2.1 Athenian Political History

With a total resident population of perhaps 250,000 persons, a citizen (adult male) population in the tens of thousands (perhaps as high as 50,000+ in ca. 431 BCE; ca. 30,000 in the fourth century BCE, the age of Plato and Aristotle), and a home territory of about 2,500 km², Athens was an exceptionally large city-state. It was also exceptionally diverse, encompassing several distinct regions, many local cults, and hundreds of economic specializations. Like most city-state residents, Athenians were highly aware of class differences. Managing diversity across the citizen population was a primary aim of city-state institutions (Ober Reference Ober1989). Athens's size became an asset only after a series of dramatic reforms in the aftermath of the revolution of 508 BCE strengthened civic identity and enabled coordinated political action on matters of common interest by large numbers of citizens.

Key postrevolutionary democratic reforms made participatory citizens of all resident males and (prospectively) their male descendants without regard to property or income qualifications. The new order also created a council of citizens, chosen by lot and recruited from across the polis's several regions. The council conducted much of the ordinary business of government and set the agenda for a legislative assembly, open to all citizens. In the fourth century BCE, there were 40 assembly meetings each year, and a typical meeting attracted one-fifth to one-quarter of the citizen body. The assembled citizens debated legislative proposals and voted directly on them. Each citizen's vote was given equal weight. Jurors in the People's Courts and most magistrates were likewise chosen by lottery. A few magistrates, notably military commanders, civil engineers, and (eventually) certain financial officials, were elected for one-year renewable terms. All citizen-officials were legally accountable for their performance and underwent a formal review upon completion of a year's term.

Athen's democracy was a direct form of government by citizens. The assembled citizens voted directly on policy; they did not elect representatives to make policy for them. Yet the common notion that representation is a uniquely modern concept, utterly foreign to ancient democratic thought (e.g., Rosanvallon Reference Rosanvallon2006: 62), is misleading. The Athenian demos (as the whole of the citizen body) was imagined as present in the persons of those citizens who chose to attend a given assembly. So the demos was conceptually represented, pars pro toto, by a fragment of the citizenry. In a related sense, the decisions made by the 500 lottery-chosen councilors, by juries (typically of 201 or 501 citizens over age 30), and by boards of “lawmakers” (Section 2.3), stood for decisions of the people as a whole and were binding upon the entire community (Ober Reference Ober1996: Chapter 8). Because Athens was very small compared to most modern nation-states, the Athenians did not face the problems that arise when authority over rule making is delegated to elected legislative representatives (Chapter 7). But there is nothing in the Athenian conceptualization of democracy, to which we turn below (Section 2.2), that renders political representation inconceivable.

Athens's democracy lasted, with two brief oligarchic interludes (410 and 404 BCE), until 322 BCE. For 180 years, Athenian political culture evolved and Athenian government proved itself to be highly adaptive. Athenians grew increasingly sophisticated in their understanding and practice of democracy. The fundamental conditions of freedom in respect to public speech and association, equality of votes and opportunity for office, and civic dignity as immunity from humiliation and infantilization were robustly supported by formal rules and related behavioral norms. The Athenians regularly adjusted the institutional mechanisms of their government. Legislation, passed in the course of the fifth century BCE, introduced pay for many forms of public service, including serving as a juror in the People's Courts. In 451 BCE, natal citizenship was legally limited to legitimate sons born to a female native married to a male native, effectively recognizing Athenian women as coparticipants in the formation of the citizen body (while denying the franchise to sons born to Athenian men who had taken foreign wives). In the late fifth and fourth centuries BCE a series of constitutional changes, discussed below in this chapter, legally limited the direct legislative authority of the citizen assembly, without restricting the citizens’ collective authority over all aspects of state government. We will consider some other Athenian institutional innovations in subsequent chapters. Yet from the beginning to the end of the democratic era, the core meaning of democracy as citizen self-government remained stable.

