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BRITISH JOURNAL FOR THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY

2020, VOL. 28, NO. 3, 553–572


https://doi.org/10.1080/09608788.2019.1641469

ARTICLE

Grote’s analysis of Ancient Greek political thought: its


significance to J. S. Mill’s idea about ‘active character’
in a liberal democracy
Leo Catana
Philosophy, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark

ABSTRACT
George Grote (1794–1871) published the History of Greece between 1846 and
1856, thereby providing the first positive evaluation of democratic Athens in
the early modern period and a novel interpretation of the roles of the
sophists and of Socrates, premised on his understanding of democratic
Athens. Grote’s account offered a sociological explanation of the moral
psychology cultivated by the constitution of the Athenian polis through the
citizens’ active political participation. This participation cultivated civic virtues,
emotional and ethical attachment to the polis, and a sense of obligation
towards the polis, even at the expense of self-interest. John Stuart Mill (1806–
1873) was familiar with Grote’s historical works and emphasized the parallels
between the ancient direct democracy and the modern, representative
democracy, which he himself promoted in his Considerations on Representative
Government (1861). In this article it is argued that J. S. Mill’s concept of the
‘active character’ of the citizen in a modern representative democracy was
inspired by Grote’s understanding and positive evaluation of ancient
democratic Athens and its moral psychology. This is one example of the
phenomenon mentioned in the editorial to this special issue, namely that
accounts of past philosophy may influence philosophy proper.

ARTICLE HISTORY Received 15 March 2019; Revised 5 and 27 June 2019; Accepted 5 July 2019

KEYWORDS Plato; Socrates; historiography of philosophy; George Grote; Mill

1. J. S. Mill on the active character of the citizen in a


representative democracy
J. S. Mill was a major contributor to theories about political liberty, democracy,
universal suffrage and utilitarianism. When he argued for a representative
democracy in his Representative Government, he claimed that this form of
rule presupposed a certain character in the citizens, namely a character by
which the citizens are not passive and submissive, but active and desirous
to participate in political life. As we shall see, this feature of J. S. Mill’s

CONTACT Leo Catana [email protected] Philosophy, University of Copenhagen, Karen Blixens


Vej 8, building 13, 3rd floor, Copenhagen, 2300, Denmark
© 2019 BSHP
554 L. CATANA

philosophy was influenced by George Grote’s interpretation of ancient Greek


democracy. Such an active character, J. S. Mill explains, is suppressed under
non-democratic governments:
Now there can be no kind of doubt that the passive type of character is favoured
by the government of one or a few, and the active self-helping type by that of
the Many. Irresponsible rulers need the quiescence of the ruled, more than they
need any activity but that which they can compel. Submissiveness to the pre-
scriptions of men as necessities of nature, is the lesson inculcated by all govern-
ments upon those who are wholly without participation in them.
(Mill, Representative Government, 410)

Mill’s tripartition of government into forms ruled by one, a few, or many prob-
ably referred to Aristotle’s famous distinction in his Politics III.7, according to
which rule by one is monarchy or tyranny, rule by a few is aristocracy or oli-
garchy, and rule by many is constitutional rule or democracy.
In the quotation J. S. Mill made the claim that constitutional form and moral
character of the citizens go together. He added: ‘Between subjection to the
will of others [that is, rule by one or a few], and the virtues of self-help and
self-government [that is, rule by many], there is natural incompatibility’
(Mill, Representative Government, 410). The role of character in J. S. Mill’s pol-
itical philosophy has been pointed out in several recent studies, though often
without exploring into his use of ancient Greek virtue politics, as revealed in
Grote’s historical works (e.g. Ball, ‘The Formation of Character’).
The ‘active’ character required in a democracy consists, according to J. S.
Mill, in the virtues ‘self-help’ and ‘self-government’. These virtues may be
understood at the level of city-states and that of individuals. ‘Self-government’
thus refers to the situation where a people is ruled not by the will of one or a
few despots, but by a law, ideally agreed upon by the people itself (Mill, Repre-
sentative Government, 395); ‘self-help’ – that is, industry, integrity, justice and
prudence – are virtues in individuals, and these virtues are conducive to any
progressive society (Mill, Representative Government, 385). J. S. Mill probably
had these virtues, among others, in mind in the above quotation, when refer-
ring to ‘the self-helping type’ typical of the democratic character. Elsewhere,
he equated ‘self-government’ with the Greek concept sōphrosynē (self-
control): ‘Modern nations will have to learn the lesson, that the well-being
of a people must exist by means of the justice and self-government, the
δικαιοσύνη and σωφροσύνη [dikaiosynē (justice) and sōphrosynē (self-
control)], of the individual citizens’ (Mill, Principles of Political Economy,
3:763, perhaps alluding to Plato, Protagoras 320c-328c). Finally, ‘character’
also has the meaning of an individual acting according to his or her own
impulse, desire and command, as spelled out in On Liberty (1859):
A person whose desires and impulses are his own—are the expression of his
own nature, as it has been developed and modified by his own culture—is
BRITISH JOURNAL FOR THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 555

said to have a character. One whose desires and impulses are not his own, has
no character, no more than a steam-engine has a character.
(Mill, On Liberty, 264)

If the two virtues singled out in Representative Government (‘self-help’ and


‘self-government’) are to flourish in citizens, it requires either absence of
‘external restraint’ (apart from ‘the necessities of nature’), ‘or mandates of
society which he [the citizen] has his share in imposing, and which it is
open to him, if he thinks them wrong, publicly to dissent from, and exert
himself actively to get altered’ (Mill, Representative Government, 411). It is
necessary, J. S. Mill continued, that the freedom granted to citizens is
accompanied by political participation, since it cultivates active virtues that
are pertinent to democracy:
The maximum of the invigorating effect of freedom upon the character is only
obtained, when the person acted on either is, or is looking forward to becom-
ing, a citizen as fully privileged as any other. What is still more important than
even this matter of feeling, is the practical discipline which the character
obtains, from the occasional demand made upon the citizens to exercise,
for a time and in their turn, some social function.
(Mill, Representative Government, 411)

