Between Utopia and Dystopia: Moses Finley and the Athenian Democracy versus

Moses Finley and the Ancient Economy

Mohammad Nafissi

‘The dead past never buries the dead. The world will have to be changed, not

the past’ (Moses Finley 1965b: 5).

‘What Oscar Wilde said in The Soul of Man under Socialism has lost none of

its force: “A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not even worth

glancing at… Progress is the realisation of Utopia”’ (Moses Finley 1975: 192).

‘Professionalism for its own sake, the cult of Research, is an ideological

stance, too. If no ingredient, no ‘theory’, is added, no serious concern with the

broad canvas of the past is advanced, nor is fundamental change illuminated.

Everything becomes a mere contingency. The tone might be called a modified

Panglossism: all change is for the worse in the best of all possible worlds,

except change in the historian’s own technique…’ (Moses Finley 1985c: 5).

This article marks the centenary of Moses Finley’s birth by examining an internal

debate he conducted in his major books, published in the last decade of his career and

life, on ancient politics and economy. In my book, Ancient Athens and Modern

Ideology (2005), I attempted to demonstrate and explain an unresolved tension

between Finley’s political values, socio-historical theories, and the empirical evidence

that made his Ancient Economy’s overall periodization and conception unsustainable,

and some of its key arguments contradictory in relation to each other and to the

conclusions of some of his other contributions. I started with the same premise as Ian

Morris, namely that it was the (socialist) politics of the Polanyi-Finley research

programme that made Finley’s work appealing to a wide audience (Morris 1994:

354), but only to reach a conclusion sharply at odds with Morris’ evaluation of

Finley’s account of ‘the ancient economy’. In Morris’ view, Finley’s once most

influential book, The Ancient Economy (AE), offered ‘the only coherent vision of

ancient economics to have emerged since the great German debates of the 1890s’

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(Morris 2002: 27). In contrast, I found AE’s conception and periodization of the

‘ancient economy’ incoherent, static, and unsustainable.1 [2] On close and

contextualised examination of AE’s questionable aspects, I traced them to the political

and theoretical sources and demands of his programme. This, in turn, cleared the

ground for an inclusive resolution of the debate that remained faithful to Finley’s

long-standing normative commitments to socialism, democracy, and theoretically

informed historiography in the new post-Cold War context.

Here, I attempt to reinforce and extend my earlier argument by locating and

probing the clash of the texts specifically differentiated as ‘political’ and ‘economic’,

namely Democracy, Ancient and Modern (DAM 1973b/1985b), AE 1973a/1985a),

Politics in the Ancient World (PAW 1983), and ‘Further Thoughts’ (in the second

edition of AE 1985a). The idea took shape following an invitation to take part in the

‘Moses Finley and Politics’ Conference at Columbia University (2012) to mark the

centenary of his birth. This provided the opportunity to address an issue first raised by

Paul Cartledge, another conference participant, in his review of my book. According

to Cartledge, it had ‘penetrated so deeply beneath the surface of Finley’s many

writings to grasp indeed the essence of his mentality and his protean changes over the

years’. Yet he pointed out that, ‘despite having ‘Athens’ in his title, Nafissi

regrettably says very little about the one ‘specific achievement’ that Finley himself

was very concerned both to explicate and to celebrate, namely Athens’ direct, citizen,

democracy. But what he does say about Democracy Ancient and Modern is in its way

both very telling and potentially very fruitful’ (Cartledge 2008: 277-8). In this article

my focus is on Finley’s politics, and in order to access and examine it, the key source

is indeed his normative account and evaluation of Athenian direct democracy.

In addressing Cartledge’s critique, the present essay should further clarify the

‘ambivalence’, ‘vagueness’, and ‘coyness’ David Konstan found in his perceptive

review of Finley’s methodological writings (Konstan 1988: 181). Despite his 1 Yet Finley’s work proved far more suggestive than the barren coherence of the political economist Carl Bücher’s ‘household economy’ (the first stage in his three stage evolutionary theory of history), which provoked the hostile response of the historian Eduard Meyer and started the century-long ‘oikos’ (or primitivism vs. modernism) controversy to which Morris refers and Weber contributed. In the 1950s and beyond, the debate transmuted into the substantivism-formalism dispute, triggered and shaped by the work of Karl Polanyi which had a significant influence on Finley’s work starting with The World of Odysseus (1954/77). The third, Finley-led round of the debate may be traced to his contribution, ‘Classical Greece’, to the second conference of international economic history and published in Trade and Politics in the Ancient World (Finley 1965a). On various rounds of the ‘controversy’ see Nafissi 2005 and sources therein. 2 [No footnote here; inserted to overcome a problem with the appearance of n.1. Will be corrected at type-setting stage.]

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appreciation of Finley’s lasting success in transforming ‘the study of ancient history

in England and the United States from an antiquarian exercise… into a critical

enterprise’ (Konstan 1988: 178; Vlassopoulos 2007:62-3), Konstan was persuaded to

level ‘a charge that is tantamount to incoherence against Finley’s argument’,

surmising that it arose from ‘a desire to suppress the politics of his own reading of

history’ (Konstan 1988: 180-81).

Konstan anticipates the puzzle that Robin Osborne, Finley’s former student,

raised in his 2002 inaugural lecture upon assuming Finley’s chair of ancient history at

Cambridge University. The lecture underlined the debt students of Greek politics owe

to Finley and highlighted his own commitment to the Jones-Finley programme of

treating democracy as ‘joined-up writing’ that connects material and ideological

factors. Yet, the one question that left him perplexed was that ‘Finley’s discussions of

politics remained curiously insulated from his discussions of slavery or the economy’

(Osborne 2010: 10). I recognise the bases of Konstan’s and Osborne’s accounts in

Finley’s writings, but will attempt to show that the conundrums they identify may in

fact be traced to an underlying political vision. To this extent, my argument matches

C. R. Whittaker’s Finley who ‘above all… insisted on the political dimension of every

enquiry, without which any historical research was in danger of being reduced to mere

antiquarianism’ (Whittaker 1997: 472). I, however, take the matter further by

pinpointing and teasing out the complexity and consequences of Finley’s politics,

rather than assuming that they are self evident and unproblematic.

William Harris’ recent account of Finley’s politics completes the spectrum of

views on the matter. Rather than propagating, suppressing or insulating his politics,

Harris’ Finley has cleansed himself of ‘almost’all politics: ‘What sort of political

Moses Finley emerges from Politics in the Ancient World and his other writings of

this period? A ghost, one might almost say; there is almost no political Finley there’

(Harris 2013: 120). The following investigates these conclusions on the basis of

Finley’s own published words.

Athenian Democracy as a Historical Utopia: Athens versus AngloAmerica

DAM offers a powerful critique of liberal democracy and its conservative apologists

and an equally potent affirmation of the case for direct democracy that debunks the

charges of its instability and dysfunctionality in the most notable and best known

case: ‘Athens managed for two hundred years to be the most prosperous, most

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powerful, most stable, most peaceful internally, and culturally by far the richest state

in all the Greek world’ (Finley 1985b: 23). This summary at once takes care of all the

major concerns raised through the ages against radical democracy starting with Plato

(Roberts 1994 ; Rhodes 2003), and affirms every universalist value with reference to

which successful modern states have sought with reason to distinguish themselves

from others: prosperity and efficiency; security and stability; cultural dynamism and

creativity. What is more, these goods were achieved through a political system that

approximated more closely than any modern state to the ideal of government for the

people and by the people ‘in the most literal sense’ (Finley 1985b: 18). And the

people in question, too, came closest to the ideal of citizens empowered and educated

to attempt to find the ‘common good’ and govern accordingly. This occasions an

approving turn to J.S. Mill:

‘… Notwithstanding the defects of the social system and moral ideas of

antiquity, the practice of dicastery and the ecclesia raised the intellectual

standard of an average Athenian citizen far beyond anything of which there is

yet an example in any other mass of men, ancient or modern… He is called

upon, while so engaged, to weight interests not his own; to be guided, in case

of conflicting claims, by another rule than his private partialities; to apply, at

every turn, principles and maxims which have for their reason of existence the

common good…’ (cited in Finley 1985b: 31-32).

Conversely, the democratic claims of the US as the first and most idealized

modern democracy, are comprehensively questioned by pointing to the combined

impact of the power of money and the narrow interests of its largest holders over the

political process; mass media’s denial of ‘the “educational” goal of classical

democratic theory’; the rise of a political class ‘drawn from a narrow sector of the

population’ with no incentive to consider ‘long-range interests… because “the future

has no administrative constituency”’; and ‘the staggering growth in bureaucracy’

(Finley 1985b: 33-35). The situation was made even bleaker as the resulting

pacification of nominal citizens was recommended for their own good by the elitist

theorists whom Finley has in his polemical sight throughout DAM. Schumpeter,

Lipset, and other influential conservative thinkers confirmed Michels’ ‘iron law’ in

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part by repackaging the US, British, and other electoral oligarchies as the only stable

forms of democracy (ibid: 11-12).3

In this context, the example of Athens had a twofold pertinence. First, it

provided a normative platform from which to evaluate and reform modern

democracies on the basis of putatively shared principles. Secondly, as an historically

realized and comparatively stable and flourishing democracy, Athens refuted the

universality claimed for Michels’ law. Finley thus brings Athens to life as what I have

named an ‘historical utopia’ (Nafissi 2005: 285), having previously and tellingly

asserted the imperative need for utopia by turning to ‘what Oscar Wilde said in The

Soul of Man under Socialism [which] has lost none of its force: “A map of the world

that does not include Utopia is not even worth glancing at… Progress is the realisation

of Utopia”’ (Finley 1967/75: 192; see also Jones 2013: 134-35).4 But equally telling

are the passages in his writing that surpass both in utopian promise and concrete

realism Marx and Engels’ descriptions of their utopia, and look to the Athenian past

rather than a speculative future, or some idealised view of the Soviet Union.

Here it suffices to turn to the celebrated portrayal of communism in German

Ideology and a comparable passage in DAM, bearing in mind that both assume

minimal bureaucratic mediation and dispense with rule by an ‘institutionalized

political elite’ (Finley 1985b: 2):

‘In communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but

each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the

general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and

another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in

the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever

becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman, or critic’ (Marx and Engels 1846/64:

44-45; cf. Lenin 1918).

And Finley’s Athens:

3 That Finley’s critique of the elitist theories may have ignored modern bureaucracies’ structural and even ethical imperatives is not at issue here. However, by way of underlining the complexity of Finley’s self-professed Weberianism, it only suffices to recall that although Weber considered bureaucracy repellent for imposing conformity, he also viewed it as a major evolutionary or ‘rationalizing’ advance over patrimonial governance. But then the liberal Weber did not have the same normative commitment to direct democracy (Thomas 1984; cf. Serge 2011). 4 Notably, this passage concludes Finley’s contribution to Herbert Marcuse’s festschrift, ‘Utopianism: Ancient and Modern’.

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‘It was literally true that at birth every Athenian boy had better than a

gambler’s chance to be the president of the Assembly, a rotating post held for

a single day and, as always, filled by drawing of lots. He might be a market

commissioner for a year, a member of the council for one year to two (though

not in succession), a juryman repeatedly, a voting member of the Assembly as

frequently as he liked.’ (Finley 1985b: 20; see also 1981: 72-3.)

In this light, the inescapable question is how to explain Finley’s silence in DAM about

the Soviet state and the ‘People’s’ Democracies’ of Eastern Europe: was it a sign of

approval or neglect, or was it pregnant with a critique even more damning than that

mounted against Western democracies? As with Finley himself, the answer has to be

Janus-faced, looking back and sideways at the two historical utopias he encountered

in his lifetime and to which he devoted the most intense moments of his public life,

namely, the Soviet Union and classical Athens.

As a realist, Finley did not find the normative appeal of Athens sufficiently

grounded sociologically to guide a radical political project in and for the modern

world. Under modern conditions, he asserted, ‘it would be absurd to make any direct

comparison with a small, homogenous, face-to-face society; absurd to suggest, even

to dream, that we might reinstate an Assembly of the citizens as the paramount

decision-making body in a modern city or nation’ (Finley 1985b: 36).5 This gap

between two societies at two different stages of development and complexity was

deepened by Athens’ failure to live up to the idealized or ‘utopian’ conception of

utopia. In ‘Freedom of the Greek Citizen’, this is put succinctly: ‘Athens was no

utopia. Injustices were committed there, both by individuals and by official bodies’

(Finley 1976/81: 86). This claim is variously unpacked throughout Finley’s writings

by exploring the linkages between Athenian freedom and slavery (Finley 1980; 1981:

part 2; 1985b: 62-94, 183-88), or between the Athenian empire and democracy,

through the funding of the inclusion of the poor in the political process (Finley 1985b:

85-88; 1978/81), and so on. Yet, the overriding comparative thrust of DAM and

Finley’s normative interest in ancient history goes beyond these reservations: ‘The

issue is whether this [oligarchic] state of affairs is, under modern conditions, a

5 Josiah Ober and Edward Cohen have forcefully questioned Finley’s characterisation of ancient Athens as a face-to-face society, and have thus enhanced its contemporary relevance (Finley 1983: 161; cf. Ober 1989: 31; Ober 2008; Cohen 1992: 207 n.104; 2000). In contrast, Cynthia Farrar and Paul Cartledge insist on the face-to-face character of democratic Athens without thereby denying its contemporary relevance (Farrar 1988; 2007; Cartledge 2007: 161). I believe the two positions are not exclusive, but this cannot be pursued here.

