Athenian democracy and popular tyranny

Abstract

An account of popular sovereignty that begins with the fifth century BCE may seem to be off to a false start. 1 Foundational works in the history of political thought have taught us that the very notion of sovereignty, and thus of popular sovereignty, emerged from the particular historical circumstances of the early modern era. One might thus believe that fifth-century Greeks could not be discussing popular sovereignty some two thousand years before this concept's emergence. 2 Leading ancient historians and classicists have adopted this view, deeming 'sovereignty' a misleadingly anachronistic way of thinking about Athenian democracy in the classical period. 3 For the concept of sovereignty seems 1 By agreement, my primary focus is on the fifth century BCE (esp. its second half) and Melissa Lane's in her contribution is on the fourth.

Empire, Popular Sovereignty, and the Problem of Self-and-Other-Determination

“…The theme of despotic rule by democratic polities over other countries appears multiple times in the history of political thought. Athenians, for one, often thought of their democracy in terms of tyranny, referring nonpejoratively to the authority of the dēmos as “tyrannical and despotic,” both vis-à-vis politicians who aimed to rule over it and with respect to other polities (Hoekstra 2016, 17, 25–27, 38–42). Nineteenth-century liberalism also grappled with these relationships; Alexis de Tocqueville, for example, argued that imperial projects could supply the virtue and glory that would ignite republican public-spiritedness (Pitts 2005, 193–94).…”

Heroic Democracy in High Relief: Political Legitimacy and Monumental Imagery in Fifth-Century Athens

“…72. On this ambivalence, see Hoekstra's (2016), 27-30, response to Connor (1977 and Raaflaub (2003Raaflaub ( ), (2004.…”

“…See, for instance, Green (2009), Parkinson (2012), Love and Mattern (2013), Bell and Zacka (2020). For notable exceptions to this logocentric demarcation of ancient Greek democratic practice, see the attention paid to visual phenomena by Monoson (2000), 92-8, Ober (2003), andHoekstra (2016), 31-4. Cf.…”

Democracy Requires Organized Collective Power*

“…27 As Kinch Hoekstra has shown, early modern theories of sovereignty deployed an interpretation of Athenian democracy that focused only on the tyranny of the demos-the idea of the Assembly as the supreme, authorizing legislative bodywhile neglecting the other meaning of the demos in Athenian democratic ideology. 28 The rise of the idea of popular sovereignty thus marked a shift in views of the people: from the people as the less powerful members of the polity to the people as all individuals within the jurisdiction of the state who retain ultimate sovereignty whatever specific form the government took. Here, the medieval interpretation of the Roman lex regia, the supposed act whereby the Roman people transferred their sovereign power to Emperor Vespasian, provided additional support to this shift.…”