The Creation of Politics (original) (raw)
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Ancient Democracy and the Modern Era
Corruption in the Contemporary World: Theory, Practice, and Hotspots
corrupted currents of this world/ offence's gilded hand may shove by justice/ and oft 'tis seen the wicked prize itself/buys out the law." 1 Such an observation raises an obvious question, for even if we can recognize the "corrupted currents", we do not know their source. In the preceding chapters we argued that the currents flow from the violation of generally accepted boundaries separating social or economic power and political power. We noted however that the limits are not absolute. Private social and economic power and political (public) power permeate one another, and the frontiers between them lack permanency. Nevertheless, we noted that there are situations that are especially susceptible to efforts to win what Burke called "undue influence," that is, to exchange one for the other in a manner that contravenes the principles that underlie the order that allows both to exist contemporaneously. In the following chapter I shall argue that one of the important differences between ancient democracy and the modern regimes of the West lies precisely in this realm. All periods and all governments have known the attempt to purchase one form of power by the other. Nevertheless, in the ancient world the difference between individual desires and social or economic interests was clearer, and the concept of the common good was emphasized. Consequently, the boundaries between the power and good of the citizen and those of the collective were rather stable. The medieval order, for its part, was based on divinely ordained boundaries that dictated reciprocal relations between unequal members. In the modern era, by contrast, the rights of the individual became the subject of politics, so that the boundaries between the social and economic on the one hand and the political on the other became blurred and shifted with political fortunes. The collective good, to the degree that it exists, is seen as the sum total of individual goods, and the boundaries have become a question of political struggle between individuals and their representatives. In the U.S. this has developed into a form of regime that one could call "civil rights based plutocracy." In essence, my argument is that the modern state, especially as it developed in the West, became a "hotspot" of corruption. It is in this sense that the term acquired a new meaning: from corruption of the state to corruption in the sense used nowadays.
Democracy and Political Philosophy
Greek political thinking and practice were always enmeshed in a relationship of dialectical tension and ambiguity. 1 The polis, or citizen-state, would not have emerged as Greece's quintessential form of political organization without the widespread belief that all free members of those small-scale agricultural communities were at least roughly similar to one another in prudence, military strength, and dignity. Equally, political thought -as well as more systematic political philosophy -could not have achieved its recognized significance if thinkers had not been closely engaged with the real-life practices, rituals, and ideologies of the classical Greek cities. Traditionally, scholars had understood the Platonic and Aristotelian texts as self-contained investigations of permanent political questions. More recently, scholars have focused on the dialectical relationship between political life and philosophy, but they have tended to represent the philosophers as hostile critics of Greek politics as usual, most particularly of democratic politics in Athens. The present chapter follows a different tack altogether.
Democracies, Ancient and Modern
This paper provides a critical survey of recent approaches to Athenian democracy. Typically, modern interpretations start from the assumption that Athenian democracy can be a useful resource for rethinking contemporary political issues. To be useful presupposes that it is well understood. Thus the results of new methods of historical-philological source criticism are brought forward to assist in the reconstruction of the ideology and cultural discourse that underpinned the working of Athenian democracy. What is highly problematic in this effort, the author concludes, is that by stressing the time-bound actualities of Athenian political experience, the historicist approach is eventually unsuited to produce paradigms worthy of emulation.
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.
After Athens - The Genealogy of Modern Democracy
Redescriptions: Political Thought, Conceptual History and Feminist Theory, 2006
Let us just for matters of illustration take a brief look at the history of political terms from a "Darwinian" perspective. In doing so, the fact that the word democracy has 'survived' in the long evolution of the political vocabulary until today is rather surprising. Just compare the amazing career of the Greek demokratia with some of its forgotten terminological brothers and sisters like ochlokratia and timokratia; other terms like oligarchia, aristokratia, tyrannis or monarchia have not fared much better, being either reduced to a metaphor or a triviality. And from the Roman vocabulary, only republic and dictatorship have survived -but having been reduced to describing a political system, which got rid of a representative role for a king or a queen, and the second by having been turned into a negative term for any political system of permanent political oppression. It is as astonishing as true: the ancient misfit demokratia did survive as the fittest of all terms. Nowadays demokratia has become the etymological basis for naming modern political systems in hundreds of languages all over the world. At the same time, it inspires and raises the hopes of political actors all over the world.
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.