild in the West learned the story, as Socrates' pupil Plato told it in the

Apology: Socrates faced trial for asebeia, impiety. This was, or could be, a capital crime because it was tantamount to

treason. Impiety was treason because religion was a public function that expressed loyalty to the city. Not to believe

in the gods that the city had declared to be its gods was to deny the legitimacy of the city.







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The trial took place before a court of 501 citizens who volunteered to serve. It was public, and the audience

included Plato himself and other young followers of Socrates. In his defense, as Plato reported it, Socrates did not

apologize or explain away the charges. Yes, he was a man who went about asking questions. Yes, he took pride in

confusing people and forcing them to think about their beliefs and what they thought was common sense. No, he

could not honesty say that he believed in the city's gods, it was true that he drew inspiration from what he called his

daimonion, his "godlet," but he really could not say whether the official gods existed or not. He saw his task as that of

goading the citizenry into alertness and new thoughts, rather like a gadfly that stings a "great, noble horse" into

sudden action.

The 501 jurors found him guilty by what, given his uncompromising tone, was a rather small margin-281 against

220. Then came the sentencing. The court had, as a mark of honor, asked him to name his own sentence, expecting

him to propose exile. Instead, Socrates thanked them for their concern and proposed that, as proper recompense for

his achievements, he be sentenced to dining at public expense in the Prytaneum, one of the official buildings of

Athens. The right to dine free at the Prytaneum was a singular honor conferred by Athens on its most distinguished

citizens, often victorious athletes. By his suggestion, Socrates was saying that he was a unique asset to Athens and

that, as such, he deserved, not punishment but the highest honor the city could confer. It would be hard to imagine a

response more designed to infuriate the court, which, in its own view, was making a substantial gesture of respect to

its prisoner by offering him the chance to get off free after having been condemned. At this point, some of Socrates'

rich young followers in the audience shouted at him to propose a substantial fine, so he said: "Now look, Plato and

Crito and Critobulus and Apollodorus are shouting at me to propose a fine of 30 mines; they will guarantee payment."

This was indeed a substantial amount: the normal ransom for a prisoner of war was one or two mines. But the court

refused to listen to this offer, which was anyway not made by Socrates but by his rich friends. The court had heard

Socrates' own opinion of his guilt, which did not put it in an accommodating mood. Sentence of death was passed by a

substantial majority and carried out soon after by giving him a poison-the hemlock-to drink. The Athenians carried

out their law, but lost at the bar of history.

Socrates' trial and death was one of the defining moments of Greek civilization and also of the West. The Grand

Narrative inherited, or rediscovered, the image of Socrates as the martyr to philosophy, to truth seeking, to fearless

inquiry, to civilization in short, and the contrary image of the prosecutors and jurors as narrow-minded bigots. In fact,

these images were as bland and false as was the adulation of Greek art and poetry propounded by the less gifted

followers of Winckelmann and Goethe. What really happened was more interesting than the images suggest and sheds

light on the relationship of Athenian democracy and philosophy to their Western counterparts.

Socrates did not exactly set out to charm the court. What we know of his character from other sources indicates

that he was not the kind of person who would consider winning this sort of case by charm. For about thirty years

before the trial, he had been a fixture of Athenian life, exploring ordinary people's assumptions about their work, their

knowledge, their moral and ethical certainties, their supernatural beliefs. He single-handedly created moral philosophy

and was the first known example of a radical methodological and moral individualist.

This Socratic individualism had a political aspect, which played an important part in his trial. Socrates led his

philosophical life during the Peloponnesian War. This war, the subject of the greatest Greek work of history,

that of Thucydides, pitted Athens and her allies against the rival city of Sparta, and her allies. The stake was

predominance in Greece. Athens was primarily a sea power; her allies were islands or coastal towns, and her strength

lay in her navy. Sparta, by contrast, was a land power, where political control rested with those citizens who could

afford the full Greek infantry, or hoplite, equipment. During the early years, Athens had the upper hand, but never

decisively so, and Spartan forces often raided up to the walls of Athens. In 415, the Athenians tried to end the war by

a bold stroke-sending an expedition to Syracuse in Sicily, which at that time was largely a Greek region. Annexing the

rich city of Syracuse would tilt the balance definitively against Sparta. Unfortunately for Athens, the expedition failed

miserably-in Thucydides' account, largely because of bad leadership, and because the expedition was undertaken in

large part on a whim of the democratic mob at Athens.

