"Political theory is, quite simply, man's (sic) attempts to consciously understand and solve the problems of his group life and organization. Thus, political theory is an intellectual tradition and its history consists of the evolution of men's thoughts about political problems over time." (Sabine, History of Political Theory, 3: Sabine uses male as the default gender, a habit not to be encouraged)
To study theory is to study a collection of writings, not the actual institutions, practices, or customs. They are important to the study of theory, but must play the role of background. An actual institution has a theory behind it, but it and the theory are at least intellectually separable. Perhaps it is similar to the relation between minds and brains/bodies. Theory and practice interact, but it is not a simple interaction.
"the political theorist is a kind of super-politician-he thinks through and presents persuasively the nature and desirability of certain connections that the work-a-day political leader may not have time to understand or analyze on his own." (Sabine, ibid., 6)
A theorist observes actual practice and institutions and then analyzes them. Interestingly, the theorist may be wrong in his observations, and yet those wrong observations might exert great influence, perhaps far away in time and space from when they were made.
Ancient Greece, in particular Periclean Athens, is what Sabine calls the starting point of European civilization, what is often called Western civilization. Pericles stands about as far from us as he does from the great pyramids of Egypt in time. Greece was a unique place, but it formed more part of the Eastern Mediterranean than the Western Mediterranean. There is an important question about the racial and geographical "ownership" of the Greek tradition that deserves a small digression. I would maintain that they, like many of the greatest sites in the world, belong as much to a Malagasy schoolgirl who learns about them as they do to a Siberian as they to a British Muslim schoolboy. Copyright and all that obscure the fact that ideas can be claimed but not really owned: an idea is the sort of thing that you do not lose by giving away, and it only acquires worth if it is given away. In fact, it grows and develops and improves more the more it is given away. Love is similar. In that spirit I teach my class in Vermont. The Greeks were a particular people, but their ideas are not particularly Greek in an important sense.
The crucial difference between Greek culture and Egyptian, Mesopotamian, or Chinese, , etc. cultures was that in Greece, religion science, politics, and myth became disassociated and the Greeks continuously asked "why" about everything they thought of. In Mesopotamia, for instance, a caste of priests were the master mathematicians and astronomists of their society, and their writing was used to record the astronomical/astrological data they collected. Myths explained the relationships between the things in the heavens and on earth: all of that was part of one fabric. In Greece, however, particularly in Asia Minor (modern Turkey) and southern Italy ("Magna Graecia"), math became a subject of its own, as did theories about eclipses and metallurgy etc. To be sure, those subjects were related to other subjects, but they were not part and parcel of the religion, myth, and political apparatus of their society. The engineering and astronomy of the Mesopotamians or Egyptians, for example, far surpassed that of the Greeks. But they were ruled by god-kings whose power was enforced by a bureaucratic and priestly class who were the holders of the astronomical, writing, mathematical, etc. knowledge. In Greece, that was not the case, and so science and math and other subjects were free to develop in a more secular way the proved felicitous to their development. They stripped the Egyptian and Mesopotamian disciplines of their mythological and political trappings.
That spirit enabled the Greeks to begin to do what we call political theory: they could observe their society and others as if from the outside and analyze or theorize about them. In addition, the rise of trade allowed them to be less dependent on the unpredictable harvest. If they did not have a good crop locally, they might be able to import from elsewhere. Thus their society depended more on group cooperation than the whims of nature. They projected the idea that laws were as important as a whimsical god-driven universe onto the universe itself. Laws of nature were thus theorized not as divine elements, but more like what we conceive laws of nature to be.
Although many of the ideas in the above discussion come from the
first chapter of George Sabine's A History of Political Theory,
Dryden Press, Hinsdale, Illinois, 4th edition revised by Thomas
Thorson, 1973, the above discussion was inspired by Sabine rather than
simply a report about Sabine.
One particular factor in the impetus to begin political theorizing
which I do not think that Sabine emphasizes enough is the tremendous
importance of the many colonies
which many Greek states sent out. To send out a colony is to form a new
society. Even if one bases it on one's mother city, nonetheless, it
must occasion reflection on that mother city's systems. When one
considers that many Greek colonies were founded jointly by more than
one city-state, it becomes clear that the Greeks were founding new
city-states from the ground up. That must have occasioned a lot of
practical decisions about how to run things. That a body of thought
grew up about politics and that it eventually found written form in
various authors individual writings is no surprise.
Something happened in Greece in the seventh century or earlier to
precipitate the development of human thought that occurred in the 6th
and 5th centuries in Greece. Coinage. Writing. Colonies. Decentralized
government. Trade. All led to an 'acceleration'
of thought on all fronts. No single factor can explain why Greece
developed such an extensive range and depth of human thought and
practice on so many forefronts of endeavor.
Rome is the inheritor of
things Greek, the conduit for things Greek, and also an important
source of innovations, adaptations, and other further developments in
political thought, among other areas. Because Greece so strongly
influenced Rome, it is customary to refer to the culture that arose
from the two as "Greco-Roman." We will discuss Rome more towards
the end of this course.