Cohen, D. (1995). "Theorizing Athenian Society: The Problem of Stability," in Law, Violence, and Community in Classical Athens, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
The author writes this chapter backwards, to increase its rhetorical impact. First, he looks at the consequences of an unstable polis, or what the Greeks called "stasis." Pointing out that cases of institutional abuse drove a situation where participants no longer trusted in institutions to protect them, but rather acted out in violence to protect themselves or even in vengeance, he then demonstrates that ancient Greeks saw numerous instances of judicial institutions being subverted for private aims. He then considers Bourdieu's proposition that conflict, when strictly regulated, serves as a bulwark for social order. Rejecting this as having no salience when the society comes under external pressure which leaves the rules without force, whether that pressure comes from war (as Thucydides found in Corcyra) or something natural like plague (as he found in Athens), Thucydides concludes that the generalization of conflict can lead to the dissolution of the social order. Social disintegration is remarkably likely to arise when groups of people have no greater motivation for their actions then hurting someone or some group on the other side. Finally, the author examines Aristotle for the proposition that institutions must appear to favor (or at least not repress) an out-group in order to preserve stability. He concludes by reviewing several cases of factionalism in ancient Greece that featured examples of institutional subversion for personal feuding purposes.
My take: this is not really political science, since it doesn't explore negative cases. This is a chapter that begs for a most-similar or most-different case study approach, but does not get it. Instead, we see no variation in the independent variable (use of institutions for furtherance of feud) and no variation in the dependent variable (stasis or factionalism). There's some interesting theorizing, particularly in the notion that institutional respectability helps to ensure social order, but it's in the realm of "trivial insight with interesting implications."