Download The beginnings of democracy

The beginnings of democracy
Democracy as news
It is only in this century that democracy has come to be seen by pretty much
everybody as the best form of government--even dictators say they are
democrats today. Most people in most places through most of human history
have not lived in democracies. Most ancient Greeks, in fact, didn't live in
democracies; and the most famous ancient Greek philosophers, Plato and
Aristotle, weren't exactly big fans of the most important democracy Greece
produced, that of ancient Athens. So the appearance of democracy in one time
and place--Athens around 500 BC--is something exceptional, is a big deal. It has
also had a tremendous impact on us. It is in large part thanks to the Athenians-with the help in translation by the Romans, who have so often translated Greek
ideas to us--that our country is a democracy. We ought to care then, about the
appearance of democracy in Greece. Among other things, we will ask:
Why did the Athenians develop democracy when they did?
The nature of Athenian democracy
Direct, not representative
The biggest difference between Athenian democracy and almost all subsequent
democracies is that the Athenian version was remarkably direct rather than
being representative. With a few exceptions, Athenians didn't vote for politicians
to represent them; all Athenians voted on just about every law or policy the city
was to adopt. Shall we fight the Spartans? The people vote and decide. Raise
taxes? Build a navy? The people decide.
A limited role for officials
To make the government run, the Athenians did have to have public officials, of
course. But they took radical measures to limit their power. Most public offices in
the developed Athenian democracy were chose by lot, i.e., were chosen
randomly. All those citizens willing to serve in a certain office put their names
forward, and the winner was chosen rather like we choose lottery numbers. The
Greeks considered this the most democratic way of choosing officials, for it
ensured that all citizens, whether prominent, popular, rich, or not, had an equal
chance to serve. (It may also have been considered a way of letting the gods pick
the right people for the right jobs.) There were thousands of public offices chosen
this way; and in almost all cases, an individual could hold a given office only
once. Most offices were relatively unimportant, and far from full time work. But
the sheer number of offices ensured that not only did the Athenians vote directly
on most issues of state; most of them served many times during their lives as
public officials.
It would be very hard indeed for an Athenian to speak of the government as
"them" or speak of the bureaucrats off in Washington or "Inside the Beltway."
The Athenians were their government: there was no "us" versus "them." And the
Athenians were, in fact, remarkably satisfied with their government; there was
little of the alienation many Americans today feel about our rather different form
of democracy.
The problem of stability
Athens was a state run almost entirely by amateurs. There were no professional
politicians; no professional lawyers or judges, no professional civil service. The
people could do what they pleased and, during much of Athenian history,
whenever they wanted to do it. The Athenian people could vote one day to raise
taxes by 50%, one day to cut them by that much; they could outlaw something
one day, approve it the next; give citizens of Athens a right one day, take it away
the next. This all must have been terribly inefficient. There was no constitution to
keep them in check, and no lifetime judges to tell them what to do: a right you
had one day could be taken away tomorrow. All this resulted in certain problems
of stability; and, as we will see, the Athenians themselves took certain steps to
limit the instability of their government without compromising its direct
connection with the people. We can learn something from the strain between
direct citizen involvement, on the one hand, and stability on the other.
Americans today often feel that the government is a big them off in DC; we often
think that the cure is more citizen involvement, and this must be right in an
important sense. But a more direct form of democracy--even if it were possible in
a country as large and diverse as our own--would also bring along problems not
unlike those faced by Athens.
By, for, and of male citizens
But the greatest flaw with Athenian democracy, from our prospective, is the fact
that while it was remarkably direct, it was also limited: no women could vote;
nor could the large number of slaves in Attica, of course, have any say; and, by
the middle of the 400's, no one moving to Athens could hope to ever gain citizen
rights: you had to be born both to an Athenian father and an Athenian mother.
So there is a sense in which Athens was both more and less democratic than our
government is. It was, arguably, more democratic if you were lucky enough to be
a male citizen; it wasn't democratic at all if you weren't.
From Solon to Cleisthenes
Solon's reforms of 594 BC may have helped; but for the middle years of the 500's
Athens was torn by civic strife which led to the tyranny of Peisistratus and then
his son Hippias. The Peisistratid tyranny may have allowed Athens to make
economic progress; but it became increasingly unpopular and when Hippias was
deposed on 510 BC the old problems of faction in unrest among the citizens
resurfaced.
Cleisthenes
Alcmaeonid: Pericles; Alcibiades
Cleisthenes was a member of the most famous political family in Athens, the
Alcmaeonids. Pericles, the most famous leader of Athens, we will meet later, as
we will Alcibiades, the most controversial Athenian leader of all time: both were
Alcmaeonids. Note, then, that powerful families continue to count even in a
more democratic society, and that the most prominent democrats are themselves
members of a prominent aristocratic family. Compare, perhaps, the Kennedy
family, which, like the Alcmaeonids, is rich, controversial, and liberal.
Cleisthenes' reforms (507)
In 510 Cleisthenes had managed to get the sons of Peisistratus kicked out of
Athens with Spartan help. But now the old internal divisions which had plagued
Athens since Solon's time reasserted themselves. Cleisthenes found himself faced
by an internal rival who had the backing of most Athenian aristocrats.