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necessary and desirable one, or whether new forms of popular participation in the

Athenian spirit though not in the Athenian substance, if I may phrase it that way, need

to be invented’ (Finley 1985b: 36).

This spirit evidently distanced Finley not only from liberal democracies but

even more so from Soviet bureaucratic/single party socialism. Finley’s reluctance to

turn a critical gaze on the Soviet camp may at least in part be understood as both a

cause and effect of the decision to take the fifth amendment when questioned about

his association with the Communist Party by the McCarran Committee in 1951

(Schrecker 1986: 165-85; 2013). In subsequent years, he maintained the fifth

amendment not only by remaining publicly silent over his membership of the CP, but

also by refusing to comment on the Soviet camp except, as will be seen, in rare, brief,

carefully formulated, and therefore all the more significant occasions. Ironically, the

ground for this silence may have been cultivated in his period of association with the

Communist party and the experience of involvement in ‘front organisations’ run by

cadres who remained undercover both to attract greater numbers of fellow travellers

and to avoid persecution of the kind that eventually lost Finley his academic post

(Tompkins 2008; 2013).6

In any case, the dialectic of Finley’s ‘no holds barred’ critique of liberal

democracy and the contrasting celebration of direct democracy leave little doubt that

he stood on the democratic left of Soviet socialism. This is the Finley who came

across in his writings and extended his readership, as Keith Hopkins noted, far beyond

the fields of ancient history and classics (Hopkins 1972). There is, however, more to

Finley’s politics than a critically potent but constructively redundant commitment to

direct democracy. It was Finley the political realist and Finley the democratic socialist

who refused to delete the Soviet camp from his vision of a better world. Put

differently, in Finley’s view, the conditions for the realization of the ‘Athenian spirit’

entailed the survival of communism even in its dystopian Soviet form, both in the

hope that it would be reformed, but also in the hope that, meanwhile, the space it

created for counter-hegemonic movements by its presence as a potent alternative to

liberal capitalism could be preserved. This is attested directly in an interview with the

6 I have shown elsewhere that even in his early writings, including those published in the Frankfurt School’s Zeitschrift, his Marxist orientation is rarely visible (Nafissi 2005: 195-208). Apart from political and professional considerations, this may have at least to an extent reflected an early and lasting heterodoxy regarding theoretical traditions (Shaw and Saller 1981: ix-xix; Nafissi 2005 Part 3, and below).

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Washington Post’s Alfred Friendly on the eve of his trip to the US to deliver DAM

and AE:

‘He describes his political and intellectual posture as “Marxisant” rather than

Marxist, meaning he no longer takes Marx and dialectical materialism as

gospel, but is Marxist oriented… He professes to see no sign or means of

America breaking out of the grip of the “military-industrial complex”… He

has doubts about the Soviet Union… but clings to the belief that the evils

there, such as they are, were man-made… and not intrinsic to the system…

But isn’t communism inherently totalitarian…? “No, I don’t think it’s

inherently totalitarian. If I am wrong? Then I would find no hope. Anywhere”’

(Friendly-Finley 1971).

Given Finley’s famous resistance to direct or detailed confirmation of his

politics, it was a joy to discover this interview in his papers which at the time (early

1990s) were still kept in Darwin College. It offered direct and clear confirmation of

his stance on the Cold War, the overriding political question of the second half of his

life, in a way that correlated with other less direct or more open-ended evidence of his

politics.7 Subsequently, it was equally uplifting to find further elucidation of this in 7 In his attempt to demonstrate, contra my book and conference paper, not only that there is almost no political Finley, but that there never was a Marxist or ‘Marxisant’ Finley even in his American years of political activism, Harris claims that ‘Nafissi makes too much out of an article about Finley that appeared in the Washington Post…’ (Harris 2013: 120). I am further admonished for calling Friendly’s piece an interview although Harris acknowledges that Friendly ‘had evidently met Finley (he describes his facial features) and his by-line was Cambridge’ (120). The ‘article’ and in particular the passages cited above are nevertheless dismissed as fabrications: ‘it is not to be believed that Finley… said any of this to a visiting journalist’ (121). After noting that ‘Nafissi has objected to me that there is no evidence that Finley, who of course read the article (but when?) demanded a retraction’, rejects my objection by asserting that it ‘would not, I think, have been his [Finley’s] style to do so’. (121.n 60). As it happens, Finley can and will speak for himself below, but Friendly cannot – at least, not as directly – unless and until his archive at Amherst College throws further light on this interview and other possible dealings with Finley. Meanwhile, those able to google Friendly, let alone see George Clooney play his role in the film Good Night, Good Luck (2005), would know that this universally respected, Pulitzer-prized architect of the modern Washington Post also covered the anti-communist witch-hunts (and civil rights struggles) as a politically engaged journalist. Born a Rosenbaum in 1911, the meeting points of the lives of Friendly and Finley (who was born Finkelstein in 1912) are telling. According to the Washington Post obituary, ‘known to his colleagues and through his work as a foe of Adolf Hitler in the 1930s and 1940s, and of senator Joseph R. McCarthy (R-Wis.) in the 1950s, Mr. Friendly throughout a 35-year career as both reporter and editor showed a passionate concern about the nation and the world, and about the fate of democracy in both’ (Weil 1983). Moreover, it is likely that Finley and Friendly met, if not in the US, then in England in the 1960s when Friendly moved to London as the Post’s ‘associate editor and foreign correspondent and set up headquarters’ (Weil 1983; see also Weaver 1983). In short, it is as certain as can be that Friendly knew Finley’s case long before interviewing him in 1971, even more so that he would not fabricate Finley’s words (especially knowing that he would read the piece, and perhaps be questioned about it, when in the US to deliver DAM and AE). Put differently, were Finley to give an interview on the eve of his triumphant return to the US, Alfred Friendly would have been his ideal interlocutor for exploring the political issues that had driven him out of the US and remained at the centre of world politics. This seems corroborated by Daniel Tompkins, who finds that although Finley ‘refused interviews with Ellen Schrecker and Stephen

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one of his scholarly works only when re-reading DAM in preparation for the

centenary conference at Columbia: ‘Outside France and Italy, there are no large,

genuinely radical parties or pressure groups, and even in those two seemingly

exceptional countries, the desire not to disturb the equilibrium, uneasy though it may

be, remains powerful, if not overpowering. “Political relaxation and consensus”, it

seems, have become the overriding national interest’ (1985b: 78).8

This passing show of political inclination is especially notable for it singles

out Euro-communism as the vehicle for radical change in the West, and closest to

Finley’s heart among existing alternatives. As with Eric Hobsbawm (who stood out,

for better or worse, among the outstanding British Marxist historians of Finley’s

generation for remaining in the Communist party/CP? until the collapse of the Soviet

Union), Finley does not seem to have overestimated the potential of the politics (or

anti-politics) engendered by the Third World revolutions and coups or the First World

counter-cultural rebellions of the period. Somewhat ironically and far more

congenially, the democratic socialist hopes invested in Euro-communism recalled

Lenin and Trotsky’s own chief justification for their ‘revolution against Das Kapital’

(Gramsci 1917/1994: 39-42) as they overrode the Mensheviks’ objection to taking the

revolution beyond its ‘bourgeois democratic phase’. Their case rested on the

putatively impending revolutions in Germany and other advanced countries, which

would in turn provide backward Russia with the assistance needed to consolidate

socialism. They were of course proven monstrously wrong, which may help to explain

Finley’s refusal to participate in the Euro-communist project alongside Hobsbawm or,

on the other hand, even visit the Soviet Union as his old comrade I. F. Stone had

done, perhaps ‘fearing that his illusions might crumble’ (Jones 2013: 141). In any

case, the Soviet camp generated the gravitational force that kept Euro-communism

Leberstein… he spoke to Victor Navasky and Alfred Friendly’ (Tompkins 2006: 198 n.11). Navasky, chair of magazine journalism at Columbia university and a former editor of Nation, quotes Finley in Naming Names (1980: 58), and in his more recent A Matter of Opinion records yet another fact pertaining to Friendly’s integrity. In discussing a law-suit against Nation for publishing an excerpt from Gerald Ford’s memoirs before their release, he mentions three expert witnesses testifying in favour of Nation, including ‘Ed Murrow’s old producer, Fred Friendly, by then teaching ethics at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism’ (Navasky 2005: 223). Thus, the unethical journalist turns out as a professor of ethical journalism at Harris’ own university (and Finley’s alma mater), where the Fred W. Friendly Chair of Media and Society is named after him.8Harris devalues the pertinence of this passage for establishing Finley’s politics as a ‘fleeting allusion to French and Italian euro-communism [that] hints at some fantasy of radical solutions…’ (Harris 2013: 119). Dismissing Friendly’s Finley as journalistic fabrication is at least a plausible proposition for those without knowledge of Friendly’s standing and serves the aim of presenting Finley as a politically lifeless ghost. But it is more difficult to see what possibly could be proved by devaluing the political views Finley himself espoused, when the point is to find and understand them.

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and independent radical movements from full absorption in the capitalist status quo.

Thus Finley’s aspiration for the reform of the Soviet camp, without which he could

see ‘no hope’ for the ideals of socialism and democracy (or socialist democracy) that

he had taken up as a ‘product of the 1930s’ and a student of ancient history, a field he

entered in the same decade.

From Finley’s anti-bureaucratic utopianization of direct democracy to his

theoretical pluralism, which turned to Weber and Polanyi as well as Marx, all

evidence suggests that Finley’s view of the Soviet camp was traceable to a broadly

based radicalism rather than some deep-seated and/or well-disguised Stalinism. In this

context and especially after the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, the Soviet

Union could not conceivably have impressed or deluded Finley as an advanced

democracy or even a vehicle for advancing democracy. The Friendly interview is also

notable for mentioning his take on dissenting socialist movements in Eastern Europe,

which parallels and is authenticated by DAM’s critique of Western politics and

political theorists. Without mentioning the Prague Spring, Finley echoes its legacy

when he says that ‘elsewhere in Eastern Europe, a new kind of Marxist discussion

may point the way to the future and to salvation – if the satellites can break out of

Russian, and in part of their own, bureaucratic shackles’ (Friendly 1971).9 Daniel

Tompkins’ reading of the evidence suggests that this was not mere fantasy on either

Finley’s or Friendly’s part: ‘In the 1970s and 1980s, a theme of Moses Finley’s

correspondence and meetings with the Czech historian Jan Pečírka and with several

East German ancient historians was the need to move beyond Diamat’ (Tompkins

2013: 19, 43).

Finley of course did not live to see his residual hopes for the reform of the

Soviet Union dashed or Euro-communism dissolve into an increasingly enfeebled

social democracy. Yet, as will be seen, his comments on communism were more

grounded and even prescient than the views of most (including this writer) who

enthusiastically celebrated the fall of Berlin wall. In any case, Finley’s legacy and the

Athens that above all warmed his heart could withstand the collapse of the Soviet

Union precisely because neither was dependent on bureaucratic socialism. The same

is true of Finley’s commitment to Marxist theory or theories, some variants of which

9 It is notable that Finley’s comrade and fellow ancient historian, Jean-Pierre Vernant, ‘the most loved and revered classical scholar of his age’ (Murray 2007) left the French Communist Party in 1969 after the crushing of the Prague Spring and the role played or not played by the Party in the parallel upheavals in France.

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have proved more resilient than others, confirming the lasting aptness of his self-

description as ‘Marxisant’. This claim will be supported in the next section once we

have examined AE, the text that was and is taken as chief evidence of Finley’s break

with Marxism.

The Ancient Economy in the Age of Extremes

AE was delivered as the Sather lectures at Berkeley in January-February 1972, shortly

before the Gross Welch Mason lectures in April, which turned into the first edition of

DAM. Evidently the selection of the topics, and where each set of lectures would be

delivered, were taken at the same time . Finley’s choice of DAM as the inaugural

GWM lectures at the University that had famously sacked him from his first

seemingly secure appointment is self-explanatory. These lectures provided him with

the opportunity to dissect critically the political order and associated theories that he

had actively fought in his formative years from a normative vantage at the centre of

his ancient scholarship. It is telling that, among his scholarly publications, it seems

only here that the 1930s, Fascism, and McCarthyism are all mentioned and together

linked to the sacralised foundations of his old country:

‘In the United States in the thirties of the present century, to be sure, there

were still voices who proclaimed that the Founding Fathers never intended a

democracy, but a republic; however, they were, and are, fairly insignificant.

