Athenian Democracy Research Articles

The Bureaucratic Origins of Political Theory: Administrative Labor in the “Other Half” of the History of Political Thought

The earliest works of political theory precede Athenian democracy—the traditional starting point of Anglophone histories of political thought—by over two millennia. More time passed between the first written accounts of government in Mesopotamia and the birth of Plato than has passed between Plato’s life and ours. And yet this “other half” of the history of political thought has barely registered in the academic field of political theory. This article seeks to “reset” the starting point of the field back to its earliest origins in ancient Sumer. Beginning then and there opens a new vista on the history of political thought by restoring questions of public administration to the foreground of the field. For while the ancient Athenians enslaved their bureaucrats and wrote almost nothing about them, the analogous actors were free and highly valued in ancient Mesopotamian political culture. It was these scribal administrators who invented the world’s first literature and written political thought. In their writings, they valorized their own administrative labor and the public goods that it alone could produce as objects of wonder and enchantment. From this vantage point, the article calls for a new research agenda that will expand political theory’s recent “rediscovery” of bureaucracy by recovering public administration as a major thematic throughline in the five-thousand-year global history of human political ideas. Understanding public administration as an integral part of large-scale human societies from the very beginning may help to counter oligarchic claims in contemporary democracies that bureaucracy is a recent alien imposition.

Έργα και ημέρες ενός διαβόητου συκοφάντη (;) στην Αθήνα του 4ου αι. π.Χ.: Θεοκρίνης Υβάδης

Theocrines was a well-known sycophant who often brought false charges against his fellow citizens in the hope of profiting financially. This is what Epichares asserts in his oration Against Theocrines, delivered ca. 343-338 BCE, in order to avenge his father. Theocrines had earlier charged and successfully prosecuted Epichares' father for proposing an illegal decree. This led Epichares to bring a denunciation against Theocrines, claiming that his adversary had violated numerous laws on several occasions. Apart from this speech, two epigraphic testimonies also provide biographical details about Theocrines. These inscriptions suggest that, following his trial, he took on public offices as a public arbitrator and councillor. This article aims to combine these different aspects of Theocrines' life and challenge the negative and stereotypical depiction of him as a notorious sycophant. This portrayal has been predominant in modern studies primarily because they heavily rely on Epichares's speech alone. Hence, the critical question arises whether this speech delivered by a vindictive Epichares can be taken literally to draw reliable conclusions about the reprehensible practices attributed to Theocrines. Characterizing Theocrines solely as a sycophant is debatable and only represents one facet of his public life. Thus, by examining these varied sources, we can develop certain hypotheses about Theocrines' character, the substance of Epichares' claims, and the workings of Athenian democracy.

The Role of Socrates in the Arginusae Affair

Abstract Sources provide conflicting accounts of the role of Socrates during the trial of the generals after the Battle of Arginusae: in Plato’s Apology and Xenophon’s Hellenica he is presented as the only πρύτανις that opposed the will of the crowd to judge the generals in a single vote. In the Gorgias and Xenophon’s Memorabilia he is elevated to the status of chairman (ἐπιστάτης). This paper revisits the possible interconnections among the sources and re-examines the suggestion that Xenophon’s version in the Memorabilia is influenced by Plato’s Gorgias, while also considering Diodorus Siculus’ narrative of these same events. It is argued that Xenophon’s agenda at Hellenica 1.7.1–16 is driven by the political aim of highlighting the deficiencies of Athenian democracy, whereas similarities between Plato’s Apology and Euryptolemus’ speech at Hellenica 1.7.16–35 encourage the inference that the latter text should be viewed against the backdrop of Socratic literature. The conclusion reached is that Socrates cannot have served as chairman and that the performance of his civic duties may not have been of such overriding importance as might initially appear.

