I’m grateful to Yoram Gat for making me a contributor to this website, which has a lot of good stuff about allotment. [ Editor’s note: Welcome, James! I previously linked to James’s very interesting work several years ago here, and much more recently here. -YG ]
One of the things Yoram suggested I might do here is assemble all my introductory Twitter threads on classical Athens’ main democratic institutions. Not all of these institutions involved sortition, but most did, and readers may want to get an overview of how the sortitive institutions functioned alongside other democratic institutions that depended on voting.
Before I share the Twitter threads, though, readers who are completely new to this topic might want to check out this ten-minute video in which I provide an overview of Athens’ Assembly, Council of Five Hundred, popular courts, and city officials, as well as of the curious practice of ostracism.
Now that we’ve had the broad overview of all these institutions, let’s go into more detail, starting with the most powerful of Athens’ democratic institutions, the Assembly:
Next, the second-most powerful institution, and our first allotted one: the Council of Five Hundred.
Next up are the popular courts, staffed by allotted juries:
And now Athens’ officials, most of whom were allotted. (There’s a mistake in this one: click on the ten statues to find the real #3 at the bottom.)
And finally, ostracism.
At the end of each of these threads you’ll find some suggested further reading, but really, the best place that I know of for details about the ‘nuts and bolts’ of the Athenian constitution is still Mogens Herman’s The Athenian Democracy in the Age of Demosthenes.
Adam Cronkright
Ali
Ahmed R. Teleb
avanderven
avergne
Alex Kovner
azakaras
Brett Hennig
campbellwallace
Simon Threlkeld
Nick Coccoma
codyhipskind
Common Lot Sortitionist
Conall Boyle
constitutionalism
davidschecter
graytmatter
gtridimas
H.J. Hofkirchner
Hanspeter Rosenlechner
James Kierstead
John Burnheim
jgarry20151
Jochen Krattenmacher
johnedwardtaylor
johnhuang865
Jonathan Crock
keithsutherland
Jacob Richter
kkoreilly
lukewhito
SimonPek
Nathan El
Nicholas Gruen
Owen Shaffer
Patrick Chalmers
Paul Gölz
peterstone
Pierre-Etienne Vandamme
pronfeld
Emil
rcaze
richwbrown
Roger Knights
roslynfuller
Pierre-Etienne Vandamme
shaharavin
tbouricius
Ted Wachtel
Joshua Laferriere
theodorestathis
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Wayne Liebman
Yoram Gat
Oliver Milne
Equality by lot 
It strikes me that James’s take-home message is that Athenian governance (the only historical example we have of a “pure” democracy) involved a combination of direct democracy, sortition and election in order to ensure that the demos exercised kratos. The interesting challenge is how to take a system of governance that evolved in a small (relatively) homogeneous polis and apply it to large modern states.
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Hi James. Welcome and thanks for this post.
I am wondering what your own position is, and what your reading of the literature is, regarding the functioning of the Assembly as a democratic institution. It appears to me that modern scholars by and large see the Assembly as the basic democratic institution of Athens. To me this appears to reflect modern ideology’s stance regarding mass voting (an ideology which is in a fact anti-democratic).
First, I believe that the primary sources show that it was common wisdom in Ancient Greece that an Assembly is not inherently a democratic institution but is rather an institution that is neutral and may be used either in democratic or in oligarchical poleis, and that it was sortition which was the defining attribute of democratic systems.
Second, theoretical analysis does indeed show this ancient understanding to be right, with the real determining factor being how the political agenda is set. In the context of the Athenian system the crucial democratic attribute was the fact that the allotted Council has strong impact on the Assembly’s agenda. The much touted “Ho boulomenos” aspect of the Assembly was not only not a democratic mainstay, but was in fact an oligarchical element of the system, since it gave distinguished people an opportunity to exercise disproportionate power by becoming rhetores.
I’d be happy to read your thoughts on this matter.
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If ho boulomenos was an oligarchic aspect of assembly governance, why wouldn’t this apply to to a group of 500 (well above the limit for a deliberative forum). The Athenian council was a similar size to the Roman senate and Cicero argued that oratory was the appropriate rhetorical style for groups of this size. I don’t believe there is much evidence regarding the internal workings of the council, which might tend to support the “modern” view that it was little more than the secretariat for the assembly (the ultimate sovereign). And Hansen’s claim that the 4th century reforms to nomothesia privileged sortition have been challenged by Canevaro and his co-authors.
