UTOPIANISM ANCIENT AND MODERN

Under the former Soviet-backed regime, the Hungarian writer György Konrád published in 1985 a stinging polemic against the intrusion of the State and of reason of state into every sphere of existence in ‘Mitteleuropa’. He entitled it Antipolitik. The ancient Greeks too had their exponents of anti-politics, although their targets and attacks were, of course, radically different. Indeed, the critical and reflexive nature of the Greek tradition of political thought, from its inception in the poems of Homer and Hesiod onwards, had always encouraged resistance to the dominant constructions of politics as the true end of man and of the polis as the unique source of the truly good life. Broadly speaking, negative reactions took one of two forms: either advocacy of a total withdrawal from politics into a privatised existence beyond the reach of the polis, or the imagining of alternative political Utopias.

The surviving evidence for the withdrawal syndrome is largely Athenian, partly because ancient democracy was premissed on endless open debate but also because Athens' radical form of democracy aroused fierce opposition from its articulate anti-democratic critics (Ober 1998). Virulently opposed to the ideal of democratic participation advocated famously in the Periclean funeral speech in Thucydides, they redescribed such participatory politics as polupragmosunê or ‘meddlesomeness’, an excess of engagement in pragmata (affairs of state) by the unfitted masses (Rahe 1992: 224 & n. 8).