As a consequence, J. S. Mill encouraged political decision processes that were


open to, and exercised by, as many citizens as possible. He underlined the
need for mechanisms that free the citizens from the routines of their everyday
work and allowed them to participate in political life, thereby educating their
‘active’ civic virtues (Mill, Representative Government, 411). Isaiah Berlin has
referred to J. S. Mill as an exponent of negative freedom (i.e. the absence of
interference by others) that was typical of liberalism (Berlin, ‘Two Concepts’,
175–6). As the above quotation suggests, and as argued below, Mill’s
notions of character and freedom were more community-centered than
Berlin’s interpretation indicates (for a similar objection, see Biagini, ‘Liberalism
and Direct Democracy’).
J. S. Mill’s notion of active character was informed, he said, by the ancient
Athenian democracy, as it had been described by ‘our great historian of
Greece’:
Notwithstanding the defects of the social system and moral ideas of antiquity,
the practice of the dicastery and the ecclesia raised the intellectual standard
of an average Athenian citizen far beyond anything of which there is yet an
example in any other mass of men, ancient or modern. The proofs of this are
apparent in every page of our great historian of Greece; but we need scarcely
look further than to the high quality of the addresses which their great
orators deemed best calculated to act with effect on their understanding and
will.
(Mill, Representative Government, 411)
556 L. CATANA

The ‘dicastery and the ecclesia’ refer to the law courts and the Assembly in
democratic Athens, where citizens participated actively in the decision pro-
cesses. The ‘practice’ unfolded within these institutions picks up on J. S.
Mill’s claim that civic virtues are ‘educated’ by means of large-scale social
and political structures. The reference to the ‘defects’ of the ‘social system
and moral ideas’ probably alludes to the fact that citizenship was only
granted to a restricted segment of Athenian inhabitants, namely adult male
citizens. The ‘addresses’ of ‘great orators’, affecting the ‘understanding and
will’ of the audience, may well refer to the famous speeches in which Athe-
nians were encouraged to defend Athens and its form of rule, e.g. the
funeral orations of Pericles (Thucydides 2.35–46 and 2.60–64), or the speeches
of Nicias (e.g. Thucydides 6.9–14, 6.68).
In this article I shall answer two questions: Who was ‘our great historian of
Greece’, mentioned in the last quotation? And how was the historian in ques-
tion important to J. S. Mill’s theory of representative democracy and its adja-
cent idea of active character? It is often claimed that Grote was influenced by
the utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham and James Mill, and that his historical
works were specimens of ‘Benthamite historiography’ (Clarke, Grote, 20–21,
37, 105–106, 127). In this article I argue that the influence went in a
different direction, namely from Grote’s historical account of the Athenian
democracy and its political thought to the political philosophy of J. S. Mill. If
I am right, this is an example of the phenomenon spelled out in the editorial,
namely that in some cases histories of philosophy undertake a philosophical
task and influence philosophy proper. Although I argue that Grote influenced
J. S. Mill’s idea of ‘active character’, I am not claiming that Grote was J. S. Mill’s
sole inspiration – it was indeed complex and included several other thinkers,
e.g. Tocqueville and the Coleridgeans. Nor am I claiming that the educational
aspect articulated by means of ‘active character’ was the only aspect of this
concept in J. S. Mill’s political thought.
Before answering the second question I should mention that the ancient
Athenian democracy was not the only instance of a past society in which
civic virtues were cultivated. Classical and early modern republicanism was
another instance (see Pocock, ‘Virtues’; Lovett, ‘Republicanism’; Biagini,
‘Neo-Roman Liberalism’). Indeed, it has been argued recently that Grote’s
account of democratic Athens served as a model for J. S. Mill’s republicanism
in his Concerning Government (Demetriou, ‘The Spirit of Athens’, 179–82).
What still needs to be explained more fully is how Grote’s account could
have contributed to J. S. Mill’s theory of active character.
Let me explain briefly how I argue for my claim that Grote’s historical
account of the Athenian democracy influenced J. S. Mill’s political thought.
As we have already seen in this section, J. S. Mill may well have referred to
Grote and his History of Greece as ‘our great historian’. In section 2, I provide
a survey of histories of the ancient Athenian democracy that were available
BRITISH JOURNAL FOR THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 557

prior to Grote, in order to clarify how Grote innovated this tradition and inter-
preted the Athenian democracy in a way that appealed to J. S. Mill’s demo-
cratic inclinations. In section 3, I bring out the historical ties between Grote
and J. S. Mill. In section 4, I account for Grote’s view of the Athenian democ-
racy in one publication of 1826, and in section 5 I move on to his view on the
same democracy in his major work of 1846–56, the History of Greece. In section
6, I turn to J. S. Mill’s reviews of Grote’s works, arguing that these reviews
strengthen the claim that J. S. Mill supported Grote’s views on the ancient
Athenian democracy and integrated some of them into his own political
thought.