Huey Long caught the correct tone when he said that, if fascism came to the

United States, it would arrive in the name of anti-fascism. Popular support for

McCarthy “represented less a conscious rejection of American democratic

ideals than a misguided effort to defend them”’(Finley 1985b: 10).10

If Rutgers and DAM were natural bedfellows, how to explain an apparently

colossal shift in AE’s time and space from about one and a half centuries of Athenian

democracy to ‘the period between 1000 BC and AD 500… and a little corner of the

Balkans and a few toeholds on the Turkish coast of the Aegean sea… to the Roman

Empire extended nearly 3000 miles from the Atlantic ocean to the edge of Caucasus’

(Finley, 1973a/85a: 34)? Why not, in other words, produce the socio-economic

counterpart of DAM? And if Economy, Ancient and Modern did not quite sound right

without a credible geo-economic context and timeframe comparable to ‘ancient

10 Here Finley directly anticipates Ellen Wood’s Graeco-Marxist discussion of representative and direct democracy as seen through the eyes of Protagoras and Hamilton (Wood 1996; cf. Hansen 1996).

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democracy’, then what about Athenian Economy or Athenian Economy and Society or

Athenian Political Economy, a Comparative Perspective? Finley of course wrote with

distinction about various periods of Roman as well as Greek history, but it was the

latter and above all Athens which not only ‘warmed’ his heart, as Momigliano noted

in his telling review of DAM and AE (and The Use and Abuse of History), but around

which his scholarship evolved (Momigliano 1975/ 1980: 314).

Finley had established his ‘antiquarian’ credentials with the publication of his

doctoral thesis, Studies in Land and Credit in Ancient Athens, 500-200 BC (1952).

Since then his theoretically informed and path-breaking studies of Homeric Greece

and Athenian slavery had developed and deepened the basis for a socio-economic

history of Athens (Finley 1981). Thus to have joined up DAM with the economic

foundations of ancient democracy was an obvious option. By contrast, his choice of

such an unwieldy and static object of study as ancient economy is highly curious,

when AE singles out Weber, rather than Marx, Rodbertus or Bücher, as an authorising

source of its conception and execution. The question is especially pertinent because

the 1909 edition of Agrarverhältnisse im Altertum (Agrarian Sociology of Ancient

Civilisations, 1976a), Weber’s masterwork which Finley held in the highest esteem

(1985c: 88), clearly avoids Finley’s approach and treats Greece, Rome, and other

ancient states each in a separate chapter.

The conception and execution of AE is examined in detail in my book. Here I

freely draw on it to explore further some normative objectives and constraints that

especially concern this paper. From this angle, AE’s essentially defensive (and

undeclared) politics is a key to its curious conception. Put simply, in contrast to DAM,

AE could not and at any rate did not claim any normative superiority for Athenian or

ancient economy (or economies) as such. Unlike Athenian democracy, Athenian (or

ancient) economy considered separately did not avail itself as a critical platform for

disclosing the weaknesses of ‘modern economy’ (with its ‘free labour’ and science-

technology fuelled dynamism) or inspiring utopian dreams. In retrospect, the (male-

citizen) restricted but egalitarian-democratic resolution of Athenian class struggles

between the Solonic and the classical periods cleared a rather unique peasant-led road

to a distinct type of modernity with its own long, evolving history (Wood 1988, 1996;

Ober 1996: 123-39, 2015; Nafissi 2004). In a myriad of ways, Finley’s insights in all

three areas differentiated by Osborne (politics, economy, and slavery), as well as his

‘proper concern for social institutions and social history’ (Finley: 1956/77), already

12

suggested most elements that shaped this evolution (see the references to Finley in

Wood 1988). Yet, he stopped short of joining them up coherently himself for reasons

some of which we shall presently examine.

A parallel may be found between Finley’s use of Athenian democracy as a

critical weapon to ‘combat elitist theory’ and the ‘de facto oligarchy of professional

politicians and bureaucrats’ (1973b/1985b: ix) in Western democracies, and Karl

Popper’s anti-communist The Open Society and its [ancient and modern] Enemies

(1945/1966; cf. Finley 1985b: 6, 134-5). Even more tellingly, the same can be said

about Finley’s own one-time mentor and later betrayer Karl Wittfogel’s Oriental

Despotism, a Comparative Study of Total Power (1957). In contrast to DAM, these

influential tracts reconstructed and damned the historical lineage of the Soviet bloc.

However, unlike the interventions of Popper and Wittfogel, AE was not to celebrate

any existing order. Rather, the normative function of AE was to guard the

foundational and ideologically contested legacy of Greek democracy against

appropriation by exponents of liberal capitalism. The least or perhaps the most that

could be expected of AE was thus to articulate the radical incommensurability of

ancient and modern economies so as to block the claim that democracy even in its

radical direct form could only be coexist with market economy. Herein lies a key to

the insulation Osborne noticed between Finley’s political and economic discussions.

Although not pursuing the normative link suggested here, Barry Hindess found its

analytical counterpart in his review of AE and DAM: ‘ … far from generating a

determinate concept of ancient economy… [Finley] merely establishes a series of

differences between the ancient world and capitalist society as described in

contemporary variants of political economy’ (Hindess 1973: 679)..

<This accords with the title chosen, presumably with Finley’s own approval, for the

Italian edition of AE, L’Economica degli antichi dei modernie (Momigliano

1975/1980: 319). Hindess was right about AE, but wrong to expect that such a

determinate concept of ancient economy could be produced in the positive and

empirically defensible sense of term. AE represented an heroic attempt to do so, when

its author was well aware that all three available anti-modernist research programmes

– primitivism, Marxism, and substantivism – were inadequate for the task.

A close look at AE’s opening chapter supports this claim. By the time of

delivering AE, Finley was not only cognisant of the Weberian critique of historical

materialism’s reductionism, but saw clearly the extent to which the ‘slave mode of

13

production’ failed to explain the features that distinguished Greek democracy or the

Roman republic as historically and normatively significant. However essential to

Greek developments, slavery predated the rise of Greece and remained a fixture of

neighbouring states. But apart from Greece (and Rome), none institutionalized free

citizenship, its significant other: ‘it is almost enough to point out that it is impossible

to translate the word “freedom”, eleutheria in Greek, libertas in Latin, or “free man”,

into any ancient Near Eastern language, including Hebrew, or into any far Eastern

language either, for that matter’ (1973a/1985a: 28; 1964/1981; cf. Vlassopoulos 2007:

117-22; Schwartz 2013).

Similar questions arose about Polanyian substantivism, whose main exemplars

in the ancient world were the redistributive palace economies of Mesopotamia and

Mycenae. Accordingly AE’s scope was reduced to the Graeco-Roman world: ‘The

Near Eastern economies were dominated by large palace- or temple-complexes, who

owned the greater part of the arable,… virtually monopolized anything that can be

called “industrial production” as well as the foreign trade... and organized the

economic, military, political and religious life of the society through a single

complicated, bureaucratic, record keeping operation for which the word “rationing”

taken very broadly is as good a one-word description as I can think of’ (1985a: 28).

Ironically, many substantivists as well as other scholars of ancient

Mesopotamia dispute the extent of redistributive embeddedness that Finley (and

Polanyi) attributed to these societies (Gledhill and Larsen: 1982; Liverani: 2005;

Bedford: 2005; and Granovetter: 2005). A more troubling question for anti-

modernism, however, may lie in Finley’s own quasi-Smithian portrayal of the

Graeco-Roman economy:

‘… the Graeco-Roman world was essentially and precisely one of private

ownership, whether of a few acres or of the enormous domains of Roman

senators and emperors, a world of private trade, private manufacture. Both

worlds had their secondary, atypical, marginal people, such as the nomads

who were a chronic threat… in Mesopotamia and Egypt… perhaps the

Phoenician cities on the coast of Syria… certainly the Spartans in Greece…

while the government of the Roman Empire became as autocratic and

bureaucratic, in some ways as Ptolemies, and before them the Pharaohs of

Egypt.’ (1985a: 29).

14

Notably, the references to the exceptionalism of Sparta and the later Roman

Empire in this passage (and the return to it when writing PAW) may equally apply to

other cases, including democratic Athens and its empire. The dilemma to pursue here

is posed by the fact that Finley’s observations noted above coincided with the broad

modernist position. Indeed, the putative arch modernist Eduard Meyer (and Max

Weber) would have been pleased to see the reference to the bureaucratisation of the

later Roman Empire which in some pertinent respects placed it alongside the earlier

redistributive states and at rather a distance from archaic and classical Athens or

republican and early imperial Rome. As such it was consonant with the cyclical view

of ancient history or indeed history upheld by Meyer, and prevalent before the

nineteenth-century ascendancy of evolutionism and the recognition of the cumulative

nature and power of the modern science-technology-economy nexus. In any case, all

modernists, whether naïve, critical, or inclusive, would have agreed with Finley over

the predominance of private property which prima facie undermined the primacy of

either redistributive states or autarchic households as agencies of ‘economic

integration’ in the classical world (Nafissi 2005: chapters 1 and 4).

Finley thus faced two basic choices. He could declare a ceasefire in what

Hopkins dubbed ‘the battle of ancient economy’ (1983: ix), and openly explore the

possibility of critically accommodating the modernists’ argument in his ‘ideology’, or

persist through a new alternative immune to his own criticisms of the anti-modernist

bloc. The ‘official’ Finley fronted in AE chose the second option: ‘… the

inapplicability to the ancient world of a market-centred analysis was powerfully

argued by Max Weber and by his most important disciple amongst ancient historians,

Johannes Hasebroek; in our own day by Karl Polanyi. All to no avail.’ (1973/85a: 26;

see also 1962/65.) I cannot and should not repeat here the detailed examination of

Weber’s pertinent writings and in particular the third edition of The Agrarian

Sociology of Ancient Civilizations singled out by Finley, pace Alfred Heuss, as ‘the

most original, boldest and most vivid portrayal’ of antiquity yet (Finley 1985c: 88).11

It suffices to note that Agrarian Sociology sits uneasily alongside Finley’s AE in

11 In his wide-ranging review of my book, Professor Tompkins finds that it ‘effectively captures Weber’s holistic portrayal of ancient economic behaviour’, but notices that it says ‘nothing about subsequent treatments of Antiquity in Economy and Society and the General Economic History’ (Tompkins 2008: 125). This is true, but then in his later writings Weber drew on rather than developed the analysis and findings of the third edition Agrarian Sociology, his final contribution to the oikos dispute, which Tompkins, too, acknowledges as ‘Weber’s greatest study of antiquity’ (Tompkins 2008: 125; Nafissi 2005: chapter 4; Gorski 2007).

15

perspective, substance, and even structure. Unlike Finley, Weber set out to synthesise

critically the modernist and primitivist arguments by questioning the modernizing

generalizations of the historian Eduard Meyer for ‘going so far as to reject entirely the

use of special economic concepts in studying antiquity’ (Weber 1976a: 43; 45). But

equally clearly he questioned the analysis of the evolutionary political economists,

Rodbertus and Bücher, according to whom ‘all antiquity’ was actually or ideal-

typically dominated by an autarchic oikos economy and went on to claim what must

come as a shock to all those who know their Weber through Finley:

“Where we find property as an object of trade utilized by individuals for

profit-making enterprise in a market economy, there we have capitalism. If

this is accepted, then it becomes perfectly clear that capitalism shaped whole

periods of antiquity, and indeed precisely those periods we call “golden ages”’

(Weber 1976a: 50; Nippel 2000: 243-47; cf. Morris 1999: xx-xxiii; Morris and

Manning 2005: 10-15).

We should pause here over Weber’s distinction between the times of the polis

and the republic, and the times of empires, for it underlines Weber’s own normative

standpoint as he finishes the story of the rise and fall of antiquity’s golden ages with

one simple trans-historical message:

‘Bureaucracy stifled private enterprise in Antiquity… Today the average

German bourgeois is as little like his medieval ancestor as was Athenian of the

Lower Roman Empire like the man who fought at Marathon. The German

bourgeois now strives above all for ‘order’ usually, even if he is a ‘social

democrat’. Thus in all probability some day the bureaucratization of German

society will encompass capitalism too, just as it did in Antiquity. We too will

then enjoy the benefits of bureaucratic “order” instead of the “anarchy” of free

enterprise and this order will be essentially the same as that which

characterized the Roman Empire and – even more – the New Empire in Egypt

and the Ptolemic state’ (Weber 1976b: 365-6; cf. Nafissi 2005: 120-23).

