Sphinx

RIP Ellen Meiksins Wood (and see also here)

A week and a half into term, and I am already being forcibly reminded of why I didn’t manage to post more than once or twice a month for much of 2015. It’s not as if I don’t have a load of stuff I’d like to write about – not least because Malcolm Turnbull, Prime Minister of Australian, has just produced a load more Thucydides references in a recent speech, on the (not unreasonable) assumption that this is how to communicate with US foreign policy types these days (cf. Xi Jinping) – it’s just the quantity of other stuff that has to take precedence. But some things do deserve recognition and comment, above all – despite the fact that this blog has started to look like an obituary column – the passing of yet another significant figure in my intellectual pantheon. I have got to find some younger, healthier people to get influenced by…

I never actually managed to meet Ellen Meiksins Wood; I invited her to a mini-conference on ‘Marx and Antiquity’ that I organised way back in the late 1990s, but she declined on the basis that she wasn’t currently doing anything ancient, and I heard her contribute to a panel discussion after a big lecture (can’t remember the details) but there were far too many much grander people wanting to talk to her for me to intrude. However, two of her books have long been touchstones – and one reason for writing this is that I wonder whether this puts me in a rather unusual position, as most ancient historians will at best know Peasant-Citizen and Slave but nothing else, and those on the political theory side sometimes seem bemused as to why she spent any time on ancient Greek history, not just in that book but in various essays (e.g. the collection Democracy Against Capitalism, the other book that I return to regularly). Insofar as I’m writing this post for any sort of audience rather than musing to myself, it’s directed towards the ancient history side of things – but maybe it will illuminate for non ancient historians why Wood’s work matters, or potentially matters.

PC&S appears in my teaching and writing in two contexts: the study of ancient Greek economy and society, where it is still (imho) an important and necessary rejoinder to the idea that slave-owning was ubiquitous in Athenian society, or at any rate in agricultural production, and the study of the role of ideas of class and historical materialism, and the use of Marxist theory in general, in ancient history. It is interesting, on reflection – and I have spent some time trying to formulate this – how much more it looks like the former than the latter; that is to say, it wears its theoretical underpinnings very lightly indeed, to the point where you’re unlikely to notice them unless they are pointed out or unless you’re already highly sensitised to certain concepts and patterns of thought. On the face of it, it seems to be a thoroughly historical account, focused on the detailed examination of the evidence in opposition to readings that insist on the prevalence of slave-owning at almost all levels of Athenian society on the basis of a set of more or less ideological assumptions – and of course a critique of the ideological underpinnings of historical accounts is a quintessentially Marxist move, but it doesn’t look Marxist to the typical student (or, perhaps, the typical ancient historian) until this is pointed out.* For the purposes of teaching about Marxist ideas in ancient history, de Ste Croix’s Class Struggle in the Ancient World is in the first instance much better, as it’s pretty hard (not absolutely impossible) to miss the agenda – but thereafter is much less helpful, as it’s too easily dismissed from a non-Marxist, supposedly neutral, position (plus, students don’t generally read two-inch-thick books these days).

Wood’s book is much more subtle, but permeated with a theoretical, political sensibility; even when it isn’t made explicit, it is clear that she has a strong sense why issues of slavery matter, and why the economic structure of Athenian society matters, as a question that is never purely historical but that must be explored by historical means. ‘Theory’ features here not as a tool – in the way that everything looks like a nail to class analysis – but as a sensibility, a world-view; the fact that everything can ultimately be understood within a wider context of class society and pervasive exploitation does not mean that everything can be reduced to that. One might almost say that the analysis itself can be read quite separately from any wider agenda or beliefs, and that is how of course many ancient historians receive it – but it is hard to imagine that the questions would have been framed in the same way without this ‘hinterland’ shaping the interpretation. It’s much more obvious in Democracy Against Capitalism, where Wood not only develops some very helpful arguments about how to understand class and historical change, but also makes explicit her ideas about the significance of the Athenian peasant-citizen as the first true example of free labour, of Athens as a unique example of a more balanced relationship between the exploiting and the producing classes, and of the power of the idea of citizenship in a real, ancient Greek sense. But, as I said, I’m not sure how many ancient historians have read that one.**

This does raise some general questions, which I don’t have time to develop now, about what it might mean to be a politically engaged ancient historian. Simply drawing on modern, politically-charged terminology and theory isn’t enough, clearly, if the traffic is only one way, drawing on the present to interpret the past (and especially, perhaps, if it’s done in the sort of subtle way that doesn’t immediately draw attention to itself; as I suggested, Wood isn’t instantly recognisable as a Marx-influenced historian, and nor are people like Paul Cartledge, Richard Seaford or indeed myself, if you don’t already know what you’re looking for). The dominant discourse continues to expect historians to pretend scrupulous objectivity, understood as the absence of any external influences on the interpretation of the past, even as it admits that this is actually impossible – which defaults to a general assumption that all proper historical writing must take the study of the past as an end in itself, with any wider contemporary purpose being at the most incidental and accidental, and preferably presented with plausible deniability. Outside the academy, of course, there are plenty of people deploying the classical past for political ends, and generally conservative ones (cf. the Thucydides Trap, the debates around Grexit, and the columns of Peter Jones in the Spectator) – but the expected response is to object on historicist grounds to this abuse of the reality of ancient history, rather than engage politically. As so often, the anti-radical position – the past is the past, and the status quo is to be taken for granted as normal and eternal – establishes itself as common sense. Wood’s work is one example of a consistent refusal to accept that.***

*Of course, pointing out the underlying theoretical agenda of a book or a historical debate doesn’t necessarily help; I am still trying to process just how badly I must have explained the supposed crisis of the slave mode of production and the transition to feudalism in class for one exam essay then to state confidently that “all farmers in late antiquity were Marxists”…

**Certainly Wood doesn’t seem to be mentioned in two of the obvious places I’ve looked for it, Kostas Vlassopoulos’ Politics: antiquity and its legacy and Wilfried Nippel’s Antike oder moderne Freiheit?

***At some point in this context I need to write about Edith Hall and Henry Stead’s project on Classics and Class, but this is not the moment…