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According to classical and postclassical sources, the early Greekturannoi were, by definition, illegitimate rulers who overturned existing political arrangements and installed rogue monarchic regimes in their place. And on this one fundamental point at least, modern observers of archaicturannides seem to have little quarrel with their ancient informants. To this day, it remains axiomatic that Cypselus, Peisistratus, and the rest were autocrats who gained power by usurpation. Whatever their individual accomplishments, they were still, in a word, "tyrants." Relying mostly on evidence from the contemporary literary and material records, my paper aims to challenge this time-honored conventional wisdom and restore the firstturannoi to the political mainstream.

The long-running Canada-US softwood lumber dispute provides a useful backdrop for comparison of the dispute settlement mechanisms of the Canada-US Free Trade Agreement, the North American Free Trade Agreement, and the dispute settlement mechanisms of the World Trade Organisation because it is the only dispute to have been litigated in all three venues. By looking at a dispute in which the central arguments of the litigants have remained consistent while the venues for litigation have changed, this article aims to evaluate the utility of these mechanisms for resolving some of the world trading system's most difficult disputes and highlights several weaknesses within each that both hamper their effectiveness and suggest avenues for future change. Copyright 2006 The Authors Journal compilation 2006 Blackwell Publishing Ltd .

Abstract:Were the poleis of Classical Greece state-based or stateless communities? Do their political structures meet standard criteria for full statehood? Conventional wisdom maintains that they do not. According to a broad consensus, the Classical polis was neither state-based nor stateless as such, but something somewhere in between: a unique, category-defying formation that was somehow both ‘state’ and ‘society’ simultaneously, a kind of inseparable fusion of the two. The current paper offers an alternative perspective on this complex but fundamental issue. It questions prevailing views on theoretical grounds, suggesting that the consensus ‘fusionist’ position rests ultimately upon a misunderstanding of what Thomas Hobbes would call the ‘personality’ of polis political structures. Focusing on the case of Classical Athens, it then proceeds to present a new account of the Greek ‘state’, an account that aims to be both theoretically satisfying and heuristically useful. Even if all those who performed state functions were simultaneously constituents of polis ‘society’, the state was nevertheless perceived to function as an autonomous agency, possessing a corporate personality that was quite distinct from the individual personalities of the living, breathing citizens who happened to instantiate it at any particular time.