Alexander as World-Historical Individual
We have examined the factors and conditions that allowed for Alexander to extend his rule over Asia, so it is now appropriate to consider his place in world history generally. Much of this will overlap with my previous post on Alexander, but I find it necessary to expand on a few themes, and I would rather do it here in a new entry. There is almost too much to dig into when discussing the particular state of Greek society at the time of Alexander, and a good deal of controversy in interpreting it. I will not be dealing with that controversy here, in such a short entry, but even a cursory review of literature will give the curious reader a good idea of current and long-standing disagreements. In some regards, this is a re-write of my earlier entry, but I'd like to think of it as an addition. Anyway, if you have had enough of Alexander, you may consider skipping this one.
History and trivia are often confused for one another. It is a very common thing to meet someone who loves history and then proceeds to list off the particular time periods and countries that they are interested in. These individuals can rattle off many facts and figures about their subject of choice, many of them will even recite commonplace "theories" about why things turned out the way they did. But, this is not history, it's trivia. The real importance of Alexander lies deeper than the facts of his life.
History and trivia are often confused for one another. It is a very common thing to meet someone who loves history and then proceeds to list off the particular time periods and countries that they are interested in. These individuals can rattle off many facts and figures about their subject of choice, many of them will even recite commonplace "theories" about why things turned out the way they did. But, this is not history, it's trivia. The real importance of Alexander lies deeper than the facts of his life.
Appearance and truth
A recent historical trend has been to study of the lives of common folk. This is admirable since the understanding of daily life for those who made up the majority of past societies is not nearly as developed as one may assume; for instance, our picture of the home life of a typical ancient Greek citizen is still somewhat foggy while we know a great many details about the lives of their kings and commanders. But it also has the tendency to err too heavily towards post-modern conceptions of history. In that conception, any "grand narrative" may be oppressive to those whose narrative gets blotted out by it. That is to say, that there is no teleological "point" to history, only a number of individual narratives and world views.
The history of human society is, of course, made up of innumerable specific facts about innumerable individual lives over a period of many thousands of years. There is never a period during which humans are not interacting with the world, as men have not yet ceased to walk the earth, but history is more than the sum of particular facts made real by trillions of names. There is meaning to human history and we can trace progress in the rise and fall of civilizations, but this meaning is found in the real demands of human activity, not in the self-realization of a divine plan.
These people all lived and died following their own individual interests and acting accordingly - it is easy to cite this is proof of the meaninglessness of history, but it is far more amazing to face the fact that out of the chaos of billions of lives with billions of aspirations comes any social organization at all. But that is precisely what we find through human history: a series of forms of society, all organized in particular ways and following their own laws of operation and development. This is true whether the participants are aware of it or not - and they have not been, generally. The functioning of economy and production has compelled humanity to organize. At first, it was in order to gain greater levels of mastery over the forces of nature. It was not long before these productive forces developed to such a level that the participants were chained to them through a web of productive relations - or what we commonly call "society". More specifically, I mean class society. Once definite social relations develop out of the daily functioning of economy and the division of labor, society in turn confronts the individual who has been born into it as a force, one as mighty as nature. That which arose to gain mastery over the environment gains mastery over its participants; the bodies and minds men are tied to the mode of production and the society resting upon it.
This does not mean - as some wise masters of common-sense never tire of saying - that "things never change." On the contrary, one sees a never-ending process of change in society. How else can one explain the fact that we no longer live as hunter-gatherers? Nor can we passively accept the explanations for historical change provided to us by the chroniclers of their times. Every epoch is captive to its ruling ideas to a greater or lesser extent, although in revolutionary times there are always those visionaries who see some of the truths exposed through the struggle of classes and nations. Thucydides, Machiavelli, Hegel, and Marx were only able to express such sharp insight because they lived during times of great shifts in their societies. Genius tends to cluster around dates, just as great events do.