The Sicilian disaster provoked a political reaction in Athens against those held responsible. For the last ten years of







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the war, power in Athens lay mostly with the leaders of the poorer classes, who provided the manpower for the navy.

The final defeat in 404 led to a right-wing reaction that temporarily brought to power the so-called Thirty Tyrants. In

this junta were several friends and former pupils of Socrates.

The Thirty Tyrants fell in 403 and democracy, in its peculiar Athenian form, was restored. But Anytus, Meletus,

and others remembered Socrates' association with the Tyrants and this lay behind the charge of "corrupting the

young."

Socrates, then, was the victim of a populist backlash against authoritarian government, a backlash exacerbated by

many years' irritation with this questioner who upset people by not thinking and living like the majority. The bland

image suggested courage and martyrdom; the truer image suggested a clash between two legitimate interests:

Athenian democracy's insistence that citizens take part in government and not sabotage it either by their opinions or

their actions, and the independent mind's interest in free thought and expression. But what if that expression had

political consequences? Was that

reason enough to execute its author? Socrates' speech was, on occasion, deliberately, rhetorically offensive to those

whose received opinions he wanted to rattle. His fate showed that democratic societies, whether of the Athenian or the

modern representative model, were perhaps not the safest places to offend popular sentiment.

According to I.F. Stone, the left-wing American journalist who wrote a penetrating study of The Trial of Socrates

in the 1980s, the backlash was against a man who had done little to oppose the enemies of Athenian democracy and

who taught that democracy was an inferior form of government, because the many were incapable of acquiring the

sort of knowledge necessary to rule. The premise of Athenian democracy was that all citizens had not only the duty

but the ability to participate in government. The duty included supporting the city's religion and opposing its enemies.

Socrates, by contrast, admired Sparta, which was governed by a narrow oligarchy, and denied that citizens, whom he

compared to a herd of cattle, had the ability to govern. For both Socrates and the democrats, that ability rested on

virtue. They disagreed, however, about where virtue in turn came from. The democratic theorists, including Aristotle,

derived virtue from character, which was found throughout society. A poor man might be more virtuous than a rich

man. According to the antidemocrats such as Socrates and Plato, virtue was a superior form of knowledge, available

only to the few. A conspicuous element in the city's grievance against Socrates was that the two most prominent of his

pupils, Alcibiades and Critias, had between them done more harm to the city than any other two men of their time.

Neither, in short, had demonstrated virtue; both had bad characters. Indeed, Xenophon reported that what attracted

Critias and Alcibiades to Socrates was that he could teach them to manipulate by argument.

Stone argued that the Athenians killed Socrates because his idea that the many were incapable of government had

become dangerous and treasonable after the Spartan victory of 404 and the dictatorship of the Thirty Tyrants in 403.

Socrates admired Sparta, and one of the Thirty had been a pupil of his. What had for long seemed eccentric but

harmless opinions were now seen as supporting the powerful forces that threatened Athenian democracy in the

aftermath of the unfortunate Peloponnesian War. The events of 404-403 explained why the democrats put Socrates on

trial at this time and not many years before. Behind the trial lurked the fundamental opposition between Socrates and

most Athenians: "He and his disciples saw the human community as a herd that had to be ruled by a king or kings, as

sheep by a shepherd. The Athenians, on the other hand, believed-as Aristotle later said-that man was 'a political

animal,' endowed unlike other animals with logos, or reason, and thus capable of distinguishing good from evil and of

governing himself in a polis.