Finley, the anti-bureaucratic democrat, of course would have appreciated

though not wholly approved of the anti-bureaucratic liberal Weber’s pronouncements,

but not the anti-capitalist/anti-modernist Finley. So what about the Weber who is

named in AE as Finley’s first precursor: is he merely an imaginary figment? The

answer is yes and no. In short, the synthesising Weber of 1909 was deconstructed, his

modernist elements largely discarded, and the remainder reconstructed with the help

16

of Weberian ‘signature’ concepts such as culture, status and order. The result was not

Weber the ancient historian cum political economist who intervened in the original

oikos dispute and was apparently uniquely welcomed by the main protagonists,

Eduard Meyer and Carl Bücher (Nafissi 2005: 53-4; chapter 4), and later by Finley

himself. Were he a follower of that Weber, Finley would have critically developed the

Greek chapter of Agrarian Sociology into a full historical account beyond the

overview presented in The Ancient Greeks (1963/1977). Instead, AE’s Weber was the

culturalist Weber whom Weber himself partly disowned in The Protestant Ethic and

the Spirit of Capitalism, by warning that his work should not be taken as a one-sided

‘idealist’ response to what he rejected as the ‘one-sided’ materialism of Marxism

(Weber 1930: 183):

‘My justification for speaking of “the ancient economy” lies in another

direction, in the fact that in its final centuries the ancient world was a single

political unit, and in the common cultural-psychological framework, the

relevance of which to an account of the economy I hope to demonstrate in the

subsequent chapters’ (Finley 1985a: 34).

However suggestive, this resolution variously undermined AE’s consistency

and coherence as I have detailed elsewhere (Nafissi 2005: 235-256). Here, we may

only note three issues that directly pertain to the present argument. First, the putative

cultural-psychological framework can only be fixed non-historically, retrospectively,

and negatively, i.e. with reference to ‘the economic man’ and capitalist modernity of

the future. AE, in other words, rests on a double negation which does not result in a

positive conception. Centuries of economic change are essentially seen as non-

essential movements of an unmovable essence that itself can only be viewed as such

by virtue of not being its modern other. As the most theoretically and politically

engaged Anglo-American ancient historian of his generation, the positive limitations

of this exercise should have been as apparent to Finley as they had been to Weber.

But then, unlike Weber’s, Finley’s political and theoretical programme prioritized

blocking the modernist battalions’ access to Athens. In the battle of ancient economy,

Finley may have thus followed the example of the Athenians who set fire to their city

rather than seeing it taken by the advancing Persian armies (and he, too, ended up the

winner, at least in his own lifetime).

Second, there is the quasi-dynamic variable in Finley’s case for justifying his

overarching conception of ancient economy, namely the political unity or embedding

17

achieved in the closing centuries of the Roman Empire. But only five pages earlier, he

had conceded that in those centuries ‘the government of the Roman Empire became as

autocratic and bureaucratic, in some ways, as the Ptolemies, and before them the

Pharaohs of Egypt’ (Finley 1985a: 29; Weber 1976b).12 But if so, doesn’t this

undercut the case for taking the unity achieved in this period as a justification for

‘speaking of the ancient economy’? Not really according to Finley, because the

autocratic bureaucracy of the Romans was not comparable in ‘all ways’ with those of

the Ptolemies or Pharaohs, and ‘we must concentrate on the dominant types, the

characteristic modes of behaviour’ (1985a: 29; cf. Cartledge 2002; Andreau 2002).

But did this mean that late imperial Rome and democratic Athens, (praised in DAM

for its comparatively bureaucracy-less polity), shared so many ‘characteristic modes

of behaviour’ that they belonged to the same ‘ideal type’?13

Marxism, Weberism and the politics of anti-positivist historiography

Thirdly, and perhaps most famously, AE’s Weberian pedigree was established when it

came to favour ‘Solonic orders’ over the ‘commonly’ used ‘Solonic classes’ (Finley

1985a: 48), and abandoned class for “status.. an admirably vague word with a

considerable psychological element” (1985a: 51). But what his understandably

indignant erstwhile Marxist allies missed was that these moves were intended to

support their common anti-marketist/modernist cause, which had already been

enfeebled by the limitations of orthodox historical materialism. Indeed, Finley

anticipated and tried to pre-empt Marxist objections by disclosing the Marxian, or

should we say ‘Marxisant’, intent behind the putatively anti-Marxist terms such as

‘status’:

‘Half a century ago Georg Lukács, a most orthodox Marxist, made the correct

observation that in pre-capitalist societies, “status-consciousness… masks

class consciousness”. By that he meant, in his own words, that “the structuring

of societies into castes and estates means that the economic elements are

12 This was of course precisely a reason for Agrarian Sociology dealing with the republic and empire, and Hellenic and Hellenistic Greece, separately.13 The methodological twists and turns that Konstan finds in his aforementioned review are at least in part traceable to Finley’s attempt to address these and other substantive challenges without giving up his normative aims or ignoring historical evidence (see Nafissi 2005: 273-83). It is also notable that Finley’s methodological moves were reinforced by a conceptual mediation that tries to create ‘by definition’ an inseparable gulf between modern and ancient economies with the former defined, following Eric Roll, ‘as an enormous conglomeration of interdependent markets…’ (Finley AE: 22; Saller 2005; cf. Cohen 1992; Osborne 1996; Akrigg 2007: 37).

18

inextricably joined to legal and religious factors”; that “economic and legal

categories are objectively and substantively so interwoven as to be

inseparable”’ (1985a: 50, emphases in the original).

By italicizing ‘substantively…’ Finley underlined his commitment to the Polanyian

programme, whilst his somewhat disingenuous reference to the purity of Lukács’

orthodoxy served as a reminder of both his own continued allegiance to ‘Western

Marxism’, and the shared roots and aims of substantivism and Marxism. Let us pause

here to add to the instances that affirm Finley’s lasting association with Marxism both

as politics and as theory.

Finley rightly considered class formation a mark of historically significant

economic (and socio-cultural) disembeddedness and a feature of Western European

modernity. This suggests an explanation for the preclusion of significant class

formations and conflicts (and collaborations) in the rise and consolidation of

democratic Athens, but does not validate it. On the contrary, the economically driven

class struggles that became fully visible and politically mediated from Solon’s time

were a characteristic of the distinct modernity of ancient Athens (Nafissi 2004). This

is recognized rather dramatically by the neo-Weberian historical sociologist Michael

Mann who, torn between the empirical evidence, Finley, and Finley’s Weber ends up

rather unnecessarily converting to Marxism, albeit only for the duration of the Greece

chapter of his magisterial study of The Sources of Social Power:

‘It might seem that in the middle of the discussion of Classical Greece, I have

converted to Marxism. I did not emphasize class struggle in previous

societies… I have been able to describe this period, but not the preceding

ones, in Marxian terminology because this became appropriate in this

historical setting’ (Mann 1986: 221).

Accordingly, Mann then proceeds to embrace de Ste Croix’s ‘effective’ critique of

‘Weber’s and Finley’s use of status… in place of class’ (Mann 1986: 226, 222; de Ste

Croix 1981: 85-98; 55-69; 1985; cf. Finley, 1985a: 35-61; 183-88; Weber 1976a :

185; Nafissi, 2005: 248-50; Harris 1988/2011). We will shortly see Finley’s own

reflections on the question about AE in PAW. Meanwhile, both by way of making our

way towards PAW and providing further evidence of Finley’s unfolding inner

dialogue, we probably could do no better than turn to his tellingly titled 1967 article,

‘Class Struggles’. The following passage is Finley’s response to a reader who had

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objected to his reference elsewhere to ‘the ferocious class bias’ of Josephus as ‘ill

applied Marxism’:

‘To a historian of antiquity this is a most remarkable posture, since ancient

authors analysed society in terms of classes having divergent and conflicting

interests. The whole of Aristotle’s Politics, for example, the most systematic

and most profound political analysis to have been produced in antiquity, rests

on the existence of classes, as does Plato’s very different discourse in the

Republic… Examples can be multiplied but to do so is unnecessary: it is all

very familiar and commonplace. Marx was neither so ignorant nor so arrogant

as to claim that he had discovered the existence of classes and class struggle’

(Finley 1967: 201).

So it was not just Mann who had converted to Marxism when reaching

Greece: Aristotle had done the same, presumably shortly after his arrival from

Macedonia. But then how could Finley’s Aristotle and Finley’s Lukács be reconciled?

If class differentiation and interest formation are modern phenomena, we might then

need to distinguish between pre-modernity in the chronological and sociological

senses of the term. In that case, we may be well on our way to a new layer of analysis

in which Aristotle, Lukács, and Finley himself shared the same ground.

Finley’s party politics ceased in the 1950s along with any public recollection,

admission, or examination of his clandestine activities. However, subsequent markers

of Finley’s allegiance to what he saw as non-dogmatic Marxist theory within a

broader front of social scientific historiography contra ‘positivism’ and

‘antiquarianism’ persisted in consonance with his ideological affinity with pluralist

Euro-communism. A highly favourable review of Perry Anderson’s Passages from

Antiquity and Lineages of the Absolutist State in 1975 thus follows his earlier turn to

Lukács in AE, this time taking and talking up the intra-Marxist divisions as ‘a great

schism’ pitting vulgar, ‘Engelsian’ Marxists against his own favoured variety, here

represented by Anderson’s ‘complex and beautifully interwoven and controlled

account…’ (Finley 6 February 1975: 14).14

14 Here we may see Finley’s Marxism not just as theory or politics but as political tactic and strategy. Seemingly having failed to persuade de Ste Croix and his other Marxist critics of the validity of AE’s case or the sustainability of a Marx-Weber alliance, he was keen on finding allies within the broader Marxist camp. In attempting to develop Finley’s research programme in their pointedly titled The Ancient Economy: Evidence and Models, Manning and Morris draw on AE and Finley’s modelling approach to cement the sociologically anchored alliance of Marx, Weber, Polanyi, and Finley in their ‘metanarrative of two Mediterraneans’. Suggestive and at a similar level of abstraction as Finley’s own work, this approach, however, does not solve or address the inconsistencies of AE (Manning and

20

Persisting with the view of Finley as a-political and devoid of any Marxian

trace, Harris believes that the most that may be said of his writings and this review is

that ‘“anti-anti Marxism” in Finley’s journalism took the form of an adulatory review

of a Marxist scholar – Perry Anderson in 1975 – who is defined as a post-Grundrisse

Marxist’ (Harris 2013: 120). But why should ‘Finley’s journalism’ be devalued as

evidence for establishing Finley’s own views; or why should his explicit endorsement

of Anderson’s variant of Marxism be limited to ‘anti-anti Marxism’, when in the

1960s and 1970s critical Marxism and Marxist movements were flourishing and full

of confidence? In any case, Harris may reconsider his claim by turning to Finley’s

further affirmative references to Anderson’s work in one of his more influential

scholarly contributions, namely ‘The Ancient City: From Fustel de Coulanges to Max

Weber and Beyond’ (1977/81).15 In my book (a source of Harris’article), Finley’s

treatment was understood in the context of a broader and long-evolving project aimed

at forming and maintaining the broad unity of Marxists and other ‘structural

historians’ against antiquarian/ ‘positivist’ historiography, on the one hand, and, on

the other, mending the cracks caused by AE’s rather hasty ‘Weberian’ abandonment

of class by pressing for a more self-critical and capacious Marxism. I believe what I

suggested therein from this vantage about Finley’s perspective and strategic aim

(and his approach to Anderson’s work) remains valid:

‘ [In the Ancient City] Finley pointed to significant areas of agreement

between Marx and Weber concerning ancient developments, and agreement

that, [he] noted, was particularly reflected in Perry Anderson’s ‘recent, subtle,

Marxist account’” (Finley 1977/81: 19). Realizing the unlikely eventuality of

convincing all his Marxist critics, Finley persisted in distinguishing between

the dogmatic, or ‘Engelsian’ or ‘linear’ and other such varieties of non-subtle

Marxists, and the sophisticated ones, in or alongside whose ranks he located

himself in what he termed in an enthusiastic review of Anderson’s work, the

‘Great Schism’. In this case however, Finley’s claim was untenable. For

Morris 2005: 10-17). 15 First published in 1977 in Comparative Studies in Society and History, this article was included as the opening chapter of Economy and Society in Ancient Greece, ‘a volume of fourteen articles covering Finley’s key articles from the early 1950s to the later 1970s’ and benefitting from ‘valuable assistance from several quarters… [including] Sir Moses himself’ (Shaw and Saller, eds 1981: viii). In their exceptionally informative ‘Editors’ Introduction’ to this volume, Shaw and Saller quote at a length from an earlier review in the Listener in which Finley, discussing his student days in New York, concludes that ‘Marxism is therefore built into my intellectual experience, what the Greeks would have called my paideia’ (Finley 1967 cited in Shaw and Saller 1981: xi). Should this too be dismissed as a piece of journalism, even though the volume in which it appears was sanctioned by Finley himself?

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however subtle, Anderson’s account, too, remained wedded to a class-divided

Athens shaped by the slave mode of production (Nafissi 2005: 252; cf.