Greek society during the first half of the 4th century was such a society: the destructive Peloponnesian War, an attempt by Greek powers, led by Sparta, to break open the markets and trade routes dominated by the Athenian Empire, had not solved the central contradictions facing Greek slave society, it only aggravated them. Property became more concentrated in fewer hands than ever, which led to great wealth disparity; revolution and counter revolution was commonplace; destructive wars raged over the remains of the empire, although ultimately no state was strong enough to secure control. The appearance of Athenian strength during the 4th century was in reality a "jobless recovery", during which certain layers of the Athenian ruling class gained at the expense of ruined small farmers and even large landowners following the war. In the West, the Greek cities of Sicily and Italy were plagued by political revolution and wars with Carthage. In this general state of impasse, Greek society was faced with the choice to either expand or face decline.
Friedrich Engels wrote that a mode of society does not exit the scene until it has developed all of the means of production that it is good for, and so it was not yet the fate of slave society to pass from existence. Slave labor was being utilized on a larger scale and in a more productive capacity than before, particularly in industry, but would not achieve the ultimate agricultural form of latifundia until the height of the Roman Republic. Many of the most ingenious scientific and artistic achievements took place under the rule of Alexander's Successors. It was, at the time, the most advanced mode of production in the world, and the ancient Persian and Egyptian modes of production - revolutionary and ascendant in their own time - continued on mostly due to the infancy of the Greek political form.
In that infancy, though, lies some of the eternal attraction that we feel - and indeed the Romans felt - for the Greece before Alexander. Writing of the attraction we still feel for Greek art and culture, Marx wrote in The German Ideology:
Yet, the city-state had outlived its usefulness. It had been a transitional form of the state that developed out of tribal society, but the realities of a more fully-developed classical economy proved to be beyond the political capacity of the polis. The experience of the Athenian Empire had been the historical test; the city-state failed such a harsh exam. Despite a relatively complex administration, employing hundreds of citizen magistrates, the imperial system remained little more than an enforced alliance. Furthermore, Athenian democracy was unfit for the task of governing such a system, even as radical democracy was possible only through imperial tribute. Democratic imperialism took the form of vampiric draining of allies for the sake of political stability at home and punitive measures to keep allies within orbit. Naturally, the imperialism of all historic ruling classes displayed these traits, but there was none of the Roman sophistication - ideological or material - to crude Athenian rule.
History is not mechanical, though. Despite being outmoded by the practical economic and administrative demands of a matured Greek society, the polis continued to exist for centuries, proving that it had not ceased to be politically useful for the ruling class. In fact, protection and patronage of the old city-states continued to be an important political asset for those Greek kings who ruled over the massive kingdoms in the East. What the polis had lost was the power of independent action.
The political demands and ambitions of the Greek ruling class in the 5th and 4th centuries were the ideological expression of the material demands of the matured Greek economy. The mode of production, especially in large trading centers like Athens and Corinth, had become quite sophisticated, with a relatively high division of labor, and it required more and more resources. Likewise, the Greek ruling class developed a thirst for luxury products. the food grown inside the limits of the states was not sufficient to meet the needs of a growing population; Athens had become reliant on grain imports from the Black Sea (Pontus) by the middle of the 5th century. More people inhabited Greece and the Aegean isles during this period than would again until the 20th century. A large proportion of them lived in cities.
With the concentration of land into fewer and fewer hands came the ruin of the small landowners and political instability - the age saw countless revolutions and counter-revolutions. Classes fought each other to a standstill and tyrants began to emerge once again throughout the Greek world. The thirst for conquest of markets and land among the representatives of the ruling class was also partially driven by such social instability. Such contradictions and forces were inherent in Greek slave society and were realizing themselves through time and human activity. With the greatest achievements of Greece came also the threat of decline and instability.