Athenian political development offers initial, historically contingent answers to the questions with which we began, concerning what basic democracy is, why it arises, how it is sustained, and what it is good for. When measured against contemporary norms, Athens was far from a liberal society: Athenian democracy arose within a cultural framework in which active participation in government, as a legislator, juror, or public official, was strictly limited to males, and ordinarily to native males. Slavery was very common (perhaps one-third of Athenian residents were slaves) and taken largely for granted. Impiety, while not defined in detail in Athenian law, was a capital offense. The institution of ostracism allowed for the occasional (albeit temporary) expulsion from the state territory, without a trial or criminal charges, of an individual regarded as dangerous or otherwise objectionable by a plurality of his fellow citizens. And yet the classical Athenian definition of democracy, so I will argue, fits the preliminary definition of basic democracy offered in the first chapter. The Demopolis thought experiment, sketched in the next chapter, seeks to generalize the features of basic democracy, abstracting it from the specifics of ancient Greek history, culture, and political practice.

As noted in Chapter 1, no definition of democracy can claim final authority. But it is worth noting that the original meaning of democracy, and the meaning that was embraced by Greek democrats across classical antiquity, was not “majority tyranny.” Rather, it was “collective self-government by citizens.” Moreover, in practice, the collective authority of the citizens to do just as they wished, whenever they gathered as a body, was limited in practice from the beginning, by what amounted to constitutional rules. It was certainly possible for Athenian populists to claim that “it is monstrous if the demos cannot do as it pleases.” Populist demagogues occasionally persuaded the assembled demos to act rashly, against its established norms, against it interests, and in ways the Athenian citizens subsequently came to regret.Footnote ² But those instances were exceptions to the standard practice of rule- and norm-bounded decision making. Were such irrational public acts typical rather than exceptional, Athens would quickly have failed in the competitive world of Greek city-states. Moreover, the historical arc of Athenian government reform bent in the direction of clearer and more formal rules, aimed at imposing sanctions on populist opportunism by would-be leaders. Athenian democracy proved robust to extreme shocks, including physical destruction of the city by foreign invaders, a plague that killed at least one-quarter of the population in a few years, and devastating loss in a protracted war. It also proved capable of providing, most of the time and for much of Athens's population, relatively high levels of security and welfare.Footnote ³

Since Athenian political history shows that democracy of the basic form existed more or less stably and effectively over a long period of time in a complex society, the argument that basic democracy cannot have existed is ipso facto refuted. Basic democracy is thus proved to be compatible with the demands of human nature and behavior as it is manifest in relatively large societies. Of course ancient Athens, with a total population in the hundreds of thousands, was tiny compared to major modern nation-states. Moreover, although the resident population of Athens was exceptionally diverse by the standards of Greek antiquity, and diversity was readily identified as a feature of democracy (Plato, Republic, Book 8), Athens was certainly not pluralistic in the sense of including sizable minorities with primary identities and political preferences defined by inflexible and demanding monotheistic religious traditions. Questions about how far a basic democracy might be scaled up, and whether it could answer to the requirements of a large and pluralistic contemporary nation-state, are addressed in subsequent chapters.

2.2 Original Greek Definition

As is well known, the ancient Greek word demokratia conjoins the words demos (people) and kratos (power).Footnote ⁴ But what sort of power, and who are the people? The compound term was almost certainly coined in Athens, within a generation of the revolution of 508 BCE. By the mid fifth century BCE, hostile critics were claiming that the true meaning of the word was “the unconstrained domination of the many poor over the wealthy few” – i.e., the tyranny of a self-interested majority faction. That critical rebranding informed Thomas Hobbes's account, in Leviathan, concerning the kind of large assembly that might serve as an appropriately lawless sovereign (albeit only as a third-best option, after a single monarch and a small ruling council); we will return to Hobbes on democracy in Chapter 4. Mutatis mutandis, the ancient critics’ definition fits Carl Schmitt's (Reference Schmitt2007) conception of politics as a system of power defined by existential contests engaged by friends against enemies. Schmitt's emphasis on contestation is, in turn, the basis of a range of political theories developed by contemporary democratic agonists. Yet majoritarian tyranny is decidedly not the sort of government envisioned by the ancient Greek originators of term.Footnote ⁵

