Kostas Papaioannou (1925-1981) was one of the many Marxist intellectuals who found their feet at the University of Athens’ Law School.[1] While there, he published his first article, “The Dying Socrates” (“Ο θνήσκων Σωκράτης”) (1942), in the literary periodical Nea Estia, at the age of eighteen. He also became fast friends with Kostas Axelos (1924-2010), the Greek Marxist philosopher, in whose company he engaged in intellectual discussion on Marx, Hegel, Nietzsche, and the Soviet experiment, as well as ancient Greece. All of these were to be synthesised in his later work.
While his university years were certainly fruitful, the Axis occupation of Greece (1940-1944) overshadowed them, and, upon his graduation in 1944, Papaioannou began to work with the Resistance alongside his father, contributing regularly to the Socialist Party periodical, Socialist Review (Σοσιαλιστική Επιθεώρηση).[2] In May, he was arrested and imprisoned, and then, after the December Events (Dekemvriana) dissolved into outright war in the streets of Athens, he went into hiding to protect himself from the ensuing “White Terror”.[3]
In the December of the following year, and alongside a number of other leftist intellectuals (including Axelos and Kostas Castoriadis), Papaioannou left Greece for France, having received a scholarship from the French Institute at Athens. Here, he enrolled at the Sorbonne, and graduated with a degree in philosophy in 1948. He proceeded to live in France for the rest of his career, rarely returning home to Greece because of the persecution of communists in the country that characterised the late 1940s, the 1950s, and, indeed, continued right up until the 1970s, with the Regime of the Colonels (1967-1974).[4] He never gained a PhD, but, because of his writings, was given posts in French universities (the Sorbonne (1959-1963), the Ecole des Hautes Etudes Commerciales (1962-1968), C.N.R.S. (1963-1970), Paris X (1970-1972), Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes (1971-1981), and was connected with a number of French intellectuals, including Maurice de Gandillac (1906-2006), Pierre Nora (1931-present), and Jean-Francois Revel (1924-2006), as well as artist Nikos Hadjikyriakos Ghikas (1906-1994).
The majority of his work focuses on Marxist ideology, and he published a number of important works, including The Foundations of Marxism (Τα θεμέλια του Μαρξισμού) (Four Volumes, 1954, 1959, 1960, 1961) and The Genesis of Totalitarianism: Economic Underdevelopment and Social Revolution (Η γένεση του Ολοκληρωτισμού. Οικονομική υπανάπτυξη και κοινωνική επανάσταση) (1959). Crucially, in his work, he strongly criticised Stalinism and was extremely sceptical about the efficacy of the USSR under the dictator’s leadership.
However, the ancient world often crept its way in. After his first article on Socrates, he published another article, also in Nea Estia, on Plato (1947). It was in this work, and his later political works, that he sought to wrest the ancient Greek world back from its conception as the foundation of the so-called “West”. To him, the Renaissance birthed the beginning of modern bourgeois culture, which was the antithesis of the ancient Greek world. The ancient Greeks were non-utilitarian, and the ‘dynamism of the Renaissance rebaptised and utilised the ancient values in its own way, but did not continue them in any way’ (Loizidi:2006, translation my own).[5] Indeed, as he wrote:
One of the cornerstones of classical civilisation was that the Philosopher (the conscious man), the Poet, and the Politician made up an inseparable union. From Plato’s Academy right up until this very day, the whole history of conscious man in the West has been the history of his failed attempts to restore this union. … The history of the Western statesman has been the failed attempt to reunite the State, the People, and Culture in some new synthesis.[6]
To Papaioannou, then, classical Greece is alienated from modern, Western, bourgeois culture. Instead, it is allied to something more primitively Marxist. It is inherently oppositional to the modern, capitalistic world, even in its very philosophical structure.
In 1972, he plunged into “straight” classicism, publishing (in French) The Art of Archaic and Classical Greece (L’art de la grece archaïque et classique). This work has been recognised as pioneering in its argument that Byzantine painting is largely continuous with Greek tradition.
Papaioannou’s work was deeply influential. As Stefanos Rozanis, both his student and his friend, wrote of him, he was ‘a Dionysian body, which was dismembered. Pieces were taken here and there’ (Rozanis 2006, translation my own).[7] However, since his death, he has been very little read, despite the efforts of academics in both Greece and France to ensure that his ideas continue to be circulated and published. Up until his death in 1981, he suffered from that peculiar difficulty of the Greek Marxist academic of the 20th century: a profound alienation from the Greek establishment, and thus a profound alienating from the populace at their hands.[8]
This profile was written by Anna Coopey.
[1] Others include Panagis Lekatsas, Yanis Kordatos, and Nikos Kazantzakis.
[2] On EAM and the Axis Occupation of Greece, see Mark Mazower (1993): Inside Hitler’s Greece: The Experience of Occupation, 1941-1944 (Yale University Press).
[3] On the December Events, see Menelaos Charalampidis (2014): Δεκεμβριανά 1944, Η μάχη της Αθήνας (Αλεξάνδρεια). On the “White Terror”, and the Civil War that followed, see Svetoslav Rajak (2010): “The Cold War in the Balkans, 1945-1956” (pp. 198-220) from Melvyn P. Leffler & Odd Arne Westad (eds.) (2010): The Cambridge History of the Cold War, Volume I (Cambridge University Press).
[4] On the virulently anti-communist Regime of the Colonels, see Sotiris Rizas (2008): Η Ελληνική πολιτική μετά τον Εμφύλιο πόλεμο. Κοινοβουλευτισμός και Δικτατορία (Καστανιώτης), pp. 385-489.
[5] Accessed via George Douatzis (2006): “Κ. Παπαῖωάννου, ο οικουμενικός Ελληνας” from Η Καθημερινή – https://www.kathimerini.gr/culture/271363/k-papaioannoy-o-oikoymenikos-ellinas/ (accessed 01-03-2025, 21:35).
[6] ibid.
[7] ibid.
[8] For more information, see the University of Ioannina’s Philosophy Faculty page on him – http://pep.uoi.gr/old/kostas_papaioannou/gr/index.html (accessed 01-03-2025, 21:38).
