C.’s book is advertised as a ‘biography of the concept’ of democracy, and its various ‘manifestations’ over the last two-and-a-half millennia. But if democracy can be said to be a single life lived out in this period, C. is clear, given both the form and content of the work, that its early years are by far the most important and interesting. Indeed, as his epilogue may be read as suggesting, there is some reason to think that what now walks the earth as ‘democracy’ is a zombie. There are some conceptual problems here that I will discuss at the end of the review. But these problems should not cloud the judgement that what C. presents is a tour de force of scholarship that does much to illuminate both ancient democratic thought and the great complexities and varieties of democratic life in ancient Greece.

The book is divided into five ‘Acts’ the first three of which consider the genesis and development of democracies in ancient Greece. After charting the rise of the polis (better translated, C. argues, as ‘citizen-state’ rather than the traditional ‘city-state’, p. 38), in Act 2 we move to the emergence of democracy in Archaic Greece. Around 594/3 b.c. the appointment of Solon as Archon in Athens lead to key political and economic reforms that pointed the way towards the rise of democracy. Solon's reforms involved the ‘political incorporation and significant empowerment’ of the demos and the simultaneous waning of aristocratic power. But one of the key strengths of C.’s approach is his consideration of the rise of other democracies, or at least poleis in which the demos advanced, in this period: Chios, Heraclea, Megara, Eretria, Chalcis, Mytilene, Cyrene, Lipara, Naxos and Ambracia (pp. 54–5). These were not, C. asserts, yet democracies, but as in Solon's Athens some of the conditions for the emergence of democracy had been put in place. After Solon, those conditions were both maintained and enhanced in Athens under the reign of the Peisistratid tyrants, from 545–510.

As we see in the following chapter, it is the reforms introduced by Cleisthenes in Athens in 508/7 that herald a ‘political revolution’ (p. 61). But those reforms took hold because of an ongoing ‘intellectual revolution’, characterised by J.-P. Vernant as the emergence of rational and abstract thought. The invention of tragic drama also played an important role, emerging as it did out of the public religious festivals promoted by Peisistratus (pp. 63–4). Cleisthenes ushered in a new form of political organisation by introducing a system of local ‘tribes’, the demes, into which each citizen was enrolled. These new ‘tribes’ replaced the existing ‘pseudo-kinship’ tribes controlled by the aristocracy and thus further advanced the power of the demos. Its assembly, the ecclesia, which had been situated in the Agora, now moved into its own dedicated space on the hill of the Pnyx. A Council of 500, drawn from the demes, became the steering committee of the assembly. All public offices were opened to citizens, and they could exercise legal judgment through the Heliaea appeal court originally set up by Solon (pp. 69–70). Notoriously, Cleisthenes also introduced the practice of ostracism.

Did democracy arrive in Athens under Cleisthenes then? C. is cautious here: he describes the new system as one of isonomia or isokratia. The principle of political equality was established by Cleisthenes, but not all citizens did or could participate in the new offices and institutions. A more complete democracy would have to wait until the reforms of Ephialtes, who set out to attack the power of the aristocracy in the court of the Areopagus (p. 85). This now found its powers reduced, and it became limited to judgments on mainly religious matters. Its judicial functions were transferred to a new people's court (the Dikasteria), and it seems likely that public payments were made for ordinary citizens holding public office (pp. 86–7). But the most radical reform in this period was introduced by Pericles. The citizenship law of 451/0 made it a requirement of citizenship that both of one's parents, not just the father, must be Athenian citizens, and had to be married at the time of one's birth. This had the effect of forcing Aristocrats to marry Athenian women, and for ordinary citizens not to marry foreign residents (‘metics’). This rendered ordinary Athenian women considerably more marriageable. While the size of the citizen body reduced, it thus became more concentrated and recognisably Athenian, enhancing further the kratos of both the demos and the demes (p. 90).

This account of the development of Athenian democracy is not particularly new, but a strength of C.’s approach is to see it not as narrowly institutional, but immersed in the intellectual and cultural life of the polis. Thus he gives considerable attention to Greek democratic thought (Chapter 6) and the cultural and social elements of democratic performance (Chapter 8). These considerations are a prelude to an excellent discussion of democracy in Greece more widely in Chapter 9, with a thorough account of the ‘crisis’ of democracy in the fifth century that would herald its decline.

The material in Acts 4 and 5 of the book is considerably thinner than in the first three Acts. Indeed, in a book that spans 313 pages (without the end matter), 231 of these are devoted to democracy in Greece, and 82 to democracy in the 2,300 years since its decline. Does this represent a major imbalance? In one respect it does not, because C. wants to make the case that Greek democracy was both unprecedented and unique in its emphasis on the relations between the polis, citizens and politics as the activity of citizens, and that democratic thought and practice fall into abeyance until the late eighteenth century c.e. (or perhaps the seventeenth century if we think of movements like the Levellers in England). This still leaves only a superficial coverage of the 200 (or 300) years since then which, after all, is about as long as the Greek democracies lasted. Moreover, modern democracy has occurred in many more places, and involved many millions more people than it ever did in its ancient Greek manifestation. But, as C. indicates in his openly pessimistic epilogue concerning the current prospects for democracy, it is not clear that the democracy we have in the modern world – representative liberal democracy – comes up to anything like the standard of Athenian democracy in its heyday. For the most part, he suggests, it has been hijacked by powerful elites and does not give ordinary people either the opportunities to make the laws under which they live nor the sense of belonging to a civic community afforded to the Athenians in their democracy.

It is here that I think there are some problems with C.’s argument. There is the obvious rejoinder, set out a couple of centuries ago by James Madison and Benjamin Constant, that the modern world cannot support democracy ancient-Greek style because the modern world is fundamentally distinct from the ancient world. Greek democracy lay on the twin foundations of war and slavery, two things that modern democracies, for the most part, have sought to avoid. Nation-states and industrial capitalism required forms of centralised administration and regulation that do not sit well with participatory democracy. Representative democracy, it can be argued, is not a second-best form, but the form best suited to the kind of social and economic relationships that define modernity. That is an argument not without problems, but at least it draws our attention to the social and economic conditions of democracy in the present. C. points to such conditions in his assessment of ancient democracy, but such analysis is wanting when it comes to his understanding of democracy in the present.