Brill’s Companion to the Reception of Athenian Democracy

Brill’s Companion to the Reception of Athenian Democracy, Volume Editors: Dino Piovan and Giovanni Giorgini (Brill, Leiden, 2021)

The first ever guide to the reception of classical Athenian democracy, Brill’s Companion to the Reception of Athenian Democracy delivers a fresh and wide-ranging analysis of the uses and reinterpretations of ancient Greek democracy from the late Middle Ages to the XXI century. The book’s first section explores this history from the rediscovery of classical antiquity in the Renaissance in different countries (England, France, Germany, Italy, American Republic) and ages, while the second section focuses on philosophical movements such as Marxism and on contemporary philosophers such as Leo Strauss, Hannah Arendt and Michel Foucault; the last section examines the reception from the perspective of current political science.

This is a comprehensive review by Colin Kirkwood, based on a recent talk [Towards Democracy: Wednesday 16 October 2024] on the subject.

From the Preface by John Dunn: “modern politics is more a predicament than it is a cultural accomplishment or intellectual achievement.”

From the Introduction by Dino Piovan and Giovanni Giorgini: “The political arrangement that Cleisthenes and his supporters succeeded in creating in Athens in the year 508 BCE was not only a revolutionary political regime in which the people, namely every *free male adult Athenian citizen, took part in the most important decisions for the city, such as making alliances, waging war, and imposing taxes. It was also founded on some implicit or explicit values: the equal value attributed to each citizen for his contribution to politics, belief in public discussion and the goodness of decisions made in common, the importance of free speech and of open debate. Athenian democracy remained a paradigmatic regime for centuries, even millennia, after its (gradual) downfall, a century and three-quarters later”. 

Note: *Athenian democracy excluded women, children, slaves, foreigners/metics, and many workers of lower status. It stimulated fierce debate, and sometimes actual conflict, lasting ever since, about the value (or otherwise) of democracy and about what it actually means.

The philosopher Plato launched the most radical attack on democracy, (placing it close to the bottom of a descending progression), which he saw as the rule of one faction (the demos) in its own interest, to the detriment of the rest of Athens. He considered human beings as unequal by nature, and favoured rule by a philosopher king.

Aristotle considered the rule of the poor a bad regime, and advocated a mixture of democracy and oligarchy. Herodotus summarised the choice as: rule by one, rule by some, and rule by many. 

Some Key Names, in rough historical order: 

Solon                               Herodotus                    Cicero

Cleisthenes                     Alcibiades                     Plutarch

Aristides                          Plato                              Machiavelli

Themistocles                  Phocion                         Thomas Hobbes

Pericles                            Aristotle                        George Grote

Socrates                           Demosthenes              Karl Popper

Thucydides                      Xenophon                    Hannah Arendt

 

Chapter 1 The Nature of Athenian Democracy by Mogens Herman Hansen

Athenian democracy is the best-known example in history of “direct” democracy as opposed to “representative” or “parliamentary” democracy.

Demokratia: the rule (kratos) of the people (demos). Athenian democrats meant by demos the whole body of citizens, and linked demokratia to the rule of law. Critics of democracy (such as Plato and Aristotle) tended to regard the demos as a class, the ordinary people, or the city poor, who by their majority could outvote the minority of countrymen and major property owners.

Democratic ideology: freedom or liberty (eleutheria, which had two aspects: political liberty to take part in the democratic institutions, and private liberty to live as one pleased); equality (isonomia, which meant every man should have an equal opportunity to speak in political assemblies, and equality before the law – but equality did not extend to the economic sphere of society); and tolerance or mildnesss (praotes and philanthropia). Laws about daily mutual relations between citizens were mild. But laws about public life and the political institutions could be severe.

An important part of liberty was freedom of speech and the right to speak your mind (parrhesia). This right extended to citizens, foreigners and even slaves. Male society was divided into orders rather than classes: these were citizens, metics and slaves. Metics included foreigners, but also operatives of unprivileged crafts, trades and services.  There were well-understood processes by which these statuses could sometimes be changed, up or down.

Citizens were the privileged, they could own property and take part in politics. A citizen could himself only be produced by two Athenian citizens in wedlock. (How the mothers could be regarded as citizens, given the male- dominated character of Athenian society, beats me. But in another sense, it’s pretty obvious: no woman, no cry) An Athenian citizen came of age at 18, when he became a member of his father’s deme (municipality). He became a full citizen aged 30, and could then present himself as a candidate for the annual *sortition of magistrates and the panel of 6000 citizens who served as both legislators and jurors.

*sortition means random selection: the action of selecting or determining something by casting or drawing lots.

