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Chapter One
Conditions for
Athenian Democracy
JOSIAH OBER
"
the Athenians meant active political rule by the demos-the native adult
males. This political body was constituted for purposes of governmental
and legal decision making withour regard for extraneous socioeconomic
distinctions; there was no property qualification for voting rights. Democracy flourished at Athens from 508-322 B.C., with only two brief interruptions in the late fifth century. After 322 B.C., periods in which the
Athenians ruled themselves democratically were interspersed with periods of foreign-imposed oligarchy, but democracy remained an important part of the Athenian (and wider Greek) political landscape well into
the era of Roman domination. 1
This relatively long political history is strikingly different from that
of every subsequent democratic state in at least one salient respect: The
democratic Athenians had no historical model ofdemocracy from which
they might hope to learn. Whereas Athens' experience with democracy
became an important model (or, more often, an anti-model) for virtually all later thinking about the potential benefits and pitfalls of republican forms of government, there was no road map for the Athenians'
own audacious political experiment. They quite literally invented democracy as they went along.
The Athenians were, of course, innocent of any teleological conception regarding the "conditions of political maturity" or "goal state"
that a democratic form of government should or even might entail.
Moreover, in the early days of the democracy, the Athenians had no
clear expectations about the relationship between the form of political
Josiah Ober
central concerns of Greek political philosophy from the mid-fifth century B.C. onward. 3 And, at least in part because of the profound influence of Greek political thought, the "democracy problem" remained a
central concern for many later Western political thinkers-even through
the long historical era (roughly the third through the seventeenth centuries C.E.), in which there was no living example of democracy as the
government ofa complex independent state to which empirically minded
political theorists might refer. 4 Once again, it is important to keep
in mind that "thinking abstractly about the conditions of democratic
flourishing" was only possible after Athens had become a democracy.
Whereas Aristotle, Cicero, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Rousseau, Paine, Madison, Jefferson, and others each had the history of democratic Athens (or
at least historical and philosophical traditions about Athens) to think
with, in the beginning the Athenians had only themselves and their own
lived experience.
Because he asked questions so similar to those posed by the editors
of this collection, Aristotle's analysis of democracy in the Politics offers
a useful starting point for thinking about the conditions that promoted
and threatened Athenian democracy. First, although he (famously) failed
to develop anything directly comparable to a modern analytic model of
the economy, Aristotle does associate democracy directly with relations
between clearly defined economic classes: For Aristotle, democracy was
formally defined as the rule (in a polis) of the fraction of the total "potential citizen" (j.e., native, adult, male: hereafter NAM) population that
was "poor."5 And thus democracy, for Aristotle, was best understood as
the self-conscious political dominance of men who were constrained to
work for their living. The fact that most NAMs in any given polis were
likely to be "poor" by Aristotle's (conventionally aristocratic) standard
means that democracies were in practice ruled by the "many" (the clear
majority ofNAMs) rather than by the "few"-that subset ofNAMs who
were leisure-class. But Aristotle insists that this empirical demographic
phenomenon (many poor/few leisured) is strictly irrelevant to the formal definition of democracy: The key to democracy was that it was government in the interest of the poor; the fact that it was therefore also in
the interest of the majority was epiphenomenal for Aristotelian political
analysis.
If democracy is defined as "the rule of the poor," we might expect
Aristotle to suggest that democracy will flourish whenever the material
interests of the "poor" are clearly recognized by the "many" qua ruling
faction, and maximized accordingly. But he certainly does not think this
to be the case: Democracy does indeed, in Aristotle's thinking, depend
Josiah Ober
kalosk agathos.