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In response to Keith’s first comment, I do think that the way Athens combined mass voting in the assembly, deliberation in smaller bodies, and elections for some offices is worth thinking about. I think this can be seen as ‘ensuring that the demos exercised kratos,’ since every democratic procedure has strengths and weaknesses, even from a purely democratic point of view. Combining several different approaches can thus produce a more democratic order overall. This makes me a bit sceptical of pure lottocracy as an option for the future. And even in purely sortitive utopias, like the one imagined at the end of Maurice Pope’s recently-published book, the sortitive bodies do of course deliberate as well. Going forward, I think we can see referenda as a large-state version of popular assemblies. Sortition we can integrate into parliaments (especially upper houses) and other deliberative bodies. And we can retain elections for some positions that require high levels of technical expertise.
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In response to Yoram’s comment, there is a debate about whether we should characterize the Assembly as ‘sovereign.’ I don’t know what I think about that, but I would certainly say it was the most powerful institution in democratic Athens, because it made policy and laws. (And that is even more the case if we follow Canevaro’s new account of nomothesia.) But why do you see mass voting as anti-democratic?
You’re right of course that we see citizen assemblies in both democratic and oligarchic poleis. But I think democratic assemblies tended to be open to a wider array of citizens, and not to have property requirements, so it wasn’t just the way they did probouleusis that made them democratic or oligarchic.
As for sortition being the defining attribute of democratic systems, I think that this is basically right. But note Matt Simonton’s recent paper in the Journal of Sortition, where he collects a lot of evidence suggesting that most ancient Greek democrats had a less clear-cut view of the matter than Aristotle. They also thought that elections did have a democratic effect in that they forced elite politicians to adopt policies they thought the demos would like.
And they also recognized that the demos in the Assembly influenced elite speakers to tailor their messages to the masses. You’re right that our evidence suggests that there was a set of elite speakers who dominated the Assembly, but we also have hints that common speakers weren’t uncommon: that’s why Socrates asks Protagoras why the Athenians allow undistinguished cobblers advise the city in the Assembly.
I suppose it would have been even more purely democratic for them to have allotted speakers to the platform or something, but if the Assembly was less than purely democratic I think most would agree that it was also a fairly democratic part of a very democratic system.
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>They also thought that elections did have a democratic effect in that they forced elite politicians to adopt policies they thought the demos would like.
Although it may be anathema to lottocrats, I think this is also true of modern democracy (notwithstanding caveats from Gilens, Page etc). We should also take seriously Nadia Urbinati’s argument that modern political parties are ho boulomenos for an age in which representation is essential in order for the demos to exercise kratos.
A propos the Council, this was appointed by (geographically-stratified) sortition, but I’d love to know in what sense it was a “deliberative” body, and how this is even possible in a body of 500. Modern experiments with citizens assemblies have to subdivide into tiny groups and require careful moderation in order to secure equal speech conditions. Although deliberative democracy claims Athenian provenance, Habermas traces it to the discursive style of eighteenth-century coffee houses. In the symposium on his new book (forthcoming in the next issue of JoS) Jim Fishkin calls for a return to this form of discourse throughout society, but this strikes me as a quixotic project. If the bourgeois discourse of the public sphere was destroyed by structural transformations like universal franchise, then how is it possible to put the clock back by an essentially normative project?
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Hi James,
Thanks for your answer. Thanks for the reference to Simonton – I’ll have a look. In the meantime, I’ll respond to your points.
Regarding the conventional view:
> if the Assembly was less than purely democratic I think most would agree that it was also a fairly democratic part of a very democratic system.
That was my impression as well – most classicists and political scientists agree about that. Unfortunately, this seems to me to reflect modern sensibilities more than it reflects the evidence.
My point was that the assembly was an arena in which the democratic force of sortition competed with the oligarchical force of the rhetors. Your arguments are not so much a refutation of this claim as they are aimed at showing that the outcome of this competition was not overwhelmingly tilted toward the rhetors.
When you write that the rhetors had to “tailor their messages” to the masses and that non-elite speakers were not uncommon you in effect grant the disproportionate power of the rhetors and you say that this disproportionate power was not overwhelming. Maybe. I think you are underplaying the power of the rhetors (power that the Athenians themselves were very much aware of, by the way). But even if we accept your arguments, we are still left with an institution in which an elite has disproportionate power. This is by definition a non-democratic institution. Why would we see this as a fundamentally democratic institution other than because in our own society we accept such elite-dominated arrangements as “democratic”? The analogy between the Assembly and the modern electoralist mechanism is very clear and the same is true for the analogy between the arguments made in favor of the supposedly democratic nature of the assembly and the supposedly democrartic nature of electoralism.
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Whilst it’s self-evidently the case that we are viewing ancient institutions through modern eyes, are there any historical examples of “pure” democracy? If not, then we are pursuing a utopian dream.