The decision-making bodies were: the boule (Cleisthenes’ boule was a council of 500 members, 50 from each of 10 new Athenian tribes, who served as the council for one year), the demos (see next paragraph), the dikasterion or court (plural dikasteria, courts) and the nomothetai. A decree had to be debated in the boule, before it was brought before the demos. In half of the cases, the demos simply ratified what the boule had decided.

The people’s assembly was called the demos, and a meeting of the assembly was called an ekklesia. The Athenians had 40 ekklesiai in a year. The meeting was attended by at least 6000 citizens, the quorum. Voting was by show of hands. Interruption was by cheers, cries of protest, laughter or shouting down.

The Athenians distinguished between laws (nomoi) and decrees (temporary or individual rules: psephismata).  Decrees were lower norms than laws. They must be consonant with the laws, otherwise they could be quashed by a graphe paranomon, a public action brought against the proposer, and heard by a dikasterion or court. The assembly decided on all decisions on foreign policy and major issues of domestic policy, by psephismata. The assembly was also empowered to elect the military and financial magistrates (archai), to initiate legislation, by appointing a panel of legislators, and to initiate a political trial.

Citizens over the age of 30 could participate in the annual sortition of a panel of 6000 who served for one year as legislators and jurors. The larger and smaller groups of legislators (nomothetai) were also chosen by sortition (random selection by lot).

Professionalism and democracy were regarded as contradictory.

Chapters 2 and 3 Athenian Democracy in the Late Middle Ages, Early Humanism and the Italian Renaissance by Gabrielle Pedulla

In my reflections on chapters 2 and 3, I include my initial thoughts on the reception of Athenian Democracy historically and generally. The first point is to draw attention to how short a time demokratia actually existed. It flourished or at any rate survived from roughly 508 BCE for one and three quarter centuries or thereabouts. It was hated, despised, trashed and misrepresented by its opponents throughout most of its short life, immediately thereafter, and well into the 19th C. Most of what we would now call the power elites, and in earlier times the aristocracy and their often ruthless promoters, feared and rubbished it. A leading Tory minister of the 1960s, Lord Hailsham, sometimes known as Mr Quintin Hogg, when asked about democracy, observed: we don’t live in a democracy, we live in an elective dictatorship, which in my view is an acute if not entirely accurate comment.

But over the centuries and millennia, democracy has gradually emerged with a more positive yet still equivocal standing. That doesn’t mean that very much has changed, but simply that it has at various points been felt necessary to change the name on the box. We will try to follow, from here on, what has actually occurred, and what remains to be done. 

Plutarch (46AD-119 AD) generated an early version of the distortion and misrepresentation of democracy, with his emphasis on the “virtues of great men” or “viri illustres” theory, celebrating such virtues as fortitude, liberalty, beneficence, magnificence, splendour, conviviality, magnanimity, prudence and so on.

The great majority of Italian writers of the late middle ages and Italian renaissance were hostile to demokratia. Very few members of the Roman, Florentine or Neapolitan elites knew anything much about Athenian democracy. Italian authors were more interested in discussing what they knew of Sparta, Venice, and above all Roma Triumphans, to care too much about what had happened in Greece or had been written in Greek, a language and history of which most of them knew little.  

In his third chapter, it is only really with his important discussion of the work (in Latin) of Carlo Sigonio (1524-1584) that Gabrielle Pedulla brings the Italian renaissance into the exploration of Athenian democracy in greater depth. Sigonio’s 16thC account of the Athenian system is the one most based on actual Greek evidence, and less on Latin and Italian sources. He also gives the best response to Machiavelli’s devious equivocations. Sigonio’s key work is called De Republica Atheniensium (1564). Pedulla says that with that work, later rated highly by Rousseau, Gibbon and Grote, a new history begins of the study of ancient democracy. Sigonio discusses earlier Athenian social history: tribes, assemblies and demes. He analysed Athens’s social geography into three groups: citizens from the country, citizens from the mountains, and citizens from the coast (not exactly the same categories as Cleisthenes used). This led in turn to an analysis based on affluence: the wealthy (patrici), the farmers (rustici) and the working class (opifices). This analysis is confirmed by the recently (1891) rediscovered Constitution of the Athenians, widely attributed to Aristotle. 

Sigonio says of Cleisthenes: Cleisthenes, an exemplary man and citizen, not only restored the republic, but empowered it.

And Pedulla says of Sigonio: Sigonio was enthusiastically for Athenian democracy. He is a colleague of today’s classicists: their first colleague.

Chapter 4    Hobbes, Thucydides and Athenian Democracy by Luca Iori

Luca Iori has a very difficult job to do here. On the one hand, he must give an accurate account of what he calls “an anxiety-ridden moment” in England. It is the autumn of 1647. The first phase of the Civil War has just ended. The parliamentary forces are victorious. Charles I is a prisoner at Hampton Court Palace. The New Model Army, commanded by Thomas Fairfax and Oliver Cromwell, has occupied the city of London, and is engaged in a large-scale programme of radical reform. Within that framework, the representatives of the army are meeting at Putney to construct a new constitutional settlement: a new republican order, a modified episcopal state church, with toleration outside it.