Anderson 1975, 1992; Manning and Morris 2005: 15).16

The most comprehensive treatment of Finley’s theoretico-political agenda,

however, was to come later in Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology (1980) and

especially its first and longest chapter, which gives the book its title. It is there that he

engages with Marx and Marxism from inside and outside the tradition and further

underscores his close affinity with other ‘post-Grundrisse’ Marxists such as Edward

Thompson (former Communist Party member) and Eric Hobsbawm (a key theorist of

the Euro-communist wing of the Party). The latter is particularly notable here because

Finley cited his influential ‘Introduction’ to Grundrisse’s Pre Capitalist Economic

Formations (1964) to remind his Marxist critics that his project is not about dropping

Marxism but addressing questions unanswered or inadequately answered by Marx and

orthodox Marxism with the help of other social-scientific paradigms represented by

the likes of Bücher, Weber, and Polanyi.17

16 We may recall Morris’ claim that AE was ‘the only coherent vision of ancient economics to have emerged since the great German debates of the 1890s’ (Morris 2002: 27). Subsequently, in their ‘Introduction’ to the aforementioned Ancient Economy: Evidence and Models, Manning and Morris name ‘de Ste Croix’s version of Marxism [as] the only coherent alternative economic model to the neo-Weberian tradition’ (2005: 15). It follows that here what they have mind is Finley’s AE. But the first difficulty with this claim is, as we saw, that AE lacks coherence. If true, this leaves de Ste Croix’s account as the only coherent ‘model’ of recent years. Ironically, Finley may not have disagreed too forcefully with this view, for he objected, fairly or otherwise, to de Ste Croix not so much over coherence as over reductionism and limited conceptual refinement. A further irony is that in perhaps the most rigorous neo-Weberian historical sociology of recent years, Michael Mann converted, as we saw, to Marxism thanks to de Ste Croix’s account of class struggles in classical Greece. But to pile up even more irony by way of demonstrating Finley’s standing in both the Marxian camp and the broader front of social scientific historians, we should refer to the responses of the Marxist historians Perry Anderson and Ellen Wood to Finley and de? Ste Croix. Anderson tells de Ste Croix off for ‘polemicizing unremittingly and exaggeratedly against Finley’, but sides with the former over his ‘decisive clarification of the terms of argument over class and status’ (Anderson 1992: 8). Wood’s Peasant, Citizen and Slave, placed by Anderson among ‘the finest works of recent years’, does not only draw extensively on Finley contra de Ste Croix, but contra Finley finds Anderson’s work even more misguided than that of de Ste Croix in its dependence on the slave mode of production: ‘The only other contemporary Marxist study of ancient Greece and Rome to match de Ste Croix’s in scope and imaginative sweep, Perry Anderson’s Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism, unequivocally embraces “the slave mode of production” in a way that even de Ste Croix hesitates to do...’ (1988: 40; cf. Anderson 1992: 8 n.14). 17 In the now unlikely event that William Harris remains unpersuaded about Finley’s notable, if non-exclusive and intricate, attachment to Marxism, then he may finally return to the evidence that he himself cites [Hopkins’ videotaped interview with Finley, 1985] to question the authenticity of what Friendly says about the matter: ‘Contrast what he [Finley] said to Hopkins in the IHR [Institute of Historical Research] interview (which is consistent with things he said to me and no doubt others): he had never been a Marxist in “the Science and Society sense”, that is a doctrinaire party-line sense; which of course implies that he had been in some loose sense’ (Harris 2013: 121). In any case, we know the kind of ‘Marxist’ journal Finley was happy to be identified with, namely Past and Present, which began ‘in the years of the Cold War with a group of young Marxist historians, at the time all members of the British Communist Party and enthusiastic participants in the activities of the “C.P.

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Ancient Politics: Athens versus Rome and the Collapse of ‘Ancient Economy’

Given initially as Wiles Lectures in 1980, PAW was published in 1983 a decade after

AE and presumably as its political counterpart. But in fact it reads more like a

companion volume to DAM as it extends the latter’s comparative and critical focus

from Anglo-America to Rome, with Athens retaining its normative function as ‘a

measuring-stick’ (1983: 89). Conversely, in just about every respect, from its

conception of ‘ancient’ to the significant differences it finds between the politics,

culture, and economics of Athenian democracy and the Roman republic, PAW

discards many of AE’s substantive assumptions along with much of its methodology.

In two key respects, this is openly acknowledged in PAW. In the middle of the first

chapter the readers are thus alerted that the author had,

‘shifted, more or less casually so far, between Greece and Rome. The

casualness will disappear, but the very possibility of incorporating Greece and

Rome into a single discourse has earlier been challenged (with reference to my

Ancient Economy) and I must make some acknowledgement of the opposition.

My present subject is politics, and specifically city-state politics… That means

the Greek world from the late archaic period… to the conquests of Alexander

the Great or a little later; the Roman world from the mid-fifth century BC to

the late Republic. No one need be puzzled by the departure from the

conventional periodization of either Greek or Roman history, an artificial

frame (especially in Greek history) that is inappropriate for the analysis of

several important aspects of ancient society… The single label ‘ancient’ does

Historians’ Group”’ (Hill, Hilton and Hobsbawm 1981: 4). Reviewing Past and Present’s coverage of different periods and perspectives for its centenary issue, this is what Jaques Le Goff has to say about the ancient world and Finley: ‘Historical sociology and anthropology have been outstandingly successful in the investigation of the ancient world… Strangely enough, although M. Finley (author of two articles and editor of one volume of collected essays for the [Past and Present] Society) has been associated with Past and Present, this association has been somewhat an exception.’ (Le Goff, 1981: 23). At least, Finley’s case is wholly understandable and not just in the light of the foregoing. He followed in the footsteps of his senior colleague Hugo Jones who was among ‘established non-Marxist scholars who were prepared to take part in the enterprise from the start [as a member of the editorial board] at the risk of being accused of lending respectability to red menace.’ (Hill et al 1981: 8). Jones’ contribution to the journal’s first issue, a powerful defence of Athenian democracy against the charges of its dependency on slavery and imperialism, clearly indicates the broad research programme he and Finley shared and anticipates Finley’s (and Wood’s) critique of the applicability of the slave mode of production to Athens (Jones 1952). John Morris, the journal’s founding editor and most radical driver, ‘considered Finley a political ally’ (John North in conversation with the author) and indeed was more explicit than Finley in his critique of the Soviet Union from the perspective of ‘direct democracy’, and somewhat more sanguine about the possibility of realising it (Morris, n.d. [1967]; Browning 1982; North 2002:2-4).

23

not imply identity either among different regions or peoples or over long

periods of time. It is enough to contrast Athens and Sparta or pre-Cleisthenic

and post-Periclean Athens within the Greek world’ (Finley 1983: 11-12; cf.

Andreau 1977).18

Without this move, Finley could not proceed with the descriptive, comparative, and

normative analysis of direct democracy and attempt to do to oligarchic Rome what

DAM had done to liberal Anglo-America. But such a move collapsed the

aforementioned first justification for ‘speaking of “the ancient economy”’, namely the

political unity of the ancient world in its ‘final centuries’. Indeed, in justifying the

shorter life span of ancient politics, the imperial state is now presented as an anti- or

non-political entity in Finley’s own, Greek-invented and Graeco-centred, conception

of politics. PAW’s ‘chronological limits, and particularly my exclusion of Rome under

the emperors’ is thus grounded in direct opposition to the imperial-autocratic

principle: ‘Where the principle… “what the emperor decides has the force of statute”

prevails, even if only in spirit, there is government by antechamber, not by chamber,

and therefore there can be no policies in my sense” (Finley 1983: 52; 116-17).19

18 Here Finley may be going too far in the opposite direction. ‘Ancient’, ‘pre-modern’, or ‘primitive’ may be useful terms (or ideal types) depending on the historical or comparative question asked and the level of analytical abstraction. The key point, as I discuss at length in my review and reconstruction of Weber’s methodology, is not to conflate ideal types or ‘models’ with historical accounts or to dismiss all those who prioritise the latter as positivist and/or antiquarian (Weber 1949; Nafissi 2005: 67-90). 19 This presumably explains why Athenian imperialism is included in PAW as it does not eliminate the politics of the chamber and, according to Finley, serves the consolidation of its most radical democratic form. In this case, it is surely notable that by limiting the discussion to the Greek poleis and republican Rome, some historically critical questions facing Pericles and Demosthenes and their generations were set aside. But these have remained crucial questions for historians as well as advocates and opponents of radical democracy ever since. Here, I have in mind the choice between empire and polis and the underlying question of social power necessary to both achieve and maintain normative orders (Runciman 1990; cf. Osborne 2004: 131-35; Morris 2009; Ober 2015). The manifold aspects of this question must be examined elsewhere. Here it may only be mentioned that this is where Rome in both its pagan and Christian periods offers a platform for normative as well as positive appraisal of Athens. Not only did Rome generate overwhelming military power (as the Macedonians had before them when they overran Greece, or the Mongols when they did the same to the more advanced civilization of eastern Islamdom) , its expansive citizenship and universalism exposed the normative limitations of egalitarian poleis as well. Unsurprisingly perhaps, it is here that the liberal capitalist democracy comes into its own as an historical utopia for critical engagement with ‘the spirit’ of Athens. By refusing to follow the evolutionary story of Rome through to its imperial phase, Finley closed off the opportunity to engage the Athenians in an important and mutually critical dialogue.

24

But this elimination of the very period of the politically induced unity (or

embeddedness) of the ‘ancient economy’ is only the first of the troubling questions

through which PAW challenged AE. For in many other significant respects, relating to

politics as well as the other unifying ‘psychological-cultural framework’ of AE

(including religious, ideological, and legal factors), what PAW brings into sharp relief

are the differences that divided democratic Athens and republican Rome. On the

cardinal question of popular participation,

‘structurally, or constitutionally if one prefers, there were fundamental

differences at every key point…. the formal devices designed [in the Roman

case] to ensure tight élite control accumulated until they amounted to a

veritable straightjacket. … The highest officials had powers incomparable

with any in Athens… [and] imperium [is] a concept that cannot be translated

into Greek. … Roman assemblies, unlike the Athenian, passed very few ‘laws’

throughout the history of the republic… Having once declared war… neither

the centuriate nor any other assembly had any further say in the conduct of

that war, save for an exceptional instance, and not even then in the least like

the Athenian Assembly which was in continuous control of wars as of all other

public affairs’ (Finley 1983: 85, 87, 90).

Similar contrasts arise over the conduct of religious affairs where

‘one other weapon in the armoury of the Roman ruling class… [was] its

exclusive right to interpret supernatural signs and portents… It was equally

characteristic of the Romans that this great power of interpretation, and indeed

all aspects of official religion, were fully incorporated into governmental

apparatus… Neither in Athens nor in any other Greek city-state was there

anything comparable. Although there, too, “priests” were fully a part of the

state apparatus, such prestige and perquisites as they may have had (little

enough for those, the majority, who were chosen by lot for a one-year term

like other officials) did not extend to political influence or even to the

advancement of their own political careers’ (1983: 93).

So what about the economy or political economy of Athens and Rome? This is

not discussed in any detail in PAW, but what is said is particularly telling. Thus when

presenting the case for excluding imperial Rome from the discussion, it is

acknowledged that taxation

25

‘hardly appears as an issue in classical antiquity before the Roman Empire.

Furthermore, as the poor were in the great majority self-employed in the

country and in the city, the peasants were also free of the burden of rents. The

tenant farmer and the sharecropper were a phenomenon of the Hellenistic

world and of imperial Rome (perhaps beginning in the late Republic), not of

the city-state’ (1983: 33).

If here the Roman republic and the Athenian democracy stood more or less together

and apart from the Hellenistic states and the Roman empire, when it came to ‘the

public sector’ they, too, went their separate ways:

‘Only in Athens, to the best of our knowledge, did the state provide massive

economic support for the poor through large-scale employment in the navy

and through the provision of pay, in the form of a modest per diem, for the

whole range of offices including the thousands of jurymen and even, from the

beginning of the fourth century, those who attended the meetings of the

Assembly’ (1983: 34).

PAW’s treatment of class, however, raised even greater difficulties. PAW is

full of references to class and economically anchored conflicts and their sharply

differentiated democratic and oligarchic outcomes in Rome and Athens. From Solon’s

mediation and laws to Aristotle’s differentiation of democracy and oligarchy on the

basis of poverty and wealth, evidence is marshalled against the accounts that deny the

‘centrality of classes and class conflict’ (1983: 2), or present it as an existential threat

to self-governing poleis (1983: 3), or use it to minimise the radical differences

between oligarchy and democracy as ‘variants of the same type of state’ (1983: 7ff.).

Evidently, this return to class had to be explained, especially were he to insist

that his widely noted abandonment of class in AE was still valid. Finley’s explanation

took a complex form. On the one hand he summed up his case by referring to

Aristotle’s Politics (1310a3-10), finding therein sufficient evidence ‘of class, class

consciousness, and class conflict… for my purposes’ (Finley 1983: 11; see also 9-10).