There is no good reason to take the hostile testimony of democracy's ancient Greek critics, or those subsequently influenced by them (at whatever remove), as evidence for what the term originally meant to democracy's Greek inventors in the late sixth and fifth centuries BCE. Nor, a fortiori, is there reason to apply that hostile definition to the mature practice of democracy as it developed in Athens and other Greek city-states in the fourth through the second centuries BCE.Footnote ⁶ A philological comparison with other compound Greek terms for regime types (monarchia, oligarchia, aristokratia, timokratia, etc.) suggests that the demos of demokratia was more expansive than its critics alleged. Linking kratos to demos was an optimistic assertion of the demos's collective strength, rather than a cynical claim regarding the domination or subordination of others. As a matter of historical fact, collective strength enabled Athenians to dominate others, especially during the mid-fifth-century imperial era. But that fact ought not to be confused with the term's original or mature meaning.

The ancient Greek vocabulary for political regimes was focused on the question “who rules?” The choice was from among a set of three options: an individual, a small and exclusive coalition, and an extensive and inclusive body of citizens. Table 2.1 offers a schematic map of the terminological terrain. Three key terms for the authority of an individual, elite coalition, and extensive citizenry are monarchia, oligarchia, and demokratia. Even in this small sample, two things stand out: First, unlike monarchia (from the adjective monos, “solitary”) and oligarchia (from hoi oligoi, “the few”), demokratia (from demos, “the citizenry/people”) is not specifically concerned with “number.” The term demos refers to a collectivity of unspecified size (see below). Unlike monarchia and oligarchia, demokratia does not, therefore, answer the question “how many are empowered as rulers?” Second, Greek names of regimes divide into terms with an -arche suffix and terms with a -kratos suffix.Footnote ⁷ Table 2.1 lists the primary classical Greek terms for regime types along some postclassical and modern Greek-derived terms.

Given the Greek penchant for creative neologism, not least in the realm of politics, it is notable that some regime names are missing from the list. The standard Greek term for “the many” is hoi polloi, yet there is no ancient Greek regime was named pollokratia or pollarchia. Nor is monokratia, oligokratia, or anakratia ever attested.Footnote ⁸ I focus in the first instance on the six bold-faced terms in columns 2 and 3 of Table 2.1: demokratia, isokratia, and aristokratia among the -kratos roots and monarchia, oligarchia, and anarchia among the -arche roots.Footnote ⁹

Each of the three primary -arche root terms (Table 2.1, column 3) is concerned with “monopoly of office.” A Greek magistracy was an arche. The public offices as constitutional entities were (plural) archai. An archon was a senior magistrate: the holder of a particular office with specified duties.Footnote ¹⁰ Each of the three -arche-root regime names thus answers the question “how many rulers (quasi actual or potential officeholders), among some larger set of possible rulers, are there in the state?” The answers are, anarchia (none); monarchia (one); oligarchia (few).

By contrast, the -kratos terms (Table 2.1, column 2) do not refer to offices or officeholders as such. Unlike arche, the Greek word kratos is not used of “office.” In regime names, kratos must refer to political authority, but if not authority gained by monopoly control of office, then ruling in what manner? Kratos has a root meaning of “power” – but Greek linguistic usage of the noun kratos and its verbal forms ranges widely across the power spectrum, from “strength/power to” through “constraint” to “domination/power over.” We can narrow the range of possible meanings for -kratos as a regime-name suffix. Unlike the -arche-root group of regime names, which, as we have seen, is composed of “number terms,” none of the prefixes in the -kratos group refers specifically to number. Thus, on the face of it, -kratos terms seem not to be about distinguishing the size of the group that holds offices, dominates, or rules over others as a subset of a larger body of possible rulers. Does it nonetheless serve to distinguish those who rule by employing power to dominate from those who are thereby dominated?Footnote ¹¹