Two different republican models are competing against each other in the debate. The first, led by Cromwell, plans an oligarchic republic, with a weak king, a strong centralized council of state, a house of lords and a house of commons with an unreformed freeholder franchise (ie landowners and traders only).

The revolutionary wing of the army is for a decentralised state, and a single-chamber parliament: “the poorest he that is in England hath a life to live, as the greatest he… every man that is to live under a government ought first by his own consent to put himself under that government”.

Cromwell commented: this must end in anarchy. The King branded it “Leveller”. Marchmont Nedham, the polemicist, identified the Leveller principles with Athenian democracy, and the Leveller mob is portrayed as the Athenian populace electing monstrous tyrants and corrupted demagogues to positions of high office. These were exactly the terms used 2100 years earlier against Cleisthenes’ Athenian democracy.

We turn back now in English time to 1628/29. Thomas Hobbes has completed the publication of his translation of Thucydides’s History, entitled Eight Books of the Peleponnesian Warre. It is in English and is generally regarded as an accurate translation, but by various devices of presentation, it conveys a precise political agenda. It presents a failing trajectory of democratic Athens, as a warning to 1620s England.  It was only 50 years later, that Hobbes declared, in Latin: “I liked Thucydides. He demonstrated to me how inept democracy is, and how much wiser is the rule of a single man than that of a multitude”. For Hobbes, democracy was and is the rule of demagogues.

The “success” of Hobbes’s English translation of Thucydides made a huge contribution to the generalised view throughout England in the decades following its publication, of Athenian and Periclean democracy as an unruly mob, much as the unruly and quarrelsome House of Commons was identified with unruly Athenian ekklesiai. Hence the extreme constitutional caution of Oliver Cromwell, and hence the absence of a real English democratic revolution.

Chapter 5 The Reception of Athenian Democracy in French culture from the Enlightenment to the second Empire by Pascal Payen 

France was very slow to develop an interest in Athens, or in democracy. In French culture, Latin was all-powerful. Historians were interested in Rome, and knew a little about Sparta. It was not until the first half of the 19th C that Sparta fades, and Athens becomes what Pascal Payen calls “the city of reference”, largely because of the publication in England of George Grote’s ten volume History of Greece (1846-56). This development was followed very closely by the French writer Victor Duruy (1811-1894) who created an image and model of a liberal Athens, owing much to George Grote’s liberal model of an Athens seen through an English utilitarian lens, thus enabling French authors to find a way round and through the disaster of the French revolution. Grote was an admirer of James Mill and of John Stuart Mill. 

Chapter 6 Athens and the Founders of the American Republic by Carl Richard

Carl Richards argues that the founders of the United States learned major lessons from studying the history of Ancient Greece, and of Athens in particular. He refers to “the near miraculous victory of the tiny Greek republics to defeat a centralized monarchical empire, Persia, the greatest power on earth, in a war for survival.” Likewise, few expected the weak and undisciplined collection of American Republics to defeat Great Britain, the greatest power of the 18th C. But the America leaders were also interested in Thucydides’ and later Plutarch’s accounts of the so-called failure of Athenian democracy, the story of Sparta’s victory over Athens in the Peloponnesian war, Plato’s account of the execution of Socrates, and the later conquests of Athens by Macedonia and Rome.

From this evidence they concluded that a strong central government was needed to bind the American states together in a powerful union. Most of the key figures involved in forming the American constitution had studied the classics, meaning the Greek and Latin languages, where they had read selections from Herodotus, Thucydides, Plato, Aristotle, Demosthenes, Plutarch and Cicero. James Wilson, one of the principal shapers of the US Constitution, wrote: “When some future Xenophon or Thucydides shall arise to do justice to their virtues and their actions, the glory of America will rival – it will outshine the glory of Greece”. Richard comments: “the classical authors’ eloquence, their narrative skill, and the nearly universal reverence their writings commanded, all worked to inhibit the founders’ critical instincts.” “They remained largely oblivious to the authors’ aristocratic and other biases. So it is not surprising – but full of historical ironies – that the founders of the US Constitution favoured mixed government over democracy when drafting federal or state constitutions. They generally agreed on an elected governor or president, a senate consisting of an aristocracy of wealth (with nearly all states establishing very high property qualifications) and a house of representatives with much lower property qualifications. 

John Adams had written in 1763 in an essay entitled On Man’s Lust for Power: “No simple form of government can possibly secure Men against the Violences of Power. Simple Monarchy will soon mould itself into Despotism, Aristocracy will soon commence on Oligarchy, and Democracy will soon degenerate into Anarchy.” 

