Following Hannah Arendt’s famous thesis in the Human Condition, Giorgio Agamben has argued that simple natural life was excluded from the sphere of the polis and remained confined – as merely reproductive life – to the sphere of the oikos in the classical Greek city-state. Contrary to Arendt, however, Agamben does not maintain that the Greek city-state was thereby immune to biopolitical rationality: reproductive life (zoê) was included in the political form of life (bios) in the mode of exclusion. In other words, the very act of exclusion constitutes the negative foundation of political life of the polis. In this paper, contrary to Arendt and Agamben, I argue that the relationship between the oikos and the polis was not exclusive in classical poleis. For the Greeks, it was self-evident that an oikos was a part of the polis, not an entity opposed to or excluded from it. Further, life of the Greek oikos, particularly in Athens during the democratic period, was controlled and regulated by magistrates with a number of laws and ordinances. In classical political theory, this regulatory tendency is even more obvious: in Plato’s and Aristotle’s works on politics, even the tiniest details of everyday life are controlled and regulated by legislators and magistrates. Finally, it is contestable whether the art of household (oikonomia) and the art of politics (techne politike) were such different arts as has been claimed in modern political theory. Even Aristotle – perhaps the first to propose a clear-cut distinction between the authority of the statesman (politikon) and that of the head of an estate (oikonomikon) – uses extensively oikos vocabulary in his reflections of the political administration of the polis.
