Review of E. Carawan, Control of the laws in the ancient democracy at Athens, John Hopkins University Press, Baltimore 2020 (original) (raw)
Related papers
Review: Creating a Constitution: Law, Democracy, and Growth in Ancient Athens, by Federica Carugati.
Perspectives on Politics, 2020
In Creating a Constitution: Law, Democracy, and Growth in Ancient Athens, Federica Carugati invites us to consider what classical Athenian democracy might teach us about the enduring conditions of successful constitution-making. While Carugati's guiding question is by no means a new one, her answer is novel and worthy of serious consideration by social scientists and citizens alike. Working between political science, political economy, and ancient history, Carugati argues for a reinforcing dynamic between legal institutions, political stability, and economic prosperity. While primarily aimed at an academic audience, her book also speaks more broadly to those attempting to understand what is at stake in protecting constitutional norms in the face of partisan pressures, offering a theoretically grounded argument that we allow such norms to be eroded at our peril. To tell us something important about constitution-making today, Carugati chooses to return to ancient Athens despite its vast social, political, economic, and technological differences from our contemporary world. One might reasonably wonder why. In Carugati's telling, however, many of these differences contribute to ancient Athens being "a remarkable laboratory to study the determinants of successful constitution-building" (9). The relative simplicity of the Athenian legal code offers a "cleaner" case for studying the necessary conditions of constitutional success, she argues, and the direct participation of the wider population in the production of the consensus allows for us to escape the biases that inform an elite-driven bargaining situation. These virtues, when combined with the notable ability of the Athenian constitution to produce stability in the wake of civil war and prosperity after losing an empire, suggest to Carugati that Athens is the ideal place to look for the minimal conditions of successful democratic constitution-making. Over the course of the tumultuous final decade of the fifth century, Carugati argues, the Athenian population forged a connection between institutional legitimacy, the concept of "legality," and the idea of an "ancestral constitution" (patrios politeia) attributed to Solon. Taken together, this equation produced a sense among the Athenians that, whatever regime form they should adopt, they must govern themselves according to a set of coherent, publicly-known set of laws. Ultimately, the regime that the Athenians adopted was a democracy, but Carugati argues that this was not a matter of path dependency. Rather, she suggests that the creation of a more restrained democracy in the wake of the Thirty Tyrants solved the underlying problem of credible commitment that had destabilized the more radical democracy of the fifth century. Key to this solution, Carugati argues, was the introduction of effective limitations to the people's ability to make law haphazardly and to appropriate the property of the elites arbitrarily. The result was, according to Carugati, an equilibrium in which both populace and elites were incentivized to uphold the new constitution rather than to engage in further civil war.
Making and Changing Laws in Ancient Athens
in E. M. Harris and M. Canevaro, Oxford Handbook of Ancient Greek Law, Oxford (forthcoming)
This chapter explores the development of ideas about legislation and legislative procedures in ancient Athens. It isolates an ideology of legislation that mistrusted legal change, and that came into conflict with democratic ideas and practices. It then discusses the creation of nomothesia procedures at the end of the fifth century BCE that reconciled the need for legal change with that for consistent and stable laws, and follows the workings of these procedures throughout the fourth century BCE.
Resurrecting democracy? Law and institutions in early Antigonid Athens (307-301 BC)
Harter-Uibopuu, Kaja & Werner Riess (eds) Symposion 2019. Vorträge zur griechischen und hellenistischen Rechtsgeschichte (Hamburg, 26.–28 August 2019), 263-89, WHeien
In this paper I investigate the legal and institutional reforms or innovations that were introduced in the period 307-301 BC, a period recorded as the restoration of democracy, the rationale behind them and the tensions that developed when royals were involved in the day-to-day administration of public affairs in an independent, autonomous polis
Harvard Ph.D. dissertation, 2013
Conventional accounts of classical Athenian democracy represent the assembly as the primary democratic institution in the Athenian political system. This looks reasonable in the light of modern democracy, which has typically developed through the democratization of legislative assemblies. Yet it conflicts with the evidence at our disposal. Our ancient sources suggest that the most significant and distinctively democratic institution in Athens was the courts, where decisions were made by large panels of randomly selected ordinary citizens with no possibility of appeal. This dissertation reinterprets Athenian democracy as “dikastic democracy” (from the Greek dikastēs, “judge”), defined as a mode of government in which ordinary citizens rule principally through their control of the administration of justice. It begins by casting doubt on two major planks in the modern interpretation of Athenian democracy: first, that it rested on a conception of the “wisdom of the multitude” akin to that advanced by epistemic democrats today, and second that it was “deliberative,” meaning that mass discussion of political matters played a defining role. The first plank rests largely on an argument made by Aristotle in support of mass political participation, which I show has been comprehensively misunderstood. The second rests on the interpretation of the verb “bouleuomai” as indicating speech, but I suggest that it meant internal reflection in both the courts and the assembly. The third chapter begins the constructive part of the project by comparing the assembly and courts as instruments of democracy in Athens, and the fourth shows how a focus on the courts reveals the deep political dimensions of Plato’s work, which in turn suggests one reason why modern democratic ideology and practice have moved so far from the Athenians’ on this score. Throughout, the dissertation combines textual, philological and conceptual analysis with attention to institutional detail and the wider historical context. The resulting account makes a strong case for the relevance of classical Athens today, both as a source of potentially useful procedural mechanisms and as the point of origin of some of the philosophical presuppositions on which the modern conception of democracy and its limits depends.
Building Legal Order in Ancient Athens
How do democratic societies establish and maintain order in ways that are conducive to growth? Contemporary scholarship associates order, democracy, and growth with centralized rule of law institutions. In this paper, we test the robustness of modern assumptions by turning to the case of ancient Athens. Democratic Athens was remarkably stable and prosperous, but the ancient city-state never developed extensively centralized rule of law institutions. Drawing on the “what-is-law” account of legal order elaborated by Hadfield and Weingast (2012), we show that Athens’ legal order relied on institutions that achieved common knowledge and incentive compatibility for enforcers in a largely decentralized system of coercion. Our approach provides fresh insights into how robust legal orders may be built in countries where centralized rule of law institutions have failed to take root.