2. Histories of the Athenian democracy and its political thought


before J. S. Mill
J. M. Robson, one editor of J. S. Mill’s Representative Government, has asserted
that in the last quotation J. S. Mill alluded to George Grote’s History of Greece
(1846–56), which appeared some years prior to J. S. Mill’s work of 1861
(Robson’s note in J. S. Mill, Representative Government, 411). In the above quo-
tation, however, Grote is not mentioned by name, nor is any specific work of
the historian in question mentioned, but simply ‘every page’ of the historian in
question. So let me ask more broadly: how was the Athenian democracy
understood and evaluated by historians before J. S. Mill?
In the century before Grote’s History appeared, several historical accounts
of ancient Greece were published in English, for instance Temple Stanyan’s
The Grecian History (1707–39), William Mitford’s History of Greece (1784–
1810), John Gillies’ History of Ancient Greece (1786), and Connop Thirwall’s
History of Greece (1835–44).
In addition to these four histories, there was another work available in
English, which narrated ancient Greek political thought, namely William
Enfield’s History of Philosophy, from the Earliest Periods: Drawn up from Brucker’s
Historica critica philosopihae (1791). This was an abbreviated, English trans-
lation of the German historian and Lutheran minister Jacob Brucker and his
Latin Historia critica philosophiae, first published in Leipzig in 1742–44.
Grote did not cite Brucker’s Latin work in his History, but he cited it in his
Plato and Other Companions of Sokrates (1865) (Grote, Plato, 1:25 n. d, 58
n. e, and 59 n. g). In none of the two publications did Grote cite Enfield’s
English translation. In his Latin work, Brucker had sketched ancient Greek
history and political thought from Homer down to the fourth century BCE
(Brucker, Historia critica philosophiae 1:434–56; Enfield, History of Philosophy,
1:126–38). Despite Grote’s familiarity with Brucker’s Latin work, this account
has not been considered by those modern historians working on Grote’s his-
torical works (e.g. Momigliano, Contributo, 213–31; Cesarini, ‘Modern His-
tories’; Demetriou, Brill’s Companion to George Grote). Demetriou has
558 L. CATANA

observed the importance of Brucker’s Historia critica philosophiae in eight-


eenth-century German history of philosophy, but he has not examined
Grote’s explicit references to this work, nor has he discussed Brucker’s original,
Latin work, but only Enfield’s English version (Demetriou, George Grote, 156;
Demetriou, Studies, VI:26–7.)
Brucker had preferred oligarchic Sparta to democratic Athens in his
account of ancient Greece and its political thought, and he had praised Lycur-
gus, the lawgiver of oligarchic Sparta, as the most noble among the lawgivers
(Brucker, Historia critica philosophiae, 1:437, 441). The Athenian democracy
was clearly not of interest to Brucker – he belonged to a longstanding, anti-
democratic tradition. According to Brucker, political philosophy among
major ancient Greek thinkers was primarily part of the respective systems of
the philosophers in question. Brucker – unlike J. S. Mill and Grote – did not
regard large-scale social habituation as decisive to the development of civic
virtues, and he did not contextualize the political theories of past philosophers
like Plato and Aristotle within such a sociological and institutional context. To
Brucker, thinkers like Plato and Aristotle were primarily solitary system
builders, and their political theories were deduced from over-arching prin-
ciples found in their respective systems (Catana, The Historiographical
Concept, 73–114).
Even though the Athenian democracy was extolled as an ideal during the
French Revolution of 1789, it was a problematic ideal, even in that period,
since the term ‘democracy’ denoted a direct democracy, not a representative
democracy, perhaps better suited to the larger social units characteristic to
early modern societies. It took quite a while before ‘democracy’ gained the
meaning of a representative democracy – it was not until the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries that the term ‘democracy’ gained its current positive
evaluation (Palmer, ‘Note’).
Mitford’s History of Greece was first published in five volumes between 1784
and 1810 and came out in several editions. The first volume, published 1784,
covered the period from the earliest times to the end of the Persian Wars. The
second volume was published in 1790 and covered the period from the end of
the Persian Wars down to the oligarchic coup in Athens in 404 BCE, that is, it
included the democratic reforms in Athens and the Peloponnesian War in the
fifth century BCE. This second volume came out the year after the French
Revolution in 1789, prompting Mitford to draw many parallels between the
direct and radical democracy of ancient Athens and the French Revolution.
The third volume appeared in 1797 and dealt with the period from 404 BCE
to the peace of Antalcidas (between Sparta and Persia) in 386 BCE, including
the rise of Philip of Macedon, whom Mitford regarded as a political hero. The
fourth volume was published in 1808, covering the period 386–338 BCE,
ending with the year in which Philip of Macedon established his rule in
Greece. The fifth and final volume was published in 1810, ending with
BRITISH JOURNAL FOR THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 559

Alexander the Great’s death in 322 BCE. Mitford had a low opinion of the Athe-
nian democracy, much like Brucker. Mitford favoured monarchy and held oli-
garchy as the second-best form of government, and he scorned the ancient
Athenian democracy (Wroth, ‘Mitford’).
According to Mitford, the Athenian democracy – established by Solon, who
gave citizens sovereign power in the Assembly – became a playground for
demagogues and was adequately called ‘a tyranny of the people’. The intro-
duction of pay for serving the law courts meant that the ‘the rich and the
industrious avoided; the poor, the idle, the profligate thenceforward sought
the office’. Mitford characterized the multitude as poor, susceptible to dema-
gogues, flattery and bribes; perverse in its delight in criminal prosecution; sha-
meless and profligate; emotional and irrational in its decisions; but supported,
unfortunately, by public revenue to maintain its idleness at the expense of
industry. Moreover, under the Athenian legal system, ‘life and property
were rendered insecure beyond what anything seen in the most profligate
of modern European governments, at least of times before the French Revo-
lution’. To the extent that Athens appeared fair and flourishing, it was due to
the aristocracy that remained intact within the democracy: generals and
archons were chosen on the basis of birth, education and connections, and
thus able to balance the ‘popular rashness and folly’ of democracy. Mitford
assigned no positive, civic virtues to the multitude in democratic Athens –
this polis, or ‘republic’, as he called it, managed despite popular rule, not
because of it (Mitford, History, 5:8–30). Clearly, J. S. Mill would not have
found any inspiration for his idea about the ‘active character’ of the citizen
in a representative democracy in these pages by Mitford.
Already in 1808, liberals like Henry Brougham complained about Mitford’s
political bias in Edinburgh Review, and in 1821, William Haygarth added that
Mitford’s scholarly handling of the source material was inadequate (Wroth,
‘Mitford’, 462). In 1826, Grote published a review, ‘Fasti Hellenici’, in the West-
minster Review, which had been founded by Bentham and served as a plat-
form for the Radicals, who campaigned for universal suffrage, annual
parliaments and secret voting (Clarke, Grote, 37). The review supposedly
examined Henry Fynes Clinton’s 1824 compendium of Grecian chronology
(560–278 BCE), but was in fact a criticism of Mitford’s History. According to
Grote, Clinton built extensively on Mitford’s understanding and evaluation
of the Greek city–state, especially his negative evaluation of the Athenian
democracy, for which reason Grote attacked Mitford’s History in his review
of Clinton’s chronology (Grote, ‘Fasti’, 269. For the context, see Turner, The
Greek Heritage, 187–205; Kierstead, ‘Grote’s Athens’, 178–82).
Grote’s review was divided into three parts. In the first part (Grote, ‘Fasti’,
269–80), he observed the many examples of excellence in ‘most of the depart-
ments of art and science’ (Grote, ‘Fasti’, 270) in ancient Greece 560–278 BCE,
claiming that the unifying motivation behind this abundance of individual
560 L. CATANA