Richard again acutely observes: “What Adams feared most in the American states were democratic, single-assembly governments like that which had controlled Athens and its allies. This simple government to which Americans were most apt to fall prey was, of course, democracy.”

Even Thomas Jefferson, the future champion of representative democracy, argued fervently that “a choice by the people themselves is not generally distinguished for its wisdom” Both Jefferson and James Madison argued for a nine-year term for senators, Madison declaring that: “Landholders ought to have a share in the government, to support these invaluable interests…, so as to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority.” Even into the 1790s, and the first decade of the 19th C, the spirit of direct democracy still lurked ominously in the collective unconscious.  

Richard’s carefully researched chapter concludes with a final section, entitled The Fall of Greece and the Need for a Strong Central Government. The so-called federalists urged the case for the need for an element of strong central government, arguing that the Greeks lost their liberty because of decentralisation.  Philip of Macedon, they argued, was able to manipulate the warring Greek republics: “under the mask of an ally to one, he invaded the liberties of each, and finally subverted the whole.” The last sentence of the chapter reads: “the founders learned that a certain degree of centralised power was necessary even for a confederacy of republics.”

Chapter 7 The Character of Democracy: Grote’s Athens and its Legacy by James Kierstead

This is one of the most carefully researched and imaginative essays in the book. James Kierstead studied Classics, Ancient History and Political Science, and is now Senior Lecturer in Classics at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand

Kierstead argues: “For all Grote’s pervasive influence on later historians, it was his treatment of Athenian democracy that later scholars were forced to come to terms with, whether they liked it or not. Grote was working at a disadvantage in comparison with modern scholars without the benefit of important literary texts (including Aristotle’s Athenaion Politeia, which did not become available until 1891). Yet even lacking that text, Grote’s assessment of the centrality of the reforms of Cleisthenes as the foundation of Athenian democracy is still regarded as correct. The academic war over Grote’s work continued into the later 20th C: it can be illustrated by two quotations. Tritle(1999): “Grote’s History tells us more about the Victorian George Grote and Philosophic radicalism than it does about Athens in the 4th century BCE”. And Calder (1996): “I had been told at the age of nineteen by my Harvard teacher to purchase ‘a Grote’ and to start reading it. Good advice that I followed.” 

I recommend readers to study Kierstead’s chapter and indeed this whole book, which will reground and reorientate the debate about the history of Athens and the meaning of democracy, but before leaving this theme, I quote Kierstead’s own summary: “Grote’s Athens overturned almost at a stroke the image of an idle and fickle, yet at the same time aggressively oppressive, ochlocracy that had been built up over centuries by a derisive (and surely defensive) scholarly elite. It rescued the sophists and demagogues from the retrospective contempt in which they had been held for much of subsequent history, and restored them to a more credible place as ordinary (even valuable) intellectuals and politicians. More importantly it irrevocably displaced Sparta as the would-be constitutional engineers’ utopia of choice, placing ancient and modern democrats in a single lineage for the first time, and transforming (the image) of Athens.” 

In other words (still by Kierstead): “Grote overturned the conventional wisdom about Athens….his substantive view of Athens as a strong state which enjoyed real popular rule is correct.” 

Grote writes in a letter to his sister-in-law: “the case for opposing democracy on the part of the one and the few is to gratify their own appetites for wealth and power.” 

We turn now to the theme of character. Kierstead writes: “the purpose of this essay is to draw attention to the centrality of moral character in Grote’s understanding of democracy, and an invitation to democratic theorists to see whether there may be something in Grote’s view of the recursive interaction between character and institutions that might be worth salvaging.” 

There can be no doubt that what Kierstead characterises as a long and venerable tradition of anti-democratic history climaxes in the 18th and nineteenth centuries. All forms of republicanism and democracy are seen as incurably unstable, and in their place are promoted the inestimable benefits for liberty and stability of the lawful dominion of a well-regulated monarchy (to say nothing of the desirability of ever larger empires).  

There is no time to engage here in debating these assumptions, except to say that it is those very assumptions which George Grote has so comprehensively undermined in his History of Greece and his understanding of the underlying arguments for democracy.

What was common to all sides in Victorian Britain was the emphasis on the virtues associated with good character, and this was true also of Grote and his friends and allies, the Mills. Character was seen not only as a quality of individual persons, but also of whole nations or peoples. National character was not simply a matter of aggregating the mental and moral, and emotional and relational, qualities of individuals: individual character and national character were intertwined and recursively influential. They were part of, and influenced, the nation’s institutions and families. 

Grote challenged the normal ascriptions by historians to the character of the Athenians as fickle, ungrateful and irritable. Instead he finds them tenacious, grateful, steadfast and loyal, when confidence is bestowed on them.  In support of Grote, John Stuart Mill writes that “the passive type of character is favoured by the government of the one and the few, and the active, self-helping type by that of the many.”