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> But note Matt Simonton’s recent paper in the Journal of Sortition, where he collects a lot of evidence suggesting that most ancient Greek democrats had a less clear-cut view of the matter than Aristotle.
I’ve now read the paper and I see no evidence offered in it for the claim that “most ancient Greek democrats had a less clear-cut view of the matter than Aristotle [about sortition being the defining attribute of democratic systems]”.
In fact, as far as I can tell that is not what Simonton is trying to argue. Simonton says he is aiming to show that “aspiring politicians would ‘play the demagogue’ to win the people’s votes” (which is a point that seems to me to be rather obvious and which I am not aware anyone has ever disputed). Simonton seems to mistakenly think that his point somehow contradicts the idea that elections are “inherently aristocratic”.
[By the way, while claiming that “an influential body of scholarship draws on the political history of ancient Athens to argue that elections are inherently aristocratic”, Simonton’s body of citations for scholars making this argument is far from convincing. He cites Manin, but of course Manin claims that elections show a mix of aristocratic and democratic elements. Other than Manin, Simonton cites Ober (1989), Moore (1975) and Jones (1940). Thus, a body of literature stretching back 85 years yields 4 citations, and even those are not wholly convincing as being clear exemplars of the idea Simonton aims to refute.
This fact is not relevant to Simonton’s argument (which, as I wrote, is aiming to establish a point that is not in dispute), but is rather indicative of the spirit of the scholarship. By and large, modern scholars, like Simonton himself, are busy asserting modern electoralist ideology and projecting it back onto the ancient Greeks, despite clear-cut evidence that this ideology is very much at odds with the democratic ideology of that time.]
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Hello, this is Matt Simonton, the author of the paper from the Journal of Sortition. (I have an interest in this site and was happy to see the work of my friend and colleague James Kierstead posted on it; he was very kind to mention my piece in a followup comment.) I would just say that the view of elections as inherently aristocratic/oligarchic among Classicists, at any rate, is quite strong. Limitations imposed by the word count prevented me from offering an exhaustive list of references, but I would point to this comment (one among many like it) by Paul Cartledge: “in ancient Greece elections were considered to be in themselves oligarchic” (https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/opinion-ancient-greeks-would-not-recognise-our-democracy-theyd-see-an-oligarchy). The explanation is usually along Maninesque lines, viz. that elections offer a choice among those already prominent in society. A widespread working assumption among classicists and ancient historians is that elections in ancient Greece were decided by social prominence rather than a policy platform.
My article aims to provide nuance to this view. A place to start is the fact that not even Aristotle says that elections are inherently oligarchic. He notes that when election is “from all the citizens by all the citizens” it is dēmotikos, that is, compatible with democracy (Politics 4.1300a32). I would agree that sortition is *more* democratic, but that does not mean that election is incompatible with democracy, at least on the ancient Greeks’ own understanding of the matter.
The other thing to note is that Aristotle worries that election “by all from all” will in fact increase the power of the dēmos, an outcome he finds undesirable. This happens when those “ambitious for elective office” (hoi spoudarchiountes) “play the demagogue” by catering their campaign promises to the dēmos’ wishes (5.1305a28-32). This passage led me to note a recurring collocation of terms, “spoude” (ambition) + “arche” (office), in multiple Classical authors. I argue that the composite picture that emerges from the sources is one in which elected politicians in a democracy attempt to outdo their rivals through an escalating set of promises to the dēmos.
Again, I’m not trying to claim that this is the essence of democracy or that it is particularly novel from a modern point of view. But I do strongly believe that it is a part of ancient Greek historical reality that modern historians and theorists need to bear in mind. I would hope that it’s not a matter of projecting modern electoralist ideology onto the ancient evidence but rather pursuing the ancient evidence wherever it might lead me. I myself am highly critical of modern electoral democracies — in my grad student days I spent afternoons at Occupy Oakland handing out flyers about the Classical Athenian constitution to whoever would listen. But neither am I convinced that elections can never serve a legitimate purpose in a democratic system.
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Hi Matt – great to have you as part of the conversation. If you would like to contribute posts to this blog, I’d be happy to set you up as a contributor.
> I would just say that the view of elections as inherently aristocratic/oligarchic among Classicists, at any rate, is quite strong. [E.g.,] Paul Cartledge: “in ancient Greece elections were considered to be in themselves oligarchic”
First, you must have noticed that Cartledge’s quote is not about his own view but a view that he attributes to the Greeks. The same is true, by the way, of the quotes from Ober and Moore in your paper. Thus, none of these quotes can be said to express a view among classicists that elections are inherently aristocratic or oligarchic.