Particular events showcased the universal necessity as Greek states reached out toward the West and East. Athenian rogue Alcibiades, the architect of the ill-fated Sicilian expedition of 415, envisioned Sicily as a stepping stone to extend Athenian rule to Italy and North Africa. Spartan king Agesilaus II launched an ambitious invasion of Asia minor in 396, anticipating Philip's plans by 60 years. Timoleon of Corinth arrived in Sicily in 344 with a mercenary force which successfully overthrew the Syracusan tyrant Dionysius and subsequently resettled many Corinthians in that city. Settlement was a common war-time practice in classical Greece, cutting across class conflict by shipping off surplus population. Many tremors presaged the coming of Alexander.
As for the phenomenon of kingship returning to the Greek world after centuries of absence, it is a case of a dialectical cycle. As discussed in the previous post, the Macedon of the 4th century was backward and barbarous. Philip and his son were able to utilize all the cultural and military achievements of the advanced states, though without any of the political and economic difficulties of dealing with private interests; since Macedonia had not developed a complex web of entrenched class and political interests, Though both kings in name, there was nothing in common between Darius and Alexander. The archaic kingship of Macedon was based on tribal social organization in which the king emerges from the traditional "front fighter" type of leader, answerable to the layer of tribal leaders and nobles who support him. This was barbarism compared to the complex and cultured forms of Greek politics, but coupled with the successful conquest and utilization of nearby gold mines and new land, the king now played the part of a centralized will. The kingship thus returned to Greece as a higher level of the previously negated form.
Kingship under Philip and Alexander retained its social base in the aristocracy and tribal tradition, but there was a difference between their reigns and those of the Successors. Like the governments of the tyrants, I believe that they represented Bonapartist regimes. Bonapartism is the rule of the sword over society, a point at which the state holds itself above society by the force of arms. The state is no empty place to be filled by different people and parties, but is born of particular societies, resting upon the dominant modes of production and social relations. The need for a state at all is born of the wish to keep class struggle at bay, a fact implicit in the rise of the first wave of tyrants in the 7th and 6th centuries: such men were often "law givers" and architects of the classical Greek state as we know it, although not in a fully-formed manner, but at least in essence. Their rise to power was due to intense class struggle, during which no contending class was able to gain a political upper hand; the situation was ripe for a strong man to step in and arbitrate, thus the first Bonapartist regimes came to the West.
Tyrant regimes balanced themselves between classes - taxing or confiscating land from aristocrats and large slave owners, cancelling debts of small farmers, providing military employment for the landless poor -but they were not truly independent of society; no one is. Their regimes, as those of the Successors, were still ultimately slave states, based upon the labor of slaves, and dominated socially by the class of large slave owners. This broad social base did not stop the kings from levying taxes upon the ruling class, or disarming the citizenry, but their reigns are impossible to make sense of without viewing them as distorted representatives of the slave owners.
In light of such an analysis, Alexander is a regime in the process of "becoming"; the past confronting past while being pulled into a novel future. The form of regime wielded by him, burnt up in its use, much like the mind and body of its wielder.
Just as there are laws which govern nature and the cosmos, it has been shown that there are laws which govern the development of human society. The major difference is that while the laws are nature exist whether we are there to witness them or not, the laws of social development function through the activities of individuals. As new modes of production develop out of the old, the force of the future knocks against the shell of society. The world-historical individual is caught between freedom and necessity; necessity will find an outlet to express the changes at the core of the world upon the surface - upon the state, culture, ideology. Greek society had outgrown its bounds, geographically and politically, and under the leadership of Alexander, it would crush the ancient powers that once dominated it. The Persian Empire and the might of Egypt, all that were once beacons of civilization, became unreal and were negated in the wake of the Macedonian. All of the old was swept into the waste basket of history.
Alexander must, in my view, be recognized as the hero of his age; this cannot be tarnished by any exposure of personal traits, of violence or moral cries against conquest. Such popular revisionism does nothing but make all history a meaningless march of cruelty and accident. Like Alexander himself, who perished in carrying out his momentous task, all else burns up in the face of events and forces that were bigger than the man himself. His successors attempted to copy his every trait and fashion, but it did not bring them any closer to achieving what he did - the material conditions were all lined up perfectly and the world only waited for someone to take up the task of embodying necessity, once accomplished, no one could force it through a second time. Despite the genius of Ptolemy or the fierce martial skill of Pyrrhus, history only moves in one direction.
