The Project

Introduction

This project aims to put class at the centre of the historical reconstruction of ancient Greek democracy. It contends that class struggle — grounded in the economic relations and occupational structures of the Greek cities, and manifesting itself in the social, political, and cultural oppositions that characterised them — is fundamental to our understanding of Greek democracy.

This perspective finds much purchase in our Classical and Hellenistic sources, both in the direct evidence for political struggle and in contemporary reflections on Greek politics and democracy. The struggle between the rich and the poor for dominance lies at the heart of Aristotle’s analysis of Greek politics, with further, complex subdivisions based on occupation determining for him the precise nature of constitutional forms.

For this keen observer of the politics of his day, thinking about Greek politics in terms of class was indispensable. It is therefore surprising that class has been all but abandoned as an explanatory concept by most modern scholars of ancient Greek politics.

It is this project’s contention that a more flexible and integrated notion of class, informed both by the best Marxist historiography (especially the work of E.P. Thompson) and by the best work in sociology (especially Pierre Bourdieu’s approach), allows us to put this concept back where Aristotle placed it: at the heart of the analysis of ancient Greek politics and society.

Objectives

The project aims to re-establish the centrality of class dynamics in Greek politics and society through engaging with other disciplines and integrating disparate scholarly trends into a new picture of the development, nature, and discourses of Greek democracy.

The main objectives are:

To shed light on the strong association in Greek thought between conditions of labour and social ranking
To explore how particular occupational groups were identified as bearers of distinctive cultural and political interests
To identify how leisure came to be seen as a key marker of elite status
To explore how class oppositions structured episodes of civil strife and constitutional arrangements
To investigate redistributive institutional arrangements as evidence of ongoing class struggle
To explore embodied attitudes and cultural tastes that marked class oppositions
To study the ideological means through which elites disqualified the working classes from political participation
To investigate how popular culture and morality formed the bedrock of democratic institutions
To shed light on how class dynamics intersected with gender, foreigners, and slavery

Theoretical Approach

The project will favour approaches to class that can be productively integrated: Marxist approaches focusing on domination and exploitation combined with sociological approaches stressing cultural forms of group distinction.

“Class happens when some men feel and articulate the identity of their interests as between themselves, and as against other men whose interests are different.” — E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (1963)

Class is approached as a historical and relational phenomenon: something that takes shape over time in social relationships, through processes of accumulation, reproduction, and conflict, rather than as a static social structure. Class positions and identities acquire meaning only in relation to one another, through opposition and differentiation.

These oppositions are grounded in economic life as it is lived and experienced—above all in conditions of labour, security and insecurity, dependency, and access to resources—which underpin the formation of class identities without mechanically determining them. Economic experience provides the material basis from which class distinctions are articulated socially, culturally, and politically.

Class struggle is therefore understood broadly. It includes relations of domination and exploitation, but is not limited to them. It also encompasses struggles over redistribution, widely conceived: over income and resources, but also over political power, public pay, honours, leisure, dignity, and institutional arrangements, insofar as these are constructed and contested in oppositional class terms.

Finally, the project treats culture and politics not as secondary “reflections” of economic relations, but as key arenas in which class identities are formed, negotiated, and fought over. Cultural practices, values, and traditions are central to how economic experiences are interpreted and mobilised, and to how class antagonisms take durable and historically specific forms.