I leave readers to enjoy for themselves the concluding to and fro of arguments between Kierstead and Grote, John Stuart Mill and Karl Popper, and Plato and Aristotle, on participatory democracy, liberalism, rationality and reasonableness and the link Kierstead suggests with the modern theory of social capital. 

Chapter 8 German Evaluations of Athenian Democracy in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

For a variety of reasons, I have decided not to summarise or comment on this chapter.

Chapter 9 Liberty Ancient and Modern in Twentieth Century Italy, Between Classical Scholarship and Political Theory by Dino Piovan

As we get closer to the present day (2024) it is almost as if the subject under discussion and the method being used, is changing significantly. We are now in cross-disciplinary and international territory and the method is philosophy. And dialogue, across time. Dino Piovan’s chapter leads the way. He is a contemporary professor of Greek from Italy and takes as his starting point a famous debate centred around a lecture given in Paris in 1817 by Benjamin Constant entitled The Liberty of the Ancients compared with that of the Moderns. 

Piovan summarises Constant’s central thesis as follows: the personal liberty of the Moderns…is the right to be subjected only to the laws, and to be neither arrested, detained, put to death or maltreated in any way by the arbitrary will of one or more individuals. It is the right of everyone to express their opinion, choose a profession and practise it, to dispose of property and even to abuse it; to come and go without permission, and without having to account for their motives or undertakings. It is everyone’s right to associate with other individuals, either to discuss their interest or to profess the religion which they and their associates prefer, or even simply to occupy their days or hours in a way which is most comparable with their inclinations or whims. Finally, it is everyone’s right to exercise some influence on the administration of the government, either by electing all or particular officials, or through representations, petitions, demands to which the authorities are more or less compelled to pay heed.

Modern liberty refers above all to the rights belonging to the individual in relation to the state, while the liberty of the Ancients, according to Constant, consisted in exercising collectively, but directly, several parts of the complete sovereignty: in deliberating, in the public square, over war and peace; in forming alliances with foreign governments; in voting laws, in pronouncing judgements; in examining the accounts, the acts, the stewardship of the magistrates; in calling them to appear in front of the assembled people, in accusing, condemning or absolving them.

OK, so that was 1817. The shock of the American and French revolutions, and Napoleon Bonapart’s rampage around Europe was still being digested. Ahead lay the late emergence of two new European nations (Germany and Italy), the flourishing (and horror) of industrialisation, the aggrandisement of the British Empire, and the beginnings of socialism on various models. And the world advanced into a 20th century of two World Wars, nazism and fascism, revolution in Russia and China, and the stand-off between West and East. Where and when is this violence, competition and greed all going to end? 

Now, in Dino Piovan’s imaginative response to the disaster of fascism in Italy, a very old and very new theme is starting to re-emerge. That theme is rooted in the fragile yet robust flower of Athenian democracy. Or should we call it – as I suggest – a very old and very new question: what exactly do we mean by democracy? What was democracy, beginning in 508 BCE and lasting less than 200 years, and what could it become in the 21st century if we were to keep our heads, and stop edging idiotically towards a third world war?

I have decided not to attempt to summarise the long dialogue between Benedetto Croce (1866-1952), and his students and followers: Arnaldo Momigliano, Gaetano de Sanctis (one of the few intellectuals to refuse to take the oath of loyalty to fascism in 1931), Piero Treves and Norberto Bobbio. It is well illustrated by Dino Piovan and like so much else in this book, it is well worth reading. It’s good to see the contribution of Demosthenes so valued.

Chapter 10 What Has Marxism Got to Do with Ancient Athens?

Carlo Marcaccini’s chapter is one of the most challenging and important in the book. I don’t intend to spend a long time on introducing its arguments or the evidence presented. Readers must get a hold of this book and digest it for themselves. The key introductory points I want to make are, first, that the thinking of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels is based on a deep admiration and study of ancient Greek culture, history and democracy, including that of Athens. Second, that the widespread misconception that the ideas of Marx and Engels are expressed and can be studied through the thinking and practice of Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin and Mao Zedong and their successors is erroneous and has caused untold damage throughout the world, for the duration of the 20th C.

Third, and specifically, Marx’s later thinking, can be studied in his Ethnological Notebooks (1880-81), and that of Engels in his Origins of the Family, Society and the State (1884), and finally through LH Morgan’s Ancient Society, or Researches in the Lines of Human Progress from Savagery through Barbarism to Civilisation (1877/1974). In the 1870s, Marx acquired increasing familiarity with the activities of the Russian populists (the narodniki). In this period, he abandoned the concept of the class war and favoured among other themes the development of the rural community. He advanced these concepts as alternatives to capitalist forms of economic development.