Greeks Drawing Lots

The drawing of lots in ancient Greece was an institution that expressed the egalitarian values, practices, and mindset apparent for three centuries before the emergence of the Athenian democracy. Constituted by a large-scale mixture lottery, classical Athenian democracy with its choice of magistrates by lot, would never have seen the light of day without the broad spectrum of drawing of lots that preceded it. The first part of this article, by Irad Malkin, presents drawing lots’ distributive (e.g., land, booty, catch, inheritance, colonial plots), selective (e.g., magistrates), procedural (e.g., taking turns), and mixture functions. The concept of ‘equal portions’ moves from the concrete equal sharing of portions (isomoiria) to the abstract sharing of equal portions of the law, isonomia. A mindset with strong egalitarian features is revealed with a tendency to make equality and equity as close as possible: Equal chances before the lot and, when possible, equal outcomes. The role of the gods is mostly not to determine results, but to grant validity and legitimacy to a procedure under their auspices. The following section, by Josine Blok, examines why drawing lots for office created difficulties not encountered in the other, common uses of lots, how nonetheless this practice spread across the Greek world and due to the variety of political systems of the poleis came to highlight the diversity in ancient Greece.

Max Weber’s Athens: The entanglement between charismatic domination and non-legitimate domination

Contemporary reconstructions of Max Weber’s theory of democracy have failed to recognise Weber’s comparative-historical approach vis-à-vis the question of democracy. This article addresses this gap with respect to his understanding of Athenian democracy. It demonstrates that Weber’s interpretation of Athenian democracy provides a dual understanding of domination. On the one hand, Weber describes the demagogues in Athens as exercising charismatic domination through their oratory skills over ordinary citizens. On the other hand, Weber characterises the institutional structure of Athenian democracy with the atypical case of non-legitimate domination [ nichtlegitime Herrschaft]. Weber maintains that the holders of office in Athens were ultimately accountable and responsible to the ordinary people who exercised their political power in popular assemblies and popular courts. Weber interprets Athenian democracy as characterised by the entanglement between charismatic domination and non-legitimate domination. Thus, this article argues that Weber’s concept of Herrschaft is an open concept which results in his amalgamation of charismatic domination and non-legitimate domination in explaining the institutionalisation of Athenian democracy. In the end, how to maintain political leadership within democratic institutional structures was the question of democracy for Weber.

АРДЧИЛЛЫГ ЗАЛРУУЛАХУЙ

Democracy is often hailed as a natural form of government, yet it is not a system that arises effortlessly. Many stereotypes, beginning with the entrenched notion that democracy embodies the rule of the people, do not align with historical and factual realities. Initially, democracy represented the rule of a relative minority possessing economic resources and political power. Athenian democracy, which initially thrived, was ultimately destroyed when it devolved into an ochlocracy driven by the unreasonable interests of the masses, a transformation brought about by the power struggles among demagogues. Political elites seeking to control governance have actively promoted democracy, incorporating various norms and rules into it to ensure their continued authority by persuading the masses. Given that many modern criticisms of democracy stem from these distortions, it is necessary to reevaluate them historically and logically to identify areas for correction.

La maschera del soldato dall’archáia alla mese

The mask of the boastful, arrogant, cowardly soldier asserts itself as a stock character in the Greek comedy of the fourth-third century BC and comes to its fullest expression in Roman palliata with Pyrgopolinice, the protagonist of Plautus’ Miles Gloriosus. However, ‘anticipatory’ traits of this mask can already be identified in Ancient Greek comedy which sometimes turns notable contemporary men, such as Lamachus, in Aristophanes’ Acharnians, or Pisander in Plato Comicus’ homonymous comedy, into comic characters who exhibit in nuce many of the founding elements that will define the soldier’s mask in the subsequent comic production. Starting from the fourth century, after the defeat in the Peloponnesian War and the end of democracy in Athens, views about war and the role of soldiers in society deeply changed: the citizen army of fifth-century Athens, which used to fight for the polis, was progressively replaced by mercenary captains operating outside or along the borders of the Greek world. Before the nea and the palliata, traces of this new type of soldier can be found in the fragmentary production of the Middle comedy: in a gradual stereotyping of the mask, poets like Nicostratus, Mnesimachus, Alexis or Antiphanes stage vainglorious, rough and swaggering alazônes who return to their native land more or less enriched by the mercenary campaigns and often dwell on hyperbolic account of phantasmagoric adventures on the edge of reality in exotic places with fairy-tale contours and on detailed descriptions of gargantuan banquets taking place in luxurious oriental courts.

