The community of equals: Rereading an early democratic concept (original) (raw)
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Isonomia and the Public Sphere in Democratic Athens
This article argues that the term isonomia is best understood as a specific type of balance of forces closely connected with the classical concept of dêmokratia. The article proceeds by placing isonomia within the context of fifth/fourth century Athenian political discourse, and by explicating the relationship between isonomia and eunomia through attention to the usages of these terms in Greek philosophy, poetry, oratory, history and medicine. This analysis demonstrates how the concept of isonomia, understood as a balance of forces created specifically through the establishment of political equality, could be used to respond to criticisms of dêmokratia as exemplifying bad order/disorder. The conclusion suggests avenues for further research and some potential connections with contemporary democratic theorizing.
Drinovsʹkij zbìrnik, 2022
Active discussions about Athenian democracy were already conducted by ancient authors in the past, and they still continue to arise among modern classical researchers 1. In this regard, the publication of the monograph by the Bulgarian researcher Stela Moneva is of considerable interest, especially since the author offers a truly original view of the advantages and disadvantages of the democratic system of the Athenian state. In the introduction, the researcher emphasizes that she seeks to reflect an objective view of this political system, «без тя да се очерня или идеализира, доколкото идеалът за историка винаги се състои в това да представи историческата истина» (i.e. "without denigrating and not idealizing it, since the ideal for the historian is always the reflection of historical truth") (p. 8). Note that this is the second monograph by Assoc. Prof. Stela Moneva, dedicated to the peculiarities of the Athenian democratic system 2 , in which the author 1 Differences in the views of ancient thinkers on the problem of democracy are presented in sufficient detail in the article by S. M. Kudryavtseva (Kudryavtseva 2008a, 112-126). 2 The first monograph by S. Moneva was published by the publishing house of the University of Veliko T'rnovo "Saints Cyril and Methodius" in 2009 (Moneva 2009).
Historia et theoria iuris 14/2022, 1
2022
The theoretical approaches of the civil disobedience are relatively new phenomena. The classical theoretical precursors (Thoreau, Habermas, Arendt, Rawls, Dworkin) point to a slice of modern society in which law, politics and morality are all "competent". Through these theories, we will attempt to analyse the disobedience movement of Hungarian public school teachers in both legal and moral contexts. What are the moral foundations of political obligations? How to resolve the dilemma between the political obligation and the unjust law?
PSCI 3600 Ancient Political Thought Syllabus, 2023
Many of the ideas central to Western politics can be traced back to ancient Greece, and more specifically, to the ancient Athenian city-state. Indeed, classical Athens is often referred to as the birthplace of democracy itself. From the eighth to the fifth century BCE, a series of legislative reforms and popular revolts alike saw power (kratos) wrested out of the hands of nobility and placed among the people (demos). Average citizens passed, voted, and deliberated on laws in the assembly and played an important role in deciding upon matters of right and wrong as jurors in the courts. During Athens' period of direct democratic government, Plato wrote his most famous tract, The Republic. Yet the canonical text has come to be known for its rebuke of, rather than celebration of, democratic rule. Plato's student Aristotle, for his part, was not himself a citizen of the famed Athenian city-state in which he wrote his Politics. What are we, contemporary readers, to make of these disjunctures? This course serves as an introduction to political theory as a sub-field of political science, as well as an introduction to ancient political thought. We will spend our semester reading Plato's Republic and Aristotle's Politics closely, paying particular attention to how it is that these thinkers view the relationship between justice and democracy. Is popular judgment in matters of right a crucible of democratic government? Can justice exist absent democratic governance? We will focus our attention on these questions in class, with some reference to contemporary issues. Our primary goal, however, will be to attend to the form and substance of the arguments put forward in these canonical texts. After surveying the arguments made for and against democracy by these thinkers and learning about the mechanisms of democratic government and popular judgment in ancient Athens, we will turn our attention to the thought of Abu Nasr Muhammad al-Farabi. al-Farabi was an important interpreter of both Plato and Aristotle and is considered the father of Islamic political philosophy. In our last classes, we will think about the legacy of "the ancients" or "the Greeks" and learn about how it is that their texts were passed down to us by way of early medieval Islamic philosophers. In doing so, we will consider how the history of political thought is narrated and told, pondering upon the questions of justice that are raised by its telling.
