At the core of democratic theory is the challenge of self-creation, the moment when a people establish themselves as a political body capable of making collective decisions and taking collective actions. Rousseau, remarking on the creation of a democratic regime, expresses wonder at “those astonishing properties of the body politic” that by a “sudden transformation” (Social Contract 3.17) enable it to reconstitute itself as a democracy, and underscores the difficulties inherent in this process of self-creation. Democratic theory inhabits a world marked by the language of popular will that brings itself and the institutions by which that self-created body will be structured into being. As Hannah Arendt remarked, “A constitution is not an act of government, but of a people constituting a government” (On Revolution 1963, 145). And yet, the question always remains: Where does a “people” or that popular will come from? Does it bubble up from the political firmament, or are there those who fashion the will without whom the democratic political body, much less the constitution by which it governs itself, could not come into being?

The American, French, and Bolshevik Revolutions have all offered historical examples as fodder for the democratic theorist's reflection on questions of democratic self-creation. The book under review allows us to add ancient Greece to the theoretical pot. It draws together work by several prominent scholars of ancient Greek history who explore “astonishing properties” of the body politic and the moment of democratic founding that took place sometime in Greece during the sixth or fifth centuries b.c.e.

No central argument frames this unusually structured volume beyond the very (too) general introductory comment by Kurt A. Raaflaub that we might engage in “dialogue with Athenian democracy” about “the best way of creating a good community that could foster a good life for its people” (p. 14). Three chapters by the main authors constitute the core of the volume. Each author identifies a different founding moment of “rupture” for Athenian democracy: the emerging egalitarianism accompanying Solon's reforms in the early sixth century (Robert Wallace); the democratic “revolution” in 508/7 (Josiah Ober); and Ephialtes' reform of the Areopagus in 462/1 and Pericles' citizenship laws of 451/0 (Raaflaub). Surrounding this debate are a chapter by Raaflaub and Wallace arguing that Greek democracy extended well beyond Athens and two chapters by Paul Cartledge and Cynthia Farrar responding to the central chapters.

Athenian democracy, glorified as the birthplace of freedom and vilified as “a tyranny of the majority,” lasted for less than 200 years and yet has stood for the democratic regime, the embodiment of its name, “people power.” But how did it emerge from the kingships, aristocracies, and tyrannies scattered throughout the Greek peninsula during the previous centuries? Apart from some vague allusions to “citizens' political awareness” and “sense of responsibility” (Wallace, p. 72) or a prior history of volatile mass/elite relations (Ober, p. 89), the authors address less the “why” than the “when.” Their disagreements on this point indeed ground the volume. Raaflaub notes that the 1993 observations of the “2500th anniversary of the founding of democracy” raised the question of what it meant to give to such an “event” a date. Could we identify a founding moment for Athenian democracy in the same way that ratification of the Constitution in 1789 marks America's founding?

That each author identifies a different moment of “political rupture” for the political transformation of ancient Athens indicates one important point of agreement: a greater emphasis on rupture than on process. Otherwise they disagree. Wallace attributes that rupture, reflecting events “blazing across Greece” (p. 57) in the seventh century, to Solon's institutional reforms, precipitated by a popular uprising, that transferred power from “an abusive aristocracy into the hands of an upper tier of men … and to all Athenians” (p. 68). Specifically, Solon institutionalized attention to the wishes of the ruled and limited the power of traditional leaders. Ober, insisting that the histories written in later centuries naming Cleisthenes the founder of democracy (with little clarification of what that meant) are unreliable, finds the rupture in an “epistemic/ideological shift” (p. 83) when democracy “comes into existence with the capacity of a demos to act as a collective historical agent” (p. 84). The “kinetic energy” (p. 90) of the demos drives out the Spartan Cleomenes and his Athenian puppet Isagoras. Raaflaub's transformative rupture arrives with the “momentous” reforms of 462–50 (p. 141). While he does not deny the stage-setting earlier steps, he argues that Ephialtes' and Pericles' reforms brought to fruition a regime based on the expectation that decisions were to be made in common and for the common good. In carefully couched language, Raaflaub says that “there was no lack of strong reasons that could have prompted the lower-class citizens in the 470s and 460s to foster and voice political ambitions,” but that these ambitions, in Raaflaub's leadership-focused interpretation, were exploited by and worked out only in the “rivalry among elite leaders” (p. 137).

Each author displays an impressive familiarity with the evidentiary materials available to ancient historians, materials that all agree are highly limited: a poem here, a phrase from ancient comedy there, and much debated epigraphical evidence, as well as highly selective, anachronistic, and idiosyncratic reporting from Herodotus, Thucydides, and Aristotle. “Probably,” “presumably,” “quite likely,” “possibly,” “doubtful,” and assorted other qualifications pervade each chapter. Yet the different claims concerning the beginning of Athenian democracy come less from any ambiguity or malleability of the data than from fundamentally different conceptions of what constitutes democracy. For Wallace, it is the movement toward equality captured by an increased attention to the wishes of those who are ruled. For Ober, democracy is not defined by institutions but appears when the demos has “the ability to do things” and becomes a “grammatical subject rather than an object of someone else's verb” (pp. 94–95). Raaflaub is the most demanding: Rejecting the “Cleisthenic system” as not “democratic in the full sense,” he insists that the demos have a “sufficiently powerful role” enabling “them to exert full control over the government” (p. 149). In his analysis, that control results from the “creative leadership” of Ephialtes and Pericles. Responding to Ober, Raaflaub remarks: “A leaderless uprising may result in victory in a particular crisis, but it cannot … transform victory into lasting political change” (p. 107). For Raaflaub, democracy appears only with that “lasting change” and not simply with isolated instances of popular actions. The three chapters do not tell us when democracy originates. Rather, individual readers must choose their own moment of rupture depending on their definition of democracy.

Cartledge's somewhat breezy chapter tries to integrate the previous chapters by speaking in the language of “development” rather than “rupture,” and introduces the language of a “more evolved democracy” (p. 165). Farrar's chapter becomes a superb book review of the book in which her review appears, but it also addresses—as none of the others really do—Raaflaub's early assertion that the volume will bring ancient democracy to bear on contemporary democratic perspectives. Resisting definitions of democracy that rely on institutions or formal citizenship status, she aligns herself most closely to Ober by highlighting Cleisthenes' reforms as the moment when “citizen status was precisely not to be defined by personal resources or social standing” and when every citizen was “given a political role” even if “full popular control of the institutions of government” had to wait until the reforms of Ephialtes (p. 175). Using the ancient experience and especially the transformation of Athens from Ober's revolution to Raaflaub's institutions as a model, she argues that the “people power” we ascribe to democracies will emerge only after the people themselves have been perceived as capable of self-rule. Thus, institutions follow ideological transformations, suggesting that “ruptures” may not be “deliberately instigated, only exploited” by leaders (p. 189).

This volume is marked by a diversity of tone with differing levels of analysis in each of the chapters, and the very structure of the book leads to a certain degree of repetition, but its great value for readers of this journal is how vividly it highlights the challenges of identifying the opening moments of democratic regimes and gives us a grounding from which to reflect on those “astonishing properties” that beget democracies.