Elite Politicians or Ordinary Citizens? Decree Making and Political Friendship in fifth-century Athens

Summary This article aims to advance our understanding of Athenian politics through a quantitative study of the proposers of decrees in the Assembly during the fifth century BC. Based on the accounts of Greek historians, biographers and orators, scholars have traditionally envisioned Athenian politics as dominated by an elite whose members competed for power and prestige and controlled the Assembly through dynamics of political friendship. Recent studies of the decree proposers attested in the epigraphical and literary sources have questioned this model. They have shown that, at least during the fourth century, political initiative was not the prerogative of an elite but was rather widespread among ordinary citizens. Yet, the traditional, elite-centred view of Athenian politics is still widely supported among scholars working on the fifth-century democracy. This article challenges this view through a comparative study of the respective pictures of fifth-century decree proposing provided by the literary and epigraphical evidence. By means of statistical tests and analyses, it argues that, while wealth certainly gave elites an advantage in the Assembly through rhetorical training as well as an edge in the run for elective offices, Athenian democracy since the fifth century provided occasional proposers and ordinary citizens with significant pathways for exerting political agency. By reviewing the problematic evidence for the practice of proposing decrees through proxies, this study also shows that the significant level of popular participation attested in the observed data was not a by-product of political friendship, and that Athenian democracy since its early history encouraged models of political aggregation which could cut through friendship groups and enable forms of participation not limited to passively supporting one’s political leaders.

Regulating free speech in a democracy: Lysias 10Against Theomnestosand the law on slander

AbstractLysias 10Against Theomnestosis the only surviving example of a classical Greek speech on a charge of slander (dikē kakēgorias). The case turns on establishing communal consensus in evaluation of meta-discursive claims: assertions as to what the law says about what citizens can say about their fellow citizens. I adapt Marmor’s account of the pragmatics of legal discourse to illuminate the litigants’ strategies as they seek to control interpretation of the legal question in this much-discussed case from 380s BC Athens. We see how each party used different assumptions about the law’s implicatures as well as its declarative meaning and presented these assumptions as grounded in common sense. The persuasive methods used by Lysias’ client are illuminated by means of cognitive narratology’s application of Lewisian possible-world logic to the creation of story-worlds and the relationships they generate between narrator and reader/audience. So understood, Lysias’ speech helps answer questions about the role and limits of free/frank speech (parrhēsia) in democratic Athens and about the relationship between individual agency and the collective agency of thedēmos, questions crucial to an understanding of the place of legal discourse and legal conflict in the ideology and day-to-day praxis of the democratic city.

Applied Democracy in Light of the Five “Iso”s of Democracy

Athenian democracy, with its five criteria, expresses an understanding and internalization of its components and thus becomes virtue. Modern democracies should strive to maintain a long process based on education for substantive democracy, and those that only emphasize the formal aspect, express a partial application of democracy. In such a situation, damage to democracy occurs. We argue that democracy can be treated as a collection of practices in the polity area by analyzing the politics and strategies of defending democracy as well as human rights. To do so, it is suggested here to integrate the tools of social choice theory with a unique institutionalist perspective that looks at both formal and informal factors. This notion creates the need to develop effective strategies for defending democracy and human rights.

Can Classical Athens Offer Lessons for a Large, Pluralistic Society?

Abstract Recoiling from the power that Athenian democracy placed in the hands of the poor, the founding fathers of the United States took Athens as primarily an anti-model, whereas nineteenth-century defenders of slavery found Athens a very congenial model indeed, seeming as it did to lend a mantle of legitimacy to an unspeakable practice. After a “honeymoon period” in which democracy was idealized as the only legitimate form of government, now at the outset of the twenty-first century the alliance of democracy with a capitalism that often proves heartless to the less fortunate has raised some troubling questions about democracy itself. Despite its small size, classical Athens offers valuable guidance for tempering current difficulties in both the United States and elsewhere by adopting and adapting the selection of some officials by sortition, direct election by popular vote of elected officials, a rigorous system of accountability, and the fostering of civic and community values.