talent was the desire for public applause (Grote, ‘Fasti’, 271, 274). This desire, in
turn, was stimulated by the smallness of the ancient Greek polis, and the
stimulus was especially strong in democratic poleis, where the constitution
forced political participants to compete with each other in order to gain
and retain political influence. It was this political culture of open competition
among political participants – but also among athletes (agōnes), poets and
others – which stimulated individual excellence within a variety of arts and
sciences, including politics.
The second part of the review examined Mitford’s ‘philosophising powers’,
that is, his ability to spell out political ideas in the past, and to articulate his
own implicit and explicit political evaluations (Grote, ‘Fasti’, 280–307; 280
for the citation). Grote concluded that Mitford’s preference for monarchy –
especially in his second volume published in 1790, published right after the
French Revolution in 1789 – resulted in political bias in Mitford’s evaluation
of ancient Greek democracies (e.g. Grote, ‘Fasti’, 282–5). The third and last
part of the review criticized Mitford as a reporter of ‘facts’: According to
Grote, Mitford was inaccurate, self-contradicting, distorting and tendentious
in his generalizations, deserving no praise as a historian (Grote, ‘Fasti’, 307–31).
In the two first parts, Grote, in contrast to Mitford, praised democratic
Athens for the civic virtues which it cultivated. The Athenian democracy
was, in fact, Grote argued, a tremendous political and administrative
success for about two hundred years, from Cleisthenes’ reforms in 507 BCE
down to the Macedonians’ abolishment of Athenian democracy in 322 BCE,
for which reason the Athenian democracy deserved respect.
Given the political bias and scholarly inadequacy of Mitford’s History, Grote
suggested in his 1826 review that a new history of ancient Greece should be
written (Grote, ‘Fasti’, 307). In his preface to his own History of Greece of 1846–
56, he referred once again to Mitford’s History as highly influential but
deficient, animating Grote himself to set the record straight (Grote, History,
1:v). Mitford’s History had been highly influential in the first decades of the
eighteenth century, and Radicals like James and J. S. Mill had used it,
though with reluctance (Turner, The Greek Heritage, 194, 204). All this makes
it likely that J. S. Mill alluded to Grote’s historical work in his Representative
Government of 1861.
Thirwall’s History of Greece was published in 1835–44. It was more liberal in
spirit than Mitford’s History. However, when it appeared, Grote had already
embarked on his own History, prompted by the shortcomings of Mitford’s
account (Grote, History 1:vi). The two histories by Stanyan and Gillies did
not attract J. S. Mill’s attention: In his writings, it was the opposition
between Mitford the monarchist and Grote the democrat that was central
(for British historians of ancient Greece prior to Grote, see Demetriou,
George Grote, 33–59). Moreover, historical ties connected Grote and J. S.
Mill, and to these I now turn.
BRITISH JOURNAL FOR THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 561

3. The historical and philosophical ties between Grote and Mill


Grote was born in Kent in 1794 and died in London 1871, where he lived most
of his adult life. In 1819, he was twenty-five years old and introduced to the
British economist David Ricardo (1772–1823). Through Ricardo, the young
Grote became acquainted with the philosopher James Mill (1773–1836) and
was influenced by his ideas, expressed, for instance, in his Essay on Govern-
ment (1820), in which James Mill had argued for egalitarianism and represen-
tative democracy as the only means to serve the interests of the many. Grote
was drawn to James Mill’s political views and his utilitarianism, ultimately
building on the theories of Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) (Hamburger,
‘Grote’, 104). James Mill also took a strong interest in Plato’s philosophy,
and this interest made its mark upon Grote, though Grote did not always
go along with James Mill’s interpretations.
Grote was soon put in touch with the mentor of utilitarianism and its
radical, democratic ideals, Bentham, who was forty-six years older than
Grote; he visited Bentham’s house and collaborated with him on several lit-
erary projects on religion. They were both atheists and agreed that the
widespread belief in the soul’s afterlife and rewards was harmful because
it led to self-denial and abstinence. Grote agreed to edit and publish Ben-
tham’s scattered notes on religion under the name of Philip Beauchamp,
published in 1822 under the title Analysis of the Influence of Natural Religion
on the Temporal Happiness of Mankind. On the public, political scene, Grote
did not follow the more aggressive agitation among the Radicals and the
Benthamites, but after the Reform Bill was passed in 1832, partly due to
the work of the Radicals and their call for reform, Grote became member
of Parliament for the City of London in the hope of promoting Bentham’s
political ideals. He served as a leader of the Radicals in the 1830s, right
until he redrew from the House of Commons in 1841. In Grote’s first pub-
lication from 1821, ‘Statement of the Question of Parliamentary Reform’,
he argued for universal suffrage, thereby revealing his sympathy with Ben-
tham’s and James Mill’s ideas about democratic reform (Hamburger, ‘Grote’,
104–6).
In 1842, at the age of forty-eight, Grote retired from his father’s bank and
focused his energy on classical Greece. Over the following two decades he
published several works that had a tremendous impact on subsequent scho-
larship: As said already, between 1846 and 1856 he published his History. In
1865, his Plato and the Other Companions of Sokrates appeared in three
volumes. Finally, in 1872, a two-volume study on Aristotle appeared posthu-
mously. These works, especially Grote’s History and Plato, were the most influ-
ential studies of the Greek heritage in Victorian Britain.
James Mill’s son, John Stuart Mill, was born 1806 and thus twelve years
younger than Grote. J. S. Mill died in 1873, two years after Grote. Like his
562 L. CATANA

