STILL RELEVANT: DEMOCRACY IN ATHENS

Josiah Ober, The Athenian Revolution: Essays on Ancient Greek Democracy and Political Theory (Princeton: Princeton U. Press, 1996) (From "Introduction: Athenian Democracy and the History of Ideologies": "But Greek democracy is not only interesting as a historical rarity. The inherent interest of a well-documented example of a real democracy is especially great in the twentieth century [LJL: I would add in the twenty-first century], because very influential thinkers, notably Robert Michels and other 'elitist' theorists, have denied that a true democracy could exist. Though Michels and other theorists of elitism are perhaps not much read today . . . their ideas have become generalized both the scholarly culture of classical history and in Western political culture. If we are today . . . all democrats in principle, most of us nonetheless seem to regard the authority of an entrenched elite an inevitable .The debates among historians and among citizens are . . . not so much about whether a ruling elite exists now or existed in past cultures. Rather, they are about, first, the identity of an aprioristically postulated ruling elite and, next, the question of whether the rule of a given elite is a good or a bad thing. Twentieth-century conceptions of ruling elites are both plentiful and colorful: the socialist vanguard, the military-industrial complex, the Trilateral Commission, the shadow government, the information elite, the best and the brightest--the list could be extended indefinitely. What seems to have been lost in these debates is the notion that a social and economic elite could effectively be controlled by the political authority of the citizenry at large. 'We the People' have lost faith in our powers." Id. at 3, 5. By the way, one means of understanding Citizens United is as the Court's, explicitly or implicitly, recognizing and empowering a corporate-elite. Those wanting to reverse Citizens United either do so because they advocate for some other "elite" or do so because they are true "democrats" who believe in "We the People." Note however, that the former may use, disingenuously,  the rhetoric of the latter. From "Power and Oratory in Democratic Athens: Demosthenes 21, Against Meidias": "To study politics and political life is to study power and the play of power. But what is power?" Id. at 86, 88. "[A] second approach to power, which we may call the 'discourse' paradigm, is less interested in overt coercion, sovereignty, state apparatuses, and law as such. It focuses instead on how social and political knowledge is produced and disseminated throughout society. According to this second paradigm, power is not centralized anywhere, and is neither 'legitimate' nor 'illegitimate.' Thus sovereignty is not at issue, and a study of formal juridical institutions alone will not reveal the fundamental workings of power. Rather than seeing power as repressive, the discourse paradigm sees power as productive: it emerges through the production of social understanding regarding what is true and what behaviors are right, proper, even conceivable. As a consequence, the concept of freedom becomes problematic. Since power is productive and omnipresent (rather than repressive and located in the state), it is not simply a matter of my being free to do whatever is not prohibited. Rather, all of my social interactions, including my speech, are (at least potentially) bound up with a regime of power that is also a regime of truth. It is not easy to get outside power, since all forms of social communication (including speech) will depend upon generally agreed-upon truths (e.g., schemes of social categorization) as fundamental premises of meaningful interchange. Coercive violence itself is thus part of discourse: the regime of knowledge will prescribe under what conditions one category of person may or may not perpetrate violence upon another and what constitutes violence (e.g., whether a free man may strike a slave; whether it is meaningful to speak of a husband raping his wife). The regime of knowledge/truth/power is thus maintained through discourse. A key question that faces the student of power working within the discourse paradigm is how, and by whom, social understandings are produced and reproduced--or challenged and overthrown." Id. at 89-90.).

