Thursday, 28 January 2021

The Hellenic Observatory (@HO_LSE) is internationally recognised as one of the premier research centres on contemporary Greece and Cyprus. It engages in a range of activities, including developing and supporting academic and policy-related research; organisation of conferences, seminars and workshops; academic exchange through visiting fellowships and internships; as well as teaching at the graduate level through LSE's European Institute.

This event is part of the 21 in 21 activities, celebrating the 2021 bicentenary of the outbreak of the Greek War of Independence in 21 Greek-British encounters. The 21 in 21 events are sponsored by the A.G. Leventis Foundation. 

Power and Impunity: what Donald Trump and Boris didn't learn from the ancient Greeks.

Are we living in a world marked by a new impunity of power? Political leaders discard established norms and taboos that have guided the behaviour of their predecessors and, in doing so, they win popular support from new areas of society, including the disengaged and excluded. How did we get here? Our notions of the good society, of the responsibility that comes with power, and, of course, democracy and its discourse, stem from ancient and classical Greece. Aristotle, Pericles, Plato, and Socrates etc. have shaped our political thinking, processes and systems. Our deepest sense of Western values, embedded in education curricula across our societies, emanates from classical Athens. Is it no longer of use or value? Are we now judging utility and cost differently? A panel brought together a set of experts to address these issues from different vantage points.

Professor Kevin Featherstone deliver introductory remarks, which included the introduction by Professor Paul Cartledge, who was unable to attend. 

I do apologise, but for unavoidable personal reasons I am unable to be with you in the flesh this evening. So I am even more grateful to  Professor Kevin Featherstone than I would anyway have been, for so kindly agreeing to be my spokesperson.

I have set out my brief contribution as a Q & A: answering half-a-dozen possible questions (of course there could have been many, many more). The keynote to be struck throughout is difference: both differences within ancient conceptions and constructions of democracy, and between all ancient (direct) versions and all modern (representative) ones.

There’s a case for arguing that modern democracies should be more direct, but there’s also a case (mismanaged referendums) that they should be less so. Unarguably, the lesson to be learned from ancient democracy is the absolute necessity of ensuring the responsibility, the accountability of all officials, but above all of the chief executives.

1. What is democracy?

There is no (one) such thing as 'democracy'. To use an ancient Greek analogy, it is hydra-headed. The original Greek word demokratia was a compound of 'demos' and 'kratos'. Kratos meant unambiguously might, power, strength, force - which could be used for good or ill. ‘Demos’, however, was ambiguous and so ambivalent. It meant People - but (as today) 'People' is an ambiguous and ambivalent term: it could mean either ALL the people (in ancient Greek terms, that meant all the empowered adult male free CITIZEN people) or a section of them. If the latter, in ancient Greece demos could be used in a sectarian/class sort of way to mean the majority of the empowered People, specifically the poor majority of them, the dictatorship of the proletariat as it were.

Thus if one was an opponent of demokratia, such as Plato was, one saw it as the dictatorship of the poor masses of the citizenry over the elite few rich citizens (such as Plato), a form of ochlocracy or mob-rule. But if one was an ideological democrat (such as Pericles) demokratia was government of the people, for the people, AND by the people. Directly by the people: all ancient versions of democracy were direct, transparent, face-to-face. Whereas all modern versions are the opposite - indirect, parliamentary, and representative governance: we the people do not actually rule ourselves but we choose others, usually by voting in elections, to rule for us (instead of us). That is the absolutely key and fundamental difference and opposition between ancient and modern Democracy.

2. How do we know about ancient democracy?

First, let's repeat that democracy was not just one thing - even in ancient Greece. The democracy of (e.g.) ancient Syracuse differed from that of ancient Athens. Athens between about 500 and 325 BCE had three different forms of democracy in succession. Athens, which invented democracy, is also by far the best documented of the ancient cities that had democracy (perhaps 250 in all out of about 1000?). I shall concentrate on Athens here.

There are three main types of source: Documentary, Literary, and Archaeological. The evidence that survives is not good enough or sufficient in quantity for us to write a continuous narrative history of democracy at Athens between 500 and 325, but it is good enough for us to see what were the major issues and turning points. What we lack, oddly, is a thorough, conceptually reasoned presentation of pro-democratic ideology and theory by a convinced ancient Greek democrat. This is partly because almost every writer on ancient democracy that we know of was more or less hostile to it.

3. What was the new democratic order?

Again, I shall confine myself mainly to Athens here. The word demokratia is first attested in works published in the 420s BCE, but most of us scholars believe that the earliest form of democracy was introduced at Athens by reforms attributed to an aristocrat called Cleisthenes in 508/7 BCE. From then on, the demos meeting in assembly (ekklesia) voted by majority (after the counting or assessing of raised hands) on all laws and on all major domestic and foreign policy issues. There was no property qualification either for attendance at the assembly or for membership of the Council of 500 that prepared the Assembly’s agenda. But there were property qualifications for holding the top executive offices - Treasurers, Generals- who were elected. About 460 BCE the old aristocratic privileges were mostly swept away. Juror-judges in the new People's courts were all selected by lot and paid from public moneys.

