The Personality Of The Greek State

Abstract

Abstract:Were the poleis of Classical Greece state-based or stateless communities? Do their political structures meet standard criteria for full statehood? Conventional wisdom maintains that they do not. According to a broad consensus, the Classical polis was neither state-based nor stateless as such, but something somewhere in between: a unique, category-defying formation that was somehow both ‘state’ and ‘society’ simultaneously, a kind of inseparable fusion of the two. The current paper offers an alternative perspective on this complex but fundamental issue. It questions prevailing views on theoretical grounds, suggesting that the consensus ‘fusionist’ position rests ultimately upon a misunderstanding of what Thomas Hobbes would call the ‘personality’ of polis political structures. Focusing on the case of Classical Athens, it then proceeds to present a new account of the Greek ‘state’, an account that aims to be both theoretically satisfying and heuristically useful. Even if all those who performed state functions were simultaneously constituents of polis ‘society’, the state was nevertheless perceived to function as an autonomous agency, possessing a corporate personality that was quite distinct from the individual personalities of the living, breathing citizens who happened to instantiate it at any particular time.

Discovering Emerging Research Topics for Brand Personality: A Bibliometric Analysis

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“…While the nature of Classical city-states is receiving critical and comparative re-assessment (e.g. Berent 2000;Hansen 2006a;Vlassopoulos 2007;Anderson 2009;Gehrke 2009), they should not be rejected as states because they do not fit one very specific spatial model; after all, when it comes to defining the nature of the state, they literally wrote the book. The archaeological models of settlement hierarchies, often applied in a mechanistic fashion, appear to have been formulated principally with reference to territorial states or very large, developed city-states; they are not adequate for recognising or analysing small citystates.…”

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