Abstract
Elizabeth K. Markovits’ book Future Freedoms: Intergenerational Justice, Democratic Theory, and Ancient Greek Tragedy and Comedy begins from the premise that we live in an “intergenerational world” and that democratic citizenries act so as to try and disavow or overcome this fact. That we might not only be affected by the actions of previous generations but also shape the political realities of future ones is generally regarded not as a permanent political condition to take heed of in political life, according to Markovits, but as a constraint to manage or throw off. Discomfiture marks a present generation’s sensibility to the “as-yet-nonexistent future” (3), and this stance reinforces and is reinforced by a modern investment in aligning freedom with “sovereignty—individual, state, and generational” (2).
Future Freedoms sets its sights on a different picture in which people are part of an “assemblage” that is “larger” than their own generation and therefore “temporally unbounded” (40). Markovits wants this conception to ground a normative vision of political action. Taking intergenerationality seriously not only orients us differently to present political questions but also reveals that we have an obligation to safeguard the freedom of future generations. This is “intergenerational justice,” the cornerstone of the book’s argument, and it requires “leaving” persons in the future “as much range as possible to bring about their own impact on the world” (125). It turns out that we are accountable to them.
The book builds this account of intergenerational justice in three ways. First, it uses the notion of intergenerationality as a through line to traverse some familiar democratic theory territory: the introductory chapter critically engages with the limits and political stakes of arguments that at bottom understand political activity as control over others and future outcomes; value democracies for letting people “chart their own courses” (26); and, committed to a notion of “generational” “self-determination” (12), neglect to prescribe an ethos of responsibility toward future persons, as Markovits herself advocates. Second, as chapter one demonstrates, the book finds inspiration in the thought of Hannah Arendt to encourage that we “accept the unpredictability of our action in the world” (32) and act with the interconnectedness of generations in mind. Third, Future Freedoms turns to Athenian drama to illustrate and inculcate this alternative orientation to the future. Engagements with classical Greek texts constitute the bulk of the book, in which Athenian plays are taken to exhibit a pronounced concern with intergenerational conflict that is refreshing because it assumes people’s vulnerability to and dependence on others and dramatizes the folly and failure of the inevitable human aspiration to sovereignty.
Future Freedoms seems motivated in part by a frustration with the near-sightedness of the present political moment, but it may be just as, if not more, driven by what it perceives to be the inadequacy of predominant modes of rational and “technical” argumentation to “move” people to care about “unknown, future individuals” (5). One admirable aim of the book’s engagement with Athenian drama is to promote the powers of storytelling, which is politically transformative because it is imaginative. In moving to tragedy and comedy, Future Freedoms undertakes and prescribes “a narrative turn,” which is the title of chapter two, in order to underscore the importance for both the study and practice of politics of “emotional motivation” and dialogical thinking, which dramatic poetry provokes in its spectators and readers. Although it is not always sufficiently clear what aiming at intergenerational justice would look like in practice, Markovits is adamant that it does not involve “represent[ing] future interests” (125), which we cannot know, but rather reflecting on “an issue as if one were in the future” and engaging critically with one’s current assumptions and views (44, 45). The interpretation of narrative and the spectatorship of public art enable both these activities.
The book is drawn to Aristophanes’s two comedies—Knights and Clouds, the subject of chapter three—for two reasons. First, it takes the comical rendering of liminal figures—an old man, a mother, and a dependent son struggling to control the actions of those around them—to foreground the contingent effects of action, draw attention to flux as a feature of power relations, and compel us to presume “the need to live among similarly free people and to use power collaboratively” (76). Second, that the plays dramatize (perhaps even satirize) life under democracy without focusing on “the able-bodied, powerful [male] individual” (76), Markovits avers, means that they provoke our self-scrutinizing awareness of the “fantasy” of individual “freedom and control” (84).
