Direct and Economic Democracy in Ancient Athens and its Significance Today (original) (raw)
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A Political Economy Perspective of Direct Democracy in Ancient Athens
Using a political economy framework the paper argues that in ancient Athens direct democracy, absence of political parties and appointment to office by lot were inextricably linked. Direct rather than representative democracy was in the interest of the constitutional framer at the time of the transition to democracy. Deciding directly each policy issue under majority rule diminished the intermediation function of political parties, a tendency possibly reinforced by an integrative ideology of defending the polis. In the absence of political parties to fight elections and distribute rents from office, appointment of office-holders by lot randomized their selection, a process which yielded an accurate representation of individual preferences, and distributed rents irrespective of the private wealth of individual citizens.
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.
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.
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