A long hope: the Prometheus Counter-Project

By offering a reading of Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound, and of the post-Aeschylus tradition of the myth of Prometheus which highlights its revisions as imagined by Karl Marx and Percy Shelley, among others, this paper seeks to explore how to grasp, amid our danger and despair, the prominent poetic and cognitive view of a similar cataclysm from the past, as a lesson to the present. The route to do so encompasses a revisitation of the connections between theatre and democracy in ancient Greece; a consideration of the variations of the themes of knowledge, injustice and tyranny, material civilization and its control and the unbowed personal will to resist oppression, all evoked by the myth of Prometheus; and teasing out the main lineaments of a meaning for the play for an endangered Athenian democracy, as staged around 440 as well as for authors who have recycled its main theme throughout centuries, and finally for us today. It ends by giving pride of place to a Promethean hope, a long hope, arisen from suffering and wedded to cognition, which has crossed centuries and reached our times in urgency. The work is, of course, a provisional statement: a contribution.

Choice of slavery institutions in Ancient Greece: Athenian chattels and Spartan helots

AbstractThe ancient Greek city-states were slave societies, but the institutions of slavery differed across them. The slaves of democratic Athens were foreigners bought as chattels labouring in agriculture, craftsmanship, banking, mining, and domestic services and were often given some limited freedoms and extra pay. On the contrary, the helots, the slaves of oligarchic Sparta, were indigenous of the lands they cultivated for their masters and were treated harshly. The study offers an economic explanation of the different slavery systems. Modelling the slaveholder as a profit maximiser, it attributes the different systems to differences in the probabilities of the slaves running away or revolting, the dependence of output on effort-intensive or care-intensive production technology, which depends on the fertility of the soil and affects whether the slave is treated kindly instead of harshly, and the cost of guarding slaves under different regimes.

Socrates’ kατάβασις and the Sophistic Shades: Education and Democracy

This article addresses the unusually elaborate dramatic context in Plato’s Protagoras and effect of sophistry on democratic Athens. Because Socrates evokes Odysseus’ κατάβασις in the Odyssey to describe the sophists in Callias’ house (314c-316b), I propose that Socrates depicts the sophists as bodiless shades residing in Hades. Like the shades dwelling in Hades with no connection to embodied humans on Earth, the sophists in the Protagoras are non-Athenians with no consideration for the democratic body of the Athenian πόλις. I conclude that sophistry can be detrimental to Athenian democracy because it can produce education inequality founded on wealth inequality.

Socrates and Sortition

Abstract In consonance with the view of Aristotle in book 4 of the Politics, Montesquieu wrote that “selection by lot is in the nature of democracy; election by choice is in the nature of aristocracy.” Although the drawing of lots was a marker of classical Athenian democracy, Socrates — according to Xenophon's Memorabilia — was strongly opposed to it as irrational. According to Socrates and Plato, the citizen of a democracy exists in a moral anarchy, and every choice he makes is random, as if drawn by lot, hence the appropriateness of random choice as a principle of Athenian democracy. And yet, despite this negative assessment of the institution, Socrates was willing to participate in a lottery that made him a member of the Council of Five Hundred, the supreme political body of Athens. This essay — a contribution to the Common Knowledge symposium “Antipolitics” — attempts to explain this paradoxical stance, with reference to Plato's allusions to it.

Anthropoligarchy: Politics and the Nonhuman in the Anthropocene

This paper uses resources from ancient democratic theory to assert a deep connection between democracy and environmentalism. I leverage arguments from two critics of Athenian democracy, Aristophanes and Plato, who thundered that democracy was so ontologically destabilizing that it would lead to animals ruling over humans. Using this ancient notion of democracy, the current human/nonhuman relationship can be recast as an eco-political regime called anthropoligarchy, an oligarch/demos conflict in which the human few dominate over a vast nonhuman demos viewed as incapable of ruling. The concept of anthropoligarchy provides a normative framework for understanding environmental politics in the Anthropocene.