Chapter four focuses on “the mother” in Euripides’s tragedies Trojan Women and Medea to unsettle further the common presumption that we are “discrete individuals set into generations apart from others” (87). The mother emerges in these texts as another “liminal” figure but one that is especially important for Markovits because it is rendered “relational” (88), constituted by bridging generations and therefore revelatory of their co-constituted quality. The chapter wants us to acknowledge the “carework” customarily entailed by motherhood because of the linkages between people that this activity forges and makes visible (88). In celebrating the interrelations that the mother figure illuminates, however, the chapter may under-realize its own argument. The chapter stops short of providing a sustained critical account of how the kinship position of “mother” is available for laying bare intergenerational connectedness precisely because of how political kinship assignments are constructed and maintained politically as conduits for patriarchy. This oversight is curious, because the book is alert to how the mother depicted in Medea, for example, is responsible for the “future” (as in kin) but, because de-privileged, also powerless to effect political change. (It would have been helpful to hear how Medea is powerless apart from being disenfranchised, however; her power [of persuasion, for example] is apparent throughout the tragedy.) Indeed, the chapter registers that women’s political value is frequently tethered to motherhood and therefore to “others.” It even acknowledges that caretaking is not a genetic relation. Why these insights do not lead Markovits to denaturalize “intergenerationality” may say something about the book’s thorough investment in the concept. Isn’t the ordering of persons and the speculating about the future in terms of generations as much a cultural, political, and patriarchal artifact as the contested idea of the “mother” that populates these tragedies?
In chapter five, the book advances a compelling reading of Aeschylus’s Oresteia and offers what I took to be its fullest articulation of how intergenerational justice relates to freedom, especially for future generations. If realizing “full political citizenship” means confronting “a demand to own the past and intersubjective present,” it entails a double move to take responsibility for conditions we inherit and “keep open the potentials for democratic deliberation among future generations” (125). Aeschylus’s trilogy encapsulates this view, Markovits holds, because it centers around the havoc that a past cycle of familial violence wreaks on the present and potentially the future and because it ends by presenting a solution that does not aim to eradicate conflict once and for all but to enable persons over time to come to their own judgments about it. As Markovits reads the plays, all “[t]he action culminates in the development of a transgenerational conception of responsibility capable of negotiating the conflicting imperatives that arise in an intergenerational, assembled context” through the establishment of the court system (125). Orestes’s eventual acquiescence to the judgment of Athena exemplifies Markovits’s notion of freedom because he faces up to tensions inherited from the past in a way that recognizes their inevitable recurrence while keeping an eye on the future (143).
Inspired by the fact that Athenian drama was performed and city-funded, the last chapter inquires into the role public art might play today in providing “sites of” potential “democratic attunement to the future” (163). Markovits looks at examples of actual spaces, such as the Whitney plantation outside New Orleans, where spectators are provoked to forge “connections between the enslaved children” that formerly inhabited the plantation and “contemporary social justice movements like Black Lives Matter” (158). The guided tour begins not with the “Big House” but rather with a historic African-American church, a memorial to the slaves who died on the plantation, and their living quarters. This novel orientation to the space of the plantation, Markovits contends, when experienced alongside the recounted stories of enslaved African children, presses the spectator to ask whether violent racial oppression persists in part because of “ignorance about the history of the enslaved experience” (158).
The book is impressive in its capacity to blend contemporary questions, democratic theory, and the textual interpretation of ancient thought without losing its own voice. Markovits’s account did leave me with questions, some of which could have been addressed in the overarching vision of the book. First, Future Freedoms turns to the texts of classical antiquity partly to unleash the critical powers of a strange, because premodern, tradition of thought and unsettle our fascination with sovereignty. I was puzzled, then, by the decision to use terms like “agency” and “sovereignty” in the actual readings of classical Greek thought, which lacks these historically specific conceptions. I understand that Markovits is seeking to trouble the contemporary investment in these notions by pluralizing their meanings, but does their application to the Greek context threaten to obscure the very historical and theoretical particularity she wants to animate for its denaturalizing potential? If sovereignty is a modern notion, how unsettling is it to say that Aristophanes’s comedies explore “competing conceptions of sovereignty” and “sovereign freedom” (5, 63)? Second, and more fundamentally, the book often elides the difference between descendants and “the future” rather than acknowledging this distinction and interrogating and theorizing it. How would the book’s stress on intergenerationality shift if it contended with alternative signifiers of the “future”? What investments incline Markovits to collapse their distinction so frequently? Finally, the picture of women as mothers and “producers of future citizens” (92) is attributed to classical and contemporary thought rather than explicitly endorsed, but it brought to my mind a difficulty that the book sidesteps when it claims less often that we talk about the future mistakenly and more often that we talk about it not at all or not enough. I struggled to quell the voice inside me that said, “Citizenries and their representatives make claims about political value in terms of futurity all the time.” I wonder whether the critical question to focus on is not whether the future is “invisible” today (4) but rather when it is present and to what various effects it operates.