It is possible, on the analogy of oligarchia in which hoi oligoi (the few) monopolize public offices, to imagine that aristokratia pertains when hoi aristoi (the excellent) dominate the rest by some other means. The term might, therefore, be construed as asserting that “those who dominate are excellent – and the dominated are not.” But, in light of the positive connotations of the Greek term, it seems more likely that aristokratia asserts, first, that excellence is the defining principle of the regime and, next, the strength or capacity of the excellent to organize public affairs accordingly. In Aristotle's taxonomy of regimes, aristokratia is the name of the regime in which excellent few rule justly, in the common interest of all, as opposed to oligarchia in which the few rule in their own factional advantage. Public offices are, on this reading, just one mechanism that the capable rulers may employ in organizing public affairs according to the regime's core principle of excellence.Footnote ¹²

Among the other compounds in the -kratos group, only gunaikokratia, “feminine rule” or rule by women (gunaikos = genitive of gune, “woman”), could be construed as referring to monopoly officeholders. Timokratia refers to an abstraction: time (honor). In Plato's Republic, timokratia (the second-best regime, after the rule of philosopher-kings) pertains when honor (construed especially as courage: Balot Reference Balot2014) is the defining principle of the regime and the honorable organize public affairs accordingly. Isokratia likewise refers to an abstraction, “equality.” By analogy to aristokratia and timokratia, isokratia pertains when the general principle of the regime is equality and when public affairs are arranged accordingly by equals. In this case, it is especially difficult to see kratos as referring to domination, insofar as domination is inherently a relationship of inequality.

Because isokratia was employed as a synonym for demokratia, it is especially important for our comparative purposes. Isokratia shares its prefix-root (iso-, “equal”) with two other terms used by the fifth-century BCE historian Herodotus as synonyms for democracy: isonomia and isegoria. Judging from isonomia (equal-law) and isegoria (equal-public address), it appears that in political discourse, iso-prefix-roots refer to equality in respect to access, in a sense of “right/capacity to make use of.” Isonomia is equality in respect to access to law, legal processes, and legal protection. Isegoria is equal access to deliberative forums: equal right to speak out on public matters and to attend to the speech of others. Equal access in each case is a valued means for using other valued instruments (law, public speech). As in the case of aristokratia, the positive connotation of these evaluative political terms suggests that equal access to the specific instrument in each case conduces to a common good.Footnote ¹³ Isokratia is, by analogy, equal access to the instrument of kratos – to public power that conduces to a common good through enabling things to be done in the public realm.

So kratos, when it is used as a regime-type suffix, appears to be power in the sense, not of domination or monopoly of office, but, more positively, of strength, capability, or “capacity to do things.” This is well within the range of how the word kratos and its verb forms were used in archaic and classical Greek. Under isokratia, each person who belongs to the category “those who are equal” (say, the citizens) enjoys access to public power in this “capacity” sense, and likewise, mutatis mutandis, for gunaikokratia, timokratia, and aristokratia.Footnote ¹⁴ In each case, access to public power would presumably include, but need not be limited to, access to public offices. In sum, rather than imagining the -kratos group as sharing the -arche group's primary concern for the monopoly control of public offices by a strictly delimited number of persons, I would suggest that each of the -kratos-root terms originally referred, positively, to the aspiration for, or fact of, the exercise of political power-as-capacity by the deserving: whether it was the female, the honorable, the excellent, the equal – or, with demokratia, the whole of the citizenry.Footnote ¹⁵