Josiah Ober, Democracy and Knowledge: Innovation and Learning in Classical Athens (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2008) ("How should a democratic community make public policy? The citizens of classical Athens used a simple rule: both policy and the practice of policy making must be good for the community and good for democracy. A time-traveling Athenian democrat would condemn contemporary American practice, on the grounds that it willfully ignores popular sources of useful knowledge." "Willful ignorance is practiced by the parties of the right and left alike. The recipe followed by the conservative George W. Bush administration when planning for war in Iraq in 2002 was quite similar to the liberal William J. Clinton administration's formula for devising a national health care policy a decade earlier: Gather the experts. Close the door. Design a policy. Roll it out. Reject criticism.* Well-know policy failures like these do not prove that the cloistered-expert formula inevitably falls short. But the formula can succeed only if the chosen experts really do know enough. Our Athenian observer would point out that the cloistered-experts approach to policy making--insofar as it ignores vital information held by those not recognized as experts--is both worse for democracy and less likely to benefit the community. Contemporary political practice often treats citizens as passive subjects by discounting the value of what they know, Democratic Athenian practice was very different." Id. at 1. * I would add that, between the design-a-policy step and the roll-it-out step, there is often another step. It is the step where the policy makers hold meetings for the stated-purpose of obtaining input from interested persons on making policy. However, this is just a show: the policy has already been decided upon, but let's pretend that it has not. You know what I mean. Haven't you ever gone to a 'brainstorming' meeting where you suddenly realize that the power-that-be have had a meeting before the meeting and have pretty much decided what is going to be done?).

Josiah Ober, Mass and Elite in Democratic Athens: Rhetoric, Ideology, and the Power of the People (Princeton: Princeton U. Press, 1989) ("The existence of economic inequalities created considerable tension in Athens. The demos needed the rich men, since with the loss of the empire the democracy was able to function only by taxing their surplus wealth. The wealthy in turn knew that the state was run out of their pocketbooks; they expected to be, and indeed were, allowed to retain certain social privileges in compensation for their cash outlay. The recognition that the rich were privileged inevitably led to a sense of resentment among the masses, whose dominant ideology stressed political and equality. Clearly, if the advantage enjoyed by the rich got out of hand, democracy would end. The power of the majority, acting in concerted defense of their interests, had to limit the dangerous accretion of power to the rich citizens." Id. at 240. Sounds like a problem or condition confronting twenty0firs-century America in it New Gilded Age. Except, given our tax laws and policies, one could argue that the rich men and women do not pay for the government out of their pocketbooks. What is surprising is that the American masses do not resent the rich more. The reason for that is the American mass does not view itself as part of the mass. Instead, the mass is perceived as those other Americans (e.g., the poor, the people of color, illegal immigrants, and so on, who are often viewed as not really American.).

Josiah Ober, Political Dissent in Democratic Athens: Intellectual Critics of Popular Rule (Princeton: Princeton U. Press, 1998) ("The Western tradition of political and ethical thought crystalized in the Greek city-state of Athens in the late fifth and fourth centuries B.C. But why just there and then? And why have ancient Greek discussions of politics--of power and justice, individual and community liberation and enactment, class conflict and public interest, eros and education--seemed so compelling to so many readers ever since?" Id. at 3. "Greek elites (those who were wealthy, highly educated, and relatively cosmopolitan in outlook) were well aware that their inability to monopolize public affairs was anomalous, and they sought by various means to 'normalize' the situation. Their sub-elite fellow citizens typically resisted these attempts. And thus city-state politics were characterized by intermittent civil conflict and by incessant social negotiations between an elite few who sought to gain a monopoly over political affairs and a much larger class of sub-elite males who sought to retain the privileges of citizenship or to gain that coveted status. Those hard-fought political conflicts and complex social negotiations proved to be very fertile grounds for the development of philosophical speculation and literary culture." Id. at 4. "Aristotle's conception of justice is the good of each and every member of society (both those who were shareholders in the polis and those who belonged to it by belonging to a native oikos), and he supposed that the polis existed for the sake of autarky and eudaimonia. The theory of natural slavery is the only practical way to ensure both the common good and 'autarkic' productive capacity without resorting to (actual or potential) citizens-laborers. If he lacked a way to assure that all potential citizens were actual citizens and that all actual citizens were leisured, Aristotle had no way of transcending the aporia with which Ps.-Xenophon's text ends. Democracy, the politeia that is at once unnatural and all-too natural, remains the best Greeks can hope for. That was an unhappy prospect for the philosopher and for his elite interlocutors. The Greek polis, the only form of human organization that allows for true eudaemonia, has no way to confront the coming Macedonian revolution--no way, to speak anachronistically, of existing happily with the Hellenistic world. And so, in order to escape democracy, Aristotle necessarily embraced racist theory of natural slavery that remains an embarrassment to analytical philosophers who regard him as a model of clear thinking and to political theorists attracted to his vision of political society as moral community." Id. at 346-347.).

