No Poetry From the Past: The Archaeology of Moses Finley’s Ancestral Constitution

Moses I. Finley’s Cambridge Inaugural Lecture, The Ancestral Constitution (1971), contains unexpected and significant traces of Moses Finkelstein’s collaboration with Frankfurt School intellectuals and of his political activity on the American left. Thus, we learn that Max Horkheimer’s analysis of political authority in "Egoism and the Freedom Movement" (1936) influenced The Ancestral Constitution’s grim portrayal of historical misrepresentation in ancient Athens, seventeenth-century England, and the United States. Equally, the lecture provides glimpses, perhaps unintended, of Finley’s left-wing political activity in the 1930s.