The Greek city, a model?

In 1992, in a famous article entitled “Cities of Reason”, the British historian Oswyn Murray noted, not without a certain humor:

Anyone who has studied attempts to describe the Greek polis is well aware of this national way of reacting to phenomena. For the Germans, one cannot speak of polished than in a constitutional law manual; polished French is a kind of Eucharist; the polished English is a historical accident; polished American, finally, combines the practices of a Mafia congress with the principles of justice and individual freedom.

If we add to this the passion of American historiography for Athenian democracy, which notably included the celebration of the 2500th anniversary of its birth, we will have no difficulty in situating Josiah Ober’s work in this strand of American research on ancient Greece, driven by a boundless faith in the Athenian democratic regime and its capacity to provide a model for contemporary nation-states.

Professor at Stanford, both Classics – which corresponds in France to both ancient history and classical literature – and political science, Josiah Ober is in fact one of the greatest and most renowned American historians of ancient Greece, particularly on Athenian democracy and its thinkers. For thirty years, his numerous works have shaped a certain approach to Athenian democracy, and contributed to establishing it – in the manner of Renan’s “Greek miracle” – as a model of civilization.

Demopolis or elementary democracy

This is the aim of this new work, which anchors its subject more in political philosophy than in history itself. The author coined the neologism “Demopolis” for the occasion – composed of demosthe people, and polishedthe city –, supposed to embody the paradigm of an “elementary democracy” (basic democracy) devoid of liberal ideals, as they have matured since the XVIII^e century until the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948, but in no way opposed to them. It is in fact about offering ancient Greece as a model to the world of today and tomorrow, to those large sections of the non-Western world foreign to the values ​​of political and philosophical liberalism, but also perhaps to a West where these same values ​​are trampled underfoot by various forms of xenophobic nationalism and populism. To draw the reader’s attention to what I would call for my part – as a European citizen of the XXI^e century – a “cheap democracy” or “minimal democracy” obviously does not consist, for Josiah Ober, in minimizing the importance of human rights and individual freedoms, but rather in emphasizing the value of this ancient form of democracy.

The first step in the argument is to recall that such a form of elementary democracy existed in the history of humanity, well before the development of modern political thought. From the 5th century onwards,^e century BC, the city of Athens already proclaimed the central place of individual participation in collective decision-making and the categorical rejection of any form of autocratic government. Having freed themselves from the Pisistratides in 510 – this dynasty of tyrants who monopolized power in Athens for more than half a century – the Athenians established a regime, initiated by the reforms of Cleisthenes and then embodied by Pericles, which promoted a first form of government of the people, by the people and for the people. A body of adult male citizens collectively and sovereignly decided on the policies to be implemented, most often unanimously rather than by simple majority – a remarkable particularity of the Greek city, recently highlighted by Philippe Gauthier through the notions of “quorum” and “symbolic totality”, while contemporary democracies are most often entangled in the construction of unstable majorities or are paralyzed by minority, coalition or cohabitation governments. This group of citizens elected or, most often, drew by lot from among its members magistrates, holders of a power (ark), without any consideration for their economic condition. They had to implement decisions which, from the end of the 5th century^e century at least, could not be contrary to a body of laws more or less established as a constitution. In the manner of ancient thinkers and political utopias, this historical example is erected by Josiah Ober as a political archetype from which the founding fathers of a nation can draw inspiration, placing citizen participation, the legislative process and respect for previous provisions at the heart of the political model of Demopolis.

The author then attempts to put this imaginary Demopolis to the test of theoretical political thought, in particular Hobbes’s Leviathan and its preference for an absolute sovereign, placed outside the collective system of participatory democracy, which alone would make it possible to counter the selfish interest of individuals and their permanent desire for glory. The answer to Hobbesian criticism lies, according to Ober, in civic education through which the collective interest of democratic values ​​is transmitted to the descendants of the founders of Demopolis, the only ones to have deliberately opted for this form of sovereign government of the people. Let us recall in this case the way in which Émile Durkheim assimilated education to a “methodical socialization of the young generation” which, far from having as its sole or principal object the individual and his interests, is above all “the means by which society perpetually renews the conditions of its own existence”.

