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In 2017 the Washington Post adopted the slogan “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” An informed citizenry, one presumably enlightened by the newspaper’s reporting, the slogan suggests, is essential if democratic regimes are to survive. The potential demise of democracy has been a consistent theme of politics in the 21st century as politicians, pundits, political scientists and political theorists identify a multitude of threats to the life of such a regime. And yet, even as we fear its demise, what we may mean by the language of democracy, what institutions constitute a democratic regime, what justifications there are for supporting democratic practices, all these remain highly contested. As I argue in this book, Athenian democracy has long been a resource for those exploring the nature, benefits, possibilities and dangers of democracy. Some in the past have viewed Athenian democracy as embodying a threat to stability and human happiness, while others have seen it as a model of the freedoms entailed in self-rule. These are the writers I dubbed the “mythmakers,” who presented a stylized image of Athenian democracy, one that might serve their various political orientations.
The language of the early 19th century English historian William Mitford who referred to Athenian democracy as a “Tyranny of the People” may be long gone, replaced by deep-seated beliefs in the fundamental value of the freedom and self-rule characteristic of a democratic regime, qualities that had been manifest in the political life of ancient Athens. Democracy, as the Washington Post slogan attests, is now the political regime that we aim to protect, preserve and encourage. Excoriation of democracy is over – at least in the West. But just what is this regime that we are eager to save from death? Why do we aim to preserve it? What are its possibilities and what are its liabilities for the pursuit of freedom and human happiness?
Thirty years ago, in the lectures that were to become the basis of this book, I suggested that we turn to ancient Athens, but not as an idealized model to be emulated as so many in the 19th and 20th century had done and were doing. Rather, I suggested we look to those authors who were writing during the period of Athens’ flourishing for the lessons about the nature of democracy that they might offer: the assumptions that underlie democracy’s structure, the tensions inherent in such a regime, as well as its virtues and its essential challenges. To do so, we need to read those writers, not as they often were then, simply as critics of democracy, but rather as interpreters of democracy. Their responses to what was then a novel regime can uncover for us insights into the political system that we are so eager to preserve. Though Athenian democracy came into existence two and a half millennia ago and lasted less than 200 years, it has possessed for many generations of political thinkers a mythic hold on the political imagination; this has hindered an appreciation of how the authors from that time enable us to see aspects of our political experiences that often escape our notice.
When I gave the lectures in the early 1990s, concerns about the viability, vitality and vibrancy of democracy often centered on questions of participation and deliberation. As writers worried about a lack of citizen engagement in political life, there arose a tendency toward Athens-envy. The image of Athenian democracy as offering an historical instance of the active citizen deliberating in common and regularly participating in the administration of the city served as an antidote to a post-World War II view of democracy that favored apathy as necessary for the stability so lacking in the years leading up to that war and its aftermath. By calling on Athenian democracy to illustrate the potential vibrancy and successes of a democracy of engaged citizens, democratic theorists often distorted the understanding of Athenian democracy, creating a distracting mythology about the functioning of that regime, one that may not have accorded with the actual practices of the regime. Often using language and concepts such as “popular sovereignty” and the “will of the people” that sit awkwardly in the ancient world, they imagined (as did Tom Paine) an Athens that foreshadowed modern democratic republics “in miniature.” My goal thirty years ago was to suggest that instead of imposing such modern concepts on our understanding of Athenian democracy or imagining that the difference between modern and ancient times was only a matter of size or seeing in Athens a political model to match our democratic aspirations, we turn to the ancient authors who experienced first-hand life in a democracy for their insights into the possibilities, the foundations, the tensions, the benefits of a regime of that type. I was eager to highlight how these ancient writers move us beyond an idealized myth of Athens as a regime of freedom and participation expressing the “will of a sovereign people” that had come to dominate the portrait of ancient Athenian political life. Such a perspective, I argued then and still do, hindered a serious attempt to learn from the ancient theorists.
In the early years of the 20th century, the popular journalist and political commentator Walter Lippmann, reflecting on the challenges of an ill-informed public for the practices of a democracy, argued that a “false philosophy” of democracy, one based on just the active, participatory “people” (dêmos) expressing its will and exercising its power that Athens supposedly exemplified, “tends to stereotype thought against the lessons of experience.” A century later Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels similarly warned about the dangers of relying on a “folk myth” of democracy. That “false philosophy,” that “folk myth” focused on a view of democracy in which “what the majority wants becomes government policy” and “[d]emocracy makes the people rulers,” perspectives that derive from the democratic practices of self-rule attributed to Athenian democracy, a regime that enthroned a deliberative public freely engaged in the communal life of the city. Both Lippman and Achen and Bartels (who titled their book Democracy for Realists) reject the myth of democracy that Athens bequeathed to the modern world. They argue instead for an understanding of democracy that acknowledges the limits of a model that sets unreasonable goals and therefore fosters disillusionment with our own political practices. Rather than allowing the folk myth of the success of regimes such as ancient Athens to govern our expectations of democracy, I return to the world of ancient Athens by exploring the thought of four of the central political thinkers who wrote during the fifth and fourth centuries BCE. These authors were not governed by the folk myth but responded directly to a life lived during the first known incarnation of democracy. Against the “false philosophy” about which Lippmann warned his readers, they bring to us the “lessons of experience.”
(excerpted from introduction)
