Download The Beginnings of Democracy Democracy as news It is only in this

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.
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 over-represented
(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.