It has emerged in this essay that while both ancient and modern democracies place a premium on the idea of equality, modern interpretations of that value go beyond the Athenian stress on political equality. In terms of political activity, the Athenians were more successful at securing significant popular contributions to the infrastructure of their community. Such differences, and in particular the fundamentally different scale of modern democracies, has led some modern thinkers to deem the Athenian example insignificant for modern democracy (Dahl 1989: 23; Bryce 1921: 1.207). But such differences do not mean that ancient democracy has little to offer a world in which ostensibly (but often superficially) democratic political practices, foremost among them that of election, have become close to representing a universal ideal. The study of ancient democracy offers three potential contributions: in terms of its ideals and aspirations, its institutions and practices, and its historical experiences and epistemological value.
The overlap of ancient and modern democratic values like liberty and equality has led certain recent analysts to suggest that the study of ancient Athenian democracy may remind modern democratic communities of the desirability of democratic ideals (Woodruff 2005), even if the Athenians themselves were far from ever making those ideals practicable (Sagan 1991: 64). One of the most significant contributions of the history of ancient Athenian democracy is to illustrate how difficult it is to sustain political practices which live up to the standard of democratic values; the history of Athens in the hellenistic period (323-146 bc), periodically dominated by the kingship of Alexander the Great’s successors, illustrates how easily democratic ideology and institutions may degenerate into little more than hollow sloganeering (see Habicht 1997).
The institutions and practices of ancient Athenian democracy have generally been thought of as less relevant to the modern practice of democracy than have its ideals and values. Before the revival of Athenian democracy in nineteenth century liberal thought by George Grote and J. S. Mill, there had been a long antidemocratic tradition, with origins in ancient critiques of democracy (Roberts 1994): thus, when the founders of the American constitution talked about Athenian democracy, it was usually as an example of political practices best avoided (Madison, Hamilton, and Jay 1987: 248, 372-3). The most scathing recent attack on Athenian democracy has come in the work of L. J. Samons, who suggests that the practices of both ancient
Athenian and modern American democracy are damaging to public virtue (Samons 2004). But it is possible that the Athenian experience of democracy may offer something of interest even for those who do not share its ideals. At the most basic level, studying ancient democracy (and ancient political systems in general) serves as a reminder of the different agendas of ancient and modern democracy: modern democracies must strive toward forms of cosmopolitanism that ancient Greek political systems were unable to internalize (Balot 2006: 302). In some ways, difference is a key factor in making ancient democracy good to think with: indeed, in the aftermath of the collapse of Soviet and Soviet-inspired communism, some North American scholars suggested that ancient democracy might replace Marxism as the central political and theoretical interlocutor of western democracy (Euben, Wallach, and Ober 1994b: 9).
But the example of ancient Athenian democracy may be held up as a worthwhile example of a political system which achieved a high level of participation. Moses Finley, for instance, thought that the Athenian example might inspire a new form of popular participation at a time of widespread disengagement from the political process (1985a: 37, 108). Mogens Hansen’s interest in Athenian democracy has recently focused on the systems of sortition and rotation: he has suggested that recent experiments in direct democracy are ‘‘based on institutions and principles borrowed from ancient Athens’’ (2005a: 56; cf. Hansen 2002a): accordingly, the study of Athenian history is one way of assessing the merits of wide participation and direct democracy. Direct democracy demands a broad political education of its participants: such an education may, as it was in ancient Athens, be based upon direct engagement with political realities. However, direct democratic institutions will give rise to rational and beneficial decisions only if the groups or individuals are well informed of both local issues (as the ancient Athenians were) but also global issues (upon which matters the ancients were less well informed). Moreover, the relevance of the Athenian example to the prospect of direct democracy in the modern world becomes less simple when we consider that if there is a future in this form of democracy, it will be heavily reliant on the development and availability of appropriate digital technology (see Barney 2000; Gibson, Rommele, and Ward 2004).
The value of individual engagement with political realities is stressed by those thinkers who take a more philosophical approach to the question of how the practices of Athenian democracy are relevant to the modern world. The political theorist Hannah Arendt suggested that ancient democracy gave men a means of public selfexpression, and thereby fulfilled their capacity for action and freedom (1958: 41-3). Arendt’s work has much in common with that of recent formulations of the notion of deliberative democracy (a theory which places emphasis on political debate and speech-making as factors in shaping democratic activity) which employ the history of Athenian democracy as an instructive case study (Fontana 2004; Saxonhouse 2004; Urbinati 2002: 54-122; generally see Blaug and Schwarzmantel 2001: 492521). A related development has led some North American scholars to emphasize the educative role of Athenian democracy: the political and judicial experiences of democratic life helped Athenian citizens develop a political understanding of the world around them (Euben 1993: 479; Wallach 1994). Coinciding with the view of J. S. Mill (Urbinati 2002; Blaug and Schwarzmantel 2001: 59-67), Josiah Ober has suggested that Athenian democracy offered a form of civic education: democracy, he suggests, enabled the ancient polis to become an ‘‘effective network of people, of knowledge, of trust’’ (Ober 2005b: 42). One formulation of his thesis suggested that Athens offers a model to for-profit businesses in the modern world: just as Athens made its citizens free and equal members of an organization, so businesses should make their employees free and equal members in the hope they will feel more personally invested in a company (Manville and Ober 2003). Applying the same principle to a global concern, it might be suggested that while the history of the Athenian democracy cannot offer technical solutions to the problems of environmental degradation and human-induced climate change, understanding the ways in which the Athenians attempted to pool ideas, knowledge, and concerns might suggest ways of focusing local and global action on concerted solutions. Organizations which encourage participation necessarily broaden the pool from which they can draw and develop good ideas.
As noted in the second section above, in democratic Athens, debates about the qualities of democracy often gave rise to the clearest expressions of democratic virtues; I have also stressed the co-existence of parallel discourses on the value of participation and expertise in Athenian democracy. The history of Greek democratic ideas, therefore, suggests the importance of criticism and contention to the vitality of the idea of democracy. But such debates may be more productive if they recognize the plurality of interpretations of democracy. While the democracy that this essay has focused upon was the Athenian form, it should be noted that, as Aristotle recognized, different communities were suited to different kinds of democracy (Arist. Pol. 1289b 27-35, 1317a 12-29). In the ancient Greek world, forms of politics practiced at both polis and federal level were highly contingent on cultural and geopolitical factors. The modern world would do well to remember this: as Bhikhu Parekh has observed, if the west intends to secure and propagate its own interpretation of democracy, it must be ready to negotiate with culturally oriented critics (Blaug and Schwarzmantel 2001: 419).
Finally, the fact that a sophisticated set of ideas about and institutions of popular government emerged in ancient Greece should serve to remind us that democracy is not the exclusive property of the post-Enlightenment western cultural tradition. Ancient Athens was not the only nonwestern expression of democratic values, as the examples of the Cossacks of the sixteenth century ad, or the Ochollo people in Ethiopia show (Detienne 2007: 101-25). As Amartya Sen has argued, democracy is a universal not a ‘‘western’’ value (Blaug and Schwarzmantel 2001: 420-3). The example of Greek democracy might help the modern west realize that the interpretation of what constitutes democracy is not its exclusive privilege.
World History