Drafting a letter to Vera Zasulic in 1881, Marx argued that in his book, Capital, there is nothing that goes against the rural commune, and that the latter could be considered as the foundation for “social regeneration in Russia”. Marcaccini further argued that what Theseus, Solon and finally Cleisthenes had done was to restore the primitive democracy that had at some point in the pre-aristocratic period existed in Greece, by means of social reform. This is an alternative analysis to George Grote’s liberal progressivism. The primitive Grecian government was essentially democratic, reposing on gentes, phratries and tribes.

Chapter 11 Leo Strauss’s Reading of Athenian Democracy by Giovanni Giorgini 

Giovanni Giorgini focusses on 20th C thinking about Athenian Democracy, particularly on the work of Leo Strauss, Eric Voegelin and Hannah Arendt. The 20th C was a difficult time for democracy, (by which of course he means representative democracy) and was characterised by totalitarian experiments throughout Europe and Asia. He notes as significant that the revival of interest in Athenian democracy and classical Greece happened immediately after the 2nd world war. The cold war between the Soviet Union and the West reminds him of the conflict between Athens and Sparta and the Peloponnesian War, with two sides opposing each other, with different political arrangements, ideologies and ways of life. 

Leo Strauss (1899-1973), a German American philosopher, puts forward a forceful argument for a return to the experience of classical Athens and ancient political thought as an antidote to the dramatic problems of political modernity.

Eric Voegelin (1901-1985), another German émigré, also found shelter from Nazism in the USA and had a profound impact on American culture and philosophy. One of his books is entitled The World of the Polis (1957), an examination of “the Athenian Century”. 

Hannah Arendt (1906- 1975) elaborated a liberal theory of action in an age of conformism and a mass society which she considered was always prone to become totalitarian in character. She was interested in Athenian democracy because she considered it the best implementation of political plurality and equality. Arendt saw in Periclean Athens the model of active citizenship (politeia) characterised by the political equality of citizens who are socially and economically different (isonomia). And she identified Plato and his utter rejection of democracy as the origin of authoritarianism in western political philosophy. Arendt contrasted the Athenian democratic experience with the expropriation of politics typical of modernity, which turned our societies into labour societies. 

Strauss’s life and work are analysed by Giorgini in greater depth. (For more on Arendt, see the next chapter, by Olivia Guaraldo). He (Strauss) promoted a much wider project to recover classical Greek political thought. He saw the West as suffering from modernity, by which I think he meant the political philosophy heralded by Machiavelli and Hobbes, arguing that they saw human beings as a-social and selfish by nature. He saw them also as having inaugurated two powerful trends in philosophy, namely Positivism and Historicism, and that these trends were then incorporated/embodied in the 20th C social sciences and particularly in political science, as both ‘value-free’, issuing in a third trend which involved utterances or pronouncements which involve only ‘judgement of fact’ and which eschew ‘value-judgement’. Strauss concludes that these three converging or uniting trends can be described as characterised by relativism, nihilism and uncertainty of purpose.

This led one of Strauss’s pupils to the conclusion that “Modernity is not simply a historical period, but a metaphysical condition of the human spirit”. I plan to leave the explication of the chapter as a whole at this point. But Strauss is a brave and independent-minded philosopher. Giorgini’s account of Strauss’s Plato in the latter part of chapter 11 is well worth reading. 

Chapter 12 “The Political Sphere of Life, Where Speech Rules Supreme” Hannah Arendt’s Imaginative Reception of Athenian Democracy by Olivia Guaraldo 

“With the loss of ‘tradition’ we have lost the thread which safely guided us through the vast realms of the past, but this thread was also the chain fettering each successive generation to a pre-determined aspect of the past. It could be that only now will the past open up to us with unexpected freshness and tell us things no-one has yet had ears to hear.” (Arendt, 1968)

Hannah Arendt’s relationship with antiquity was a “free one”, ready to delve with interpretative freedom into the archive of the past, in order to remove from its transmission, the worn-out trivialities, the cliches, the no-longer lively capacity of illuminating a meaningful message. Since the thread of the tradition has been inexorably broken – at first with the modern refusal of the triad:  traditio, religio, auctoritas – and subsequently with the advent of totalitarian regimes, the past has ceased to shed light on the future, Arendt does not think we must concede to despair: her purpose in recovering antiquity is “the phenomenological intent of illuminating the forgotten layer of the life in common…….what she calls its political experience, which she regards as pre-socratic and pre-philosophic, where what is at stake is not truth but freedom. Freedom, she claims, is not a philosophical concept, but an exclusively political concept, indeed it is the quintessence of the Greek city-state and of citizenship.”