Of course, the details are still pretty amazing too.
Suggested Readings
Hegel, "Reason in History"
Marx, "The German Ideology"
Arrian, "Anabasis Alexandri"
The history of human society is, of course, made up of innumerable specific facts about innumerable individual lives over a period of many thousands of years. There is never a period during which humans are not interacting with the world, as men have not yet ceased to walk the earth, but history is more than the sum of particular facts made real by trillions of names. There is meaning to human history and we can trace progress in the rise and fall of civilizations, but this meaning is found in the real demands of human activity, not in the self-realization of a divine plan.
These people all lived and died following their own individual interests and acting accordingly - it is easy to cite this is proof of the meaninglessness of history, but it is far more amazing to face the fact that out of the chaos of billions of lives with billions of aspirations comes any social organization at all. But that is precisely what we find through human history: a series of forms of society, all organized in particular ways and following their own laws of operation and development. This is true whether the participants are aware of it or not - and they have not been, generally. The functioning of economy and production has compelled humanity to organize. At first, it was in order to gain greater levels of mastery over the forces of nature. It was not long before these productive forces developed to such a level that the participants were chained to them through a web of productive relations - or what we commonly call "society". More specifically, I mean class society. Once definite social relations develop out of the daily functioning of economy and the division of labor, society in turn confronts the individual who has been born into it as a force, one as mighty as nature. That which arose to gain mastery over the environment gains mastery over its participants; the bodies and minds men are tied to the mode of production and the society resting upon it.
This does not mean - as some wise masters of common-sense never tire of saying - that "things never change." On the contrary, one sees a never-ending process of change in society. How else can one explain the fact that we no longer live as hunter-gatherers? Nor can we passively accept the explanations for historical change provided to us by the chroniclers of their times. Every epoch is captive to its ruling ideas to a greater or lesser extent, although in revolutionary times there are always those visionaries who see some of the truths exposed through the struggle of classes and nations. Thucydides, Machiavelli, Hegel, and Marx were only able to express such sharp insight because they lived during times of great shifts in their societies. Genius tends to cluster around dates, just as great events do.
Greek society during the first half of the 4th century was such a society: the destructive Peloponnesian War, an attempt by Greek powers, led by Sparta, to break open the markets and trade routes dominated by the Athenian Empire, had not solved the central contradictions facing Greek slave society, it only aggravated them. Property became more concentrated in fewer hands than ever, which led to great wealth disparity; revolution and counter revolution was commonplace; destructive wars raged over the remains of the empire, although ultimately no state was strong enough to secure control. The appearance of Athenian strength during the 4th century was in reality a "jobless recovery", during which certain layers of the Athenian ruling class gained at the expense of ruined small farmers and even large landowners following the war. In the West, the Greek cities of Sicily and Italy were plagued by political revolution and wars with Carthage. In this general state of impasse, Greek society was faced with the choice to either expand or face decline.
Friedrich Engels wrote that a mode of society does not exit the scene until it has developed all of the means of production that it is good for, and so it was not yet the fate of slave society to pass from existence. Slave labor was being utilized on a larger scale and in a more productive capacity than before, particularly in industry, but would not achieve the ultimate agricultural form of latifundia until the height of the Roman Republic. Many of the most ingenious scientific and artistic achievements took place under the rule of Alexander's Successors. It was, at the time, the most advanced mode of production in the world, and the ancient Persian and Egyptian modes of production - revolutionary and ascendant in their own time - continued on mostly due to the infancy of the Greek political form.
