Public Speech and the Power of the People in Democratic Athens

Abstract

I will defend three premises. (1) If we take democracy to mean what ancient Greeks took it to mean—“political power wielded actively and collectively by the demos” (i.e., all residents of the state who are culturally defined as potential citizens, regardless of their class or status)—then Athens was a democracy. (2) Even granted that Athens excluded from regular political participation persons Greeks did not regard as potential citizens (slaves, women, most foreigners, children), the historical example of the Athenian experience with democracy should be taken seriously by democratic theorists interested in expanding “the bounds of the possible” (as well as “of the thinkable”). (3) The Athenian demos exercised its collective power in order to prevent elite political domination, and thus the “power of the people” was not a cover for elite rule.These premises do not mean that the people's power was in some ontological sense “pure,” or “undistorted”—indeed it was arguably through the tightly coiled and convoluted “distortions” of social and political power that the Athenian democratic order counterbalanced elite social power. Nor can Athens, with its acceptance of slavery, exclusion of women and foreigners from political participation, and jingoistic “blood and soil” doctrine, be considered a readymade model for a just, modern political society. It can be argued (incorrectly I believe: Ober 1989a, 20-35), that democracy in Athens was fundamentally dependent upon slavery, or empire, or the exclusion of women and foreigners.