A look at the theorists of the small states

Keith Woods

Dec 30, 2023

Is modern society too big? This is not the kind of question we are used to approaching political theory with. We ask a lot of questions about the ideal form of government, but very little about the ideal scale of a society. This is not to be confused with establishment conservatives complaining about the size of government itself, promising that all manner of problems can be solved by eliminating taxes, easing regulations and laying off bureaucrats. The question concerns not the size of the government apparatus, but rather the society it governs. My last essay looked at the work of Panagiotis Kondylis, and his view that we are in a unique social formation called mass democracy, characterised by mass consumption and production, atomisation, managerialism and globalisation. All of these are unique to mass society, so it may be worthwhile to take another look at what political philosophers have written about this.

In contrast to contemporary politics, many of the great political philosophers of history converge on the small, organic state as the ideal unit for their political theories. Kirkpatrick Sale describes this perennial pattern in what he calls “the decentralized tradition”:

It is striking to re-read history with eyes opened to the persistence of this tradition, because at once you begin to see the existence of the anti-­authoritarian, independent, self-regulating, local community is every bit as basic to the human record as the existence of the centralized, imperial, hierarchical state, and far more ancient, more durable, and more widespread.1

When we read about the great political philosophers of antiquity, we make the mistake of assuming that their notions about forms of government, like democracy, are the same as ours today. We often neglect to consider the scale these thinkers had in mind for implementing these ideas : the small, compact, homogeneous city-state. And this was not just a reflection of their own circumstances. They often emphasised limits to the size of a society, and gave clear reasons for these limits.

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