In ancient Greece, the economy was not conceived as a sphere separate from politics,1 itself closely bound up with religion. It appeared in the form of practices — agriculture, craftsmanship, mining, and so on — embedded in the life of the city. Even though trade contributed, for example, to Athenian wealth, it was not regarded as a factor of power, since war was, at that time, the most highly valued means of acquisition.2
The contemporary world displays an inverted social structure: politics, now distanced from religion, rests to a large extent on the economy. Military power derives from technology and finance. Already in the 20th century, many imaginary heroes who were meant to save the day had taken on the features of enhanced humans, produced by the fusion of striking scientific discoveries and a nostalgia for Homeric combat.
The series of articles on the valorisation of the economy3 showed how, in the 17th and 18th centuries, the latter came to assert itself as a political principle, and then how, in the 19th century, a new social grammar took shape around the concepts of utility, labour, and distribution. These major upheavals unfolded over the course of only a few centuries, alongside the Enlightenment, which forged and spread republican conceptions of politics suited to modern nations.
Before the American and French Revolutions of the late 18th century, most philosophers envisaged not so much a turn towards democracy as a softening of existing regimes. Democracy emerged, on the one hand, from political practices in the American colonies and, on the other, from a Rousseauian conception of sovereignty. This genealogy calls into question the very idea of modern democracy: is it not more a republic than a democracy?
To answer this question, we shall go back to Antiquity and to the links that may have existed between trade and political configurations of limited equality (Mesopotamia, Athens, Italy, England, etc.). We shall show that the concept of democracy, being malleable, can denote different political arrangements, varying according to the degrees and modes of participation.
Beyond the question of how democracy should be characterised, this new series of articles will examine the relationship between the economy and democracy: to what extent has the former favoured the latter? If the economy was a driving force behind democracy in the 19th and 20th centuries, will this still be the case in the 21st? Might the current technological ruptures and geopolitical reconfigurations relegate the period stretching from 1776 to the present to the status of a democratic parenthesis?
Contents
To be continued
Notes
1 Claude Orrieux et Pauline Schmitt Pantal, Histoire grecque, PUF, 2013, p. 256-257.
2 Pascal Payen, La guerre dans le monde grec. VIIIe-Ier siècles av. J.-C, Armand Colin, 2018, chapitre 11.
3 https://damiengimenez.fr/wpdgi_snapshot/at-the-origins-of-the-valorisation-of-the-economy-15th-19th-century/