In that infancy, though, lies some of the eternal attraction that we feel - and indeed the Romans felt - for the Greece before Alexander. Writing of the attraction we still feel for Greek art and culture, Marx wrote in The German Ideology:
An adult cannot become a child again, or he becomes childish. But does the naivete of the child not give him pleasure, and does not he himself endeavour to reproduce the child's veracity on a higher level? Does not in every epoch the child represent the character of the period in its natural veracity? Why should not the historical childhood of humanity, where it attained its most beautiful form, exert an eternal charm because it is a stage that will never recur?
The Political Form and Content
Yet, the city-state had outlived its usefulness. It had been a transitional form of the state that developed out of tribal society, but the realities of a more fully-developed classical economy proved to be beyond the political capacity of the polis. The experience of the Athenian Empire had been the historical test; the city-state failed such a harsh exam. Despite a relatively complex administration, employing hundreds of citizen magistrates, the imperial system remained little more than an enforced alliance. Furthermore, Athenian democracy was unfit for the task of governing such a system, even as radical democracy was possible only through imperial tribute. Democratic imperialism took the form of vampiric draining of allies for the sake of political stability at home and punitive measures to keep allies within orbit. Naturally, the imperialism of all historic ruling classes displayed these traits, but there was none of the Roman sophistication - ideological or material - to crude Athenian rule.
History is not mechanical, though. Despite being outmoded by the practical economic and administrative demands of a matured Greek society, the polis continued to exist for centuries, proving that it had not ceased to be politically useful for the ruling class. In fact, protection and patronage of the old city-states continued to be an important political asset for those Greek kings who ruled over the massive kingdoms in the East. What the polis had lost was the power of independent action.
The political demands and ambitions of the Greek ruling class in the 5th and 4th centuries were the ideological expression of the material demands of the matured Greek economy. The mode of production, especially in large trading centers like Athens and Corinth, had become quite sophisticated, with a relatively high division of labor, and it required more and more resources. Likewise, the Greek ruling class developed a thirst for luxury products. the food grown inside the limits of the states was not sufficient to meet the needs of a growing population; Athens had become reliant on grain imports from the Black Sea (Pontus) by the middle of the 5th century. More people inhabited Greece and the Aegean isles during this period than would again until the 20th century. A large proportion of them lived in cities.
With the concentration of land into fewer and fewer hands came the ruin of the small landowners and political instability - the age saw countless revolutions and counter-revolutions. Classes fought each other to a standstill and tyrants began to emerge once again throughout the Greek world. The thirst for conquest of markets and land among the representatives of the ruling class was also partially driven by such social instability. Such contradictions and forces were inherent in Greek slave society and were realizing themselves through time and human activity. With the greatest achievements of Greece came also the threat of decline and instability.
Particular events showcased the universal necessity as Greek states reached out toward the West and East. Athenian rogue Alcibiades, the architect of the ill-fated Sicilian expedition of 415, envisioned Sicily as a stepping stone to extend Athenian rule to Italy and North Africa. Spartan king Agesilaus II launched an ambitious invasion of Asia minor in 396, anticipating Philip's plans by 60 years. Timoleon of Corinth arrived in Sicily in 344 with a mercenary force which successfully overthrew the Syracusan tyrant Dionysius and subsequently resettled many Corinthians in that city. Settlement was a common war-time practice in classical Greece, cutting across class conflict by shipping off surplus population. Many tremors presaged the coming of Alexander.
As for the phenomenon of kingship returning to the Greek world after centuries of absence, it is a case of a dialectical cycle. As discussed in the previous post, the Macedon of the 4th century was backward and barbarous. Philip and his son were able to utilize all the cultural and military achievements of the advanced states, though without any of the political and economic difficulties of dealing with private interests; since Macedonia had not developed a complex web of entrenched class and political interests, Though both kings in name, there was nothing in common between Darius and Alexander. The archaic kingship of Macedon was based on tribal social organization in which the king emerges from the traditional "front fighter" type of leader, answerable to the layer of tribal leaders and nobles who support him. This was barbarism compared to the complex and cultured forms of Greek politics, but coupled with the successful conquest and utilization of nearby gold mines and new land, the king now played the part of a centralized will. The kingship thus returned to Greece as a higher level of the previously negated form.