On the other hand, however, de Ste Croix is put down for turning ‘Aristotle into a

Marxist’ (1983: 10 n.26), with Finley himself failing to notice or note that that may be

the flip side of Marx being an Aristotelian (or that at the time of writing AE and PAW,

class analysis had long been a defining feature of Marxism).20 What is more, rather

20 De Ste Croix returned the favour in a footnote of his own noting that PAW ‘contains many references to class, but none to status’ (Ste Croix 1985: 185 n.39).

26

than acknowledging the revision, if not reversal, of his earlier rejection of class, it is

camouflaged in mystifying jargon and depth:

‘My return in the present work to ‘class’ (in the sense intended in ordinary

discourse, not in a technical sense, Marxist or other) does not imply a change

of view. I merely find the conventional terminology more convenient, and

harmless, in an account of ancient politics’ (1983: 10 n.29).

What may seem an obfuscation here, is in fact clarified fully in the next

chapter in terms that both modernists and Marxists could not but welcome: ‘If Greek

and Roman aristocrats were neither tribal chieftains nor feudal war lords, then their

power must have rested on something else, and I suggest the obvious, their wealth and

the ways in which they could disburse it’ (1983: 45). In contrast to AE, PAW thus

acknowledged the disembedding of the economy to a degree sufficient to allow

sociologically and historically significant collective interest formation and the rise of

class ‘for itself’. Finley does not explicitly explain why class proved more convenient

in discussing ancient politics than ancient economics; nor does he elaborate the

difference between the conventional and technical senses of the term or why it was

preferred to the presumably ‘technically’ superior status. Clearly slavery and rare

incidence of slave rebellions, on the one hand, and high but rarely violent incidence of

conflict between rich and poor, on the other hand, posed questions that orthodox and

perhaps many non-orthodox variants of Marxism could not fully resolve (de Ste Croix

1981; Wood and Wood 1978; Vernant 1980; Vidal-Naquet 1986; Rose 2012). But this

did not preclude deploying a broad and historically contingent concept in the

overlapping spirit and letter of Marx and Weber that Finley himself had variously

contemplated. At any event, PAW ends with a chapter on ‘ideology’, and that chapter

itself ends with a question about the plebs who, unlike their Greek counterparts, acted

in a manner that

‘the ruling class called responsible behaviour. And the Roman demos was

remarkably obedient most of the time. Why? ... Rome’s unique military

history itself provides some of the answer, as we have seen, but for the

decisive element we must look to the ideology, the whole complex of beliefs

and attitudes which have been a leitmotiv of this book’ (1983: 141).

This move takes Finley back to the ‘common cultural-psychological

framework’ which was his (second) ‘justification’ for ‘speaking of ancient economy’

(Finley 1985a: 34). But now this, too, is clearly thrown out along with his first

27

justification, the political unity brought about through the Roman Empire. Without

recalling AE, PAW discards any talk of any such a frame that could hold even Athens

and republican Rome together. Instead, it acknowledges the ‘fundamental contrast

between the two societies’ (1983: 128), and more specifically of the ‘differences that

gave the behaviour of the Romans, and particularly their psychology, a quality, or at

least a nuance, setting them apart from the Greeks (most markedly from Athens, least

so from Sparta)’ (1983: 129).

Indeed, PAW goes so far in undercutting AE that it ends up turning its

comparative foundation on its head by pointing, rightly or wrongly, to a gap between

Athens and Rome as wide as between Athens and Anglo-America. Thus in a renewal

of DAM’s normative agenda, it first turns approvingly to Alastair MacIntyre’s

‘Aristotelian’ critique of modernity:

‘The Athenians had not insulated, as we have by a set of institutional devices,

the pursuit of political ends from dramatic representation or the asking of

philosophical questions from either. Hence we lack, as they did not, any

public, generally shared communal mode either for representing political

conflict or for putting our politics to the philosophical question’ (MacIntyre

1981: 129-30, quoted in Finley 1983: 125).

Finley then adds: ‘One can with complete accuracy repeat my earlier quotation from

MacIntyre, merely replacing ‘we’ by ‘the Romans’’ (1983: 126).

Thus we are full circle back to the radical critique of modern democracies

launched in DAM, this time through a comparative and complementary deconstruction

of Graeco-Roman politics and critical appraisal of oligarchic Rome from the same

normative perspective of radical democracy. The big question was thus whether

Finley would proceed with revising AE in the light of his ‘politics’ books? In

retrospect, we may also wonder in the same light, whether he might have anticipated

Cohen by attempting his own Athenian Economy and Society, but, say, from A

Radical Perspective or perhaps, given his appreciation of MacIntyre, A Radical

Aristotelian Perspective.

The DAM-AE debate could have had a happy ending, had Finley followed the

programme elaborated in the Jane Harrison Memorial Lecture at Newnham College

delivered in May 1972 (and published with some revisions in 1975) shortly after his

return from Berkeley and Rutgers:

28

‘Ideally, we should create a third discipline, the comparative study of literate

post-primitive (if I may), pre-industrial societies… For most of the concerns of

the classicist (and for most of the periods on which he concentrates), pre-

Maoist China, pre-colonial India, medieval Europe, pre-revolutionary Russia,

and medieval Islam offer a more appropriate field for the systematic

investigation of uniformities and differences, and therefore for an increased

understanding of the society and culture of his own disciple’ (Finley 1975:

119).

In the case of classical Athens and Rome, this was prompted by an incisive,

self-critical account of Polanyi’s substantivist primitivism that displayed a perspective

rather different to the one that, as we saw, opens AE, which points to Polanyi as the

thinker to follow ‘in our own day’:

‘One of the intellectual roots of [Polanyi’s] insistence that the market model of

trade is not universal was the work of the German anthropologist, Richard

Thurnwald, who formulated a scheme of types of exchange which he called

‘reciprocity’, ‘redistribution’ and ‘market (or commercial) exchange’. These

Polanyi tried to convert into systems of ‘integration’ and, though the effort

must be deemed a failure, his insights remain indispensable in the study of

classical trade, indeed in all pre-industrial societies. The implication was

irresistible that the students of classical trade should steep himself in the

available studies of primitive trade, as did Polanyi himself. At least I could

not resist, until I discovered that these studies, thorough, sophisticated and

increasingly numerous though they are, were more misleading than

illuminating for my purposes… [T]he intrusion of genuine market

(commercial) trade, on a considerable scale and over very great distances, into

the Graeco-Roman world had a feedback effect on peasant markets and the

rest to such a degree as to render the primitive models all but useless’ (Finley

1975: 117).

This conclusion, which clashes with AE’s rejection of market-centred analysis just as

PAW and AE clashed over status and class, cleared the ground for explicit inclusion of

Marxist and modernist insights along with primitivist and substantivist ones in a

sustainable overall account of the Athenian trajectory (Nafissi 2005: 243-73).21

21 Ironically, Edward Cohen, considered Finley’s most effective modernist nemesis, follows Finley’s 1972/75 programme and the narrow and clearly demarcated focus of DAM and PAW much more closely than Finley himself in both the original and extended edition of AE. Cohen thus questions ‘the

29

‘Further Thoughts’ (AE in 1985): Retreat, Advance, or Holding Operation?

Finley gave the matter ‘Further Thoughts’ (FT) and published them in the second and

final 1985 edition of AE. The thoughts in question, however, retracted the self

criticism, and the alternative approach suggested in DAM and PAW, or rather refused

to extend them to ‘the ancient economy’. Indeed, the original conception of AE is

defended with renewed zeal as if PAW had been written by a polemical opponent:

‘All this brings me back to the point with which I closed my first chapter in

the original edition, namely that we may speak of ‘the ancient economy’ only

for reasons that have little or nothing to do with the economy, because of the

political and cultural history of Graeco-Roman antiquity’ (Finley 1985a: 181).

The original polemical context of this reiteration is underscored in FT where Carl

Bücher and Eduard Meyer are now named. The occasion is a defence of a major plank

of the former’s ‘primitivism’, the conception of Greek and Roman towns as ‘centres

of consumption’, against the ‘Historians of classical antiquity [who] have normally

ignored these views, or, following the lead of Eduard Meyer, treated Bücher, Weber

and Sombart as ignorant and not very bright trespassers onto a field they were advised

to abandon.” (1985a: 192). The reference to Bücher is significant as none of the

precursors (Weber, Hasebroek, Polanyi) mentioned in AE’s first edition went as far as

Bücher in producing an overarching account of the ancient economy that matched

AE’s scope (Bücher 1901). Indeed, following Polanyi and Eduard Will, Finley himself

had affirmed in 1962 that the ‘principle merit’ of Hasebroek was to have analysed

economic life within the cadre of the polis (Finley 1962/65: 12). Accordingly,

Hasebroek had refused to speak of the ancient economy as ‘the Hellenistic period’

freed ‘Greek commerce and industry… from its shackles… to expand beyond the

narrow limits of the city-state’ (Hasebroek: 1933: 81; cf. Gomme 1937).

blended amalgamations implicit in a work titled The Ancient Economy’ all the more forcefully by contrasting it ‘with the same author’s proper refusal, in analysis of legal history, to consider together evidence from the politically distinct Greek entities of Athens and Amorgos, even where the material relates to the same era, language, and geographical area’ (Cohen 1992: xii). A further irony is that the oikos, originally the concept and institution at the heart of Carl Bücher’s primitivism and defended by Finley against Eduard Meyer’s modernism, is ubiquitous in and central to the argument of Cohen’s Athenian Economy and Society and almost wholly absent in the actual analysis of Finley’s Ancient Economy (1985a: 152). Yet, the irony is compounded when in the introductory pages where Finley seeks to establish the unbridgeable socio-economic and intellectual gulf separating the pre-modern science of oeconomics and Adam Smith’s classical political economy, Finley complains that the ‘currently standard work [H. Mitchel, The Economics of Ancient Greece, 1957] in English on Greek economics has neither “household” nor oikos in its index” (1985a: 26).

30

However otherwise critical of the modernists, the 1962 Finley was in this

respect at one with the author of DAM a decade later and PAW a decade after that, but

not with the Finley who published AE at the same time as DAM or defended it in

1985 against the charge of neglecting the Hellenistic era: ‘… the old Greek world,

including the ‘western’ Greeks, underwent no changes in the economy that require

special consideration despite all the political and cultural changes that undoubtedly

did occur’ (Finley 1985a: 183, emphases added). But if so, Finley had placed himself

in a curious situation. For, prima facie, the above claim made on page 183 of AE’s

1985 edition directly contradicted the 1973 assertion repeated on page 181 of the

1985 edition that ‘we may speak of “the ancient economy” only… because of the

political and cultural history of Graeco-Roman antiquity”. By thus retaining and

reinforcing AE’s original conception, Finley and Finley’s Weber once again half clash

with my Weber. In this case, I have in mind the Weber whose concern about the uses

and abuses of ideal types applies as much to orthodox Marxism’s modes of

production and Bücher’s ‘household economy’ as to Finley’s AE:

‘The eminent, indeed unique, heuristic significance of these ideal types when

they are used for the assessment of reality is known to everyone who has ever

employed Marxian concepts and hypotheses. Similarly, their perniciousness,

as soon as they are thought of as empirically valid or as real (i.e., truly

metaphysical) ‘effective forces’, ‘tendencies’, etc. is likewise known to those

who have used them’ (Weber 1949: 103; Nafissi 2005: 83ff).22

Over the question of class too, FT reiterates AE’s original programme. In this

case, Finley acknowledged that he had reverted to class analysis in PAW whilst

rejecting it as ‘a useful category in the analysis of the ancient economy’ (1985a: 248

n.35). This was true, but what remained unclear was the further claim that PAW had

‘explained’ why the move did not constitute an inconsistency (1985a). The putative

explanation in fact amounted to no more than what is repeated in FT, namely that

‘There are many contexts in which we all speak of ‘class’ vaguely and non-

22 In questioning my possible over-estimation of Polanyi’s influence, Daniel Tompkins points out that his name is mentioned only once in AE’s “prologue [whereas], Weber appears in every act as well as the sequel” (Tompkins 2008: 131). Tompkins is of course right about the count, but when it comes to AE’s research programme, it remains the case, as was seen, that Finley named his precursors as Weber, Hasebroek and “in our own day… Karl Polanyi” (1985a: 26, emphasis added). Moreover, as I tried to demonstrate in my book and indicate here, the Weber that Finley employs in AE is not the evolved one (or is only one half of the one) who in the third edition of Agrarian Sociology came closer than anyone to consensually settle the oikos dispute, and whose research agenda anticipated the programme Finley self critically outlined in ‘Anthropology and Classics’ (Nafissi 2005: chapters 2-4; von Reden 2008).