Relatedly, there is a tendency among classicists to ignore or downplay the importance of sortition in the Greek ideology and system. Against the evidence, the Assembly is played up as the most important democratic institution. Sortition is presented as no more than a way to ensure the power of Assembly is not usurped by an elite. (This goes back at least to Headlam.) Considering the strength of the evidence, it is remarkable how few classicists (as far as I am aware) acknowledge that the Greeks saw the allotted Council as the most important democratic institution. And there are even fewer who promote the idea that the Greeks were right to in this view and that elections should generally be avoided in a democratic system. (Cartledge may actually be one of the few exceptions here, by the way. But Ober is not, as far as I am aware, and while Manin acknowledged that elections are [in part] aristocratic, he thought this was all for the good.)
But all of that is somewhat of an aside to the main thrust of your argument in the paper. Your point was that the Greeks thought that politicians (elected strategos or unelected rhetors) tended to ‘play the demagogue’ to win the people’s votes. As I wrote, this seems such an obvious point and plays such a strong part in both ancient and modern perception of politics that I can’t imagine anyone doubting that. Who do think of as denying or doubting this phenomenon?
What seems on the other hand to be very far from obvious is how this phenomenon (or its perception) can be thought of as refuting or nuancing the oligarchical nature of elections. How does the phenomenon of politicians ‘playing the demagogue’, or making “escalating sets of promises to the dēmos”, in any way come in conflict with the politicians in fact being self-serving and promoting the interests of elites at the expense of the interests of the masses? After all, demagoguery and making promises to the demos is a universal phenomenon associated with every ruling elite. Has there ever been a ruling elite that told the people over whom they rule that they despise them and are planning to immiserate them? Surely we don’t think all ruling elites ever have had a democratic character because of their (generally empty) promises?
Finally, you write:
> But neither am I convinced that elections can never serve a legitimate purpose in a democratic system.
Can you elaborate: what legitimate role do you see for elections in a democratic system?
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Yoram:> the Greeks saw the allotted Council as the most important democratic institution [per se].
Can you let us have citations to support this claim? And were there any proposals to abolish the [undemocratic] assembly in favour of an all-powerful council?
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This is how Fishkin puts it in the introduction to the symposium on his new book, forthcoming in JoS:
“Particularly in ancient Athens, where these practices are best documented (Hansen, 2006), key decisions were made by randomly selected citizens of 500 or more. While Athenian democracy was also distinctive for the direct democracy of the Assembly — open to the participation of all male citizens, that direct democracy was decisively influenced by the institutions of random selection. The Council of 500 was randomly selected and set the agenda for what could be discussed in the Assembly.”
In sum, Athens in the classical era was a direct democracy, moderated by the use of random selection. As to why random selection was used, we can only speculate.
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This is Fishkin’s summary of speculations on the ‘why’ question:
“Going back to ancient Athens, there is some controversy as to precisely why the Athenians engaged in random sampling (or ‘sortition’). Some have argued it was representativeness. The Council of 500 was praised by ancient commentators as ‘the polis in miniature’ (Sinclair, 1988, p. 103). Sortition or random selection was also regarded as an expression of equality. But it was also a method of avoiding corruption by providing for rotation among decision makers (Hansen, 1999, p. 84).”
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Hi Yoram,
Matt Simonton again. My comment about the beliefs of classicists and ancient historians was limited to what they think is important *for the ancient Greeks*. My impression is that most historians of ancient Greece, when teaching undergraduate history courses, anyway, impress upon their students the democratic bona fides of sortition in the ancient world when it comes to selecting magistrates. This is often framed as a contrast between the current day, when “free and fair elections” are often considered the gold standard for democratic legitimacy, vs. the ancient Greek world, where one could, as in the case of the epistates of the Council, be “president of Athens for a day,” so to speak, thanks to the lottery. I don’t know whether ancient historians on the whole think sortition would be a good solution to modern political inequality, but I suspect that they are more open to it, on average, than the general citizenry, if only because they are aware of it as a historical case study, while the average lay person is not. (Although thanks to the modern lottocracy movement the number is growing.) Most ancient historians don’t make normative political recommendations in a professional capacity, although some have (e.g. Maurice Pope).
