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Beyond the Gates of the Polis

Reconfiguring Sociology’s Ancient Inheritance

University of Aberdeen, soc103{at}abdn.ac.uk

Roland Robertson

University of Aberdeen, soc123{at}abdn.ac.uk

In recent sociological debates, the concept of ‘society’, understood as a delimited, bounded entity, has come under much critical scrutiny, especially as it seems increasingly inadequate as a frame of analytical reference in an age characterized by ‘global’ flows and processes beyond national boundaries. In this article, we suggest that this understanding of ‘society’ is analogous to, and was in part generated by, the conception of the city-state (polis) favoured by ancient Greek thinkers of the 4th century BC, most notably Plato and Aristotle. Standard accounts of the history of sociology see the roots of the discipline as originating in this type of Greek political theory, for it provided many of the bases of the social analyses of ‘classical’ sociologists such as Durkheim. The development of forms of sociological thought that can grasp phenomena that exist in certain senses beyond ‘society’ requires not only a reconsideration of the relations that can or should pertain between present-day sociologists and the ‘classical’ 19th-century thinkers, but also a rethinking of the connections between these two groups and their ancient predecessors. We suggest that it is today fruitful to reconfigure our understanding of the nature of the history of sociological thought, such that thinkers of a later, Hellenistic, period in Greek history, especially the historiographer Polybius, are recognized as important predecessors in the search for analytic categories that are not restricted to the study of particular bounded social entities. Thinkers of the Hellenistic period rejected the polis as the central analytic category in favour of the study of the whole ‘inhabited world’ (oikoumene). The ways in which Polybius in particular transformed the nature of historiography should be seen as important precursors of modern notions of ‘global sociology’. A recognition of the importance of this Hellenistic revolution in analytic orientation compels us to rethink what texts we take to be ‘classical’ vis-á-vis contemporary sociological endeavours to grasp the ‘global’.

Key Words: globalization • Hellenistic historiography • oikoumene • Polybius • ‘society’

Journal of Classical Sociology, Vol. 4, No. 2, 165-189 (2004)
DOI: 10.1177/1468795X04043932


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