Josiah Ober, The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton U. Press, 2015) ("My goal is to measure the classical Greek efflorescence [Note: By "periods of efflorescence, " Ober means "periods of increased economic growth accompanied by a sharp uptick in cultural achievement." Id. at 2.] and to explain how political institutions and culture enabled the Greek world to rise to greatness from humble beginnings, how the great state of Greece fell to a predatory empire, and how Greek culture was subsequently preserved for posterity." Id. at 6. "The purpose of this book has been to present anew the inspiring story and cautionary tale of the rise and fall of classical Greece, using newly available evidence and the explanatory tools of twenty-first century scholarship. I have thereby sought to keep faith with my predecessors: the generations of scholars and writers--from Herodotus, Thucydides, and Aristotle onward--who made the political history of ancient Greece a living resource for all who aspire to end domination and to advance toward citizenship." Id. at 315 (italic and bod added). "After the collapse of the western Roman Empire in the fifth to seventh centuries CE, classical Greek culture was sustained by the successor Eastern (Byzantine) empire and by scholars and scientists in the medieval Arabic-speaking world. When, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries CE, in the face of Ottoman Turkish imperial expansion, Greek literature was reexported to the West during the Italian Renaissance, and when Greek learning was popularized in northern Europe by Erasmus and other luminaries, in the sixteenth century, its immortality was ensured." Id. at 296-297.).

However, consider (with its twenty-first century ring) this . . .

Cynthia Farrar, The Origins of Democratic Thinking: The Invention of Politics in Classical Athens (Cambridge: Cambridge U. Press, 1988) ("The purpose of this book is to retrieve a distinctive and neglected form of democratic thought from behind the shadows cast by Plato, by Aristotle, and by our own preconceptions. This version of democratic theory is to be found in the ideas espoused by Protagoras, Thucydides and Democritus. All were fifth-centre thinkers . . . For all their differences, these three thinkers are importantly alike. . . . I attempt to show, first, that the similarities reveal a coherent analysis and critique of democratic man, i.e. of the possibility of achieving order and freedom when all citizens, rich an poor, exercise autonomy. Second, I argue that the differences reveal the difficulty of maintaining a stable and itegrated understanding of democracy man and avoiding extremes of order or freedom." Id. at 1-2. "It is no accident that we have tended to look right past the fifth-century thinkers and to treat Plato and Aristotle as the first political theoriests. For like Plato and Aristotle, we have lost confidence in democracy and its corollary, the integration f the reflective and the concrete. That is, we have lost confidence in politics, in the possibility of reconciling the autonomy of particular individuals with a social order that can withstand reflective scrutiny. We think of ourselves as private individuals with concrete sentiments and desires, imbedded in our personal lives; we we think of political order either instrumentally, as the arena for the fulfillment of antecedently-established desires, or as a formal system for realizing abstract principles of equality and fairness. Unlike Plato and Aristotle, however, we do not seek to bridge the divide by binding man and society in one universal order. We do not attempt to unite ethics and politics by reconstructing man or society in terms of the cosmic foundations of the good. Modern thinkers turn neither to a meaningful universe nor, as the ancient democratic theorists did, to political order, to integrate man's understanding of himself in society. We rest discontent with a schism between the realms of the 'private' and the 'public' citizen. The self of private existence is isolated and hemmed in; its values find no anchor, no supporting structure outside their own sphere of operation, and when challenged can seem arbitrary, pointless, without connection to any larger order of nature or society, merely self-indulgent. If the way we structure the world comes to seem an expression of self-indulgence or narrow self-interest and the formal, procedural order intended to buttress our sense that this is not all there is to human interaction comes to seem unrelated to our sense of self and our purposes, then we are apparently left without any basis for attributing worth or objective force to our values. The choice appears to be between a formal, abstract order and pure self-interested struggle." "It is democracy, as conceived and lived by Athenians in the fifth century B.C., that offers at least the possibility of healing this spiritual and social fragmentation." Id. at 274.).