I think I have not made my point about “ambition for office” and “demagoguery” clear, thanks in large part to contemporary connotations of “demagoguery.” By this I do not mean politicians making *false* promises to the electorate which they have no intention of keeping, nor do I have in mind lying, slander, “lowest common denominator” politics, and the other sorts of tactics that spring to mind when we use the word “demagogue” today. I mean instead “demagogue” in the sense that Aristotle and his school often use it, where it signifies something like a leader who champions the interests of the mass of the poor majority against the interests of the wealthy elite. What Aristotle fears from election “from all by all” is that those who run for office will change the rules of the game once elected so that the dēmos qua poor majority has more constitutional power than the wealthy few. In practice this could mean referring more and more decisions of magistrates to review by popular courts/dikastēria (a process called “ephesis”). In a military context it might mean referring decisions of commanders in the field to popular oversight. Although the parallel is far from exact (more on this in a moment), something like this fear also animated those opposed to the English Reform Bills of the 19th century, since they thought that a universal franchise would lead the masses to expropriate the wealthy or worse.
The parallel is inexact, though, because the English Reform Bills were about the election of legislators, while Athenian elections (of generals, for example) were for the executive. The flip side of the coin is that sortition was also limited to the executive. Something lottocrats ought to take seriously (which many already do) is that no ancient democracy passed legislation through a body selected by lottery, which is what many modern proponents of lottocracy wish to do. This is quite untested territory. The assembly often approved of legislation that had been formulated in advance by the Council of Five Hundred, and in that sense one could say that the sortitive Council “legislated.” But its proposals always had to be approved by the assembly, and the assembly could reject the Council’s advice on a topic and adopt a different approach, formulated by a rhetor (or multiple rhetores). In fact, modern scholarship (e.g., that of PJ Rhodes and Stephen Lambert) often counts it as a mark of a “strong democracy” in the ancient world that the assembly is on record acting independently of the Council. It starts to look suspicious if the assembly merely “rubber stamps” the policies of the Council (to use the most common metaphor), since this means average citizens in the assembly are not availing themselves of the political rights of isegoria (equality of political address) and of voting on alternative proposals put forward by rhetores. It sounds like you have a position quite similar to Rousseau’s, according to whom Athens was not a democracy but an aristocracy ruled by orators and philosophers (since they exerted so much influence in the assembly). But to the Athenians’ way of thinking, the assembly needed to have a say because it most approximated the general citizen population (this is why it is sometimes simply called “the dēmos”). I agree with you that the magistracies were very important to democratic thinking: they needed to be open to all citizens, with no property requirements attached, and in the strongest versions of democracy they were almost all sortitive, with political pay (misthos — this last point is also very important, although I don’t think it was a necessary condition for ancient Greek democracy). But the assembly was also very important — ancient democracy involved a combination of different institutions with different rules and characteristics, as James has emphasized.
As for offices that could be elective and yet genuinely democratic, I think that, along ancient Greek lines, these might include positions that required technical expertise or skills of existential import for the city, like the generals. But this has to be combined with a high degree of oversight, short terms of office, etc.
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Matt, where do you stand on the disagreement between Canevaro and Hansen on the 4th century reforms to nomothesia? Some modern sortition proposals (including my own) draw on the principle of decision-making by large, silent legislative juries. The other aspect to the model is that the Assembly chose the defenders of the existing laws by election, along with Urbinati’s argument that political parties are the modern incarnation of ho boulomenos.
P.S. Even if Canevaro is right then the only difference is the size of the jury (500+ or “everybody”).
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The 4th century reforms meant that new laws “were to be passed by procedure analogous to a trial” (Hansen, 1999, pp. 165-169). Any citizen could put up a proposal for changing an existing law, and the Assembly decided whether or not to set up nomothetai and elect five advocates to defend the existing law. The proposer acted as “prosecutor”, and a water clock ensured the equal speech rights of both parties. The jury listened (ideally) in silence before deciding the outcome by show of hands. Whether the reforms were undertaken for epistemic improvement/stability or procedural convenience is unknown and there is controversy (between Hansen and Canevaro) as to whether the jury was appointed by lot or was the entire Assembly assuming the role of legislator.
Modern proposals based on the 4th century reforms note that the “defence” was elected by the Assembly and that ho boulomenos in large states requires a similar representative method. As for the jury, a large quasi-mandatory jury would be the only way of ensuring an “attentive” (mini)public in large modern poleis. The legislative trial would follow adversarial debate format, rather than deliberation in the Habermasian sense.
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Hi Matt,
> My comment about the beliefs of classicists and ancient historians was limited to what they think is important *for the ancient Greeks*.
Well, that is a significant qualification that I think is very much worth emphasizing. Reading both your comment above [“the view of elections as inherently aristocratic/oligarchic among Classicists, at any rate, is quite strong“] and the abstract to the paper [“An influential body of scholarship draws on the political history of ancient Athens to argue that elections are inherently aristocratic”] it certainly seems like you are saying that many classicists (and potentially other scholars) assert universally that “elections are inherently aristocratic” rather than saying that that was the view of the Greeks.
