Abstract

The observation that men reveal their distinctive identities as human beings in what they do and say seems neither very original nor very controversial. But consider the following set of implications: that men are more likely to reveal who they uniquely are when they act and speak spontaneously, than when they labor to maintain biological subsistence or work to produce a tangible world of human artifacts; that action and speech together make up a “web of human relationships” that forms the intangible but vital substance of human community; that, paradoxically, when they act and speak in human community men are most truly free and yet least in control of their own destinies; that when deprived, as they can be, of human community men quickly lose the sense of their own reality as well as that of a world experienced in common; that the Athenian citizenry of Pericles’ time, fully aware of all this, constituted the greatest and possibly the last authentically “political” community in Western history; and that Pericles’ faith in the power of the Athenian polis to actualize and to sustain human greatness was, for understandable reasons, so short-lived that political thought and political decision from Plato to the present day might well be regarded as an escape from “politics” altogether.