The Tragedy of Democracy without Authority: A Reflection on Maritain and Thucydides

The Tragedy of Democracy without Authority: A Reflection on Maritain and Thucydides | Jose Maria J. Yulo, Ed.D. | May 5, 2011 | Ignatius Insight

Editor's note: This essay was presented to The American Maritain Association at the 2010 Annual Meeting, held at Walsh University, North Canton, Ohio.

Scrupulous fear of the gods is the very thing which keeps the Roman Commonwealth together. To such an extraordinary height is this carried among them, both in private and public business, that nothing could exceed it. –Histories, Polybius
 
Infirmity doth still neglect all office
Whereto our health is bound; we are not ourselves
When nature, being oppressed, commands the mind
To suffer with the body. – King Lear, Shakespeare
 

In the Poetics, Aristotle described the distinctly Hellenic medium of tragedy thusly. It was "the imitation of an action that is serious and also, as having magnitude, complete in itself...with incidents arousing pity and fear, wherewith to accomplish its catharsis of such emotions" (p. 1460). From Aeschylus to Sophocles and finally Euripides, there can be observed certain unspoken dynamics within tragedy. The tragic figures of Agamemnon, Oedipus, and Pentheus all share a binding doom which can be traced to the ramifications of their chosen actions in the course of their respective tales. There are subtle differences between what brings about suffering and pathos to each of these men. Aeschylus' Agamemnon agrees to divinely mandated sacrifice of his own Iphigenia. Pentheus refuses to bow to the new god from the east. Oedipus is the unhappy mean between these two in his having complicity, albeit unknowing, leading to his father's death. To study tragedy, it seems, is to attempt to understand humanity's role in bringing it about.
 
In keeping with this introspection, there can be found in antiquity separate accounts, historical rather than theatrical, telling of even greater tragedy than the abovementioned tomes. The Athenian general Thucydides, with keen and sobering perspective, wrote of the greatest of all Hellenic falls, that of a war to end Greece's golden age. In his history of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides described the descent of Greece from its height of victory over Persia and into a horrific conflict between its two powers, Athens and Sparta. This civil war will provide a link between tragedy and the study of politics, most specifically the politics of democracy.
 
Jacques Maritain outlined some potentially marring elements to particular democracies. Democracies were acutely problematic when they did not collectively comprehend the necessity of legitimate authority permeating the polis. Lacking this understanding, power was elevated in authority's absence. Ultimately, this led to the degeneration of societies thus constructed because, "To separate power and authority is to separate force and justice" (p. 94). Thucydides told of two accounts wherein this descent, or tragic fall, is most evident. These are the accounts of the Melian Dialogue, and the siege of Corcyra. In examining these accounts, Maritain's championing of democracies wed to legitimate authority has special import nearly twenty centuries ago. Toward this end, a brief discussion of the causes and outcomes of the Peloponnesian War will commence, followed by the two narratives abovementioned, and finally a particular perspective from Maritain's political thought will be discussed.
 
There are few scholars today who have written as much on the subject of Thucydides' histories as Yale's Donald Kagan. The Sterling Professor of History and Classics is noted for his four-volume opus on the Peloponnesian War, and his ability to draw parallels from this saga to more recent and contemporary world conflicts. It is precisely this that Kagan produced in his On the Origins of War (1996).

Read the entire essay at Ignatius Insight...