The Primacy of the Political: Rahe and the Myth of the Polis

Abstract

Paul Rahe belongs to the long tradition of mythologizing the polis, otherwise known as ‘the classical republican tradition’, which has two signal achievements to its credit. The first is to claim for the great landed monarchies of Europe the democratic legacy of the polis as their very own. The second is to distance themselves from eastern regimes by characterizing them as ‘despotic’ and ‘other’. This tradition is seriously challenged by modern classical and Near Eastern scholarship, which shows city-republican forms to have originated in the east. Rahe's particular version is open to the additional challenge that it glorifies the male warrior polis, from which women were systematically excluded, ‘as a moral community of men united by a common way of life’, as if a community which depended on the labour of women but gave them no rights could have moral integrity.