> most historians of ancient Greece, when teaching undergraduate history courses, anyway, impress upon their students the democratic bona fides of sortition in the ancient world when it comes to selecting magistrates
It is a testament to the power of modern ideology that such ideas remain safely sequestered in the lecture halls and that neither the professors nor the students manage to carry them out with them from the halls to the outside world.
> Most ancient historians don’t make normative political recommendations in a professional capacity
Avoiding making recommendations for change, and avoiding pointing out the a-historical nature of what we now call democracy are ways of supporting the status quo. Thus these are (in)actions which amount to normative political recommendations. This also works in the opposite direction: ancient historians do carry their own modern normative commitments to their professional work, resulting in the downplaying of the role of sortition and the playing up the role of assembly. (And on occassion going so far as making the argument that elections were considered as democratic by the Greeks as well.)
> I do not mean [the] sorts of tactics that spring to mind when we use the word “demagogue” today
Well, it is interesting that you say that this is not what you had in mind, because almost all the examples you give in your paper of discussions of people who are eager for office are very much focused on exactly on this issue, i.e., various actions by the ambitious which are self-serving and harmful to the public:
> In fact, modern scholarship (e.g., that of PJ Rhodes and Stephen Lambert) often counts it as a mark of a “strong democracy” in the ancient world that the assembly is on record acting independently of the Council. It starts to look suspicious if the assembly merely “rubber stamps” the policies of the Council (to use the most common metaphor), since this means average citizens in the assembly are not availing themselves of the political rights of isegoria (equality of political address) and of voting on alternative proposals put forward by rhetores.
Indeed – this is exactly the ideological distortion that I have been referring to. The idea that the allotted council is the threat to democracy, while the process of ho boulomenos is a “strong democratic” process is a projection backward of the normative sensibilities which stem from the modern vision of the electoralist system as the democratic ideal. The rhetors are the analogs of our modern day electoral candidates and the assembly is the analog of the electorate selecting among the proposals of those rhetors/candidates.
The Greeks understood very well that the inevitable outcome of the electoralist process is that the agenda (set of candidates) is set by elites, and the public is therefore limited to choosing among factions of the elite. Thus the Greeks rightly considered this process as inherently oligarchical. In the assembly the same situation would have been replicated (the elite rhetors setting the agenda) if it were not for the allotted council being a major factor in setting the agenda – a factor that is democratic.
> It sounds like you have a position quite similar to Rousseau’s, according to whom Athens was not a democracy but an aristocracy ruled by orators and philosophers (since they exerted so much influence in the assembly)
No – I do not adhere to this view (which I also see as elitist). This is not a matter of the people being “influenced” (swayed, convinced, manipulated, awed, impressed, outmaneuvered) by clever and articulate orators and philosophers. It is a mechanical process by which, unless sortition is employed, the agenda is necessarily controlled by the elite.
> As for offices that could be elective and yet genuinely democratic, I think that, along ancient Greek lines, these might include positions that required technical expertise or skills of existential import for the city, like the generals. But this has to be combined with a high degree of oversight, short terms of office, etc.
Do we really believe that elections produce people with high technical skills? Such positions would much better be appointed by allotted bodies, and, as you say, be supervised closely by those appointed bodies, including the power to fire and hire replacements if necessary. (As well as to punish for abuse of power if necessary.)
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Yoram:> The rhetors are the analogs of our modern day electoral candidates and the assembly is the analog of the electorate selecting among the proposals of those rhetors/candidates.
That’s clearly true, and would be democratic iff:
These are non-trivial caveats, which need to be explored both theoretically and experimentally.
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Hi Yoram,
I agree that not speaking out amounts to endorsing the status quo — but some (most?) professional classicists like the status quo. (Or at least, the foremost political issue in their minds in the current climate is not “election vs. sortition” but “electoral government vs. Trump.” As someone who has always been critical of electoralism I find this rather limiting, but I understand that we are living in exceptional times.) In any case I think that it’s important that I teach my students what I take to be the truth about ancient Greek history and not my political opinions.
The thing about the sources that I quote and analyze — and I will have to be clearer about this in future publications — is that they are not objective concerning the politicians in question. The accusations of bribe-taking, embezzling, etc., are not objective statements of historical reality but attempts to discredit politicians whose platforms they do not like. (You’ll notice how I say “(so it is claimed)” because I would not like to be seen as endorsing the view of the source in question.) It is controversial to say this about Aristophanes and other Old Comic poets, who are sometimes described as “apolitical” or difficult to pin down politically, whereas I think their skepticism of if not hostility towards democracy is quite obvious. All we know for sure about these politicians is that they were popular with the dēmos and that they were perceived (by many elites) as increasing the power of the common people in a way that was dangerous to the status quo. The view of the political establishment towards socialist and other left-wing movements and their leadership in the 19th and 20th centuries is not dissimilar.