Kingship under Philip and Alexander retained its social base in the aristocracy and tribal tradition, but there was a difference between their reigns and those of the Successors. Like the governments of the tyrants, I believe that they represented Bonapartist regimes. Bonapartism is the rule of the sword over society, a point at which the state holds itself above society by the force of arms. The state is no empty place to be filled by different people and parties, but is born of particular societies, resting upon the dominant modes of production and social relations. The need for a state at all is born of the wish to keep class struggle at bay, a fact implicit in the rise of the first wave of tyrants in the 7th and 6th centuries: such men were often "law givers" and architects of the classical Greek state as we know it, although not in a fully-formed manner, but at least in essence. Their rise to power was due to intense class struggle, during which no contending class was able to gain a political upper hand; the situation was ripe for a strong man to step in and arbitrate, thus the first Bonapartist regimes came to the West.
Tyrant regimes balanced themselves between classes - taxing or confiscating land from aristocrats and large slave owners, cancelling debts of small farmers, providing military employment for the landless poor -but they were not truly independent of society; no one is. Their regimes, as those of the Successors, were still ultimately slave states, based upon the labor of slaves, and dominated socially by the class of large slave owners. This broad social base did not stop the kings from levying taxes upon the ruling class, or disarming the citizenry, but their reigns are impossible to make sense of without viewing them as distorted representatives of the slave owners.
In light of such an analysis, Alexander is a regime in the process of "becoming"; the past confronting past while being pulled into a novel future. The form of regime wielded by him, burnt up in its use, much like the mind and body of its wielder.
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| Alexander at the Siege of Tyre 332 BC |
World Historical Individual
There have been certain personalities who have so dominated their world that their individual names came to represent the universal character of a whole epoch: Alexander, Caesar, and Napoleon. Historical biographers have never tired of exploring the personal quirks and mannerisms of these characters, as if some detail of their childhood might explain how they came to dominate their world. Each had their own aims and their own particular way of achieving them, but through their particular actions they carried out the universal; their particularities and traits disappear in the face of their accomplishment, of which the former were only the means by which the latter realized itself. Their personalities are burnt away by the fact of their accomplishments, and indeed only become interesting in light of them.Just as there are laws which govern nature and the cosmos, it has been shown that there are laws which govern the development of human society. The major difference is that while the laws are nature exist whether we are there to witness them or not, the laws of social development function through the activities of individuals. As new modes of production develop out of the old, the force of the future knocks against the shell of society. The world-historical individual is caught between freedom and necessity; necessity will find an outlet to express the changes at the core of the world upon the surface - upon the state, culture, ideology. Greek society had outgrown its bounds, geographically and politically, and under the leadership of Alexander, it would crush the ancient powers that once dominated it. The Persian Empire and the might of Egypt, all that were once beacons of civilization, became unreal and were negated in the wake of the Macedonian. All of the old was swept into the waste basket of history.
Alexander must, in my view, be recognized as the hero of his age; this cannot be tarnished by any exposure of personal traits, of violence or moral cries against conquest. Such popular revisionism does nothing but make all history a meaningless march of cruelty and accident. Like Alexander himself, who perished in carrying out his momentous task, all else burns up in the face of events and forces that were bigger than the man himself. His successors attempted to copy his every trait and fashion, but it did not bring them any closer to achieving what he did - the material conditions were all lined up perfectly and the world only waited for someone to take up the task of embodying necessity, once accomplished, no one could force it through a second time. Despite the genius of Ptolemy or the fierce martial skill of Pyrrhus, history only moves in one direction.
Of course, the details are still pretty amazing too.
Suggested Readings
Hegel, "Reason in History"
Marx, "The German Ideology"
Arrian, "Anabasis Alexandri"
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