4. What were the governing bodies?

The grease in the machine was provided by the Council of 500: 50 citizens chosen by lot from each of the 10 electoral districts into which the Athenian citizen population was divided. By lot, because on democratic principle elections were not in themselves democratic. Such was the distribution of the 500 seats that well over 30 percent of the citizen population would have had to serve at least once in their lifetime. The Council was both proactive - it prepared the agenda for the monthly, later almost weekly Assembly meetings; and reactive - it saw to the execution of the wishes of the Assembly. It also exercised an oversight (accountability) over all elected or allotted officials. Even Pericles might be brought to account on a criminal charge and deposed and fined. The Assembly, advised by the Council members and by top officials and by other, unofficial 'speakers', made all the key policy and pragmatic decisions by majority vote. Those decisions could be reviewed and revised and indeed rejected by legal means, specifically through the People's jury courts.

But the Athenian democracy was not just a matter of democratic political institutions of decision-making governance. Democracy was also a matter of education and culture. Religious festivals including for example the theatre festivals in honour of Dionysus were completely democratised. And democracy was local as well as national. Democracy happened within the 139 or 140 local villages as much as in the political capital of the city of Athens.

5. What were the merits of this democracy? What were its problems?

From the surviving - mostly elite - ancient sources we hear much more about the defects and failures of democracy as a system than we do about its merits. The two key features of democratic ideology were freedom and equality. Anti-democrats complained that democracy gave too much of the wrong kind of freedom (license) to the wrong sort of (poor) citizen people, making the cardinal error of treating unequals as if they were equals.

Democrats countered those attacks in various ways, stressing above all that, if and when 'the Athenians' made a decision, it was ALL Athenians who were empowered to make that decision, not just a small subset of them. Democracy treated all Athenians equally AS Athenians. (Men only, male citizens only, of course.) They invoked the notion of what today we call 'the wisdom of the crowd'. Even Aristotle, who was not a democrat, saw merit in this democratic argument.

Pragmatically, the Athenian democracy made terrible - and fatal – mistakes, especially in foreign rather than domestic policy. On the other hand, democracy in various forms flourished for most of almost two centuries. And it was under the democracy and because it was a democracy that Athens scaled cultural heights achieved by no other ancient Greek city - nor by hardly any other city or country since.

6. Heritage – how does Athenian democracy compare to ours? What have we changed?

Whereas all modern democracies are fundamentally representative, all ancient ones were fundamentally direct democracies. Combining representative democracy with direct democracy by using referendums is a potential recipe for disaster. Another factor bedeviling modern democracy is the mystifying rhetoric that is often applied to politics today. The expression 'the people' is not self-explanatory and is regularly abused to support variously populist agendas. Today we could, because of the availability of our new digital technology, reintroduce if we wish direct democratic decision-making on ALL issues - not just the occasional referendum. But in order to make that work, we would need a great deal more of what the ancient Greeks called paideia, education and culture, and we would need to introduce many more of the sort of checks and safeguards that the Athenians introduced when faced with their own disastrous mistakes. In this regard at least the US constitution – itself subject to bitterly confrontational interpretation – is, despite being far too Presidential, clearly superior to the UK’s mixed parliamentary system.

Let us prove Hegel wrong – who said that what we learn from history is that we do NOT learn from history! We can learn from the experience of the ancient Greeks and apply it to improve our own democratic politics.

 The speakers: 

Professor Michael Cox lectured to universities world-wide as well as to several government bodies,  is currently visiting professor at the Catholic University in Milan. He is the author, editor and co-editor of over 30 books, including most recently a collection of his essays The Post-Cold War World, as well as new editions of J M Keynes’s, The Economic Consequences of the Peace and E H Carr’s Nationalism and After. He is now working on a new history of LSE entitled, The “School”: LSE and the Shaping of the Modern World.

Professor Simon Goldhill is Professor of Greek at the University of Cambridge and Foreign Secretary of the British Academy. He has written extensively about Greek society and the culture of ancient democracy. His books have been translated into ten languages and won three international prizes. He has lectured, and broadcast on television and radio, all over the world, from Canada to China.

Johanna Hanink (@johannahan) is Associate Professor of Classics at Brown University and co-editor of the Journal of Modern Greek Studies. Her work focuses on classical Athens and the modern reception of Greek antiquity. She is author of Lycurgan Athens and the Making of Classical Tragedy and The Classical Debt: Greek Antiquity in an Era of Austerity. She is also a translator of Ancient and Modern Greek, and her new volume Andreas Karkavitsas: The Archeologist and Selected Sea Stories (translation with introduction and notes) is due out in autumn with Penguin Classics.

The Chair 

Paul Kelly (@PjThinker) is Professor of Political Theory at the LSE, where he has taught for over 25 years. He is author and editor of fifteen books on political philosophy and the history of political ideas. His publications include Utilitarianism and Distributive Justice (Clarendon 1990), Liberalism (Polity 2005) and edited Political Thinkers with David Boucher (Oxford 2017). He has also been co-editor of Political Studies and editor of Utilitas: A Journal of Utilitarian Studies. He was recently Pro-Director Education at LSE and has recently returned to regular academic life. He is completing a book entitled Conflict, War and Revolution. 

You can watch the event in full via this link https://www.facebook.com/lseps/videos/542777373347200