After the inauguration of democracy, if a nobleman's speech in the
public space of the citizen Assembly was regarded by the mass of the
poor as incompatible with their own demotic convictions and aspirations, their collective voice might simply drown out the nobleman's
individual voice. They might furthermore demand to hear a speaker
whose public views were more in tune with their own. Given the traditional competition among aristocrats for political distinction, this
"behavioral training" of public speakers eventually led (in the view
of the old elite) to a SOrt of political Gresham's Law, by which the
"good public speech" of adherents to traditional aristocratic norms was
driven out by the "bad public speech" of "demagogues"-upstarts of
dubious background who were willing to say whatever would please
the mob. ll
Much of the negative evaluation ofAthenian politics offered by elite
Greek writers, from Pseudo-Xenophon and Thucydides in the fifth century B.C. through Plutarch in the second century C.E., is influenced by
more or less sophisticated versions of this general conception of "what
went wrong" in democratic politics. While I certainly do not share the
aristocratic evaluative stance of these elite writers, I think that their
general description of democratic Athens, as characterized by demotic
control of elite public behavior and (especially) elite political speech, is
accurate and that it helps us to explain how Athenian democracy functioned in practice. 12
The disgust of the traditional aristocrat at the social leveling that
the political enfranchisement of the lower orders brought in its train
is hrilliantly salirized in Tht'()phr:I.~IIIS' late {Ollflh-ccIHllry work
on Characters. Theophrastus sketches an amusing portrait of the
Oligarchic Man, who struts about in public dressed ostentatiously and
ranting against the entire "race of demagogues" (26.4-6). He demands
plenary powers for elected government officials. He seeks to display
his education by citing Homer, although he actually knows only the
verse praising monarchy.13 He calls for the elite to meet in private in
order to discuss political matters and asserts that they should give up
public participation in democratic politics so as to avoid being either
Conditions Tor
f\[llellldll UeIIH)U
acy
Josiah Ober
10
Josiah Ober
tential of non-citizens to subvert the democratic political order remained latent; democratic Athens (unlike aristocratic/oligarchic
Sparta, discussed subsequently) never felt constrained to institutionalize a regime of military terror aimed at suppressing local non-citizen
ambitions. 18
A rich array of intermediary Athenian civic and civil organizations
responded to the democratic regime, either by alignment with egalitarian democratic norms or by providing private-realm spaces in which
alternative norms could be celebrated. 19 The physical space of the democratic city was reconfigured to reflect the more equitable access to public
goods characteristic of democratic thinking. 20 State-sponsored festivals,
parades, public sacrifice and feasting, and dramatic performances-all of
which had deep roots in formerly elite-controlled religious rituals-were
all brought under democratic institutional authority and served variously
as loci for the display of social solidarity and (in the case of drama) for
sharp and salutary critical interrogations of public values. 21 New literary
genres and subgenres, from historiography to oratory to philosophical
dialogue emerged and evolved under the influence of democratic public
discourse. 22
In brief, it is clear that classical Athenian governmental and legal
institutions, political ideology and public speech, social practices, and
high culture all participated actively in creating a distinctive set of values and practices-at once affected by and important for the robustness
ofdemocratic Athenian politics. Plato's terminology may remain strange
to us, but we can begin to see what he meant when he claimed in the
Republic that the "democratic soul" was the microcosmic individual
analogue to the socially diverse macrocosmic collectivity that was the
democratic city. Although it may be impossible to specify the priority of
these various "sustaining conditions," they can be described in enough
analytic detail to make the study of democratic Athens worthwhile for
comparative purposes. 23
By contrast to the conditions sustaining democracy, the conditions
that undermine democracy have, on the whole, concerned recent Greek
historical scholarship kss than they did earlier generations of scholars.
The, by now, shopworn notions that a growth in democratic "radicalism" destabilized the democracy, that political leaders after Pericles abandoned concern for the public good and treated the public sphere as
nothing more than a system of private spoils, and that class tensions and
a growth in selfish individualism among the populace at large undermined civic solidarity, have been exposed as tendentious fictions by a
spate of detailed work on the fourth- and third-century phases of the
democracy.24
11
12
Josiah Ober
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13
14
Josiah Ober
t
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16
Josiah Ober
human resources available to the state. The potential military population doubled from roughly half to the entire NAM population,
enabling the explosive emergence of Athens as a naval power. Moreover,' it was no longer necessary for the enfranchised NAM population
to waste its energy seeking to control the ambitions of "unenfranchised
NAMs," since the latter category literally disappeared. 30 Finally, the
incorporation into the political body of those who necessarily worked
for others contributed to the atrophy of traditional aristocratic constraints on individual economic activity. As recent scholarship has
emphasized, the Athenian economy of the late fifth and fourth centuries manifests strikingly "modern" features. And these must be
attributed, in some measure, to the emergence of frankly democratic
social values. 3' In brief, 508 and its immediate aftermath was a watershed in Athenian and, indeed, in Creek hisrory. Athens became :l
great state upon bccoming a dcmocracy. So what was lhc SC(!lIC1H.;C
of events that precipitated the unpredictable and decisive political
change?
The Athenian political stage in the years immediately following the
expulsion of the tyrant in 510 H.C. was dominated by two ambi tious
aristocrats, Isagoras and Cleisthenes. Although the state of our evidence
does not allow us to align these men or their supporters neatly along a
habrosunelmetrios axis, Isagoras clearly advocated a more exclusionary
approach to elite rule, yet he found enough support among the "middling men" to win the archonship for the year 508. Whether out of
principle or desperation, Cleisthenes turned to the remainder of the
NAM population, "making the demos [i.e., the poneroi] his comrades"
(Herodotus 5.66.2). In response, Isagoras called in military support
from Sparta. He then exiled Cleisthenes and the more prominent of his
supporters. Isagoras also sought to dissolve Athens' ruling council,
intending to replace the sitting councilors with 300 of his own supporters. Unexpectedly, the councilmen resisted and the demos ofAthens
rose up in arms, quickly besieging Isagoras and his Spartan allies on the
Acropolis. The Spartans surrendered; Isagoras was expelled from the
city. Cleisthenes was then recalled to Athens and inaugurated the reforms
that established the institutional basis of democratic government. A
year later the decisive Athenian military victory over an alliance of several regional rivals marked the beginning of Athens' ascent to Aegeanwide prominence.
