ancient Greece

This study examines conceptions of outsiders to the polity, focusing on the lexical items migrant(s), refugee(s), and exile(s) in both internet- and print-based sources. Drawing primarily on a subsection of the Genealogies Internet Corpus consisting of left-wing sources, I argue that left-wing politics is currently caught up in the rhetoric of the right and of mainstream institutions in society, largely reproducing the same discursive patterns even as it sets out to challenge them. Dominant patterns in left-wing Internet sources reveal, for example, that the economic migrant vs. political refugee distinction enforced by mainstream institutions remains largely intact, that the assumption of a “refugee crisis” unfolding in Europe is accepted at face value, and that the left is entangled in the same politics of labeling imposed by the right, reproducing designations such as “undocumented migrants” uncritically. Refugees and migrants, moreover, are represented as victims with no agency, are discussed in legal terms that serve to dehumanize them, and are repeatedly “quantified” as a homogenous and potentially problematic category. Acknowledging the contagious nature of dominant discourses and the difficulty of finding an alternative language with which to argue against established institutional rhetoric, the study further explores historical models that appear more consistent with the values espoused by left-wing politics today. It examines a subcorpus of modern English translations of ancient Greek texts such as Thucydides’ The Peloponnesian War and Herodotus’s Histories to demonstrate the viability of adopting a different conceptualization of refugees and other outsiders to the polity that may be drawn from classical antiquity—and/or from nineteenth- and early twentieth-century receptions of texts originating in classical antiquity—and the possibility of developing an alternative discourse with which to speak about migrants in the present.

Commentators oft cite the rather grand claim that for Hegel there was no concept of individual personality, subjectivity nor personal autonomy in Ancient Greece. Hegel’s claim is either taken as orthodox and making sense in the Hegelian historical system as a whole and so little discussed; or is flatly ignored as the worst kind of metaphysical obfuscation; a response a little too comfortable for liberal thinkers. Neither reaction is entirely satisfying. Not enough attention has been paid to it, especially for the vast majority of social and political thinkers who would find it at least contentious, so the present paper aims to assert its significance both for Hegelian politics as a whole and to pay enough attention to it in order to make it very difficult for those who find it a contentious statement to continue to ignore it. One wants to ask what it might mean for one’s self-understanding to be so radically different that, as a human being, I understand myself as first and foremost (and perhaps completely) not as a subjective individual. It is conceptually very difficult to be a self-conscious individual -- in even a minimal sense -- without some idea of being an atomic, individual unit. It is the claim of the following argument that a full understanding of this distinction, between ancient and modern self-understandings, would lead to a revision of Hegel’s liberal credentials, though not entirely for liberal reasons.