father, J. S. Mill had received a very thorough training in classical languages, its
literature and philosophy, and, also like his father, he had not attended univer-
sity but, at a young age, entered the India Office, where his father was in
charge. J. S. Mill remained there for the rest of his career. J. S. Mill was intro-
duced to Grote through his father, since Grote had been a regular visitor at the
Mill house since 1808 – together with Bentham, Ricardo and other Radicals. It
was not before 1821 or 1822, when J. S. Mill was about fifteen years old, that
he read Bentham’s philosophical writings, immediately resulting into a con-
version to Benthamism and its ‘greatest happiness principle’. Inspired by
Bentham, he founded the Utilitarian Society in 1822–23. Like Grote had
done in the early 1820s, J. S. Mill assisted Bentham in his writings: from
1824 to 1826, he was research assistant on Bentham’s classical writing on
legal theory, his Rationale of Judicial Evidence, published in 1827 (Harris,
‘Mill, John Stuart’, 156–7). In the early 1820s, the young J. S. Mill would have
found a like-minded in the older but still young Grote, who was similarly
attracted to Bentham’s ideas.
This situation changed somewhat with J. S. Mill’s mental crisis in 1826–27.
The crisis meant that he became critical of Bentham’s narrowness and lack of
human insight. As a consequence of this crisis, J. S. Mill distanced himself from
the circle of Radicals and utilitarians (including Grote) in the 1830s and 1840s.
However, he resumed his friendship with Grote in the late 1850s and pub-
lished very positive reviews of Grote’s works in the 1840s and 1850s (Harris,
‘Mill, John Stuart’, 158, 162, 171).

4. Grote in 1826 on the Athenian democracy and its civic virtues


‘The motive’, Grote claimed in 1826 in his explanation of the abundance of
individual talent within history, poetry, philosophy, rhetoric and the arts in
Greece 560–278 BCE, ‘almost uniformly and without exception, is, a strong
desire for the public applause: there are many motives which suffice to
produce mediocrity, but this alone will give birth to excellence’ (Grote,
‘Fasti’, 271). This drive for recognition remained unchanged in the modern
period, Grote contended, even though the ‘circumstances of modern
society have materially changed’, implying that the paths for recognition of
aspiring talents were now in the fields of jurisprudence and theology
(Grote, ‘Fasti’, 278). Although this anthropology of recognition has a Hegelian
ring, it is unlikely that Grote drew inspiration from him: Grote referred expli-
citly to the ancient Greek religious festivals, where contests, agōnes, in gym-
nastics and poetry stimulated ambition among Greek citizens (Grote, ‘Fasti’,
277), and he referred to the contests between political leaders at political insti-
tutions in democratic Athens – a competition aiming at political influence in
the form of public applause (Grote, ‘Fasti’, 274). Support for such an under-
standing of the culture of democratic Athens could be found among the
BRITISH JOURNAL FOR THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 563

ancients themselves, where terms like hamilla (competition), agōn (strife) and
philotimia (striving for honour, ambition) were abundant in accounts of the
Athenian democracy, e.g. Isocrates 7.25 and Demosthenes 39.10–12 (see
Whitehead, ‘Competitive Outlay’). Mitford had bypassed these tenets in his
History, emphasizing instead negative traits like fickleness, but Grote
advanced bold explanations of them in his 1826 text.
The fundamental, material cause for the excellence in question was ‘the
subdivision of the Grecian population into a great number of distinct city-
communities’, that is, the polis, or city–state. Mountains, sea, a vast number
of islands and distant colonies made it natural to establish small, self-govern-
ing city-states. This plurality of city-states generated, in turn, a need for
‘mutual defence’ and protection that led to ‘intimate and frequent contact’
between the city-states and stimulated a civilization process (Grote, ‘Fasti’,
270–3). The smallness of these city-states had several consequences, that
institutionalized and stimulated competition for public applause among the
Greeks.
First, the ‘smallness of these city-communities into which the Hellenic race
was subdivided, kept alive in the bosom of each individual resident a constant
feeling of union with all his fellow citizens’ (Grote, ‘Fasti’, 272). Second, the
civic protection offered to the citizen by the polis, and not by a local great
man, a king or an aristocrat, imparted a sense of obligation towards the
polis itself. This citizen, Grote related
early contracted the habit of looking for orders and for protection only to the
central authority; he felt and regarded himself as the citizen of a community,
not as the subject of any local great man; and the obligations which he rendered
towards the community became inseparably connected in his mind with rights
which he was entitled to claim from them.
(Grote, ‘Fasti’, 272)