The import of my brief recapitulation of the events of 508 is this:
Although the establishment of "republican/moderate-oligarchic" social
and ideological conditions in the archaic period was a prerequisite for
17
18
Josiah Ober
That Lite has continued, in some sense, down to the present day.
The hisrorical conditions that yielded Athenian democracy were perhaps
unique; certainly they were ro somc extent contingent and unpredictable, bur not unrcpeatable. Once democracy was securely in place, the
model ofAthenian democracy became a factor in world political history.
Because the new democratic state proved wildly successful on the international scene and spectacularly productive ofliterary, artistic, and philosophical culture, the Athenian model was highly influential and never
forgotten. Any post-classical attempt to assert the perfect naturalness of
arisrocratic or monarchical government had to face the potentially disruptive memory of democratic Athens. Concerted attempts by antidemocratic intellectuals to blacken the memory of Athens' political
experiment did indeed ensure that there was no attempt to apply the
Athenian model directly to a post-classical regime. But ironically, those
who sought to show "what went wrong" in Athens kept alive the conceptual possibility of popular government and the hope that it might
someday be "done right. "33
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NOTES
1. On the origins and use of the word demokratia: Hansen 1991. Robinson 1997 collects
the exiguous evidence for early Greek democracies ourside Athens. I remain unconvinced
that any genuine democracy was established before that of Athens. On the origins of
democracy in Alhens (in 50S II.C.), St'C below. Democracy at Athens afrcr }22 II.C:
Habicht 1997.
2. I discuss Ariswcle on dcmocracy, and thc relationship betwcen thc ideal and commonly
existing regimes, in considerably more detail in Ober 1998, chapter 6.
3. Ober 1998 :1Cf\ues this general point in detail.
1. The "dealh of dt'monacy" in the ancient world has beell pushed back by recellt scholarship
on rhe political t'xperience of the Hdknistic world, but even oprimisrs tend ro agree thaI'
democracies did not survive the era of the high empire; see Ph. Gauthier, "Les cites hellenistiques," in Hansen 1993. For proco-democratic rhought in pre-eighteench-cencury Europe,
see T. Rabb, this volume.
5. Politics 1290a40-b3; cf. 1290b 17-20. Finley 1970 remains an essemial incroduction co the
problem, although see fur mer De Ste. Croix 1983, 69-81. Ober, "Aristotle's Political
Sociology: Class, Status, and Order in the Politics," in Lord and O'Connor 1991; and
Meikle 1995.
21
22
Josiah Ober
Sparta and its allies defeated Athens in rhe Peloponnesian War, Sparta fell apart as a society
soon there3fter, 3nd never recovered from the milir3ty defe3r 3t Lellcrr3 in 371 H.C. By
contrast, Athenian society recovered quickly from what seemed a catastrophic loss in the
Peloponnesian War.
3 J. "Modern" features of Athenian economy: French 1964; Cohen 1992. Contrast Millett 1991.
For a good overview of the question, see Morris 1994. Hostility of aristocratic "economic
values" to coined money 3nd moneymakers: Kurke 1999.
32. See, further, Ober 1996, chapter 4; Ober, "Revolution Marters," in Morris and
Raaflaub 1998.
33. History of hostility to Arhens: Roberrs 1994.
Chapter Two
r,
MAURIZIO VIROll
arly modern political theorists have very little to say about democracy, ifby democracy we mean a political constitution based on rules
that confer the power to take collective decisions to a (more or less)
large number of the members of the group and respect basic liberal
rights. I Some of these political theorists, however, were republicans, in
the sense that they supported a republican political constitution. By
republic or popular government, they meant a political constitution that
affirms the principle of the rule of law and assigns sovereign power to
a collective body, as opposed to a monarchy or principality: "All the
states, all the dominions that have held sway over men, have been either
republics or principalities," as Machiavelli put it in the opening lines
of The Prince. Republics, in turn, can be either democratic or aristocratic. In democratic republics, sovereign power belongs to the majority of the citizens; in aristocratic republics, sovereign power belongs to
a minority. Although both scholars and non-scholars prefer to use the
term democracy, it would be more correct to use the term democratic
republic, because contemporary democratic polities are in fact democratic republics.
The implication of these historical and conceptual considerations is
that democratic theory is a special kind of republican theory. It also
means that early modern republican political wisdom is a vital source
for understanding the conditions and the problems of democratic
societies. In this essay I intend to explore the contribution that early
modern republican theory has to offer concerning the relevance of the
international context for the institution and flourishing of democratic
societies, the role ofeconomic and social conditions, and the interpretation
23
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