The article introduces a symposium, “The Crowd in the History of Political Thought,” which is being published as a two-part special issue. The articles are by American and European scholars with disparate interests and approaches to the history of political thought. Some engage contemporary questions, while others offer interpretive analyses. Today, commentators, scholars, and pundits alike ignore the history of political thought to the detriment of their understanding of populism. Many thinkers have reflected on democratic health and sickness. The articles here furnish a partial catalog of the quarrels associated with this inherited vocabulary. The tradition itself is best conceived of as an unfinished Socratic conversation. In this issue, articles on Thucydides, Aristophanes, Plato, and Aristotle orbit the original democracy at Athens, the backdrop for reflections on popular rule of so many thinkers. The final article on Josephus moves away from the experience of the Greek polis toward the more contemporary preoccupations of the second issue.

Modern discussions of freedom focus on negative liberty or nondomination. In his portrait of the Athenian democracy, Thucydides thematizes the psychology of ancient freedom. By focusing on the psychology of the demos, Thucydides shows how democratic imperialism unfolds from the experience of freedom as a kind of felt power. His analysis offers us a way to think about contemporary populism. In representative democracy, the connection between power and freedom has been severed by representation and the modern state, but an experience of power nonetheless remains part of what we mean by freedom today. Modern citizens frequently feel powerless and so unfree, ensnared by impersonal forces. One lure of populism is that it satisfies the longing for freedom as a form of felt power, for a measure of control over one's life.

Aristophanes in his comedy the Acharnians educates the crowd that he creates as a character on stage, as well as the crowd gathered to watch his comedy, about what is truly in their interest: the peace that allows them to be happy by satisfying their longings for good food and frequent sex. I suggest, invoking the medieval language of vox populi vox dei, that Aristophanes (like the politicians and demagogues of today) competes to become the one who gives the people their voice. His comedy imagines that both the crowd in the play and the audience in the theater learn through the action of the comedy the value of peace for private happiness. The crowd so educated will give voice to Aristophanes's wisdom when they vote in their democratic assemblies about what seems best to the people.

Plato's antipathy to crowds is a commonplace that reinforces a prevailing portrait of the Socratic method as a practice that centers on individuals, to the exclusion of crowds and the many. This canonical view, however, comes into tension with the tendency of Plato's Socrates to conduct his dialogues in the presence of collective audiences. I argue that Plato's position on crowds is at once more complex and more ambivalent than has been commonly accepted. I distinguish between two distinct lines of critique that Plato develops against crowds: the argument that the incentive structures that move crowds are unconducive to philosophy; and a more ambiguous argument that crowds tend not to be as amenable to control as their portrayal in the Athenian democratic imaginary seems to promise. Plato's depiction of Socratic practice can be understood as an effort to explore an alternative vision of crowd control.

Populism has lately become a matter of concern in both popular and academic circles. Yet contemporary writers have had difficulty parsing populism's relationship to democracy, partly because they are universally committed to the latter. It is worth turning to a thinker like Aristotle, who—despite not explicitly addressing populism itself—is able to reflect clearly on various democratic phenomena that we tend to consider populist, because he does not share our normative or analytical assumptions about democracy. Aristotle's discussions in books 3 and 4 of the Politics allow us to see that what we call populism is a function of a broader problem of class conflict in democracies. In light of this analysis, we can see populist movements not as an external challenge to the democratic regime, but rather as a characteristic expression of a recurring dispute over the contours and prerogatives of the people.

Renowned as a historian, Flavius Josephus enjoys little reputation as a political thinker. As heir to the classical historical tradition of Thucydides, however, considerations of the regime remained primary for him. All the more so given his most important task not inherited from them: the defense of the Jewish law and people against their pagan detractors. Josephus defended the law as having specified the best political regime (which he called “theocracy” but by which he meant a rigorous natural aristocracy). He defended the people as faithful to that law and as innocent of the terrible excesses of the great uprising of 66 CE. In so doing he was compelled to confront a phenomenon unknown to his classical predecessors: a politics not of class divisions but of sectarian ones. His response to it uncannily anticipated features of the modern (post-Machiavellian) reinterpretation of politics in terms of “peoples” and “elites.”

Ceva and Ferretti's book offers an innovative account of political corruption as “a form of unaccountable use of entrusted power” (14). Accordingly, an officeholder's conduct counts as corrupt when in her institutional capacity she pursues an agenda whose rationale cannot be vindicated as coherent with the power mandate specified by her institutional role. Among the numerous advantages of this persuasive view, one is that it offers a nonmoralized definition of corruption with explanatory and discriminatory potential (21). Another point of strength is that the authors outline an original path to anticorruption centred on developing a public ethics of office accountability. To ensure public institutions’ good functioning, officeholders must exercise their power mandate in accordance with institutions’ raison d’être and engage in practices of mutual answerability, as they are all accountable to each other in virtue of the interrelatedness of their institutional roles (25).

Ceva and Ferretti provide rich, comprehensive, and thought-provoking answers to the question of what political corruption—understood as corruption that occurs in public institutions—is and when and why it is morally wrong. One aspect that greatly contributes to the book's originality and political relevance is its commitment to a “continuist” conception of (public) institutions (14), according to which institutions are nothing but the interrelated actions of their members—the officeholders entrusted, by virtue of their institutional role, with specific powers that they should always be able to use with a certain level of discretion. This conceptual starting point makes this book a compelling reminder that, even if designing and reforming formal institutions can be done effectively to shape the powers and incentives of institutional actors, we cannot focus only on formal institutional and procedural design to have functioning institutions. As Ceva and Ferretti argue, “no institution can be designed in such a way that makes it immune from political corruption, which may always sneak in per the officeholders’ work” (61)—namely, whenever public officeholders use their entrusted powers in a manner that is incompatible with the terms of their power mandate.

Ceva and Ferretti have written an important book on how we should understand political corruption, which they argue entails a public official acting in their institutional capacity as an officeholder but pursuing an agenda that cannot be justified by the specific mandate of their role. Their definition, in stressing the relational nature of political corruption, underpins their argument that its wrongfulness must be understood as a breach of interactive justice and addressed from within. Only by ensuring that individual public officeholders remain accountable and mutually answerable for their conduct (because institutions are constituted by individuals who have interactive duties to their colleagues) can the threat of political corruption be meaningfully addressed. Office accountability as the core duty of officeholders, to be exercised through the practice of answerability, is crucial to developing a meaningful defense against the risk of corruption within organizations and institutions. The central argument of Ceva and Ferretti's book is both powerful and persuasive and makes a significant contribution to the literature on identifying and tackling political corruption.