Cleisthenes, the historian Herodotus tells us, decided to turn to the people.
Perhaps he did so solely out of practical political reasons: he needed a powerful
force on his side now that the Spartans were against him. But this, I think,
probably sells Cleisthenes short. I suspect that his major motivation was more a
matter of principle. I'm not certain, though, that his idea, at least at the outset,
was to produce a full-fledged fully democratic society. My guess is that he was
acting to produce a government that would unify Athenians by giving all, rich
and poor alike, some say in how the government worked. Unity, perhaps, rather
than democracy, was his immediate goal. But it was democracy that he would
prove to be the means to the unification of the people of Athens.
Reorganization
Deme, Trittys, Tribe
Athens, like most Greek cities, had been divided into tribes based on descent.
This gave aristocratic families a natural way of securing influence, because
relatives tended to stick together. The people of Attica had also often clumped in
regional groupings, as in the days of Peisistratus, and this had let to dangerous
internal disorder, with people from one part of Attica set against those from
another. Cleisthenes completely reorganized the Athenian state into a new,
artificial, and rather complicated system. In his system the basic unit was the
deme, the village or neighborhood in which one lived. These demes when then
put together into 30 somewhat larger units called trittyes. Cleisthenes then
formed his 10 new tribes by combining one trittyes from different parts of Attica,
one from the coastal region, one from the city, and one from inland. These tribes
would form the units in the Athenian army, and the Athenian Council. The result
was to put Athenians from different parts of Attica together into the same
political units; it's a bit like having some people from Alaska and some from
Alabama belong to the same congressional district.
Council
Solon may already have set up a council: but we know nothing about it. It is
under Cleisthenes that the Council or Boule (sometimes translated by it's Latin
equivalent and called a Senate) became important. It would consist of 50
members chosen by lot from each of the 10 tribes. The Council would thus be a
geographically balanced body, one of whose functions was to tie Athenians
together regardless of where they lived or who they were related to. The
Council's main task was to prepare legislation for the Athenian Assembly, but it
also had certain functions we would associate with the executive branch of
government. Each tribe's group of 50 would be on duty for one tenth of the year
to oversee any business that needed immediate attention.
Assembly
The most important body in the Athenian democracy was the popular assembly,
in which all male citizens could participate. The Assembly would meet a number
of times each month, and the first 6000 or so Athenians citizens to arrive (all that
could fit in the meeting place of the Assembly) would deliberate and vote on all
important state actions. The assembly had the powers of our congress, and was
not checked by any powerful executive or judicial branches, for public officials
became progressively less important at Athens, and the judicial branch consisted
of large juries of citizens who had interests similar to those of the members of the
Assembly. Cleisthenes increased the power of the Assembly largely by making
use of it to push through his reforms. By this precedent he ensured that all
important laws had to be passed by a vote of the people as a whole. It is now fair
to call Athens a democracy--so long as we note that women, slaves, and
immigrants were not allowed to vote.
Note that the two political bodies of Athens, the Assembly and the Council, had
rather different roles: the Council made proposals which the Assembly could
vote upon and amend. They also may have had somewhat different
memberships. To get to the Assembly meeting you would have to come to
Athens; as many Athenians lived 15 or 20 miles out in the countryside, this
would have been quite a burden, and so it is possible that city-folks were overrepresented (rather the opposite of today). The Council, though, was
automatically geographically diversified by Cleisthenes' play, which ensured
that people from the countryside at least had some say at that stage of the
deliberations.
Ostracism
Cleisthenes may also have been responsible for the curious Athenian procedure
known as ostracism. Under this procedure the Athenians would vote once a year
in a sort of negative election: the unlucky winner, assuming a minimum of 6000
votes had been cast, was sent into exile for 10 years. His property was not
confiscated, and he was not convicted of any crime; when the 10 years were up
he was free to return. Apparently the procedure was designed to prevent any
one man from becoming too powerful. As a matter of practice it seems
sometimes to have cost the Athenians some of their best leaders. But it also
produced a long term conclusion to what otherwise might be a prolonged debate
between two leaders. The Athenians, one suspects, would have ostracized both
Newt Gingrich and Bill Clinton: we only managed to get rid of one of them.
From thesmos to nomos
The Athenian vocabulary for "law" changed in an interesting way in Cleisthenes' day, and
Cleisthenes himself may have been responsible for the change. Solon's laws were known
as "thesmoi"; the word is related to the Greek verb meaning to put or place, and refers to
the process by which law is imposed by a law-giver or other authority. Solon was a good
and wise man, and was given his power by the people; but he was still imposing laws on
the people. Nomos, by contrast, refers to custom and tradition, customs and traditions
already present in the society rather than being imposed from on high. Thus by referring
to statues as "nomoi" rather than "thesmoi" one gives law an entirely different meaning.
No longer are laws imposed on "us" by someone else: "we" make our own laws. Thus the
Athenians were beginning to take charge of their own government. And just in time; for
they would need all their strength to meet the challenges of the 5th century.