Perhaps the most conventional, and seemingly the most intuitively defensible, approach to politics is to locate it in a set of constitutional and institutional arrangements that allow a community to allocate resources, enforce values, and adjudicate disputes. By any other name, these formalized institutional arrangements are called governments. Finley, for example, contends that ‘‘political decisions’’ must be ‘‘binding on the society’’ and ‘‘political units’’ must have a ‘‘governmental apparatus’’ (1983: 9). This understanding of ancient politics would be informed largely by two separate traditions: a German legal tradition (which would guide the study of Roman politics and, to a lesser degree, Greek politics); and a twentieth century Anglo and French anthropological tradition (which would be most important in the study of early Greek politics).
Rechtsstaat
The German legal tradition is perhaps best known by way of Theodor Mommsen, whose Romisches Staatsrecht can be read as an attempt to construct the unwritten constitutional arrangements, limitations, and functions of Roman political institutions. Although the ancient world may no longer be viewed through the rational eyes of a Prussian jurist, the formalized relationships of ancient governments continue to be fertile ground for scholars. Through the study of political structures, two questions tend to be asked of ancient politics. First, what is the procedural basis by which formalized relationships between different offices are established and sustained? In short, if politics is understood procedurally, then by what procedures is the political system formed? Lintott asks of Roman political development, for example, ‘‘what was the authority which sanctioned a given constitutional practice’’ (1999a: 2)? And Ehrenberg struggles mightily to explain how Cleisthenes could enact sweeping changes in the Athenian constitution when he had no ‘‘official position,’’ and how he could implement democratic changes in a seemingly undemocratic way (1950: 542; also 1967: 87-8).
The second political question is a functional one: how, as Jones asks in the title to his article, does the system work (see A. Jones 1960; also Rhodes 1972 and Rhodes, this volume, chapter 4)? How are offices composed and organized, and what are their powers? By what procedures are laws passed and enforced? What is the relationship of these different offices or functions to particular groups or interests in society? At times scholars have sought to answer these questions by interpreting the functioning of politics - the assemblies, councils, law courts, magistrates, and electoral procedures - by way of modern constitutional forms, such as the rule of law, separation and balance of powers, a mixed constitution, or an independent judiciary (Hignett 1952; de Laix 1973; Sealey 1987; Stockton 1990). Understanding the operation of politics by way of a system encounters an explanatory limit: faced with the absence of clear constitutional processes, Hignett, for example, could only ascribe the workings of Athenian democracy vaguely to the ‘‘peculiar qualities’’ of the people (Hignett 1952: 250). More recent scholarship has sought to avoid what Finley describes as the ‘‘constitutional-law trap’’ (1983: 56) and has sought to place these institutions in their broader social, ideological, and comparative context.
One value of such approaches is that they can tell us something about the constraints operating on political behavior. Laws, procedures, and institutions guide how arguments can be proffered, interests advanced, and binding judgments made (see Hansen 1989a). Furthermore, the evolution of constitutional structures can serve as a record of the various economic, social, and political challenges to the perpetuation of rule, such as administrative problems of raising revenue or of incorporating new groups. And the study of formalized processes can be helpful in providing a comparative basis for analyzing political development (Eder 1986: 1991).
The emphasis on process and function imparts a particular perspective, though, in which politics tends to appear continuous, change as incremental, and political life as normal (or normalized). For Crook, for example, Roman law, whatever its flaws, provided a diverse people with a ‘‘legal framework in which orderly lives could be led’’ (1967: 284; see also Johnston 1999). In his exhaustive study of senatorial procedures in imperial Rome, Talbert points to a much slower decline in the corporate significance of the senate under the Principate than we might expect (1984: 4, 490-1). And Lintott uses as his starting point Polybius’ organic metaphor of the Roman constitution as a ‘‘product of natural growth’’ that changed through ‘‘slow, piecemeal development’’ (Lintott 1999a: 26, 38; see also Lintott 1993: 188, 192-3).
Structure and function: Greece
One of the problems of constitutional approaches is that they are decidedly unhelpful in understanding what politics looked like in societies lacking formalized institutions. Scholars, particularly those interested in Archaic and Dark Age societies, thus had to look to other models. Perhaps most influential in identifying not only what counts as politics, but also the nature of the evolution of political forms, was the structural-functional anthropology of Radcliffe-Brown, Fortes, and Evans-Pritchard, and the evolutionary approaches of Service, Sahlins, Fried, and Cohen. Although these schools differed in important ways, they shared an attempt to identify and classify politics in structural and functional terms. Informed by this anthropological tradition, classicists, led importantly by Finley (1977, 1981) and Donlan (1989, 1993, 1997), approached the study of politics by first identifying formal institutions or groups within a society and then determining the distinct functions they performed. Politics, from this perspective, came to be identified with the emergence ofan autonomous polis and a set of differentiated institutionalized roles and relationships between rulers and citizens within that polis (discussed in Hammer 2002: 19-26 and Holkeskamp 2002).
One of the virtues of this approach is that it meshed nicely with Aristotle’s identification of the typical form of the polis as autonomous, suggestive of the development of sufficient political structures for both internal control of the people and external protection of the territory from others. But the approach often carried with it the assumption that institutions were political although the preinstitutional activity of forming these institutions was not. This posed a significant problem for understanding the politics of early Greece since, as Raaflaub points out, ‘‘Institutions and constitutions and the corresponding terminology had to be newly created, and the political sphere itself had to be discovered and gradually penetrated by thought, understanding, and explanation’’ (1989b: 5).
World History
