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Public Speech and the Power of the People in Democratic Athens

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 September 2013

Josiah Ober
Josiah Ober*
Affiliation:
Princeton University
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Extract

I will defend three premises. (1) If we take democracy to mean what ancient Greeks took it to mean—“political power wielded actively and collectively by the demos” (i.e., all residents of the state who are culturally defined as potential citizens, regardless of their class or status)—then Athens was a democracy. (2) Even granted that Athens excluded from regular political participation persons Greeks did not regard as potential citizens (slaves, women, most foreigners, children), the historical example of the Athenian experience with democracy should be taken seriously by democratic theorists interested in expanding “the bounds of the possible” (as well as “of the thinkable”). (3) The Athenian demos exercised its collective power in order to prevent elite political domination, and thus the “power of the people” was not a cover for elite rule.

These premises do not mean that the people's power was in some ontological sense “pure,” or “undistorted”—indeed it was arguably through the tightly coiled and convoluted “distortions” of social and political power that the Athenian democratic order counterbalanced elite social power. Nor can Athens, with its acceptance of slavery, exclusion of women and foreigners from political participation, and jingoistic “blood and soil” doctrine, be considered a readymade model for a just, modern political society. It can be argued (incorrectly I believe: Ober 1989a, 20-35), that democracy in Athens was fundamentally dependent upon slavery, or empire, or the exclusion of women and foreigners.

Type
Research Article
Information
PS: Political Science & Politics , Volume 26 , Issue 3 , September 1993 , pp. 481 - 486
Copyright
Copyright © The American Political Science Association 1993

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Footnotes

*

This essay was written in the aftermath of a conference, organized by myself and Charles Hedrick (“Democracy Ancient and Modern,” Washington, D.C., April 16-18, 1993), that featured papers and commentary by both classical historians and political theorists. I have taken this opportunity to develop some arguments I sketched out in the course of several conference discussions. Given the informal nature of much of the debate, I have not always attributed positions to specific authors, but I have tried to catch the general tenor of the conversation and to avoid attacking straw men.

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