We need to persist a little longer here with Hannah Arendt, until we get to the heart of what she is struggling to communicate. In section two of Olivia Guaraldo’s chapter, there is a very important sub-heading: Democracy versus Isonomia. Quoting from Herodotus, Guaraldo writes: the loveliest name of all, equality (isonomia)…..It determines offices by lot, and holds power accountable, and conducts all deliberating publicly. This passage occurs in the context of an argument against monarchy, and the speaker in Herodotus’s story says: “I give my opinion that we make an end of monarchy, and exalt the multitude, not by means of democracy, but of equality”. Arendt takes up this specific point: that the whole essence of isonomy is the refusal of the notion of rule.  In her book The Human Condition (1958), Arendt explains her phenomenology of the vita activa, in which she uses not the word democracy, but the word . isonomia, by which she means active participation, implying explicitly an exercise of freedom that is possible only among peers. “To be free means both not to be subject to the necessity of life or to the command of another, and not to be in command oneself. It means neither to rule nor be ruled.” In her book On Revolution (1963) she expatiates at greater length on the condition of no rule, insisting that the Athenian polis is isonomia and not demokratia. By no rule, Arendt means alterity, full participation, interdependence and not majority rule. It means what Aristotle called “sharing words and deeds,” arguing in his Nicomachean Ethics that the polis is the means by which the good life could be possible. Athenian politics, Guaraldo concludes, is the ability to embrace rather than reject human plurality, civic equality, diversity of opinion, and the central activities of public debate and deliberation.

Chapter 13 Philosophy as a Political Praxis Foucault’s Use of the Classics by Giovanni Leghissa

Michel Foucault (1926-1984) was a French historian of ideas and a philosopher. There is a wide range of aspects of and views about his work. This is not an attempt to summarise them, but instead to give a selective account of his use of the classics as understood by Giovanni Leghissa, who is Professor of Epistemology of the Humanities in the University of Torino. 

Foucault’s aim, according to Leghissa, is for the person to become and be an autonomous individual: he is trying to forge a philosophy of the self, and the capacity to develop a new and self-generating kind of subjectivity of the self. Foucault develops a concept based on the Greek word askesis, which originally means exercise, and refers to a form of severe self-discipline, involving self-government, the government of others and the courage to tell the truth. He puts these ideas together as follows: “the concrete possibility to connect one’s life and experience to the truth, and to scrutinise one’s actions through the lens of reason”.

On the one hand this concept or project appears to me (CK) initially, to be very self-centred. On the other hand, it also appears to link to telling the truth or parrhesia, and as occurring in a context involving a close relationship between the government of self and the government of others. The speaking subject has a pact with himself, and at the same time binds himself to the statement he has just made and the truth that is conveyed in the statement. In so doing, his truth-telling demonstrates a readiness to put his own life in danger.

In illustrating these ideas and this practise, he refers explicitly to Thucydides’ account of three speeches made by the 4th C BCE Athenian leader, Pericles, and especially to his famous Funeral Oration. So, this practise refers also to the practical government of Athens, in difficult times, which accords equality to all citizens, and involves speaking the truth in the assembly (the demos), with authority, courage and competence. 

Leghissa concludes: there cannot be democracy without parrhesia. Freedom is not the right to be free, but a capacity for free action, which we have to demonstrate truthfully and in practice.

Chapter 14 Classical Athens as an Epistemic Democracy by Josiah Ober

Josiah Ober is Professor of Political Science and Classics in the School of Humanities and Sciences at Stanford University, USA. He gives a detailed account of how Cleisthenes in 508 BCE created a new structure for Athenian Democracy. I will attempt to summarise his account. We need to remember that Athenian Democracy involved only adult male citizens, and not women, slaves, children, or metics, who seem to include foreigners and lower status workers. (There is of course no reason whatsoever why these absurd exclusions should be perpetuated for another 2500 years!) Those adult male citizens lived in villages or demes, or other local neighbourhoods which were coastal, urban or inland. Before the reform, they met annually in local village assemblies to admit new male citizens. They knew each other as villagers: their statuses, social norms, and commitments were clear. Ober calls these local relationships “strong ties”. In order to intermix the male residents of Athenian territory, Cleisthenes now artificially created ten new tribes. These new tribes were each composed of a third consisting of, say, 16 members of a coastal deme, a third of 16 members of an inland deme, and a third of 16 members of an urbanised deme. These demes were not contiguous, but were now linked.  His aim here in each case was to build a tribe that mixed people from three different types of locality, to build or bridge from a local identity towards a national Athenian identity. Thus, with ten new tribes, there would now be a Council of approximately 500 men, covering the whole of Athens, drawn together from and integrating these different types of local community.

This Council of 500 had as a key task to set the agenda for what would be discussed and decided at a full Assembly of all the male citizens of Athens, which would meet approximately 40 times a year. The Assembly would have other tasks as well: to muster a national army, to organise sacrifices, the eating of ritual meals, marching in parades, dancing, and performing other rituals. 

