by Mary Lucia Darst
The question of isonomia’s feasibility in a real world situation drew me to Japanese scholar Kojin Karatani’s book, Isonomia and the Origins of Philosophy. In this work, Karatani explored isonomia as practiced in Ionia during the sixth century B.C. The intriguing aspect of the study was Karatani’s focus upon the discontents of isonomia followed by idealizing it into an intellectual lineage for Marxism.
Karatani hypothesized that isonomia as a political and legal framework worked only if citizens could freely emigrate or immigrate based on their personal preferences. Yet, he also equated movement with independence:
Isonomia, or no-rule, is not just a rejection of ruler-ruled relations internal to the state, but by definition includes a rejection of foreign rule. This means that the essential condition of isonomia is first of all independence.
In the late 1800s, British legal scholar and jurist Albert Venn Dicey published a book based on his decades of study and teaching in which he attempted to create a clear picture of what a judicial system and society that balanced protection of the individual with complete legal equality might look like:
1. That an individual has the freedom to act in any way he so wishes without punishment, provided it is not in breach of any law. This gives supremacy to the rule of law over any other arbitrary act of power that is not backed in law.
2. That no one is above the law, meaning that every subject, regardless of stature, can be held accountable to the law and punished in the courts of the land.
3. That the rule of law is based on the collective rights of all individuals. Essentially, this means that the courts will enforce individual rights on a collective basis to all subjects within its jurisdiction1.
This is a British argument for and interpretation of isonomia, and one can say that it was largely successful for many decades. In response to Karatani’s argument, what this means is that what prevents isonomia is not literal equality before the law, but rather that people hate distinction and see it as a sign that isonomia doesn’t exist.
Karatani argued that isonomia in its original usage was an overarching social arrangement, saying “[it] tolerates no special status, privilege, or position”, and that it was not simply a legal or juridical principle. Over the course of his study, Karatani argued that capitalism is incompatible with isonomia:
[I]n the [pre-Revolution] American townships, because a person with no land could simply move to another space, it was nearly impossible to support large landholdings. In other words, this system lacked the conditions for the accumulation of wealth made possible by employing other people. Naturally, class division did not emerge there. The same applies to Iceland and to Ionia as well.
Yet, the contrary appears to be the case. Dicey formulated a discrete definition of equality under the law at the height of the British Empire, a time when there was great contrast among individuals in terms of wealth and when class distinctions were much more fixed than they are today. In the same manner, one cannot truly say that there were no great landowners in pre-Revolution America. As explored in Hernando de Soto’s The Mystery of Capital, the Founding Fathers were very wealthy men who deliberately sought to create in their own dealings a replica of the British estate system. Yet, the Founding Fathers’ conscious efforts to amass extensive landholdings and great wealth for themselves did not preclude their attempt to create a constitutional republic (not a democracy) in which the rule of law would apply to every individual equally. The onus of the pursuit of distinction was placed upon the individual.
In practice, as recounted by Karatani, societies built on an unwritten form of isonomia were subject to repeated cycles of chaos, collapse, attempted restoration, followed ultimately by tyranny. As he wrote,“[I]n Samos, on the other hand, the original state was isonomia, and tyranny arose from within a democracy designed to restore it.” In this context, Karatani identified Pythagoras as the original philosopher-king:
Pythagoras had come to reject democracy because of his bitter experience witnessing democracy transform into tyranny. Yet he did not abandon the principle of isonomia itself. He did, however, come to the conclusion that the path lay not in democracy but in the rule of the philosopher. As a result, his pursuit of isonomia ended in the political form in a sense most antithetical to isonomia, and in a philosophy most antithetical to natural philosophy.
As Karatani addressed, Pythagoras promised complete equality to his followers, but it came at the expense of their freedom. That Pythagoras and his followers were able to dominate two separate cities, Samos and Croton, stemmed from the citizenry seizing upon his promise of equality to overthrow an existing social order, not a legal or judicial one, and in the process walked into subjugation.
What Karatani described was a Marxian cycle: rule in the name of the many turns into rule by a strongman who is more tyrannical than the original ruler or type of rule. Yet the history of Pythagorean philosophy is one of constantly leaving. Karatani does not deny that under isonomia as practiced in Ionia and by the Pythagoreans, the true freedom, the only freedom, was to leave which was by extension the true equalizer:
When the polis of Samos bent its knee to the tyrannical system, Pythagoras set out for a new land to build an ideal society unswayed by the sensible. The Pythagorean order was the result. This was to recuperate the lost isonomia in an alienated ideal form.
Therefore, Karatani argued, isonomia created a classless society and only under that one condition could it exist. However, as human nature is ever to seek self-advancement, this of necessity led to distinction, which in turn had to be rigidly suppressed in order to avoid destabilizing the new order. What Karatani’s assessment does is create an intellectual lineage for Marxism from Hellenic isonomia.
In fairness, Karatani also drew a line of descent for democracy from isonomia, though it was a less positive view:
Subsequent to the reforms of Solon, the Athenian people came into contact with the Ionian spirit of isonomia (no-rule), but in reality settled on the degraded form of isonomia called democracy (rule of the many), a form constrained by the distinctions of public and private, and spiritual and manual labor.
This paragraph returns to the issue of distinction and the Marxian view that any type of distinction creates alienation. Therefore, in this line of thinking, distinction is the obstacle which prevents full isonomia, or full equality.
