Update 10/10/2019: Democracy is a state of society where “the people” are supposed to have equal political rights. Some aspects of its evolution include (re-)defining, again and again, who “the people” are, as well as the scope and meaning of their rights. In the place where “civilized” democracy (as opposed to that of hunter-gatherers) had its beginnings, i.e., Athens, some thinkers saw democracy as fraught with pitfalls, e.g., Plato, who in the Republic foresaw its degeneration into tyranny. Some contemporary thinkers on the other hand, like Hannah Arendt, criticized its unsatisfactory record regarding people’s agency, focusing as she did in this respect on the issue of human rights (man’s de facto universal prerogative under its liberal variant). Those are but a few of many objections leveled at democracy.
According to Plato democracy is preceded by oligarchy as a system of government. In terms of mimetic theory oligarchy, as well as timocracy and aristocracy that precede it, may be regarded broadly as a system where external mediation of desire is preeminent, aristocracy being its purest embodiment. Democracy on the other hand may be seen as embodying internal mediation of man’s mimetic desire. Its degeneration into tyranny might then be regarded as one possible consequence, or aspect, of its inherently competitive, rivalrous if not, finally, conflictual nature.
That is a very pessimistic view of man as a political animal. Murray Bookchin, preeminently in his book The Rise of Urbanization and the Decline of Citizenship, presents an alternative scenario. He employs examples drawn from Athenian democracy to flesh it out. The main postulate is for democracy to be direct or at least, broadly, participatory – as opposed to representative. For inspiration, he sketches how such a system came to be in sixth-century B.C. Athens and, crucially, how it was fostered by a spirit and practice of paideia, making for an informed and committed citizenry; an agential citizenry largely able to control “unthinking mimesis” in their midst.
When I wrote my blog over a week ago I couldn’t have possibly foreseen how topical it might become shortly thereafter. An experiment in participatory democracy, along the lines proposed by Bookchin, has been afoot in Rojava, in a war-torn northeast Syria, since 2013. Just as Athenian democracy was effectively quashed by Alexander the Great, it appears that the present experiment may share its fate at the hands of an army second only in size to that of the U.S. in NATO.
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Democracy in the West is in severe crisis, its line of development questioned both in theory and in practice, the institutions of its dominant liberal variant under attack. Many of those who consider ways of its regeneration seek how to introduce direct or participatory democracy in contemporary circumstances, inspired as some of them are by Athenian democracy.
One of such people was the late Murray Bookchin, the author of such books as The Ecology of Freedom and The Rise of Urbanization and the Decline of Citizenship. His thought remains a major source of inspiration for Rojava, in a war-torn northeast Syria, where an effort to create a meaningful democracy is underway among Kurds and various other, mostly Islamic, ethnicities living there. It is called democratic confederalism, and is largely a practical transposition and implementation of Bookchin’s libertarian municipalism.
What follows below are quotes from The Rise of Urbanization and the Decline of Citizenship focusing on two major themes: (1) How a democratic polity in Athens was crafted by a handful of statesmen, with a view to this process providing a lesson for us, if not directly certainly by analogy and inspiration; (2) Athenian democracy’s various rituals and theatrical dramas as a practice of paideia, a fostering of a rational and committed citizenry. For Bookchin Athenian paideia and polis were of a piece, and must never be viewed otherwise. Moreover, they provide crucial lessons for us that may be ignored only at our peril.
As may be gleaned from the quotes, Bookchin draws a sharp, if summary, distinction between Athenian democracy and Roman republicanism, pivoting around democracy being participatory in character and a republic – representative, on the one hand, and this distinction having practical consequences for the type of citizen that prevails in each system, on the other hand. Again this is highly informative.
“The Eumenides, the last drama of the [Oresteia, Aeskylos's] trilogy, celebrates the victory of civic law and rationality over tribal custom and unthinking mimesis”: Societal “unthinking mimesis” is seen here as something that has been, and still can be, transcended by a skillfully designed and cultivated democratic order, in contradistinction to its being viewed, e.g., by followers of Rene Girard, as an inescapable and unwitting force responsible for much of what ills society in our apocalyptic times. Participatory democracy is about (re-)gaining agency, both at an individual and a societal level. Mimesis certainly need not be unthinking: there is a lot to be learned and adapted from the Athenians. Indeed, in order to thrive, if not survive, we may need to become new Athenians – a trite call perhaps but a tall order!