Grote’s emphasis on the obligations and rights of the citizen re-occur in his
History, and it was a feature which J. S. Mill picked up on in his review of
Grote’s History, as we shall see. In Grote’s understanding of civilization, this
gradual emancipation from great men or powerful families was typical of
the Greek poleis (Grote, ‘Fasti’, 272–3).
Third, the smallness of city-states allowed the citizens to hold their political
leaders accountable: ‘It [the small polis] enabled the bulk of each community
to protect themselves better against the injustice and ill-usage of their own
rulers, than it would have been possible to do had the distribution been
different’ (Grote, ‘Fasti’, 273). The fourth and last consequence of the small
polis concerned the custom of open and free public discourse on matters of
general interest (Grote, ‘Fasti’, 273). In the realm of politics, this meant that
rhetoric became an important and valuable discipline, because that was the
channel thorough which competitions were won at public assemblies and
law courts (Grote, ‘Fasti’, 275–6).
564 L. CATANA

According to Grote, the active citizenship of the ancient democracy culti-


vated a series of civic virtues – courage, wisdom and justice – which were, rever-
sely, loathed by monarchs and oligarchs, because the latter required a
submissive and passive character, completely opposed to the character of
the citizens ruling themselves in turn in a democracy. However, Grote
argued, even the monarch needed subjects possessing these virtues, and he
cited Xenophon (Hiero c. 5), who was otherwise critical of Athenian democracy,
as his witness (Grote, ‘Fasti’, 279). As a further witness, Grote cited Aristotle’s
Politics V.9, claiming that ‘that philosopher [Xenophon?] has described and
explained the policy common with the Grecian princes, of nourishing littleness
of soul and mistrust among their subjects’. This counter position between the
submissive and passive subject in despotic forms of rule on the one hand, and
the free and active subject in democratic forms of rule on the other, featured in
J. S. Mill’s Representative Government, as explained in the first section above.
In his 1826 text, Grote thus drafted an account of civic virtues that were
decisively shaped by sociological and institutional structures. According to
Clarke, its methodology was ultimately shaped by James Mill’s History of
British India (1817) and its sceptical and rigorous interpretation of primary
sources (Clarke, Grote, 105–106). Grote’s 1826 text transcended the account
of Roman, republican virtues that were otherwise available through Plutarch’s
Lives, since the virtues in Plutarch’s work were attributed to individual persons,
largely without reference to their possible sociological and institutional foun-
dations; Plutarch’s portraits were partly intended as exempla to be emulated
by his readers. The ‘philosophical’ task undertaken by Grote was of a
different nature, namely to map and evaluate the causal links between insti-
tutional structures and civic virtues. In line with this innovation on Grote’s part,
he dismissed the French historian Charles Rollin’s (1661–1741) account of
Roman republican virtues: ‘Rollin’s book [Historie ancienne, 1730–38 or Historie
Romaine, 1738–41?] is an honest recital of facts, with hardly any philosophy’
(Grote, ‘Fasti’, 270).

5. Grote in 1846–56 on ‘constitutional morality’ under the


Athenian democracy
Grote’s History covered the period from the earliest known times down to
Agathocles, the Greek tyrant of Syracuse, who died in 289 BCE – hence it
accounted for the period of almost 200 years of Athenian democracy from
Cleisthenes’ reforms in 508/7 BCE to the Macedonians’ abolishment of the
Athenian democracy in 322 BCE, including the two oligarchic interruptions
in 411/10 and 404/3 BCE (for a modern account of most of this period, see
Rhodes, A History). Grote’s History also covered philosophical movements
and figures within that time-span, e.g. the sophists (part 2, ch. 67) and Socrates
(part 2, ch. 68).
BRITISH JOURNAL FOR THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 565

Grote’s History of Greece, part two, on historical Greece, chapters 31 and 62,
dealt with the so-called ‘constitutional morality’ in ancient democratic Athens
and similarly touched upon civic virtues. In chapter 31 Grote examined Athe-
nian political life after the expulsion of the Peisistratids, who ruled Athens as
tyrants from 561 to 510 BCE. In particular, Grote discussed Cleisthenes and his
democratic reforms in 508/507 BCE, which Grote understood as foundational
to the Athenian democracy (compare with Ismard, ‘Les associations’, arguing
that Cleisthenes’ reforms marked continuation rather than a break). The Pei-
sistratids worked in some formal respects within Solon’s reforms of 594/3
BCE, implying, among other things, that non-aristocrats could participate in
voting on the Areopagos and in the newly established Assembly. Neverthe-
less, Grote contended:
The timocratic classification of Solon [in respect to income] also continued to
subsist – but all within the tether and subservient to the purposes of the
ruling family, who always kept one of their number as master, among the
chief administrators, and always retained possession of the acropolis as well
as of the mercenary force.
(Grote, History 4:168–9)

The Peisistratids thus upheld what Grote had classified as a non-democratic


form of rule in his 1826 review, institutionalizing a passive and subservient
character in their subjects.
With the expulsion of the last Peisistratid (Hippias in 510 BCE), this situation
changed: The Athenians were now free from foreign influence, political parties
were declared and competition amongst political candidates arose, especially
between Isocrates and Cleisthenes. Grote explained (citing Herodotus 5.66–
69): ‘he [Cleisthenes] took into partnership the people, who had been
before excluded from everything’. And he added: ‘His partnership with the
people gave birth to the Athenian democracy: it was a real and important
revolution’ (Grote, History, 4:169.) More specifically, Cleisthenes abolished
the four quasi-family-based Ionic tribes and invented ten new tribes, each
including a number of demes, which bypassed the earlier divisions into
families, gentes or phatries, and which included the many otherwise disen-
franchized immigrants in Attica, especially in Athens and Piraeus, plus many
metics and slaves (Grote, History, 4:170–2 and 4:218).
The circumstance that many people were now free and equal was the deci-
sive factor in the Athenian democracy. According to Grote, it also transformed
the Athenians from being ‘slack and timid’, ‘feeble and apt for submission’,
under the rule of one despot, e.g. Hippias, into confident and self-asserting
agents, even able to match Sparta in military terms (Grote, History, 4:236).
Grote’s account of the political franchise granted to these people was
largely in line with his view stated in 1826, that advanced, ancient Greek
city-states procured freedom and independence from local families and
great men. Moreover, Grote noted that Cleisthenes’ new constitution was a
566 L. CATANA