Demokratia cannot mean “the demos rules/dominates by a monopoly on officeholding” in that the singular demos (unlike the plural hoi oligoi) must refer to a collectivity, a “public” – and that public cannot collectively be “officeholders” in any ordinary sense.Footnote ¹⁶ In classical Greek, demos had multiple meanings, including the primary meaning of “citizenry” and the secondary meanings of “the citizen assembly” and “the lower classes.”Footnote ¹⁷ In the postrevolutionary political context in which the demokratia compound was coined, when all native, adult, male residents of Athenian territory were enfranchised, demos must refer to “the whole of an extensive and diverse citizen body” (in conformity with earlier Greek usage of the term) rather than “the many who are poor” (i.e., “not leisured”), as it later came to mean to democracy's critics. When it refers to “the citizen assembly,” demos points to the whole of the citizenry, insofar as access to the assembly was open to all citizens. The demos that authorized legislation in a given meeting of the assembly stood for the whole of the citizenry.Footnote ¹⁸ In classical Athens, then, demos originally meant “the whole of the citizenry” (free native male population of a defined territory) – not a sociologically delimited fragment of the citizenry. Demos of demokratia was originally an inclusive term, referring to all potential rulers (in the relevant category of free, native, adult males) as opposed to just some. If we employ Aristotle's analytic vocabulary of parts and wholes, we may say that the demos was a comprehensive whole rather than a subsidiary part. Thucydides has the democratic politician, Athenagoras, make that exact point in a speech to the citizen assembly of Syracuse: “the demos encompasses the whole; oligarchy only a part.”Footnote ¹⁹

If we extrapolate from isokratia and other -kratos compounds, the term demokratia makes both philological and historical sense: Demokratia, which emerged as a regime type with the historical self-assertion of a demos after a popular revolution (Ober Reference Ober, Raaflaub, Ober and Wallace2007a), asserts a demos's collective capacity to do things, to rule in the positive sense of capably organizing public affairs. If this is right, demokratia does not refer in the first instance to the demos's monopolistic control of preexisting constitutional authority. Demokratia is not just “the power of the demos” in the sense of “the dominion or monopolistic power of the demos relative to other potential power-holders in the state.” Rather, it means, more capaciously, “the empowered demos” – it is the regime in which the demos gains a collective capacity to effect change in the public realm. And so it is not only a matter of the people's collective control of a public realm (Pettit Reference Pettit2013). Rather, it is their collective capability to act effectively within that realm and, indeed, to reconstitute the public realm through their joint action.

The institutions of Athenian demokratia were never centered on the use of a majority-voting rule to elect officeholders. Voting for generals (for example) and directly on policy was certainly important – the individual Athenian citizen could be described not only as isonomos and isegoros but also as isopsephos: an equal in respect to his vote. But in contrast to isonomia and isegoria, isopsephia is another “missing” classical Greek regime name: It is unattested until the first century BCE and was never periphrasis for demokratia. Psephokratia (vote-power) is unknown in ancient Greek. Ancient critics of popular rule sought to rebrand demokratia as the equivalent of a tyrannical “polloi-archia” – as the monopolistic domination of government apparatus through the voting power of the many who were poor. This is the strategy, for example, of the so-called Old Oligarch, an anonymous fifth-century pamphleteer (Ober Reference Ober1998: Chapter 1). But we ought not to confuse this rebranding with the positive meaning of term, as it was used by Greek democrats across the long history of Greek democracy.Footnote ²⁰

Demokratia therefore originally meant “the People's capacity to do things” – to make history through joint action at scale.Footnote ²¹ As used by its inventors, the term democracy was descriptive, asserting that the people do have the capacity to effect change. As we will see (Chapter 5), joint action at scale required the exercise, by citizens, of inherent human capacities for reason and communication in the formation of shared plans for the pursuit of common purposes.Footnote ²² But its inventors also deployed “democracy” normatively, contending that the people ought to be capable of making and enforcing rules. The original Greek definition thus captures the core of what a nontyrannical form of democracy is, in principle and practice: legitimate collective self-governance by citizens.