31

technically, without causing any difficulty in comprehension’ (1985a: 183). But

nowhere is it explained why such a theoretically accomplished historian should accept

and employ vague concepts. Nor, having employed it, are we given to understand why

the vague concept of class was useful in analysing ancient politics but not ancient

economics and why the exact opposite was the case when it came to status. Indeed, at

one point AE did come tantalizingly close to finding a path back to class analysis,

only to have it withdrawn, apparently without any ironic or playful intent: ‘the most

troublesome inequality was not between town and country, not between classes, but

simply between rich and poor’ (1985a: 152). But did wealth and income not lend

themselves better to classification as class (or some post-class category) rather than

status, as Finley himself had recognized in PAW and earlier writings? Instead of

posing and answering the question directly, FT enters a closed loop by way of a rapid

tour of the ancient world and the variety and inconsistencies in conception and

application of the concept of class in Marxist literature up to and including de Ste

Croix, with the aim of disallowing the use of the concept. But what about using the

‘non-technical’ variant that had proved essential in the political analysis of Athens or

republican Rome in analysing the economic relations of the same periods and places,

and testing its usefulness? This of course may have entailed the break-up of the

ancient economy to periods and situations where status or estate or some other

concept may have been more applicable.

This option is ruled out without being put to the test by switching to the so-

called technical or Marxist sense of class, conceived statically and confined narrowly

to the sphere of production and master-slaver relations. The argument is then clinched

by turning to Pierre Vidal-Naquet’s ‘unimpeachable demonstration that Graeco-

Roman slaves did not constitute a class in a Marxist sense’ (1985a: 248 n.37; Vidal-

Naquet 1986), as if he had not earlier pointed to the multiplicity of Marx’s and

Marxist positions on the matter. In any case, Vidal-Naquet’s analysis understandably

questioned the designation of slaves as a class, because although exploited, they did

not generally constitute a class as an economically driven and politically engaged

collective actor or a ‘class for itself’. But this did not entail ignoring the historical

existence and significance of precisely such actors in Greece. Nor did it exclude a

dynamic conception of class in which the struggles of peasants enslaved or threatened

with slavery succeeded in banishing the practice in the case of male Athenians, i.e. all

those in possession of the status of citizen who nevertheless continued to coalesce and

32

act politically in part on the basis of economic identity and interest. Most tellingly

however, this approach accorded with Finley’s own discussion of slavery and politics

in Athens, but also with the putatively rival views of his sources, starting with

Aristotle:

‘The real difference between oligarchy and democracy is poverty and wealth.

Wherever men rule by reason of their wealth, whether they be few or many,

that is an oligarchy, and where the poor rule, that is a democracy. But in fact

the rich are few and the poor many; for few are well to do, whereas freedom is

enjoyed by all and wealth and freedom are the grounds on which the two

parties claim power in the state’ (Aristotle, Politics 1279b39-1280a6; cf.

1291b1-13; Plato, Republic 557a).

Here Aristotle both indicates the differentiation/disembedding ofactors and

factors along economic lines, and their reconnection at the political level in the form

of oligarchic and democratic factions arising in and through perhaps the most

successful class struggles waged by the peasants and urban poor, history’s usual

losers. And here is Weber’s distilled response to such developments, where no doubt

is left about what he would have thought of his portrayal as simply a

primitivist/substantivist theorist of status:

‘The ‘class struggles’ of antiquity – to the extent that they were genuine class

struggles and not struggles between status groups – were initially carried out

by indebted peasants and perhaps also artisans threatened by debt bondage and

struggling against debt creditors. For debt bondage is the normal result of

differentiation of wealth in commercial cities, especially in seaport

cities”(Weber 1976a: 185).

This analysis is underpinned and made possible by viewing class as

representing a ‘merely possible, and frequent, basis for communal action’ (Weber

1948: 181), and where ‘Property and lack of property are [considered]… the basic

categories of all class situations’ (1948: 182). Broad and historically contingent,

Weber’s approach to class thus not only accommodates Aristotle’s conflicts of rich

and poor, Finley’s ‘non-technical’ classes, or Marxist orthodoxy’s ‘technical’ classes,

but dovetails Marx’ own dynamic observation that, ‘The class struggles of the ancient

world took the form of chiefly of a contest between debtors and creditors, which in

Rome ended in the ruin of the plebeian debtors. They were displaced by slaves’ (Marx

1974: 135; cf. Finley 1985a: 184; de Ste Croix 1985).

33

Aristotle, Marx, and Weber thus all variously shared Finley’s ‘harmless’

conception of class, revealing a significant degree of economic disembedding or

marketization in Athens as well as in modern societies, albeit within distinct societal,

institutional, ideological, technological, and political matrices. This suggests yet

another factor that made up the distinct modernity of ancient Athens (Nafissi 2004;

2005: 257-73) and made their dialogue possible and of mutual and continuing interest.

Concluding Remarks

In view of the preceding discussion, at least a key to our starting questions and

conundrums is found in the tensions between Finley’s historical (Athens),

contemporary (Soviet Union) and speculative (their awaited and elusive synthesis)

utopias. The transformative or ‘revolutionary’ impact of his writings may be traceable

to the existentially charged energy and the normative, theoretical and empirical

resources he employed in the process. In the final analysis, they could not be resolved

without betraying his calling as a professional historian by ignoring existing evidence,

or discarding his normative commitment to ideals that he had internalised in the

1930s, the decade of the Spanish civil war, capitalist crisis, the spread of fascism, and

the dawn of the Soviet Union’s ‘planned civilisation’ (Finley 1967; S. and B. Webb

1936; Polanyi 1945: 240, 39; cf. Sievers 1949). What Hobsbawm named (1994) the

‘age of extremes’ or the ‘short twentieth century’ (1914-1991), which spanned

Finley’s life (1912-86), precluded a happy resolution to Finley’s own internal debate.

By the 1970s, when we joined this debate, if not 1956 or earlier, Finley had little

doubt that the actually existing socialist states had little to do with democracy in any

recognisable sense of the term. And of course, it was never in question that Athenian

democracy could not be linked to a socialist economy in either its prevalent statist or

other variants. In contrast, the liberal capitalist dystopias, which Finley opposed first

as a committed and rather effective activist (Schrecker 1986; Tompkins 2006, 2013;

Jones 2013) and then as a scholar and public intellectual, could claim far more

convincingly both descent from and advance over the slave-owning Athenian

democracy.

As with his almost certain membership of the US Communist Party (or

somewhere, in Cartlege’s words, ‘quite near the extreme left of American politics’

2013: 94), Finley never publicly discussed his choice of the country of Locke, Smith,

and Keynes (and indeed A. H. M. Jones) over that of Lenin, Stalin, and Khrushchev

34

as his second home. It is, however, telling that he confided to Michael Crawford (a

Cambridge University colleague between 1964-86) that he ‘took British citizenship to

vote Labour’ (correspondence with the author, 31 July 2015).23 Finley did not

join/rejoin the British Communist Party or any other political organisations,24 but nor

did he come anywhere near crossing the line to the anti-communist side of the

ideological Cold War. Quite the contrary, by concentrating his critical and polemical

fire on liberal democracies from the Athenian vantage, he found his own ‘third way’

to the (intellectual) left of social democracy alongside various tendencies that made

up ‘Western’ Marxism as well as other path-breaking thinkers such as John Dunn,

23 What I heard from Finley’s other colleagues and former students whom I interviewed in the course of my earlier research (and thanked in the ‘Acknowledgements’ to my book: ix-xi) all accorded with what was found above in his ‘political’ writings, namely that he saw himself as a man of the left, although less vocal or radical than his wife Mary. This was so even in the case of the late Geoffrey de Ste Croix, who had questions not just about AE or Finley’s treatment of his own magnum opus but also about the clash between the anti-elitism of Finley’s published writings and his acceptance of a knighthood and some other ‘grand’ aspects of his later lifestyle in Cambridge. It is, however, also notable that the ‘two men remained very close friends’ and when de Ste Croix was broken by his daughter’s suicide while at Cambridge ‘it was to Moses that he turned’ (Crawford, correspondence with the author, 3 September 2015). What Robert Browning says about John Morris is evidently true of both Finley and ? Ste Croix: ‘He saw his historical work as in a sense a contribution to politics’, except that, for better and/or worse, Finley did not seem to have achieved the ‘coherence’ found in Morris’ ‘attitude to life and history’ (North 2002: 3) or in de Ste Croix’s politics, theory, and historical accounts. This may help further explain the partial or curious judgements about his work or politics which assume coherence and thus generalize from his more widely read publications, arresting self- presentations, life style, or even a few off-the-cuff conversations.24 Finley, however, did not give up institutional-academic politics and Cartledge discusses his achievements in improving the teaching of ancient history in secondary schools as well as universities (2013: 102-4). Cartledge also discovered from talking to ‘many academic colleagues from the many academic colleagues in Cambridge of a senior generation or generations, Finley was a consummate academic politician’ who usually got ‘his way on the Classics Faculty Board… Typically, I understand, he exerted his influence by as it were chairing the meeting from the floor, which suggests to me that he would have been in his element in the Athenian boule…’ (ibid: 102). As with just about every other aspect of Finley’s career, there is a twist waiting to be discovered. Here is Michael Crawford on Finley at the History Board: ‘Although I have no recollections of MIF on the Classics Faculty Board, where I spent only one year as a co-opted member, my recollection of him on the History Faculty Board is of needless aggression that was mostly counter-productive; there is a related oddity in his interview with Keith [Hopkins, 18 October 1985], where he both insists that he is a historian, with all that that implies, but goes out of his way to say how congenial he finds the Classics Faculty, (correspondence with the author, 3 September 15). What Crawford describes as needless aggression tallies with Finley the polemicist whom Cartledge finds lapsing at times into caricaturing opponents (Cartledge 2013: 98), and whom Shaw and Saller celebrate for consciously ‘drawing the distinctions between various historical viewpoints with sufficient clarity that a choice is forced upon the reader’ (Shaw and Saller 1981: xxv, emphasis added). Momigliano may have had in mind these aspects of Finley’s office and scholarly politics in this passage in his ‘Personal Note’ to Finley’s (ed.) posthumously published Classical Slavery: ‘When Moses Finkelstein changed his name to Moses Finley a whole set of questions was almost entirely removed from the public side of his thinking. There are still some signs of the violence of this decision’ (Momigliano 1987: 2). I have attempted to show elsewhere why Momigliano’s claim does not fully convince by pointing to ‘other breaks and sacrifices’ (Nafissi 2005: 197; 196-200).

35

Quentin Skinner, or the former Marxist – and still a capacious Marxisant? – Alistair

MacIntyre.

From this base, Finley intervened through his ‘political’ (and anthropological/

sociological) histories forcefully and often polemically, but almost always with

internal coherence and clarity. Yet, as we saw, when it came to AE and FT and, as I

have shown elsewhere, in his other contributions to the battle of the ancient economy,

his argument suffered from inconsistency and indeed vacillation, even if rarely

without insight. This affirms not only Osborne’s observation about the insulation of

his economic and political writings but also their discordance, albeit entailed by an

underlying concordant and persistent theoretical-normative stance. In part, Finley’s

(halting) exclusion of modernism was about advancing the cause of theoretically

informed history against the conceptual primitiveness he associated with its

advocates. In this respect, what mattered most was theoretical rather than political

value. Thus the liberal Weber, the anti-liberal Polanyi, the subtle Marxist Anderson,

the ‘orthodox’ Marxist Lukács or the ‘Aristotelian’ MacIntyre, not to mention Marx

himself, all were gathered in a broad front to battle it out against ‘positivist’ and

‘antiquarian’ contingents. From this angle, ‘modernism’ with its tendency to obviate

structural and contextual discontinuities by atomistic treatment of evidence was a

necessary as well as obvious target for Finley’s campaign to transform his discipline.

A serious difficulty, however, was that from the first round of the oikos

dispute to the one which he started in the 1962 International Economic History

Conference (Finley 1965a) and kept going until his last publications (Finley 1985a,

1985c), there were modernist historians with the kind of theoretical versatility and

holistic mastery of evidence whose case therefore could not be easily dismissed as

positivist or antiquarian.25 On the contrary, many of their conclusions were not only

confirmed or anticipated by Weber, but coincided with Finley’s own findings (Nafissi

2005: 243-6). This should not be surprising if only because without a degree of trans-25 Two pairs of writers whom Finley chose to defend and reject in FT illustrate the point. The first, already mentioned above, was the favoured primitivist historical political economist, Carl Bücher, and his and Finley’s chief nemesis, the modernist historian Eduard Meyer. But Meyer could stand up to the political economists and their linear stages theory of history because of his developed knowledge of and substantive and methodological contributions to the emerging social sciences as well as history. In other words, he was the Finley of his day albeit from the conservative side of the political spectrum. The second contemporary pair was his favoured Hungarian-German historian Thomas Pekàry and his former student Keith Hopkins whose ‘models’ respectively showed no economic growth and significant growth under the Roman Empire (Finley 1985a: 182-3). But again the ‘modernist’ Hopkins, a subsequent holder of Finley’s chair, perhaps came closest to Finley in the breadth and depth of his theoretical versatility as the first ancient historian in the English speaking zone to hold chairs in both sociology and ancient history.

