Chapter 3 analyzes freedom as doing “whatever one wishes” in fourth-century oratory. As several scholars have noted, doing “whatever one wishes” appears ambivalent in forensic speeches. They argue that, since Athens was not an anarchic state, extreme freedom could be glossed as a threat to sociopolitical stability. In contrast to prevailing scholarship, however, I argue that the most dominant principle, even in these texts, is the preservation of positive freedom as justification for the litigant’s position. While acting “however one wishes” may be presented as objectionable, the rhetoric of that assessment emphasizes who is doing “whatever they wish” and whom they affect by doing so. Bad characters, whether a criminals, oligarchs, or metics, can be rebuked as undeserving of positive freedom and abusing the power that attends it. The limitation of another citizen’s ability to do what he wishes can also condemn the action. Doing “what one wishes” is not a byword for antidemocratic action, but can have such a connotation because of the particular actors or victims of the actions. It is the misuse of the natural qualities of a citizen that leads to censure.

Drawing on local judicial records and on-the-ground interviews, the chapter examines two criminal cases in a Shandong village, highlighting how, in the hyper-politicized context of the Great Leap Forward, factional struggles among rural elites took on a dangerous new significance. The revival of the Socialist Education Movement saw the downfall of two leading cadres in early 1960. The local lineage made a series of incendiary allegations against them, leading to their removal from office, prosecution, and long-term imprisonment. A key learning from this case study concerns the way in which the implementation of campaigns, as well as judicial punishments, produced contingency. At the local level, campaigns were not just a path by which the state achieved or failed to achieve its own goals, but also provided a framework for individuals to exercise their own agency. Meanwhile, a decentralized judicial system with limited safeguards and poor evidence-gathering and case-making practices allowed campaign-induced conflict to spill over into criminal punishment. The convergence of campaign-style politics with politicalized legal enforcement seems inevitably to have ratcheted up the stakes to the point where only one endgame was possible: a bitter struggle followed by brutal and ultimately fatal punishments.

This chapter examines the transformation by which, over the final decades of the nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth, the urban poor of Iran and especially the “lower depths” among them ceased to be merely a permanent and occasionally troublesome presence in towns and cities, to be tolerated, managed or ignored, becoming instead a collective menace. The chapter discusses both marginality itself and the dialectical dynamic between the marginal and modernism, locating its focus on Iran within wider comparative frameworks. Using especially the work of Michel Foucault, it takes as its key players, on the one side the so-called “dangerous classes” and, on the other, their eternal adversary, the modern state, using examples drawn from Egypt, the Ottoman empire, Algeria, France and Britain to illuminate the Iranian experience. The chapter has, at its centre, narratives of the lives of various representatives of the “dangerous classes,” prostitutes, the criminal in the form of the serial killer, prisoners, the undeserving poor, beggars and paupers, and the quintessentially liminal lutis. But it also argues for the artificiality of this notion of the “dangerous classes” and its deliberate construction by a modernizing elite for whom it functioned as a mirror image, the marginal, the immoral and the criminal a perfect foil for the emerging middle classes. The chapter examines the role allocated to the marginal in the construction of modern regimes of surveillance and discipline, including avowedly “modern” police forces, prisons, judicial systems, red light districts and clinics. The chapter concludes by arguing that, far from disappearing with the triumph of modernity, the dangerous classes themselves, and the environments which supposedly produced and succoured them, are rapidly proliferating in the twenty-first century Middle East and North Africa.