2.3 Mature Greek Definition

The Greek term kratos can have, as we have seen, the sense of both strength and constraint; those meanings are conjoined in acts of rule making and enforcement. The kratos of the Athenian demos was manifest in rules, enacted by the citizens and binding on all members of the Athenian community, and in the enforcement of those rules. In classical Athens, citizens were expected to participate from time to time in the civic activities that sustained the nontyrannical regime; not to do so was to risk the censure of fellow citizens, to be called out, as Thucydides's Pericles puts it in the famous Funeral Oration (Thucydides 2.40.2), as “useless.” Athenian law and participatory behavioral norms sustained democratic conditions of political freedom, political equality, and civic dignity. Athenian democrats and their ancient critics alike regarded those conditions as essential for democracy's continued existence.Footnote ²³ But the conditions of freedom, equality, and dignity in turn required restraint in the demos's exercise of kratos. In Greek political history, the full recognition that the demos must, and can, impose legal limits on the exercise of its own capacity to do things, by regulating legislative procedure, developed well after the democratic founding era. But by the end of the fifth century BCE, the need for limits had been recognized and formalized in Athenian law.

The recognition that the authority of the ruling demos can and should be limited by law is often thought to distinguish liberal democracy from democracy before liberalism (Starr Reference Starr2007). Limitations on legislative authority in democratic government are associated with a liberal ideal of individual liberty, understood as a natural condition or an inherent human right. Yet the theory and practice of legal limitation of legislative authority was well developed in Greek antiquity, long before the emergence of doctrines of natural law or rights theory. In classical Athens, it was the imperatives of security and prosperity that impressed upon the citizens the necessity of limiting the power of the assembled demos to act as an unconstrained legislative body. The necessity was reconfigured as a virtue by the realization that the essential democratic conditions of political liberty and equality were potentially compromised by the unconstrained exercise of public authority by a democratic majority.

Democracy, as a regime type, persisted in the Greek world for some 400 years; the theory and practice of democracy evolved considerably over that time. By the era of the historian Polybius, in the second century BCE, the term demokratia was synonymous with “legitimate nonautocratic government,” and the notion of “mixed government” – in which presumptively monarchical, aristocratic, and popular elements would serve to counteract tendencies to autocracy inherent within each element – was commonplace. But in practice, legislative limitation came much earlier.Footnote ²⁴

Certain self-imposed constraints on the authority of the demos to do what it wished to individual citizens appear to be coterminous with democracy's founding. The practice of ostracism, for example, by which an individual could be expelled from the community by plurality vote was limited by procedural rules. The rules required a prior majority vote in favor of ostracism, permitted such a vote only once each year, and limited the period of expulsion to ten years.Footnote ²⁵ For our purposes, however, the key development was an innovative set of legal changes enacted in the late fifth and early fourth centuries BCE. Those changes were motivated by the Athenians’ recognition that the stability of the state required systematic constraints on the power of the people to do things, just when and as they pleased. The constraints came in two forms: first, formally distinguishing day-to-day policy, made by simple majority vote in a legislative citizen assembly (usually by show of hands), from fundamental constitutional law, made by a more cumbersome, multistage quasi-judicial process; second, formally subordinating the “decrees” passed in the ordinary meetings of the assembly to codified constitutional “laws” made through the more cumbersome quasi-judicial process.Footnote ²⁶

In the late fifth century BCE, in the aftermath of the Peloponnesian War, the Athenians instituted, by democratic means, a new constitutional rule whereby they required the immediate expression of the will of the assembled citizenry, in the form of “a decree of the Assembly” to be consistent with existing fundamental law. They had recently codified and archived the laws. Now they distinguished the procedure for making and amending fundamental law from the direct-vote method of passing decrees. Constitutional law could be revised, if and when a majority of the assembled citizens voted to initiate a constitutionally mandated process that allowed specific laws to be challenged and, potentially, changed. According to the usual reconstruction of the process, lawmakers responsible for considering and authorizing changes were randomly selected (by lot) from among citizens over age 30 (Hansen Reference Hansen1999: 167–168; cf. Canevaro Reference Canevaro, Harris and Canevaro2015). The process resembled a jury trial, in which the assembled lawmakers heard detailed arguments for and against adding a new law and simultaneously repealed those existing laws that contradicted provisions of the new law. Amending the constitution was not nearly so difficult as it is, for example, in the contemporary US. But, when compared with ordinary Athenian legislative procedure, the new process for changing Athenian constitutional law was relatively protracted, public, and deliberative.