Demopolis: an effective and sufficient democracy?

As proof of the effectiveness of an elementary democracy, Josiah Ober offers the example of the discussions that led the Athenians, on the proposal of Themistocles, to choose to confront the Persians at sea rather than on land in 480. Certainly, this is a fine example of the effectiveness of a civic rationality at work in public debate and in its organization, which was at the origin of the naval victory of Salamis and the influence of the city of Athens. It would be difficult, however, to celebrate in the same way the Sicilian expedition (415-413), although decided at the end of a contradictory debate in the Assembly and in an Athenian democracy with identical functioning, which ended in a disaster both military and political and which contributed to the advent of the oligarchic episodes of the end of the 5th century.^e century.

One is also surprised by the lightness with which two profoundly negative aspects – at least by contemporary liberal ideals – of the classical Athenian system are evoked, namely slavery and the exclusion of women. “The speculative experiment that Demopolis constitutes consists in generalizing the characteristics of elementary democracy, abstracting from the contingencies of ancient Greek history, culture and political life,” Ober specifies (p. 21). As a historian but also as a citizen, these are not, in my view, mere side-effects of the Athenian experience; therefore, in my search for a model, I cannot subscribe to an approach that proclaims: “we must not burden ourselves with Greek sociocultural baggage” (p. 33, We need not be burdened with ancient Greek sociocultural baggage). For if the political participation and sovereignty of the Athenian people constitute the essential characteristics of the political ideal of Demopolis, it must be emphasized that these were limited to a particularly restricted fringe of the total population of classical Athens, not only by excluding half of it (women), as well as slaves and metics, but also by keeping aside a large part of those who nevertheless benefited from the right of Athenian citizenship. Let us recall the figures, as retained by Ober himself (p. 19): of the 250,000 inhabitants of Attica, the civic body, composed of adult men, could have represented up to 50,000 people in 431 BC and around 30,000 in IV^e century, or between 20 and 12% of the population; but only a quarter to a fifth of citizens actually went to the Assembly in the IV^e century, in other words between 3 and 2.4% of the total population. In fact, the 6,000 Athenians who were in particular responsible for the ostracism vote constituted what Philippe Gauthier called the civic “quorum”, it being understood that this was not a minimum number of voters, but rather the “symbolic totality” of Athenian citizens called upon to deliberate sovereignly, in short a maximum reached at the People’s Assembly. This civic body was, moreover, totally and irremediably closed in on itself, reproducing itself in a strictly endogamous manner: in addition to an exclusive transmission of citizenship from father to son, the Athenians had in fact imposed, since the law of Pericles in 451, a double civic ancestry: the wife of a citizen had herself to be the daughter of a citizen in order to guarantee civic status to her descendants. This is how the same Philippe Gauthier recently opposed “Greek avarice” and “Roman generosity” in the matter of granting the right of citizenship.

Is this really a model for the contemporary world, whether it is non-Western societies unaccustomed to liberalism or our liberal democracies in crisis? Since the perspective of the work is a political comparison between Antiquity and the contemporary world, I admit that I cannot be satisfied with a system that would be inspired by classical Athens, whose multiple forms of discrimination, low popular participation and radical exclusion of foreigners are no better than the ills of our contemporary democracies. That Athens is considered a “miracle” among past civilizations, particularly ancient ones, is an indisputable fact; and imagining a regime taking up the political principles of Athenian democracy is certainly interesting from a theoretical point of view. On the other hand, forgetting the Athenian “sociocultural baggage” is a methodological error from a historical point of view and to consider, even for a moment, that a modern democracy can do without liberal values, even if their implementation requires constantly repeated efforts, is simply chilling.