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(1) The Greek democrat, Kleisthenes, is almost a symbol of… shrewd maneuvers, maneuvers by no means unique to the Athenian polis. To break the hold of family ties that obstructed the power of civic institutions, the citizenry was organized into territorial "wards," but each "ward" was felicitously called a "tribe." The municipal space of Athens, in effect, was expanded to create a largely civic citizenry, unencumbered by the mindless tribal obligations and blood oaths that impeded the rights of the stranger but in a form that wore the symbols and enjoyed the prestige of tribal tradition.[…]
A face-to-face relationship between active citizens for the purpose of arriving at a consensus is alien to republican systems of government. A democracy is participatory; a republic, representative. The first involves the exercise of power directly by the people; the second, its delegation to selected surrogates, who then reconstitute the political realm that initially existed at the base of the koinonia into a distinctly separate and usually professional power at its summit. Republics are beyond the immediate reach of popular control; democracies are not even confronted by the issue of the displacement of power.[…]
Kleisthenes, the head of the aristocratic Alcmaenodae, became archon in 506 B.C., and the democraticization of Athens was launched in earnest. Kleisthenes struck decisively at the societal basis of aristocratic power – the traditional kinship network that gave the Attic nobility its very sense of identity. The ancient Greek phratries and clans were simply divested of any political power and gradually declined in importance for want of any significant functions. The old Ionian system of four ancestral tribes was converted into ten strictly territorial "tribes" based exclusively on residence. The villages and towns of Attica, in turn, became outlying sections of Athens and were designated as "demes" instead of genoi. Politics now became inseparable from territorialism: the demes, with their own popular assemblies, were grouped together in varying numbers into thirds or trittyes, and three trittyes, in turn, constituted a tribe, hence Attica was composed of thirty trittyes. Ten of the thirty demoi were composed of residents in or around Athens; another ten, from the maritime districts; and the remainder from the interior.
Kleisthenes shrewdly placed one urban trittys in each of the ten tribes, so that the Attic agrarians from whom the nobles garnered whatever popular support they had were politically buffered by city citizens – the men who were to form the backbone of the democracy. This switch in the governance system of the polis was strategic: it fostered the power of a citizenry that was distinctly urbane, cosmopolitan, and forward looking, vitiating the strongly hierarchical structure of a once-entrenched, highly parochial, feudal class system. At the same time, tradition was kept alive by using the language of the tribal world (even the word gene had a special clannish origin), retaining a number of local religious associations, chieftain-like figures such as demarchs (the deme's version of the Athenian archons), and by making membership in a deme hereditary even though a citizen might choose to reside at some later time in another part of Attica. Kleisthenes, in effect, "revolutionized" Athenian political life in the literal sense of the term: he replaced a once-egalitarian tribal system that had been perverted into a harsh feudal hierarchy by a tribalistic structure that actually restored the old freedoms of the people on an entirely new political and societal level. Athens had "revolved" in a full circle – more precisely, a spiral – to the isonomia of its tribal past, but without the innocence that made the early Greeks vulnerable to hierarchy and domination.
The boule was increased from a council of four hundred to five hundred and restructured so that fifty men from each of the ten tribes rotated every tenth of the year as an administrative "executive committee" between sessions of the ekklesia. Each tribe selected its fifty bouleutes by lot, a practice that became so widespread that even archons were so chosen from members of the boule, as were members of Athenian juries (dikastoi) and lesser functionaries. Apart from the polis's magistrates, no property qualifications debarred Athenian citizens from participating in the governance system, and under Perikles the last restrictions that lingered on from Kleisthenes's reforms disappeared completely. In time, members of the boule, the ekklesia, and the heliaea or courts were compensated for participating in these institutions, generally on a per diem basis and in the case of the boule, annually. No public office could be held for more than a year, and with certain exceptions (jurymen and generals) none could be held more than twice in a lifetime.
This extraordinary opening of public life to the Athenian citizenry was completed during the sixty years that saw Kleisthenes assume the archonship in 492 B.C. and the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War in 431… [W]hat counts is the way the democracy formed the citizenry and, in turn, was formed by it. Democratic leaders such as Kleisthenes and Perikles did not foist a remarkably open system of participatory governance on a passive people; the institutional structure and the body politic interacted closely with each other against a haunting background of quasi tribal social forms and relationships. This is politics at its best – in a lived sense, not a formal one. The Athenian notion of arete, the daily practice of paideia, and the institutional structure of the polis were synthesized into an ideal of citizenship that the individual tried to realize as a form of self-expression, not an obligatory burden of self-denial. Citizenship became an ethos, a creative art, indeed, a civic cult rather than a demanding body of duties and a palliative body of rights. At his best, the Athenian citizen tried not only to participate as fully as possible in a far-reaching network of institutions that elicited his presence as an active being; the democracy turned his participation into a drama that found visible and emotional expression in rituals, games, artwork, a civic religion – in short, a collective sense of feeling and solidarity that underpinned a collective sense of responsibility and duty. This drama extended beyond life itself. The Athenian citizen had little hope of any certain immortality other than the memory he left behind in the polis. Afterlife became a form of political life and eternality existed only insofar as noble political actions were memorable enough to become part of the polis's history and destiny.[…]
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(2) Like the agora, the "contests and games" of Athens often created a shared sense of preternatural civic enchantment. The democrats knew this very well and these "contests and games" occurred with considerable frequency… [E]very year, many days were devoted to the Lesser Mysteries in February and the Greater Mysteries in September, rituals that centered around Persephone's descent into Hades and Demeter's mourning, the mythical explanation for the occurrence of winter and its lean months. Every July, Athenians participated in the Lesser Panathenaia, which culminated quadrennially in the Greater Panathenaia, an extraordinary parade of Athenians and Athenian life in full array, if we are to judge from the bas relief that girdles the Parthenon. Almost every month, Athenians witnessed or participated in a variety of rituals, contests (athletic, musical, poetic, and choral), or celebrations to honor deities, historic events, great personages, victors in Panhellenic festivals such as the Olympics or the fallen of past and recent battles. Religion and civic loyalty blended the great variety of personal and social interests within the body politic into an underlying commonality of outlook that, if it did not remove serious conflicts, rarely reached such desperate levels that they could efface the democracy from within. Ultimately, it was to be Macedonian rule that brought the democracy to its definitive end, not the Athenians. For all its shortcomings, the democracy in various forms persisted through nearly two of the most stormy centuries of the ancient world and, at its height, exhibited a degree of cultural and intellectual creativity that has no peer in western history.
