Isonomia
= concept proposed by Kojin Karatani
Description
Tarik:
"Out of the Ionian cities of Western Anatolia emerged a rare and radical idea: Isonomia, the principle of equality before the law not simply as a judicial norm, but as a structure of anti-rule. In cities like Miletus and Ephesus, power wasn’t concentrated. Authority circulated, and governance operated without entrenched elites.
Philosopher Kōjin Karatani argues in Isonomia and the Origins of Philosophy that Isonomia did not emerge from the later Athenian model of democracy, but instead from a deeper, older structure of society that avoided both monarchy and aristocracy. He writes: “What distinguished Ionia was not freedom of the polis, but freedom from the polis.” In Karatani’s reading, isonomia was a condition in which people chose to live together under laws that no one person or group could own or manipulate. It was not about elections or voting it was about the absence of domination.
This unique social configuration allowed philosophy itself to emerge not as a luxury of surplus, but as a consequence of liberty. The pre-Socratic thinkers thrived in these isonomic conditions, where intellectual inquiry was unbound by social hierarchy. Heraclitus, Anaximander, and Thales were not Athenians; they were Ionian, shaped by civic environments in which migration, transparency, and equal participation were normalized.
Arendt and others later reflected on Isonomia as a precursor to the modern republic not because it created institutions of governance, but because it prevented any one institution from claiming authority over others. In isonomia, freedom was not granted from above it was exercised laterally, daily, communally.
Thus, Isonomia was not merely a precursor to democracy. It was something even more foundational: a socio-political atmosphere in which the rule of law operated without rulers.
Out of the Ionian cities of Western Anatolia emerged a rare and radical idea: Isonomia, the principle of equality before the law not simply as a judicial norm, but as a structure of anti-rule. In cities like Miletus and Ephesus, power wasn’t concentrated. Authority circulated, and governance operated without entrenched elites.
Philosopher Kōjin Karatani identifies Isonomia as the original context in which pre-Socratic philosophy flourished not under Athenian democracy, but within horizontal societies where no man ruled another (source).
This wasn’t a democracy of votes. It was a non-domination pact. A shared civic rhythm, where migration was permitted, offices rotated by lot, and law was transparent to all.
Arendt and others argue that Isonomia created the preconditions for philosophy not because people had more time, but because they had more freedom. To question nature, one must be politically unshackled."
Discussion
Please read the article by Michel Bauwens:
More information
* Book: Isonomia and the Origins of Philosophy. by Kojin Karatani. Duke University Press, 2017
URL = https://www.dukeupress.edu/isonomia-and-the-origins-of-philosophy
"In Isonomia and the Origins of Philosophy—published originally in Japanese and now available in four languages—Kōjin Karatani questions the idealization of ancient Athens as the source of philosophy and democracy by placing the origins instead in Ionia, a set of Greek colonies located in present-day Turkey. Contrasting Athenian democracy with Ionian isonomia—a system based on non-rule and a lack of social divisions whereby equality is realized through the freedom to immigrate—Karatani shows how early Greek thinkers from Heraclitus to Pythagoras were inseparably linked to the isonomia of their Ionian origins, not democracy. He finds in isonomia a model for how an egalitarian society not driven by class antagonism might be put into practice, and resituates Socrates's work and that of his intellectual heirs as the last philosophical attempts to practice isonomia's utopic potentials. Karatani subtly interrogates the democratic commitments of Western philosophy from within and argues that the key to transcending their contradictions lies not in Athenian democracy, with its echoes of imperialism, slavery, and exclusion, but in the openness of isonomia."