Freedom and Labour in the Ancient World
The concept of freedom emerges in the ancient world in a social context where the vision of labour as a condition incompatible with the freedom of man is in evidence. A free man, in the full sense of the term, that is, as a citizen, discharges the burden of efforts necessary to ensure his material existence onto politically non-free men.
To put it differently, in the ancient world, political freedom, which confers to the individual the fully fledged status of citizen, is the condition of a person with private means, a “rentier”, who has at his disposal sufficient labour force, that is, slaves, to be exempt from economic activity. Ancient society reduces a part of the population to the rank of objects, that is, to the rank of what Aristotle called a simple “animate tool” (Aristotle, 1885: 1253b 32), so that freedom existed for the rest of society. According to Moses I. Finley: “one aspect of Greek history... is the advance, hand in hand, of freedom and slavery” (1981: 115, original emphasis). In this world freedom does not exclude slavery; rather, the latter is a condition of the former.In the fourth book of his Republic, Plato observes that in a just city three virtues must necessarily be present: wisdom, courage, temperance. For him, the first virtue belongs to the first class of the city, the guardians, the second characterizes the second class, that is, “the part which fights and goes out to war on the State’s behalf”. The reader would expect that the third virtue, “temperance”, be expected from the rest of the population, that is, the part which works and produces. However, concerning temperance, Socrates underlines expressly that all of the members of the city share this virtue. In other words, the third part of the city does not have any specific virtue as do the other two classes. Jean-Pierre Vernant, commenting on this passage of Republic, stresses this significant asymmetry:
This surprising asymmetry cannot be explained but by Plato’s refusal to grant a positive virtue to those whose labour constitutes their social function.
We can say that according to Plato labour remains unfamiliar to any human value and under certain aspects it appears to him as the antithesis of what in the human being is essential. (Vernant 1974: 12, our translation)Through his profound knowledge of ancient Greece, Friedrich Nietzsche observes that in this world both labour and slavery were “a necessary disgrace, of which one feels ashamed, as a disgrace and a necessity at the same time” (Nietzsche 1911: 6, original emphasis). As much as possible the free man of the antique democratic state tries to get rid of the necessity of labour by passing it on to slaves. This does not mean that no free man works in this society. However, the condition of the real exercise of citizenship is incompatible with labour. A man who is forced to work could not be a good citizen able to dedicate himself entirely to the business of the city. One can say that in this society labour is rejected “outside the state” (ibid.: 122), out of the sphere of political freedom.
According to Aristotle and also to all the other thinkers of antiquity, to be free means essentially not to depend on the will of another person. A non-free man is a man who is forced to obey the orders of another’s will. In this sense the producer or the labourer, from an exclusively economic point of view, is necessarily a non-free, dependent person because he or she obeys the will of the buyer who orders the work and pays for it. The difference between the free and non-free conditions can be specified by resorting to a conceptual difference, which was well known in ancient Greece, between Poiesis and Praxis. Poiesis is an activity, which gives birth to a product untied to its author. In this sense all activities of production, whatever they are, are considered as stemming from Poiesis. The product leaves its author and acquires an autonomous, exclusive existence. The agent has no control over his productive process when his activity is of poietic type.
The German philosophers of the nineteenth century describe this condition of becoming an outsider regarding one’s own product by a reference to the notion of “estrangement” (Entfremdung). Praxis instead means an activity the finality of which does not escape its author. Sport, music, philosophy, science are these kind of activities. Through such activities the individual develops the force and the abilities of his body or his intellectual endowment and competences. The result of the activity does not leave its author. Consequently, activities which suit the free man are those which stem from Praxis. But when a poietic activity is achieved freely, that is when the individual achieves it without being subjected to the constraint to work in order to ensure his subsistence, such an activity does not degrade him. In short, in this world, labour in its economic sense, that is, wage labour, degrades and enslaves its author. The salaried worker, whatever the particular activity he carries out, is necessarily in a demeaning situation.