belong to no one but him. At the same time, by engaging a person with his
local and observable world of contingency and particularity, the ‘‘What
should I do’’ question calls that person to the practice of theory,theoria.
And theorizing brings to light, among other things, the ways in which
individual human beings are always in relation not only to what is immedi-
ately around them but also to that which makes their unique circumstances
what they are, namely, a culture, a set of institutions, a constitution, and the
other members of their community, past and present, that brought these into
being.
By inviting reXection that reveals the ways in which agency is both indi-
viduated and also embedded in collectivities made up of, and made by,
others, the ‘‘What should I do’’ question brings to light the dependence of
individual human beings on the collectivities of which they are parts and also
the dependence of the collective whole on the actions, choices, and judgments
of the parts that make it up. It underscores the centrality to politics of
individual agency and accountability, the human impossibility of taking
into account everything one would need to in order to answer fully ad-
equately for one’s actions, and the utter vulnerability of those actions to
collective power and institutions. In all these ways, the ‘‘What should I do?’’
question contains within it other questions, including ‘‘What is there to be
done?’’ and ‘‘What do we wish to be able to do?’’ and ‘‘What should we do as a
collectivity?’’ These questions, together, indicate the possibilities, responsi-
bilities, and limitations of a political life.
Modern and contemporary political theorists are no less concerned than
were the Greeks with the possibilities, responsibilities, and limitations of a
political life. Studying individual agency or rational choice or identity or
culture or state-centered institutions, these theorists tend to orient their
analyses of politics to one particular axis of inquiry. The Greeks, by contrast,
theorized politics by drawing all of these axes together. There is, to be sure, no
easy Wt between these domains of inquiry, and so the classical authors
theorized as well about the quarrelsome interfaces among individual
human beings, households, social groups, and polities, and also between
politics and philosophy, politics and piety, politics and society, and politics
and poetry. By putting the ‘‘What should I do’’ question at the center of their
study of politics the classical poets, historians and philosophers disclosed the
scope and breadth of politics. Asking that question now, and again, returns us
to their methods and contexts, and allows us to appreciate anew the possi-
bilities of political theory.
the political theory of classical greece 187