Athenian democracy has been an omnipresent topic in western intellectual history. Depending on the time period and the thinker, it has served as a counter model, as a source of inspiration or as a historical record for drawing lessons. Today, Athenian democracy is present in conversations on issues ranging from deliberative democracy, over the desirability of referenda, to gender and slavery.
This Companion focuses on modern receptions of Athenian democracy, from the late Middle Ages to the contemporary period. It does not cover ancient reception, although some account of it appears in the introduction. It brings together authors representing a range of disciplines, namely intellectual history (Giorgini), philosophy (O. Guaraldo, G. Leghissa), Ancient History (L. Iori, C. Marcaccini, W. Nippel), Classics (P. Payen, J. Kierstead), Political Science (J. Ober, Y. Sintomer), Italian literature (G. Pedullà), and of countries, including the United States, Germany, Italy and France. This gives the book a richness and multi-disciplinary dimension that is very refreshing. It is dense, erudite, but also reader-friendly, and the chapters are accessible to non-specialists of the represented fields.
The volume complements nicely P. Cartledge's Democracy. A Life (2016), which focuses on the idea of democracy as a whole, whereas the current volume deals almost exclusively with Athenian democracy. It also complements and builds upon older collections, such as J.T. Roberts's Athens on Trial. The Antidemocratic Tradition in Western Thought (1994) and M.H. Hansen's The Tradition of Ancient Democracy and Its Importance for Modern Democracy (2005). It is at the same time more complete than these works, as it includes chapters on contemporary political science, and more narrow, as it focuses almost exclusively on Athenian democracy.
The book is divided into four sections. The first part provides a brief introduction to Athenian democracy. It consists of one article, by M.H. Hansen, which gives an excellent overview of the main tenets and institutions of Athenian democracy. It is useful as background for the rest of the book. It also provides a summary of subsequent receptions of Athenian democracy by both ancient and modern thinkers.
Part 2 consists of nine articles on the reception of Athenian democracy from the late Middle Ages to the twentieth century. Some chapters focus primarily on authors (Machiavelli, Hobbes, Grote); others on countries (Germany, France, United States, Italy). One sees very clearly the negative view of Athenian democracy that permeates intellectual history until the nineteenth century, and which reproduces many arguments found amongst ancient authors, such as Plato and Xenophon, who were critical of democracy. Readers are given a good sense of the ways in which Athenian democracy has been used as a source of lessons at different historical moments, its particularly harsh condemnation in the texts of Thomas Hobbes, and the embeddedness of these discussions in national debates in France and Germany.
The first two chapters of Part 2 (Chapters 2 and 3), both by Pedullà, focus on the reception of Athenian democracy in Italy, from the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries. Pedullà shows the existence of three approaches: a ‘moral-pedagogical’ approach, which sees Athenian leaders (Themistocles, Alcibiades, Pericles) as examples to be followed, represented primarily by Petrarch; a ‘historical-political’ approach, which relies on the history of Athenian democracy to draw lessons for the present, represented primarily by Patrizi, then Machiavelli; and an ‘antiquarian’ approach, examining authors in their own words, represented primarily by Carlo Sigonio. It is characteristic of this period that Athenian democracy was seen with mistrust, following the thinking of ancient critics of democracy, such as Xenophon and Plato.
In Chapter 4 Iori deals with seventeenth-century England, showing how Athens was used in the political debates of that period. This is particularly true in the case of Hobbes, who famously accused democracy of the downfall of Athens and drew conclusions against the citizens’ assemblies of his time. However, even before Hobbes, Athens was present in the thought of both the republican and the royalist camps, in both cases critically; in short, the mistrust against democracy persisted during this period – and would persist until the nineteenth century.
Chapter 5, by Payen, moves to France, and it is here that one sees the emergence of a dichotomy that will inform many debates around Athenian democracy until today. That dichotomy starts with C. Rollin's depiction of Athens as a place of cultural achievements, allegedly because of its mixed constitution and the freedom of movement that it allowed. This depiction paved the way for the image of a bourgeois, liberal Athens, which was subsequently contrasted with a more collectivistic Sparta. This dichotomy informed the thinking of authors like Rousseau (who was also suspicious of democracy). It was present in the grand rehabilitation of Athens by George Grote. It informed Benjamin Constant's article ‘On the Liberty of the Ancients, Compared to that of Moderns’ (1819), in which the author contrasted the political liberty of the Ancients, which, according to him, was linked to collective decision-making but allowed no protection for individual rights, to the individual liberty of the Moderns. While drawing this distinction, Constant warned of the futility – and danger – of trying to implement the former in modern times. After the Second World War this line of thought would be echoed in the distinction between positive and negative liberty by Isaiah Berlin. It is worth noting that, following Pollin and Grote, Constant identified Athens as the city that most resembled the ideas of modern liberty in ancient times.