The Grand Narrative saw Socrates as the West's founding father: the inventor of moral philosophy and of radical

self-questioning. According to Stone, however, Socrates questioned many things, but never his own antidemocratic

beliefs or his idea of a superior form of knowledge available only to a chosen few. Socrates' known political

associations were authoritarian. Could it be, as Stone suggested, that there was a natural affinity between Socratic

individualism and a skeptical, even hostile attitude to democracy? Consider that the two greatest Socratic thinkers of

the modern West, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, were intensely opposed to democracy in its broad modern sense. Both

held that truth was individual and could never be found In consensus. "The mass is untruth," said Kierkegaard.

Nietzsche feared that mass suffrage and popular sovereignty weakened the will of the rulers and led inevitably to







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social and political decadence. Both preferred absolutist monarchy to democracy. Both were, by temperament, Old

Westerners dismayed by the superficial, leveling, trivializing forces of the New West.

Socratic individualism, in its most notorious representatives, was not liberal but illiberal. In other words: the hero

of the Western origin legend-St. Socrates, as Stone called him-was not Western, if by Western one meant liberal and

egalitarian. That middle-class culture of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that turned Socrates into a

founding father of the West was only one, if perhaps the most important, result of the cult of Greece. But it was not

the only one. How a culture defined individual freedom, or whether it did so, depended in part on how members of

that culture defined human nature. How did the Greeks differ from the West in this regard?

A French thinker, Pierre Manent, provided a thought-provoking answer in a book published in 1994.51 Manent's

purpose was nothing less than to describe the modern Western or liberal personality. This modern personality rested

on a paradox: on the one hand, modern liberal man believed in freedom and autonomy, and hence in democracy and

human rights as the foundations of political, personal, social, and even emotional existence. The paradox was that

modern man believed in these things dogmatically, as absolutes. Yet, modern political philosophy from the eighteenth

to the late twentieth century tended to deny absolutes, and in particular that there was such a thing as human nature.

This denial was at the root of democratic freedom, in which everyone was the shaper not merely of his own fortune,

but, more important, of his own desires and goals. Democracy was the form of politics, social interaction, and

personal behavior most compatible with the claim that there was no such thing as human nature.

The purpose of political society, in the words of the American Declaration of Independence, was to protect "life,

liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." In democratic theory, individuals pursuing their own goods jointly produced

and protected the liberty of all. The Greeks thought differently. Their view of society was less rosy, more

contradictory. To them, political society was an arena of competition, where men displaying and honoring different

sorts of excellence fought for preeminence, for the chance to direct the fortunes of all: excellence of birth, of wealth,

of virtue, of courage. The ethic of competition that Homer described survived into the sixth, fifth, and fourth centuries

B.C., into the era of Athenian democracy. So did its ethical and religious implications. According to the Greeks, the

purpose of political society-what Manent called 'the city' -was not to protect individual desires, but to find and

maintain the just balance between the goods and the goals sought by the incompatible desires of varying excellences.

Greek thinkers did not focus on desire itself as a value, but on the purpose of the desire-was what was desired good or

bad, would it serve or harm the city?

Another, related difference between Greeks and moderns, according to Manent, was that the primary political

virtue in ancient Greece was what they called magnanimity, great-heartedness, or great-spiritedness. Magnanimity

was ambition, skill, constancy, courage, and moderation rolled into one-the mark of the superior man. The

magnanimous man sought victory without embarrassment because of the great things he would accomplish. There

was another vital difference here between Greeks and modern Westerners: the magnanimous man, to the Greeks, was

self-sufficient, needing no one's aid. By contrast, the primary political virtue, whether honored in the breach or in the

observance, of Western democratic modernity was collaboration, which required humility, namely, the humility to

recognize that achievement rested on interdependence.