‘testimony to his prudence and skill not less than to their [his countrymen’s]
courage and unanimity’ (Grote, ‘Fasti’, 272). Courage, here assigned to
the Athenian, democratic people, was one of the civic virtues claimed by
Grote in 1826 to be inimical to the civic virtues cultivated in authoritarian
societies.
Cleisthenes retained the Assembly as a key institution in the Athenian
democracy, but his new division into ten tribes and subdivisions of the
tribes into a number of demes implied an increase of the number of citizens
attending the Assembly. Moreover, he enlarged the number of senators in the
Council (or Senate, as Grote calls it) from four hundred to five hundred, and
these were chosen by lot. Hereby political participation had increased con-
siderably and it was no longer controlled by a few ruling families (Grote,
‘Fasti’, 272). In his History, Grote explained that the meetings in the Assembly
were:
frequent and free: men thus became trained to the duty both of speakers and
hearers, and each man, while he felt that he exercised his share of influence
on the decision, identified his own safety and happiness with the vote of the
majority, and became familiarised with the notion of a sovereign authority
which he neither could nor ought to resist.
(Grote, History, 4:186; see also 4:203.)

Cleisthenes’ democratic reform thus habituated a substantial number of citi-


zens to participate in the political decision-process and to seek protection
in democratic institutions. Grote’s account in his History corresponded to his
earlier account in 1826, where he had similarly pointed out that individuals
in ancient city-states identified with their community and regarded it as
their best guarantee of protection and civic rights (Grote, ‘Fasti’, 272).
According to Grote, Cleisthenes had consciously facilitated this habitu-
ation, in order to establish a ‘constitutional morality’ and in order to protect
the democratic constitution against internal threats:
It was necessary to create in the multitude, and through them to force upon the
leading ambitious men, that rare and difficult sentiment which we may term a
constitutional morality — a paramount reverence for the forms of the consti-
tution, [1] enforcing obedience to the authorities acting under and within
those forms, yet [2] combined with the habit of open speech, [3] of action
subject only to definite legal control, and [4] unrestrained censure of those
very authorities as to all their public acts—combined too with [5] a perfect confi-
dence in the bosom of every citizen, amidst the bitterness of party contests, that
the forms of the constitution will be not less sacred in the eyes of his opponents
than in his own.
(Grote, History, 4:205)

In the first sentence, asserting a mechanism between the multitude and


ambitious political leaders, Grote picked up on a feature of the Athenian
democracy that he had underscored in his publication of 1826, namely that
BRITISH JOURNAL FOR THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 567

open competition for public applause among ambitious political leaders was a
distinctive and constructive feature of the political institutions of democratic
Athens. In the above quotation Grote asserted that the franchised multitude
re-enforced this feature, and that it produced ‘constitutional morality’ with
five characteristics: (1) ‘obedience to the authorities’, e.g. the law courts and
the Assembly; (2) ‘habit of open speech’, that is, freedom of speech practised
by citizens and political leaders within these institutions, among other places;
(3) ‘action subject only to legal control’, probably signalling that there was no
authority above the constitution of Athens, e.g. families or other private inter-
ests; (4) ‘unrestrained censure of those very authorities as to all their public
acts’, that is, accountability required from those in office; and (5) a pervasive
confidence among citizens that the constitution unites opponents. This was a
very different understanding and evaluation of the multitude than the one
emerging from Mitford’s History.
Grote underscored the role of public and free speech, not only as a demo-
cratic right of the citizens, but also as a means to understand and evaluate the
moral character of a potential political leader under democracy, well before
the leader becomes a danger to the polis: ‘a man must stand in evidence
before the public, so as to afford some reasonable means of judging of his
character and purposes’ (Grote, History, 4:207; for freedom of speech, see
also 8:55).
Grote observed an emotional effect upon the many newly franchised citi-
zens in the Athenian democracy, part of the multitude just described. Grote
said as follows about the collective emotional bond established by means
of a democratic constitution:
It was this comprehensive political idea which acted with electric effect upon the
Athenians, creating within them a host of sentiments, motives, sympathies, and
capacities, to which they had before been strangers. Democracy in Grecian anti-
quity possessed the privilege, not only of kindling an earnest and unanimous
attachment to the constitution in the bosoms of the citizens, but also of creating
an energy of public and private action, such as could never be obtained under
an oligarchy, where the utmost that could be hoped for was a passive acquies-
cence and obedience. … Theories of government were there [in democratic
Athens] anything but a dead letter: they were connected with emotions of
the strongest as well as of the most opposite character.
(Grote, History, 4:236–7)

One civic and active virtue in particular was stimulated by democracy,


namely courage, as it was presented in Pericles in his funeral orations (Thucy-
dides 2.35–46 and 2.60–64) (Grote, History 4:239) (for courage in the Greek
democratic polis, see Balot, Courage). The energizing effect of democracy
upon the multitude may account for the ‘active character’ to which J. S. Mill
referred in his 1861 book on representative democracy. J. S. Mill had not
only referred to ‘our great historian’, but also to ‘the high quality of the
568 L. CATANA

addresses which their great orators deemed best calculated to act with effect
on their understanding and will’: These speeches by Pericles may well be
examples of such addresses.