One therefore sees, in the nineteenth century, a rehabilitation of Athens, presented as a liberal space of free speech and exchange of ideas. This image of Athens was at times contrasted with a closed, absolutist and elitist view of politics, allegedly represented by its main critic, Plato. This is, at least, the theory that one finds in K. Popper's The Open Society and its Enemies (1945). Athens was also seen, in the liberal tradition, as an example of popular participation, as well as a model for building citizens’ character, attributes that, for authors such as J.S. Mill, are important for a well-functioning state and for human flourishing. All these themes are presented in a very comprehensible chapter on England, written by Kierstead.
The chapters on nineteenth- and twentieth-century United States (by C.J. Richard), Germany (by Nippel) and Italy (by Piovan) offer excellent analyses of how Athenian democracy was used in the context of the political issues of the day. These include the question of how Republics can fight against empires (a crucial question in the case of the United States), debates around the Weimar Republic as well as the idea of a Roman superiority vis-à-vis Athens found in Italian fascism.
Part 3 comprises four articles focusing on the engagement of modern philosophy with Athenian democracy, and specifically Marxism, Strauss, Hannah Arendt and Foucault. Marcaccini's chapter on Marx focuses on Marx's ethnographic notebooks, highlighting his reading of anthropologists (Morgan), conservative thinkers (Schömann) as well as Russian populists. What emerges is a series of debates about the importance of slavery and imperialism in sustaining Athenian democracy. One also finds, in the later Marxist tradition, the idea of Athenian democracy as reflecting the values of the people itself (Ober), as opposed to being the result of reforms made by the ruling class. The chapter shows the influence of Marxism on Moses Finley, on the French school of J.-P. Vernant and P. Vidal-Naquet (a part that would benefit from more development) as well as on contemporary thinkers.
In Chapter 11 Giorgini focuses on the work of Leo Strauss, whose interest in Athens was part of his broader critique of political modernity, his hermeneutics of reticence, and his vision of Athens and Jerusalem as the two cities of Western civilisation (representing philosophy and Biblical faith). In Chapter 12 Guaraldo examines the work of Hannah Arendt, focusing on isonomia, non-dominance, the supremacy of speech, the absence of violence as well as embodied practices of political participation as central features of democracy. In Chapter 13 Leghissa examines the work of Michel Foucault, and in particular his interest in the notion of parrhesia, that is, the demand and possibility to tell the truth, as a central aspect of Athenian democracy.
Part 4 deals with two ways in which contemporary political scientists have engaged with Athenian democracy. The first is the idea of ‘epistemic democracy’. In a reprint of an older article Ober shows how, by relying on democratic deliberation, democratic Athens was able to make better decisions than other cities. This is a fascinating discussion, which informs a central debate in contemporary political theory. The second is the idea of sortition, which has recently gained a lot of appeal among political scientists, and in relation to which Sintomer shows the benefits as well as the risks.
The book is long, and many chapters could, perhaps, be shorter. While the writing is always accessible, the details are often too many for the non-specialist – especially in the chapters on intellectual history. On the other hand, many aspects of political theory – especially recent work – could be further developed. In particular, recent work on the importance of the courts in Athens (D. Allen, D. Cammack), on the economy (Finley and his critics) or on women (for a slightly older, but extremely rich, overview of recent engagement with ancient Greek democracy in political science see Ober, ‘What the Ancient Greeks Can Tell Us About Democracy’, Annual Review of Political Science 11 [2008], 67–91). Similarly, it would have been interesting to include some thoughts on the reception of Athenian democracy in the non-European or American tradition – an area that is absent from the book. However, the volume does not claim to be exhaustive, and it is obviously impossible to cover everything in detail. This is a very rich volume, which will undoubtedly serve as reference to those interested in the reception of Athenian democracy.
