The most distinctive feature of this process was that the more Solon managed to strengthen regular Athenians politically, the further he went in building state institutions. And the more these institutions took shape, the further he went in establishing popular control over them. Thus once the Ekklesia was re-empowered, it featured greater popular participation. In order to achieve this objective, his reforms didn’t just introduce greater representation in assemblies and political institutions, they also brought about changes in institutions and norms, such as the end of pawning, which changed the nature of society and made it more capable of acting collectively and controlling the elites and the state.
Aristotle agreed that empowering regular Athenians was the most important aspect of Solon’s reforms and singled out the end of pawning, improved means of resolving conflicts, and access to justice. He remarked:
These three seem to be the features of Solon’s constitution which most favored the people: first and greatest, forbidding loans on security of a person’s body; second, the possibility of a volunteer seeking justice for one who was wronged; third, and they say that this particularly strengthened the people, appeal to the court.
Here Aristotle is emphasizing the presence of some type of “equality before the law,” where laws applied to everybody and common citizens could turn to the courts to seek justice. Though political representation in the Boule and membership of the Areopagus excluded the poorest, anyone could bring a lawsuit and have it heard, and the same laws applied to elites and ordinary citizens alike.
One of the most interesting ways in which Solon institutionalized popular control over the elites was via his Hubris Law. A surviving fragment states:
If anybody commits hubris against a child (and surely one who hires commits hubris) or man or woman, whether free of slave, or if anybody commits anything unlawful against any of these, it has created graphai [public suits] hubreos.
This law thus created the crime of graphai hubreos in response to an act of hubris, behavior aimed at humiliation and intimidation. Remarkably, people could be charged with hubris against slaves, who were protected as well, and people were occasionally executed for repeated violations of the law. The Hubris Law enabled Athenians not only to control the elites, but also to enjoy liberty from the dominance of powerful individuals.
By banning debt peonage and ending the status of unfree pawns, Solon started simultaneously undermining the elites’ dominance over ordinary citizens and preparing conditions for democratic politics. But there was much more to the power of the elites in Athens at this time. They had become significantly richer, and any increase in the capacity of the state, unless matched by a similar empowerment of society, might increase their political dominance by giving them additional tools for repression and control. So it was vital to strengthen the hands of regular citizens against the elite. This is what the Hubris Law helped achieve by codifying and intensifying existing norms.
Solon’s Hubris Law reveals a more general aspect of life in the corridor—the delicate balance for creating liberty requires institutional reforms to work with and build on existing norms, while at the same time modifying and even obliterating aspects of those norms that are holding liberty back. No easy feat to be sure, but Solon’s reforms broke considerable ground on both objectives. In the period before Draco, the rules and laws that governed people’s lives were not written down and were enforced by families and kinship groups, most often using social ostracism and exclusion. Solon managed to build on these norms by codifying and strengthening them as in his Hubris Law, but in the process he also changed these norms, so that hubristic behavior became far less acceptable in Athenian society. We’ll see many examples of this complex dance between institutional change and norms, and how failing to strike the right balance between them may damage the prospects of liberty. Solon struck the right balance.
The Red Queen Effect
How Solon limited the elites’ control over the state and dominance over regular citizens on the one hand and increased the capacity of the state on the other is not a peculiar feature of an ancient civilization. It is the essence of the Shackled Leviathan. The Leviathan can build greater capacity and become much stronger when society is willing to cooperate with it, but this cooperation requires people to trust that they can control the sea monster. Solon built this trust.
But it’s not just trust and cooperation. Liberty and ultimately state capacity depend on the balance of power between state and society. If the state and the elites become too powerful, we end up with the Despotic Leviathan. If they fall behind, we get the Absent Leviathan. So we need both state and society running together and neither getting the upper hand. This is not unlike the Red Queen effect described by Lewis Carroll in Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There. In the book, Alice meets and runs a race with the Red Queen. “Alice never could quite make out, in thinking it over afterwards, how it was that they began,” but she noticed that even though they both appeared to be running hard, “the trees and the other things round them never seemed to change their places at alclass="underline" however fast they went they never seemed to pass anything.” Finally, when the Red Queen called a halt,
Alice looked around her in great surprise. “Why I do believe we’ve been under this tree the whole time! Everything’s just as it was!”
“Of course it is,” said the Queen, “what would you have it?”
“Well in our country,” said Alice, still panting a little, “you’d generally get somewhere else—if you ran very fast for a long time, as we’ve been doing.”
“A slow sort of country!” said the Queen. “Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.”
The Red Queen effect refers to a situation where you have to keep on running just to maintain your position, like the state and society running fast to maintain the balance between them. In Carroll’s book all that running was wasteful. Not so in the struggle of society against the Leviathan. If society slacks off and does not run fast enough to keep up with the state’s growing power, the Shackled Leviathan can quickly turn into a despotic one. We need society’s competition to keep the Leviathan in check, and the more powerful and capable the Leviathan is, the more powerful and vigilant society must become. We need the Leviathan to keep on running too, both to expand its capacity in the face of new and formidable challenges and to maintain its autonomy, which is critical not only for resolving disputes and impartially enforcing laws but also for breaking down the cage of norms. This all sounds quite messy (all that running!), and that, we’ll see, is often the case. Even though it’s messy, we depend on the Red Queen for human progress and for liberty. But the Red Queen herself creates lots of swings in the balance of power between state and society, as one party and then the other pulls ahead.
The way Solon managed to activate the Red Queen effect illustrates these broader issues. His reforms not only set up the institutional basis for popular participation in politics, but also helped relax the cage of norms that both directly restricted liberty and prevented the sort of political participation that is necessary in the corridor. The Athenian cage wasn’t as stifling as in many other societies we’ll see, such as the Tiv later in this chapter. Nevertheless, it was still oppressive enough to block the path of the Red Queen. By breaking down part of that cage, Solon started to fundamentally change society and forge a different type of politics capable of supporting a budding Shackled Leviathan.