36

historical affinity, Finley’s own Athenian critique of liberal democracy or

commitment to ‘joined-up writing’ (and theoretical holism) would have become

groundless and devoid of any contemporary normative significance. Indeed, as we

saw in ‘Anthropology and Classics’, Finley himself self-critically acknowledged this

while affirming the existence of ‘markets on a considerable scale and over great

distances’, thus anticipating the conclusions of Cohen (1992) and Osborne (1991,

1996; cf. Saller 2005). This signalled a switch to a genuinely neo-Weberian research

programme with an inclusive reach which may have overcome AE’s inconsistencies

and resolved its clash with DAM and PAW.

Yet, Finley eventually chose instead to maintain and reinforce AE’s anti-

modernism. If this move cannot be in the main traced to conceptual or empirical

issues, by elimination as well as direct evidence, then it should not be surprising if an

explanation is found in the ‘political dimension’ which for him was a mark of every

serious enquiry. Finley’s historiography pursued a triple aim: to advance the cause of

theoretical and normative historical enquiry against antiquarianism, positivism, and

‘Panglossism’ (1985c); to use the Athenian legacy as a platform to ‘change the world’

(1965b) and thus deny its appropriation by apologists of liberal capitalism; and to do

so without subordinating historical evidence to normative and theoretical aims as was

the case with the historians who ‘converted Trotsky into a non-person in Soviet

historiography’ (Finely 1985c: 5).

He achieved all three coherently and normatively in the case of Athens’

political legacy, but when it came to the Athenian or ‘the ancient economy’ he

experimented creatively and desperately with all manner of methodological and

conceptual means (including redefining commonly understood terms, over-extended

ideal typification, and cultural reductionism) to resist its categorisation as a variant of

market economy. Critical accommodation of modernism may not have blunted the

normative force of direct democracy, but by conceding the association between

market economy and direct democracy would have reinforced the ‘Western’ case in

the central contest of his time between capitalism and socialism. In refusing to take

this step, Finley stood with the radical left which, although variously divided over

alternative forms of socialist economy, was at one in rejecting market capitalism. The

theoretically productive or suggestive incoherence of AE was, from this angle, the

result of the opposing pulls of his professional (antiquarian?!) calling that would not

countenance brushing facts out of his histories and the normative commitment that

37

pressed him to resist the categorisation of classical Athens as another variant of

‘open’ market society.

Finley did not do too badly in the circumstances. Hopkins, who opposed his

substantive analysis as well as his normative stance, celebrated his career, albeit

somewhat cheekily, as the leader of a new orthodoxy (Hopkins 1983: xi; cf. Morris

2002: 27), and Finley himself did not live to lament the worldwide triumph of liberal

capitalism and the evaporation of the hopes for socialist democracy in the Athenian

‘spirit’. Yet, as Jennifer Roberts finds, DAM ‘represented a new intellectual universe’

which saw a dramatic rise ‘in the valuation of Athens’ (Roberts 1994: 298), and not

just in the field of ancient history.

In contrast, not long after his death marketism was on the march in the

battlefields of ancient economy as well as in the collapsed world that had ‘produced’

Finley in the 1930s. I can refer to many telling examples of confirmations of what my

study of Finley’s own work both demonstrated and ‘predicted’, but here it suffices to

refer to Richard Saller’s confession:

‘Overall, I confess that I was surprised at the fundamental points of agreement

between Rostovtzeff and Finley, after years of reading about the “dichotomy”

between their interpretations [modernism versus primitivism] to quote a recent

important publication (Harris 1993: 15 [2011: 293])… after years of

tendentious representations it is important to understand what these two great

historians wrote in order to stop the fruitless jousting at straw men’ (Saller

2005: 227; cf. Shaw and Saller 1981).

But who should be blamed for hiding the truth for so long from Saller? He

specifically points the blame at William Harris, Keith Hopkins, and Peregrine Horden

and Nicholas Purcell (Saller 2005 : 224, 227).26 But what about Finley’s own

26 It is also notable that Harris’s rejection of Rostovtzeff’s vision of ‘a quasi-industrial economy’ in the article (and very passages) questioned by Saller (Harris 1993/2011: 293) is reasonable and indeed anticipated in Finley’s own lasting methodological and substantive criticisms of Rostovtzeff (Finley 1965a: 13; 1985: 193). Hopkins’s characterization of the Finley of AE as a ‘static minimalist’ is as accurate as can be for a model claiming to cover ‘the ancient economy over a thousand years’ (Hopkins 2002: 217; Crawford 1999: 5). According to Osborne, ‘Finley’s static world has now been superseded as the orthodox understanding of ancient economy by Horden and Purcell’s world of constant movement of goods and people’ (Osborne 2010: 126). Yet they too may be considered post-Finleyans who consider aspects of Finley’s legacy still ‘powerful’, ‘persuasive’, ‘laudable’, and ‘fundamental’ (Horden and Purcell 2000: 31, 105, 146, 554), whilst questioning his ‘ “minimalizing” comparative technique’ that ‘sabotaged’ his ‘galvanizing’ vision of ‘an ancient economy’ (2000: 146). And they are at one with Finley (and Saller?) that Rostovtzeff’s ‘vision of the structure of ancient society is now obsolete’, yet insist that ‘his careful combination of literary, epigraphic and archaeological data represents the only way forward in this field’ (2000: 32). Ironically here they anticipate Saller’s own wish that Finley ‘had addressed his challenge to archaeologists in a more constructive and precise way’

38

culpability? All Saller is able to recollect is that a ‘polemical tone’ spread after the

publication of AE to which ‘Finley himself contributed, for instance in the 1985

postscript to the second edition’ (Saller 2005: 227). But in fact almost all of the

references to Rostovtzeff in the original 1973 edition were clearly about variously

disclosing and dismissing his ‘modernism’, in some cases in terms that do not

disguise their murderous intent (see Finley 1973a/1985a: 33, 58-9, 78, 88, 145, 231

n.14, and especially 226 n.57, 234 n.52, 241 n.11, 244 n.47). In other words, the main

culprit was Finley himself, and not without some help from Saller when he and Shaw

stood shoulder to shoulder with the Finley who started a new round of ‘the battle of

ancient economy’ by turning his critical fire on Rostovtzeff in 1962 and famously

extended it in all directions in AE (Shaw and Saller 1981: xxiv-v; Finley 1962/65).

Yet, Saller’s confession/ revelation is grounded, but mainly in Finley’s

‘Anthropology and Classics’ (and many of his other writings on slavery as well as

DAM and PAW), not in the Finley of AE and FT to which both modernists and

Marxists were reacting. This is another way of saying that Finley was not in the first

and last instance debating Meyer, Rostovtzeff, de Ste Croix, or Hopkins, but himself.

Saller thus appears both right and wrong. He can fault Finley’s critics for not

recognising that there was more than one Finley, but then it is also true that the

criticism applies with greater force to himself and Finley’s others followers, not to

mention the great man himself.

This should also help overcome another related reductionism rampant in both

camps, namely that there was only one Weber (or Marx, or Polanyi),27 and more

crucially, that he was Finley’s Weber. This multiple conflation informs Manning and

Morris’ explanation of the apparent shortcomings of AE and the programme that

underpins it:

‘Given that Finley made some of his most important contributions as much as

fifty years ago, and his larger Weberian theoretical framework had already

(Saller 2002: 257). On reflection, it should not be surprising that Finley’s serious critics would come from the ranks of his own followers or students such as Hopkins and Osborne, or allies and opponents in theoretically informed history such as de Ste Croix or Cohen, rather than the ‘antiquarians’ and ‘positivists’, unequipped or uninterested to respond.

27 The Weber part of my book (2005: chapters 2-4) discusses the methodologically mediated break in Weber’s contributions to the study of ancient economies and the oikos dispute, from the insightful primitivism of the ‘Social Causes of the Decline of Ancient Civilization’ to the critically inclusive approach of the third and final edition of Agrarian Sociology.

39

been around for fifty years at that point, it is hardly surprising that we know

more and ask different questions’ (Manning and Morris 2005: 43)

This is certainly a significant welcome shift from claiming that ‘Finley’s

substantivist vision will remain at the centre of our attempts to understand Athens for

the foreseeable future’ (Morris 1994: 366). It is, however, no more and no less than

moving from the Finley of AE to the Finley of the ‘Anthropology and Classics’, DAM

and PAW. But are Manning and Morris on the right track when they explain the

limitations of AE by tracing it to Weber’s largely outdated programme? They are –

but only if it is recognised that the Weber they have in mind is the one deconstructed

and reconstructed in accordance with the primitivist-substantivist Finley’s normative

agenda. Otherwise, although the contributions of the Weber who wrote AS may not

last as long as those of Plato and Aristotle, they still have much to offer, not least for

appreciating the extent to which he stood apart from Finley’s Weber. In any case,

what should be clear by now is that the limitations that Morris himself has found in

AE are not traceable to the Weber who wrote Agrarian Sociology and was praised by

Finley for having done so.

Finally, Saller again makes a telling point when he blames the politicisation of

the battle of ancient economy for the ‘sterile’ continuation of the overlapping Finley

debate. He thus regrets that ‘the debate over the ancient economy has taken on a

strident, political edge, as it has been caught up in the larger politics of the twentieth

century’ which he pinpoints as a key factor in the ‘increasingly sterile… Finley/anti-

Finley debate’ (Saller 2005: 228). But this Saller may recall the Saller and Shaw who

produced a most comprehensive bibliography of Finley’s publications from 1934 to

1981, and underlined ‘the central role of confrontation and polemic’ in Finley’s

historiography, affirmed it by claiming that ‘it is one of the historian’s duties to take

sides’ (Shaw and Saller 1981: xxv), and concluded his overview of Finley’s thought

and writings with this quote from the historian: ‘The world will have to be changed,

not the past’ (1981: xxvi). That Finley (and presumably that Saller) would have said

that serious scholarly debates were always and intrinsically political and would not

have much minded stridency. That said, what would have certainly concerned Finley

and should concern us is the increasing sterility of the Finley/anti-Finley debate, but

in part that may be blamed on the participants’ failure to decide even for themselves

which is the Finley they are defending or attacking. The sterility, in my reckoning, is

40

in the main to be found in the solipsistic supremacy of neo-liberal capitalism which

has made so many academic debates just that.

If there are other more adequate accounts of the questions and conundrums left

unresolved in Finley’s thought and legacy than the one outlined here, I’ll be elated to

see them. Meanwhile, having attempted to retrace his scholarly path(s) in the spirit

that warmed his heart, this is how I imagined he would have ended the debate he

carried on with himself until the end, had he lived to witness what we have since his

death:

‘… If it is true that markets are here to stay, then there must be considerable

consolation in the recognition that direct democracy is not irreconcilable with

a variously constrained but flourishing market economy, such as existed in

Athens in its classical age. That this extends rather than diminishes the utopian

appeal of Athens by bringing to the fore the socio-economic institutions and

mechanisms that helped ensure the primacy of political ends and values as

well as establish perhaps one of the most egalitarian distributions of income

and wealth among the citizens of any market democracy, is surely the kind of

ironic twist in the continuing ‘battle of ancient economy’ that Finley would

have appreciated’ (Nafissi 1994/2005: 288).

Be that as it may, Finley’s ghost would have reason to question the hopeful

undertones of this conclusion. More than two decades after this was originally written

(1994), the implications, if not the formulation, of what Finley said to Friendly four

decades earlier (1971) about the Soviet Union and the prospects of democratic

socialism sound prophetic. As with just about all Kremlinologists, Finley was not

predicting the collapse of the Soviet Union then or later. Instead, he was saying that,

were it to prove immune to democratic reform, then there was no hope for the kind of

socialism (and capitalism?) that he could be at home in or even visit. At least in two

respects this has come to pass. First, with the elimination of the Soviet camp, the

Euro-communist and other radical universalist movements, however sustained,

dissolved, or reconstituted, have yet to produce a genuine alternative to neo-

liberalism. Secondly, social democracy, capitalism’s saviour in Finley’s formative

1930s and later, not only failed to renew itself as a potent universalist alternative to

neo-liberalism in the 1990s and 2000s, but is emerging from the present crisis weaker

than ever before. Unlike the 1930s or 1970s, the (neo-liberal) programme that bears

the main responsibility for a global crisis is emerging stronger, even though the crisis

41

is contained for now largely by its putatively redundant, neo-Keynesian, rival. In

Finley’s time, the social democratic state was rejected by the radical left, from

revolutionary Trotskyists and Maoists to Euro-communists, Frankfurt Marxists and

militant unions precisely for saving rather than overthrowing capitalist plutocracies.

Now the unifying horizon and common ground of the left as a whole is to stop the

marketist forces form completing the commodification of that state and its ‘public

services’. In sum, far from having become politically a ghost in the last decades of

his life, both his ancient and contemporary political positions were astute and far

sighted enough to have kept his legacy alive and his ‘ghost everywhere’ (Patterson

1998: 157) thirty years and a whole era after his death.

King’s College London

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