H ουτοπία του Λυκούργου
Σπάρτη
Albert
Jay Nock “Thoughts On Utopia”
(αποσπάσματα από το άρθρο)
Atlantic
magazine, July 1935
ΚΟΙΝΩΝΙΚΗ ΣΚΕΨΗ
I encountered Plutarch’s Life of Lycurgus,
with its fine picture of the Utopia which that dignitary introduced into
Sparta.
This was no
imaginary commonwealth like the one projected by Plato.
Plutarch’s Utopia, on the contrary, purported
to be historical; it was the real thing as it had actually existed. I became
convinced, however, that Plutarch was press-agenting Lycurgus a little too handsomely,
and I presently discovered that authorities like Aristotle and Suidas bore out
this notion.
Lycurgus
established the New Deal in Sparta on the right idea; he believed in keeping
his people poor, and his success seems to have been without precedent. He was
the greatest leveler on record.
Other rulers
have managed to keep most of their people broke most of the time, but in Sparta
everybody was broke all the time. Lycurgus did not need any Brain Trust to help
him further this excellent enterprise; he was all the Brain Trust there was,
and he was enough.
Lycurgus did
not fiddle around at nicking partial values off the basic currency-unit; he
devalued the whole currency right down to zero at one stroke, and substituted
iron money so heavy that if by some miracle a Spartan accumulated a bank-roll
of $165, he had to have a two-ox team to carry it around.
Hence,
obviously, Lycurgus had no trouble with predatory bankers; also he had no
trouble about foreign exchange, for foreigners would not handle his money on
any terms whatever, regarding it with what Homer finely calls ‘asbestos
laughter,’ «άσβεστος γέλως»,
which perhaps might be construed to mean the horse-laugh.
As an exponent
of collectivism, Lycurgus must have made Marx, Engels, Lenin, et al., look like
bush-leaguers. With him the State was collectivist to a degree that made the
individual’s status determinable only by algebra. He had prescription down to
what one might really call a fine point; and as for ‘social legislation,’ it
seems to have been his specialty. Nobody could have any ornaments or even any
clothes to speak of. Lycurgus believed in nudism on moral and social grounds as
well as on hygienic grounds; Plutarch’s observations on this point are worth
the attention of those who are interested in such matters nowadays, as are also
his observations on the arrangements instituted by Lycurgus for a sort of
quasi-companionate or tandem marriage.
Sumptuary
laws extended even to haircutting; everyone had to have the same style of
haircut. One could not wiggle out of compliance with Lycurgus’s regulations by
the aid of resourceful shysters; nor, on the other hand, did Lycurgus need a
pliant contortionist judiciary to validate his incursions upon the liberties of
the subject. The subject had no liberties, and there were neither lawyers nor
lawsuits in Sparta — though prescription would seem to have been unnecessary on
this latter point, for with everybody hopelessly busted, there was really
nothing on which to found a lawsuit.
Plutarch sums
up the situation by saying that ‘no man was allowed to live as he pleased, the
city being like one great camp, where all had their fixed allowance and knew
their public duty.’
So this was
Utopia! This was the sort of collective existence that Spartans were supposed
to like and be proud of! Perhaps they did like it; they may have done so,
though Plutarch does not say specifically that they did. Knowing, however, that
in such cases there is no great chance for dissenting opinion to find its way
into history, I suspected that there might have been some few who in the long
run became a trifle bored by the conditions of life in Lycurgus’s Utopia.
One thing
remained with me permanently from my perusal of Plutarch. I observed with
particular interest his saying that the Spartan system was philosophically
perfect; that is, the way Lycurgus ran things was precisely the way that
philosophers would say they should be run. Plutarch remarks that while the laws
of Lycurgus remained in force, ‘Sparta was not so much under the political
regulations of a commonwealth, as under the strict rules of a philosophic
life.’
This
observation could not be read without certain misgivings of a very serious
nature; but Plutarch goes even further. He says that Lycurgus ‘produced a most
inimitable form of government; and by showing a whole cityful of philosophers
he confounded those who imagine that the much-vaunted strictness of a
philosophic life is impracticable.”
I perceived
then that if Plutarch was right about this, I had laid up another valuable
criterion for future use, in addition to those I had garnered from previous
observation. I had already made up my mind that my first test of any proposed
Utopia would be a measure of its attitude towards prescription, and my second
would be a very close measure of the sort of people whom it qualified for
membership. Now that Plutarch had given me a line of direction on the kind of
thing one might expect from philosophers if they were given a free hand, my
third care would be to see how many of these gentry were on the board of
managers.
[ αποσπάσματα από το άρθρο του
Albert Jay Nock “Thoughts On Utopia”, Atlantic
magazine, July 1935, pp. 14-25.
( τα επιλεγέντα
αποσπάσματα εδώ από τις σελίδες 18-19. )
]
ΕΛΕΥΘΕΡΟΓΡΑΦΟΣ
[ ανάρτηση 27 Απριλίου 2024 :
H ουτοπία του Λυκούργου
Σπάρτη
Albert Jay Nock “Thoughts On Utopia”
(αποσπάσματα
από το άρθρο)
Atlantic magazine,
July
1935
ΚΟΙΝΩΝΙΚΗ ΣΚΕΨΗ ]
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