아테네 폴리스와 주민자치

The ancient Athenian polis is the prototype of democracy. Athens found the essence of democracy in the rule of the people, and had direct democracy and lottery systems as institutional devices to realize it. This Athenian democracy is called a prototype democracy. prototype democracy is only possible in small political communities. On the other hand, most democratic countries today adopt representative democracy. Representative democracy regards the essence of democracy not as the rule of the people but as the election by people. This change in meaning about the essence of democracy was made by medieval Scholar scholars such as Thomas Aquinas. Representative democracy has enabled democracy at a large national level. However, there is a problem that the rule of the people is transformed into the rule of the elite. Even if representative democracy is inevitable at a large national level, prototype democracy may be possible at a small unit such as eup, myeon, and dong. The institutionalization of residents autonomy is one of the ways. Before that, we look at the case of Athens, where Prototype democracy blossomed brilliantly in the most complete form in history. Athens’ democracy has never developed in a short period of time. Athens was an early aristocratic society. However, from around the 7th century B.C., commoners began a long march toward democracy against the aristocracy. After Solon’s democratic reform and Claystenes’ democratic establishment, Pericles finally completed democracy around the 5th century B.C. The political systems of Athens include ekklesia, boule, heliastai, and the administrator, which are quite elaborately institutionalized. Athens’ political system was also a product of long-standing accumulated changes and reforms. Korea’s residents autonomy has neither identity nor substance. However, the selection of members of the residents’ association by lottery and the general meeting of residents, which are being carried out in the pilot project of the residents‘’ association, contain seeds of new possibilities. This is because the selection of members of the residents’ association by lottery, which is a lottery system, corresponds to the selection of members of boule, and the general meeting of residents, which is a direct democracy, corresponds to ekklesia. Therefore, it is necessary to establish the identity of residents autonomy by using prototype democracy as the ideological basis of residents autonomy, and to develop the residents’ association into a practical residents autonomy organization in Eup, Myeon, and Dong through institutionalization of residents autonomy. In that case, Korea can move toward a true democratic republic where the election by people and the rule of the people are realized at the same time, with representative democracy at the national and local governments levels and prototype democracy at the eup, myeon, and dong levels.

Criticisms to Athenian Democracy by Socrates, Plato and Aristotle

Bu çalışma insanlık tarihinin en büyük filozofları arasında kabul edilen Sokrates, Platon ve Aristoteles’in Atina demokrasisine yönelttikleri eleştirilere odaklanmakta, bu eleştirilerin modern demokrasiler açısından ne anlam ifade ettiğini ele almaktadır. Sokrates demokrasinin siyasette ehil olmayan şahısları söz sahibi hale getirdiğini ileri sürmektedir. Demokrasiyi istikrarsızlığa zemin hazırlayan bir rejim olarak gören Platon yönetici olma hakkının gerekli yetenek ve eğitime sahip şahıslarla sınırlı olacağı “ideal devletten” yanadır. Aristoteles ise güçlü bir orta sınıf yaratarak zenginler ile yoksulların çıkarları arasında denge kurabilecek olan politeia adını verdiği rejimi savunmaktadır. Bu üç filozofun yaşadıkları çağdan binlerce yıl sonra kurulan modern demokrasiler hakkındaki siyasal düşünce tartışmaları demokrasinin ne ölçüde halk yönetimi olabileceğini masaya yatırmaktadır. Siyaset Bilimi literatürü ise üç filozofun Atina demokrasisine yönelttikleri eleştirilerin bir ölçüde modern demokrasiler için de geçerli olabileceğini ortaya koymaktadır.

Urban–ruraljustice

<scp>Urban–rural</scp>justice

Review: Building Democracy in Late Archaic Athens

Review: <i>Building Democracy in Late Archaic Athens</i>