ATHENIAN DEMOCRACY

Athenian Democracy

Evaluating the Political Values of Fifth Century Athens, Assessing the Nature of Athenian Democracy

Introduction

The term politics derives from the ancient Greek term polis, meaning “city-state,” which was the typical form of political community in ancient Greece. We continue to use the term politics even though with the exception of Singapore and perhaps the Vatican, there are no city-states in the contemporary world. This paper evaluates the political values of fifth century Athens, assessing the nature of Athenian democracy in a concise and comprehensive way.

Evaluating the Political Values of Fifth Century Athens, Assessing the Nature of Athenian Democracy

Politics has been defined in numerous ways. For example, the philosopher Plato (427-347 BCE) once defined it as the art of caring for souls, by which he thought that the primary role for political leadership is to cultivate the virtue or moral excellence of citizens. Focusing on power or wealth is a sign of bad leadership, as is building public monuments or empires, for which Plato's teacher, Socrates (469-399 BCE) criticized the Athenian statesman Pericles (Benhabib, 2002).

Athenian society had many libertarian aspects. Its economic and intellectual freedom attracted merchants and philosophers from all over the Greek world. Although the execution of Socrates reminds us of the limits to Athenian free speech, Demosthenes' remark that one could freely praise the Spartan constitution in Athens, but not vice versa, also was true. Dispute resolution was a competitive field, with disputants having a choice among private arbitrators, public arbitrators, and public courts. Unlike many Greek city-states, the Athenian state exercised no control over education (Benhabib, 2002).

The Athenian banking system, likewise unregulated, was quite sophisticated, and women exercised considerable de facto authority in commerce and trade. The Athenian system was never purely majoritarian; magistrates were selected by sortition (thus ensuring proportional representation), while decisions of the democratic assembly could, in some instances, be overturned by judicial review. Literary works (e.g., Sophocles' Antigone) and political speeches (e.g., Pericles' Funeral Oration) alike acknowledged the authority of unwritten laws to which human edicts were answerable. Critics of Athenian democracy point to its tendency to break down in civil strife, but nearly all this civil strife was confined to a single decade (413-403) in the aftermath of the disastrous and demoralizing Peloponnesian War.

The two chief Athenian philosophical movements that were to emerge were the Socratics (e.g., Plato, Xenophon, Aristotle) and the Sophists; each embraced libertarian conclusions, although seldom with regard to the same issue. The Socratics saw human interests as naturally harmonious, inferred that social cooperation under law was the natural human condition, and concluded that the state should take an active role in shaping the moral character of its citizens. The Sophists, by contrast, saw society as an artificial construct, a mutual nonaggression pact among potentially hostile egoists, and concluded that states should confine themselves to minimal defensive functions (Dryzek, 2000). (Arguably both groups failed to grasp the distinction between society and state, despite living in a community that largely exemplified that ...