The Greeks, who believed in a human nature, valued competition, magnanimity, and self-reliance, whereas

democrats, who believed in individual rights, valued-or pretended to value-humility and collaboration. Thus, the

individual autonomy extolled in democratic liberalism was something quite different from the magnanimity extolled

by the Greeks.

The difference, according to Manent, could be traced to the long centuries of Christianity that incubated

democratic modernity. Christianity proclaimed man's radical imperfection, his dependence on God and neighbor, and

that nothing great or good could result from individual desire alone. Desire, conscience, and will must be instructed

by faith and by humility. Following Alexis de Tocqueville, Manent claimed that the Christian teaching of original sin

and of humanity's flawed nature made modern democracy possible. The democratic pursuit of individual autonomy

needed the balance of humility if it was not to degenerate into anarchy or the rule of some ideology, such as, in the

twentieth century, Marxism or National Socialism.







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The cult of Greece was a profound fact of cultural life in the West in the nineteenth century. Three to four

generations of European and American elites grew up learning that all that was best in their own civilization carne

from the Greeks, who held the key to poetic, philosophical, and artistic truth. They also learned that their own

civilization, that of the modern West, was superior both to its own past and to all other cultures in the world, a

doctrine that might seem incompatible with the doctrine of Greek excellence, but which was made compatible by the

argument that Greek truth was timeless, and that the modern West, thanks to its superior methods, was better able to

get at that truth than any earlier epoch.

However eager and well intentioned its practitioners, the cult of Greece obscured both the realities of ancient

Greece and the independent reality of Western civilization. When, in the aftermath of World War I, American edu-

cators produced the Grand Narrative, they inherited the idea of Greek excellence as well as the contradictory idea of

progress and of the superiority of the modern West. With the collapse of the Grand Narrative from the 1960s on, those

who wanted to understand Western evolution and identity no longer had to labor under the burden of either error.

Instead, they could ask more fruitful questions, for example: who were the Greeks? What was the West? And, given

that the Greeks were not the first Westerners, what was the connection between them?

For that there was a connection no one could reasonably deny. The difficulty in describing that connection in the

time of the Grand Narrative was that doing so raised further points that did not fit easily within the Grand Narrative's

story of democratic, liberal, and capitalist progress. One such point was that, for the West to emerge, Greece had to

die; Greek ethics, religion, and politics had to be fundamentally transformed and blended with other elements. The

originality of the West was unfairly obscured by the cult of Greece and by its intellectual offspring, the Grand

Narrative. But when the Grand Narrative lost prestige in the 1960s and after, this did not refocus attention on the real

history of the West. Rather, the critics of the Grand Narrative threw out the baby with the bathwater. The West, from

being wholly good, became wholly bad. The critics saw no point in discussing Western origins except to condemn

them, just as the authors of the Grand Narrative had not been able to distinguish the West from its alleged Greek

ancestors. Finally, the reconstructed optimist narrative of the 1990s, the narrative that said that the West consisted of

democracy and free markets, was a future-oriented narrative with little historical depth and no more interest in ancient

history or the Greeks than either the Grand Narrative or its critics.

The Greeks, to conclude, were not the first Westerners. To believe that they were was an error of the nineteenth

century, perpetuated by the Grand Narrative, that did more to obscure than to illuminate the real history of the West

and its elements. Greek ethics, politics, and religion formed a whole that identified a particular civilization, the Greek,

that. sometime in the early centuries of the Christian era, faded into the synthesis of Roman order and Christian

religion that defined the starting conditions of the West. To see how the real West emerged it was necessary, first, to

remove the distorting mirror of the cult of Greece. The next step is to look at Rome.

Yet the question of Western origins and identity remained important, if only because many of the critics as well as

the neo-optimists remained, in some sense at least, Westerners, and it was a pity that they often did not know what

they were talking about. And the truth about Western origins was that they were a complex synthesis of apparently

incompatible elements, in which Greek identity was transformed by the impact of two forces that both the Grand

Narrative and its enemies tended to disparage or ignore: Rome and Christianity. (Pages 86-93)









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