6. J. S. Mill’s appreciation of Grote’s re-evaluation of democratic


Athens
The mature J. S. Mill took a special interest in Grote’s publications and pub-
lished four extensive reviews of them. In 1846 he published a sympathetic
review of the first two volumes of Grote’s History, fully subscribing to
Grote’s rejection of Mitford’s historical account of ancient Greece (J. S. Mill,
‘Early Grecian History’, 275); in 1853, another and equally long review of
volume six to eleven of Grote’s opus followed. In these reviews, J. S. Mill eulo-
gized Grote’s History as a ‘philosophical history’ or ‘history of philosophy’ (in
contrast to that of Mitford, according to Grote), because Grote’s History high-
lighted the causal links between the ethical beliefs and manners of the Athe-
nians (ēthos) and the institutional framework of democratic Athens (J. S. Mill,
‘Early Grecian History’, 275; and ‘Grote’s History’, 311, 332). In 1866, J. S. Mill
reviewed, and praised, Grote’s Plato and the other Companions of Sokrates
(J. S. Mill, ‘Plato’, 377, 383, 385, 440). Finally, in 1873 he published a last
review of Grote’s Aristotle (1872) in Fortnightly Review.
Grote only made a few passing comments on Mitford in his History of 1846–
56 (Grote, History, 1:v-vi; 3:15–16), but never entered a substantive discussion
of his work, as he had done in 1826. In both of J. S. Mill’s two reviews of Grote’s
History, however, J. S. Mill referred approvingly to Grote’s attack on Mitford (J.
S. Mill, ‘Early Grecian History’, 275; id., ‘Grote’s History’, 336). J. S. Mill also
defended the fifth-century Athenians against the charge of being ‘fickle’
and susceptible to the manipulation of political leaders, a charge raised by
Mitford and subsequently rejected by Grote (J. S. Mill, ‘Grote’s History’, 316–
7. For this charge, see Demetriou, George Grote, 111–9). Moreover, J. S. Mill
praised Grote for his understanding of the ēthos of the Athenians and the
way in which the institutional structure of the Athenian democracy had pro-
duced a feeling of moral obligation towards the polis among Athenians – a
feeling that was put to use in civic matters such as participation in the insti-
tutional life of Athens (J. S. Mill, ‘Grote’s History’, 332). He used Grote’s
account to contrast the sense of duty to the public in ancient Greece with
that in modern Britain:
But we greatly doubt if most of the positive virtues were not better conceived,
and more highly prized, by the public opinion of Greece than by that of Great
Britain; while negative and passive qualities have now engrossed the chief
part of the honour paid to virtue; and it may be questioned if even private
duties are, on the whole, better understood, while duties to the public, unless
in cases of special trust, have almost dropped out of the catalogue: that idea,
BRITISH JOURNAL FOR THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 569

so powerful in the free States of Greece, has faded into mere rhetorical
ornament.
(J. S. Mill, ‘Grote’s History’, 314)

This lesson, learned from the Athenians via Grote, may well have informed
J. S. Mill’s notion of active character in his Representative Government: The
active character does not only regard the industry with which the individual
freely pursues self-interest, but also his or her free and motivated engagement
in the political and institutional life of the society in which he or she lives. The
Athenian democracy, governed by the multitude of citizens and based on the
principle of open offices to citizens, provided a political education of civic
virtues, which J. S. Mill emphasized:
while the daily working of Athenian institutions (by means of which every citizen
was accustomed to hear every sort of question, public and private, discussed by
the ablest men of the time, with the earnestness of purpose and fulness of prep-
aration belonging to actual business, deliberative or judicial) formed a course of
political education, the equivalent of which modern nations have not known
how to give even to those whom they educate for statesmen.
(J. S. Mill, ‘Grote’s History’, 324)

This lesson, learnt from democratic Athens via Grote, was largely in line with J.
S. Mill’s Representative Government, and it offers one example of history of
philosophy influencing philosophy proper, not vice versa.

7. Conclusion
The present article connects with at least two themes of this special issue.
First, it illustrates the trivial fact that written histories of philosophy have a
history of their own. Historical accounts of the ancient Athenian democracy
and its political thought is one case in point: As we have seen, Brucker
praised oligarchic Sparta and not democratic Athens in his Historia critica phi-
losophiae (1742–44), Mitford continued this long-standing tradition and eval-
uated democratic Athens negatively and rather dismissively in his History of
Greece (1784–1810), whereas Grote, in his History of Greece (1846–56), circum-
vented this negative evaluation. This is an illustration of the historicity of
written histories of philosophy, but it is also an illustration of the dynamics
of historical epistemology, which is far from trivial. The case of the Athenian
democracy shows that it requires an enormous degree of scepticism on the
part of the historian of philosophy to circumvent long-standing assessments
that carry conviction and appear uncontroversial and natural. The historiogra-
phy of philosophy is a useful tool in this respect: It reveals inclusions and
exclusions of material in the canon, transformations of perspectives applied
on past philosophical texts, as well as shifting evaluations of texts and con-
texts of the past.
570 L. CATANA

Second, the article demonstrates how written accounts of past philosophy


can influence philosophy proper. I have argued that J. S. Mill’s idea of ‘active
character’ was influenced by Grote’s interpretation and evaluation of the
ancient Athenian democracy. Contrary to many earlier historians, Grote
argued that the Athenian direct democracy educated ethical virtues
amongst Athenian citizens, and he held it responsible for the so-called consti-
tutional morality in classical Athens. As we have seen, J. S. Mill explicitly
agreed with Grote’s rejection of the earlier negative evaluation of the Athe-
nian democracy, Mitford in particular. In his reviews of Grote’s historical
works, J. S. Mill picked up on Grote’s dichotomy between the submissive
and the active character, arguing that the active character developed by
the Athenian democracy, along with the community-centred understanding
of the civic virtues developed in the citizens, ought to be transplanted to
the modern representative democracy.

Acknowledgements
I should like to thank Karen Green, Lena Halldenius, James Kierstead, Alexandra Lianeri,
Mogens Lærke, Colin Tyler and the anonymous reviewers for their comments to earlier
drafts of this article.

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