From another perspective, the issue is the inability of the majority to attain distinction, which in turn is applicable to modern society. Back in 2019, an older friend of a family member sent an article responding to Tucker Carlson in which the writer essentially asked, what’s wrong with Americans who just want to support their families and be happy? Much like the inhabitants of the cities where the Pythagorean Order took hold, according to Karatani because the populace desired to overthrow the local elite to make room for themselves, the sender of the article identified with it through feeling as though his happiness was reduced by knowledge that there were others in the US who were of his age and generation but had been more successful, had accomplished more, and whose children and grandchildren were more prominent. In other words, they were distinct while he and his family were not. In his interpretation of the facts, for some to rise higher than others was a sign that “the system” was broken and had to be remade. From this example, one may extrapolate that what people want, what they envy, is the 1000 year family with its prestige, status, and presumed wealth, i.e. its distinction. Those families turtle through the tough times and don’t focus on “just supporting their families” and being “happy.”
Perhaps this discontent strikes though at the root of a clash between human nature and human desire. America worships the concept of family. However, it does not value the principles upon which a sustainable family must be built. The truth is that family is not compatible with isonomia as defined by Karatani. True family creates distinction. How many of the world’s works of literature or entertainment pieces are predicated on telling the story of an old, prestigious family with the conflict often being a clash of cultures between parvenu(es) and establishment? Most old families, in both the East and the West, have house laws, i.e. dynastic laws, which are designed to ensure homogenization within the house by clarifying what will cause a person to be excluded. Truthfully, this is a form of isonomia: all members of a society, in this case an old family, are held to the same rules, and disobedience results in immediate expulsion. But this is contrary to the American idealization of family. In the early days of this country, a non-entity American Patterson family seeking to acquire distinction married a daughter to the youngest Bonaparte son, whose own family immediately invalidated the marriage, using their house law, to which all members of their family were subject. The American family approached the situation assuming that money would solve the problem only to be rebuffed. This is merely one example of the manner in which what might be equal for one group is exclusionary or elitist for another.
Is equality under the law even possible based on human nature? Take, for example, the history of Roman marriage law. The legal codes around marriage were blatantly unequal, as they were entirely focused on the preservation of the patrician class. There was an equality to it if one considers that penalties were levied against both the patrician and the non-patrician for violating these laws. However, these penalties were unequal in effect in that while both parties received fines, the non-patrician family was the one that faced complete ruination — the law even opened the door to the death penalty for them if they had lured the patrician into marriage through deceit. The issue here appears to be that at a discrete level different individuals have varying abilities to absorb the consequences of breaking laws. From this standpoint, the fault definitively lies not with the government, but with the individuals. Though one can sympathize with such a situation appearing to be one of inequality in the sense that from the outside one party appears to receive legal privileges the other does not.
That said, isonomia does not appear to be a true form of governance but rather an understanding of society existing and interacting according to certain rules. For the historic model, one should note that the Ionian isles do not appear to have defined those rules in an explicit document but instead merely expected everyone to know them, having learned them through an oral tradition or by osmosis.
A form of governance such as an orally transmitted one is hardly good for a constitutional form of government, especially in a situation where everyone is expected to be equally responsible under the law. But is that really all that different from a large and diffuse constitution, such as the British one which has evolved over the centuries from a variety of laws, customs, and traditions? Yet, as described by Karatani, the Ionian form of isonomia led to the community having too much room to interpret what no-rule meant, such that the subsequent chaos and one-upmanship created environments hospitable to seizure of power by a strongman.
The breakdown appears to be in a combination of isonomia’s theoretical rejection of distinction and a community intolerant of diversity of outcomes. While discontent with inequality of outcomes and arguing that such inequality is antithetical to isonomia would suit Karatani’s efforts to incorporate isonomia into an intellectual pedigree for Marxism, history indicates that human nature is such that Karatani’s interpretation of what destroyed isonomia originally is probably correct. Inevitably, isonomia as practiced in the ancient world drifted either toward democracy or toward tyranny. To Karatani’s criticism that such democracy is what we today might call oligarchy, almost all of human history has been oligarchic, with vast swathes of any given population not enfranchised — note that I say ‘not’ rather than ‘dis-’ as the latter implies that a person once had something and now does not — due to status, wealth, or race. In the US, aside from the infamous three-fifths provision in the Constitution, poll taxes ensured that males without a certain amount of property had no say in the process of government.
Ultimately, isonomia as interpreted by Karatani, and as he openly acknowledged in his abstract, is the freedom to leave, the freedom to seek new shores in the name of economic opportunity or to seek more congenial company based on one’s particular values. In this sense, isonomia would be a form of voluntary association, as would every other form of rule be, with people choosing the rules, or no-rules, they wish to live under. Yet, we know that Karatani’s assessment that all times true no-rule occurred in the Ancient Hellenic world, the experiment ended in dictatorships. We know that the world is full of histories of oppressive regimes struggling to keep people in, and yet each one began by seizing upon popular discontent with a status quo and promising greater equality, often couched exactly as a new rule of law which would make no distinction between individuals. With this history, we would be justified in questioning whether or not isonomia is ever practicable as a form of governance.
NOTES
- see also G.C. Cooke’s Web 3.0: The End of Business as Usual ↩︎
Mary Lucia Darst is a filmmaker, an active classical musician, and a DPhil candidate in Music at the University of Oxford. Send her mail.
Isonomia Quarterly 