I don’t think it’s just modern ideology that sees ho boulomenos in the assembly as a strong indicator of democracy in action. Many sources stress the importance of isēgoria or the ability of anyone to address the assembly, and Matteo Barbato has shown (Klio journal issue 105 [2023]) that already in the fifth century many average citizens — not semi-professional rhetores — got up and made proposals on a quite regular basis. (This was already known concerning the fourth century.) And beyond the question of “average citizens vs. elite rhetores” there is also the fact of thorubos or “raising a ruckus” and thus the ability of assembly audiences to pressure speakers, whoever they were, until they proposed things that were more to the majority’s liking. If the ancients did not consider the assembly an embodiment of democratic values, it is not clear why they would have called it “the dēmos,” nor is it clear why they would have retained it and allowed it to contravene the proposals of the allotted Boulē. (And I think they were allowed to do this not because they thought the allotted Council was a “threat” to democracy — it was indispensable for democracy — but because it was important in their minds that a very large group of citizens, much larger than the Council, make the final decision on a proposal.) Again, I think that it is important to acknowledge that the ancient Athenians did not think that there was just one way of maintaining the power of the dēmos: they saw the assembly, the Boulē, the courts, and the other magistracies as all contributing in their own institution-specific ways to the democratic project. If we ourselves in the modern era think they were mistaken about that and that they were inconsistent with their own stated values it is another matter.
Hi Keith — I agree for the most part with Canevaro about nomothesia. Perhaps a newly discovered nomos inscribed on stone will tell us more about the nomothesia procedure, but until then it’s best to keep an open mind that the nomothetai may have just been a special session of the assembly.
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Matt >: I agree for the most part with Canevaro about nomothesia.
Agree, especially as decision making was by show of hands, rather than secret voting. When Mirko first told me about his work I saw this as a setback to the modern sortition project. But on reflection it isn’t, insofar as (from a stochastic perspective) there’s no essential difference between 500+ and “everybody”. In the fourth century it was feasible (in theory) that everybody should attend; not so in modern poleis, especially in the light of the rational ignorance threshold. That’s why a large quasi-mandatory sample is a better match to 4th century nomothesia than decision making by referendum.
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The lack of epigraphic evidence might suggest that Mirko is right. To transfer sovereignty from the whole demos to a randomly-selected subset would have been a big deal (especially for a culture that had no mathematical model for statistical probability) yet it doesn’t appear to be much referenced in the sources.
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Mirko debated all this on EbL in 2019. Use the search: https://equalitybylot.com/?s=canevaro
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Hi Matt,
> some (most?) professional classicists like the status quo.
Yes. As members of an elite, academics naturally tend to perceive the system as basically just and well-functioning, even if having its flaws (such as Trump) which they come up with various fixes for, but always leaving the basic structure (including, of course, their own privileged status) intact.
> I think that it’s important that I teach my students what I take to be the truth about ancient Greek history and not my political opinions.
Sure. My point, however, is that the classicists’ positive perception of the status quo also shapes their understanding of the “truth” about the Athenian system.
> the sources that I quote and analyze […] are not objective concerning the politicians in question
Naturally, all sources (ancient as well as modern) should be understood as expressing certain concerns and frames of thought rather than expressing objective reality. Thus one may debate what should be made of the explicit and repeated accusations of politicians as being self-serving and corrupt which appear in the quotes you presented. But if you are claiming that those quotes provide evidence that Athenian politicians were widely perceived as true “champions of the interests of the mass of the poor majority against the interests of the wealthy elite” (rather than as self-serving corrupt figures whose professed interest in the well-being of the people is no more than manipulation) then this argument has to be made very explicitly. (It also seems it would be a fairly impressive trick to pull off.) I didn’t see this argument being made in the article.
> If the ancients did not consider the assembly an embodiment of democratic values, it is not clear why they would have called it “the dēmos,”
I very much agree that “the assembly [was considered] an embodiment of democratic values”. I think this is exactly the right way to put it. Just like elections in modern systems are an embodiment of democratic values. The fact that citizens (and only citizens) are all allowed to attend the assembly/vote, and that votes count equally, embodies and re-inforces democratic values.
However, in both cases if the agenda (proposals/list of candidates) is controlled (or disproportionately influenced) by elites, then the outcome is non-democratic. Thus, the assembly/elections are important symbolic institutions but they are not mechanisms for generating democratic policy. In terms of their outcomes they are a neutral arena and essentially rubber-stamp the agenda set for them by choosing among the alternatives on offer. To the extent that the agenda is controlled by elites, the outcome is not only not democratic, it is anti-democratic. That is the situation in the modern electocratic systems.