The constitutional innovation came in the aftermath of two oligarchic coups d’état and a devastating military defeat. After the democratic restoration of 403 BCE, the Athenians saw that a return to prosperity required political stability. Stability in turn required a credible commitment on the part of the ordinary-citizen majority to a legal order that would protect the persons and property of the wealthy. Elite citizens must, for their part, credibly commit to preserving the entitlements (e.g., pay for public service) that enabled the relatively poor to participate in politics. The civil war era was ended with a reconciliation agreement that took, as Edwin Carawan (Reference Carawan2013) has shown, the form of a contract between the elite-citizen “men of the city” and the ordinary-citizen “men of Piraeus.” The new constitutional order was predicated on acknowledging that the social diversity of the demos gave rise to opposing policy preferences. Yet it also recognized what Federica Carugati (Reference Carugati2015) has called “the patrios politeia consensus” across that diverse population – a widespread agreement that Athenians were “ancestrally” committed to living according to their own laws. There was general agreement that behavior that endangered the ability of Athenians to negotiate diverse preferences and to live together peacefully was against the law. There was also a widely shared sense that toleration of lawlessness led to poverty and insecurity. That general consensus was enough to bootstrap recommitment to a formal system of fundamental constitutional law.

The change in the way in which constitutional law was made in Athens was, therefore, predicated on an equilibrium solution, achieved in high-stakes social conditions by people who recognized that they had more to gain by cooperating than by fighting. The result was what we may call the mature (philo-democratic) Greek definition of democracy: collective self-governance by a socially diverse body of citizens, limited by constitutional laws that were also established by citizens.

That ancient definition is consistent with two of the most famous and resonant phrases in early American political history. One is Abraham Lincoln's succinct evocation, in his Gettysburg Address, of “government of the people, by the people, for the people.” Basic democracy is for the people, in the sense of aiming at the fulfillment of fundamental interests that are commonly held by the citizen body as a whole, rather than merely satisfying the preferences of a majority faction. It is by the people insofar as the citizens make, execute, and enforce public policy. And it is of the people in that democracy is a common possession. The citizens own the government, it is their government, because they were and are its author. That collective authorship and ownership had been asserted in the previous century in the Preamble of the US Constitution: “We the People…do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”Footnote ²⁷

The assumed and aspirational political context in 1787 and 1863 was, of course, a representative government rather than a direct democracy on the Athenian model. As noted above, ancient Greek democracies came about and were sustained in distinctive and presumably unrepeatable historical circumstances. They manifested distinctive social and cultural features. Some of those features, which included slavery and denial of participation rights to women, are foreign and abhorrent to any contemporary regime that today would be considered a democracy. But, as we turn to the Demopolis thought experiment in the next chapter, we need not be burdened with ancient Greek sociocultural baggage or, for that matter, with the attitudes characteristic of political leaders in the America of 1787 or 1863. If Demopolis is imagined as a state in the twenty-first century CE, its citizens will not require a moral commitment to principles of liberalism to do without slavery and to open participation rights to women.

All ancient Greek democratic governments were, as Paul Cartledge (Reference Cartledge2016) has emphasized, procedurally different from all modern democracies in relying on the regular and direct legislative activity of citizens. I suggested in Section 2.1 that the procedural distinction does not point to an unbridgeable conceptual chasm. In Chapter 7 we will turn to the question of how the basic democracy framework might support a government in which the people have delegated to representatives the primary responsibility for most (although not necessarily all) rule making and enforcement. For now, I assume that until it is shown that a representative government of a large state cannot be a basic democracy, that is, a system of self-government in which citizens are capable and (directly or through representatives) collective rulers, it remains possible that democracy before liberalism could be relevant for a modern state.Footnote ²⁸ Thus, as we turn to the thought experiment of Demopolis in the next chapter, I consider it possible that the government that will emerge from the experiment could be provisionally delegated to representatives. By abstracting from the specific historical circumstances in which ancient citizen self-government arose, the thought experiment allows us to posit a system of basic democracy in different contexts – including modernity.