Diversity and Ancient Democracy

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W HAT CAN ONE LEARN about democracy from fifth and fourth century practice of and theory about Athenian democratic institutions? Joel Schwartz's review of my book Fear of Diversity: The Birth of Political Science in Ancient Greek Thought (1992) in November 1994 Political Theory (vol. 22, pp. 685-8) implicitly raises this question. While issue was at best subsidiary in a book that focused primarily on ancient theorists' explorations of political consequences of an epistemological search for an unseen, underlying unity, question of how ancient democracy can help us understand most common modern political regime is an important one and worthy of more consideration than I can offer in these brief comments on Schwartz's review of my book. Ours is a world in which democracies constantly have to address demands for unity, ethnic or otherwise, as well as demands for an openness to diverse populations. Our ability to accept the other, to acknowledge difference at same time that we recognize need for a unity based on some set of similarities, is central to preservation and successful functioning of democratic institutions. Schwartz reads argument of my book as turning demos into totalizing modernist, unable to accept differences that derive from particular bodies of individual members of community, and as suggesting that aristoi become champion of diversity (1994, 686). The former point deserves primary consideration; latter is simply a misreading of argument, but in itself indicates difficulties we often have with acknowledging tensions within democratic regimes between a need for a unity based on identity of members as opposed to a unity that can incorporate and build from differences. To approach this as a conflict between aristocracy and democracy with all normative baggage that accompanies those words is to ignore that those tensions plague democracies and is to limit possibility