> Many sources stress the importance of isēgoria or the ability of anyone to address the assembly
Just like the assembly itself, isegoria was important because it reflected the democratic values of equality and freedom of opinion and expression, not because it was perceived as a way to generate equal influence over the agenda. Obviously, it did not in fact generate equal influence over the agenda, as must have been very clear to all Athenians and as the mere existence of the concept of “rhetors” clearly shows.
(It would be interesting to see if any of those sources makes claims about the effects of isegoria as a mechanism for generating proposals, rather than celebrating it as expressing democratic values.)
Again the analogy to our modern societies is instructive: Mass media supposedly embodies the value of free speech. In practice it is dominated by the modern day “rhetors” – the big business owners and celebrities that have mass audiences – while most citizens can only talk to a very small audience. These “rhetors” have a hugely disproportional influence over the agenda.
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Hi Yoram,
Just very quickly, three points:
Take care, and thanks for the opportunity to discuss my work.
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That’s very interesting Matt. I believe the difference between Sparta and Athens was that ho boulomenos only applied in the latter case. I also agree that deliberative democrats are misguided to claim trace their provenance to the Athenian boule (the bourgeois 17th century coffee house provides a closer parallel). 500 is far bigger than Cicero’s threshold for sermo (conversation) as a deliberative style.
In terms of modern parallels I like to reference Ledru-Rollin’s “there go the people, I must follow them as I’m their leader”. The overriding interest of politicians is to secure re-election and (in political systems that have limits on campaign contributions), this means reflecting the priorities (and prejudices) of their constituents. Nadia Urbinati is right to argue that political parties (suitably reformed) are the only way to implement ho boulomenos in large modern states.
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Hi Keith,
I think legislation by a sortitive body run along the lines of Fishkin’s Deliberative Polls may be possible, it just wouldn’t resemble the Council of 500 that much.
It’s true what you say about Sparta vs. Athens. No one could propose alternatives to the counsels of the gerousia from the assembly floor. But it’s undemocratic in further ways, as well: the gerousia was limited to men over 60 elected for life and was therefore highly unrepresentative. Greek democrats thought that probouleutic bodies like the Boulē shouldn’t be limited to a restricted group among the citizen body, whether that be through an express property qualification or a de facto one like age limits. And the best way to ensure representativeness was through sortition (and misthos or payment, which again hasn’t come up as much in this conversation but was a major marker of the Classical Athenian democracy).
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Hi Matt,
Responding to your 3 points:
1. Thanks for the reference to Aristotle. I find the description in the passage you referred to rather vague so I am not sure that this can be used as evidence for elections leading to democratic outcomes. But in any case I would not dispute the theoretical possibility that elections can be a mechanism for instituting democratic policy. There are modern examples for such a situation, e.g., the New Deal and the golden age of electoralism in the West which spanned the 30 years after WWII. Present day Russia also seems like a situation where the elected government is widely perceived by the population as serving the people well.
The fact is, however, that these are exceptions to the rule. They depend on having an elite that is truly dedicated to promoting the popular well-being or on having some fortuitous alignment between the popular well-being and elite interest. The typical situation is where elites are self-serving and have enough commonality of interests so that they will never sacrifice elite privilege to gain an advantage in some factional intra-elite disputes.
Granting that sometimes elections can generate outcomes serving the people at large, why would we want to use a mechanism – elections – that is at its best no better than sortition at generating democratic outcomes, and most often much worse?
2. I do not doubt that Ho boulomenos did generate proposals. (If that was not the case, the institution could not have been a tool for wielding power, democratic or oligarchial.) The question is whether those proposals, and the ideas presented in the speeches advocating for those proposals, tended to promote popular values and interests.
Although the exact social composition of the proposers may be difficult to determine, the fact that elite speakers were highly over-represented among those proposers is not in dispute, I believe. Thus the only question is whether the elite speakers were better representatives of popular values and interests than the allotted Council was. I believe it would be quite difficult to argue that this was the case, unless one starts out with underlying guardianist assumptions (as Socrates does, for example, but which are less fashionable in our days).
3. I agree that a body of 500 is probably too large for effective all-to-all communication which is needed for real equality. The optimal size for allotted bodies would depend on the context, but the maximum size – suitable for long-serving, full-time, high-resource, high-power bodies, such as an allotted Congress or parliament – should not be over, say, 250.
It was great to have you here for the discussion – I enjoyed it.
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