These men, in these ten tribes, from different localities, with different social, relational and working knowledge, would now meet, work together and get to know each other, for a year, forming a national identity. Each deme and each tribe’s members building on their strong local identities would develop bridging national identities. They would get to know each other. They were initially chosen by sortition (lot) at local deme level, and each tribe would take responsibility for running the Council for one month at a time, and they would all serve for one year. You as an individual councillor would work closely with your 49 fellow tribe councillors, as a member of the Council of 500, and as a citizen at Assembly level, taking responsibility for day-to-day administration of state affairs, meeting foreign delegations, reviewing the performance of outgoing magistrates, and ensuring that the policies decided by the monthly Assembly meetings of all citizens were carried out, on such matters as finance, army, navy, public works, religion and so on.

The point is that these tasks were not carried out by a controlling hierarchical professional elite. They were done by the councillors of each tribe, working monthly by rotation among the ten tribes or teams. They were paid for their work. There would be a gradual build-up of what Ober calls knowledge aggregation. I would add: knowledge and skill sharing, and competence development. As Ober sums it up: “Athens knows what the Athenians know.” He assumes that both the Council and the Assembly will become, to use a modern term, learning organisations. Since each team serves for a year, new teams will come forward to take over and learn in their turn the following year. Athenian democracy in the Boule and the Assembly is a rolling forward programme of learning organisations.

The key words of Ober’s vision of an epistemic democracy are the very opposite of the words we are familiar with in Britain, here in Scotland and indeed throughout the world: the new words are: sortition, rotation, knowledge-aggregation, knowledge -sharing, radical decentralisation, learning communities, accompanied at assembly level by the development of strategic rationality, overarching vision, Periclean leadership, goodwill, more cooperation, a lot less competition, a lot less greed, a lot more equality, direct democracy, dismantling hierarchy,  thorough public debate and discussion. Not a bad set of ideas! Cleisthenes must have been some guy!

Chapter 15 Sortition and Politics by Yves Sintomer

This is the final chapter of the book. Because it so ably summarises and joins up many of the themes of the whole volume, I have decided simply to select and present three or four paragraphs or quotations and let them speak for themselves Yves Sintomer is Professor of Political Science at one of the Universities of Paris.

The assumption behind random selection in politics is that just about anybody who wishes to be involved in decision-making is capable of making a useful contribution, and that the fairest way to ensure that everyone has such an opportunity is to give them an equal chance to be involved. Random selection worked in ancient Athens. It works today to select juries and has proved, through many practical experiments, that it can work well to deal with policy issues. For democracy to be strong, it must contain the essential element of citizen participation, not just by a self-selected few but by ordinary people who rightly can determine their own futures. Given the difficulty of involving everyone in such a deliberative process, we argue that random selection is an ideal means by which a cross section of the population can be involved.

“(They believe that) democratic legitimacy is closely linked to the expansion of deliberation in the sense of public debate: the more a decision comes from a well-organised public debate, the more it will be legitimate, both normatively and empirically. This line of thought is clearly a response to the growing distrust of the political system by the citizenry, which is a current and significant trend, at least in Europe and North America.”      

(Carson, L. and Martin, B. (1999) Random Selection in Politics, quoted by Yves Sintomer).

Selection by lot was massively used during the golden age of Athenian democracy, during the fifth and fourth centuries BCE. At the time of Pericles, it was extended to the great majority of public offices, while the democratic momentum took deeper root, the establishment of daily allowances for council members (bouleutai) and the randomly chosen juries of the people’s courts (461 BCE). (Yves Sintomer)

“We alone regard a man who takes no interest in public affairs, not as a harmless, but as a useless character; and if few of us are originators, we are all sound judges of a policy. The great impediment to action is, in our opinion, not discussion, but the want of that knowledge which is gained by discussion preparatory to action.”

(Pericles, speaking in his Funeral Oration, according to Thucydides, quoted by Yves Sintomer).

“The polis appears as a homogenous universe, without hierarchy, without levels, without differentiation. The arche (power) is here no longer concentrated in a single person at the summit of society. It is evenly distributed throughout public life, in that common space where the city finds its centre. Sovereignty passes in a regular cycle from one group to the next, so that commanding and obeying are not opposed as two absolutes but become inseparable terms of one and the same reversible relationship.”

(See Vernant, J-P (1983) Les origines de la pensée greque)

The Kleroterion: the allotment “machine” (referred to in 393 BCE by Aristophanes), designed in such a way that many witnesses could observe its operation, was crucially important. It made the sortition procedure quicker and more straightforward, while simultaneously protecting it from any attempts at manipulation. 

(See Lopez-Rabatel, L and Sintomer, Y (eds) (2019) Sortition and Democracy. Histories, Tools, Theories).