ANCIENT AND MODERN DEMOCRACY. A SHORT REAPPRAISAL
Philosophy and Public Issues (New Series), vol. 9, no. 2, 2019
The paper intends to reconsider the comparison between ancient and modern democracy that most scholars today prefer normally to avoid doing or do very hastily. Of course, all people know that the word ‘democracy’ comes from ancient Greek and that its etymological meaning is kratosof the demos, i.e. ‘power of the people’. It is also very frequent that they pay homage to the ancient origin of democracy, but they normally add immediately afterwards that classical Athens was a direct democracy, which is impossible to achieve today. I will recall some of the most distinctive features of Athenian classical democracy like participation, equality, lot and elections, how they worked in daily life, and dedicate a paragraph to the famous lecture by Benjamin Constant, The liberty of ancient compared to that of modern(1819), that became canonical to define modern democracy in comparison with the ancient one. In the end I will try to sketch which positive contribute the study of ancient democracy could do to answer to the crisis of contemporary democracy.
Democracy and Public Choice in Classical Athens
Drawing on classical Athens the paper explores the qualities and workings of direct democracy and provides a simple model of public choice to analyse policymaking with specific reference to war and peace. Given the cost and the benefits of defence and the public revenues at the time, it looks into the motives, processes and consequences of decision-making for war or peace in two historical situations (the Themistocles' Naval Law and the Eubulus' and Lycurgus' "social contracts") to ascertain that under direct democracy economically-motivated, bounded-rational individuals tend to designate policies that advance their personal welfare along with the overall welfare of the community. Moreover, such a policy course has not only economic, but also political and social implications: it entrenches direct democracy to the polity and reinforces equality, freedom, security and solidarity among the people.
Interview with Ferenc Hörcher (1964) University of Public Service, Budapest
Clotho
The question whether the governance and autonomy of medieval and early modern cities and the participation of their citizens in communal affairs may gesture toward a form of communal self-governance or it is yet another form of the rule of the privileged has re-emerged with new answers in recent scholarship. It was also one of the topics of the lecture series, Urban Governance and Civic Participation in Words and Stone, as part of which Prof. Ferenc Hörcher also gave a talk. Prof. Hörcher is a Hungarian philosopher, historian of political thought and aesthetics, a critic, and a poet. Currently, he is head of and research professor at the Research Institute of Politics and Government at the University of Public Service, Budapest, and senior fellow at the Institute of Philosophy of the Eötvös Loránd Research Ntework. One of his latest books is titled The Political Philosophy of the European City: From Polis, through City State, to Megalopolis? His lecture, “The Political Ideology of the Renaissance and Early Modern City – from Bruni to Althusius,” explored the explicit and implicit principles of political thought in the medieval and Renaissance European city. Taking Leonardo Bruni’s panegyric In Praise of Florence (c. 1403–4) as a paradigm case, Prof. Hörcher first illustrated the example of Florentine civic humanism to demonstrate the intellectual foundations of governance in the medieval Italian “city state.” Embedding this overview into a short summary of Max Weber’s meta-description of the Western city, Prof. Hörcher then shifted his attention to the paradigm of the Northern European city through the exposition of Althusius’ Politica (1603) and discussed the influence of the Reformation as well as the birth of the modern state on the self-governance and autonomy of cities. Although the following interview is based primarily on Prof. Hörcher’s lecture, the discussion joyfully meandered through a number of other, fascinating topics, like the value of philosophical dialogue vis-à-vis debate, the literary figure of the flaneur, the political ideas of Dante and the philosophical potential of poetry.
The emergence of the polis as the prominent form of socio-political life is one of the most important developments of archaic and classical Greece. Its result was a type of society consisting of a group of free inhabitants, who lived in an identifiable territory with some kind of city centre, and who claimed to exercise a form of self-government which might but did not necessarily include a foreign policy of its own.' The existence of the polis as a socio-political system depended on a sense of territorial and social coherence, both as a subjective experience and as a practice in common activities. This sense of coherence was the outcome of a number of separate but mutually influential processes. Among the most significant and most intensely debated factors involved in the materialisation of the archaic polis are population growth, development of common cults, military cooperation especially in the hoplite falanx, the creation of written laws, changes in political discourse, and changing political consciousness in relation to (re)organization of space.2