Perhaps the most important of the Athenian festivals was a comparatively new one: the City Dionysia. Even more than the Greater Panathenaia, when all of Athens went on display with a large tapestry (the pelops) that depicted the triumph of Olympian "reason'' over the chthonic rule of "force," the City Dionysia was strongly democratic in its focus. It was then, for three out of a span of six days that overlapped March and April, that Athenians could witness the great dramatic tragedies that gave the democracy its ideological meaning. By the thousands, Athenians flocked to the Theater of Dionysus on the southeast slope of the Acropolis to see the plays of Aeskylos, Sophokles, Euripides, and others who literally created serious drama in western culture. Under the clear skies of a high Mediterranean spring, they watched with absorption the Aeskylean drama of their own polis and its human antecedents unfold with a majesty that may have verged on reverence – certainly a thrilling sense of exaltation… Aeskylos's trilogy, the Oresteia, advanced a powerful validation of the democracy that, in its emotional and declaratory power, may even exceed the funeral oration of Perikles – a trilogy that was constantly replayed and kept winning prizes at the City Dionysia long after the author's death.
Its story has been told and interpreted repeatedly... Let it suffice to say that the murder of Agamemnon, the returning chief of the besiegers of Troy, by his wife, Klytemnestra, followed by her own death at the hands of her vengeful son, Orestes, opens the whole drama of Athens's transformation from a quasi-tribal society, rooted in kinship rules, custom, and chthonic deities, into a political community – a polis – based on residence, reason, and the anthropomorphic Olympians. It is Athene who, in a challenging statement against the Erinyes (the three female guardians of "matriarchal" blood ties and tribal retribution for the murder of one's kin), solemnly declares:
“It is my task to render final judgement here.
This is a ballot for Orestes I shall cast.
There is no mother anywhere who gave me birth,
and, but for marriage, I am always for the male
with all my heart, and strongly on my father's side.
So, in a case where the wife has killed her husband, lord of the
house, her death shall not mean most to me. And if the other votes
are even, then Orestes wins.”
After being pursued by the Erinyes for committing a blood crime more damning than a marital one – and particularly against his mother from whom early tribal descent may have been traced – Orestes is absolved and the Erinyes reconciled by acquiring a civic status as Eumenides, the kindly ones who look after the well-being of the Athenian polis.
The trilogy has many levels of meaning, probably all of which had a gripping effect on the audience that knew Aeskylos personally or, in later years, by reputation. The Eumenides, the last drama of the trilogy, celebrates the victory of civic law and rationality over tribal custom and unthinking mimesis. Athene, born of Zeus's head, embodies logos and justice. In a strongly patriarchal society that saw male rationality as the sole bulwark to dark chaos and an uncertain, untamed world, it was not difficult to identify "fickle" woman with nature and the polis as the sole realm of freedom and law. Orestes' trial, which marks the culmination of the trilogy, is presented as a new dispensation in the affairs of men. The Erinyes unrelentingly pursue any homicidal perpetrator of the blood tie. All that counts with them is the act of murder of one's kin, not the circumstances or motive that produced it. To the Athenians, this behavior was evidence of unreasoning tribalism, of an irrationality that precluded any civic union based on discourse, logic, and orderly compromise. Recourse to trial rather than ordeal, to the weighing of circumstantial evidence, motive, and logical judgement rather than mere action and contests of fortitude, marked the first step toward a political koinonia – the city as a polis.
To the Athenian audience, which believed Athens was the first city to establish a system of laws, the trial of Orestes was a founding act. Athens's decision to try homicide by a judicial process literally created the polis as an ethical union based on justice. "If it please you, men of Attica," intoned Athene, the patroness of the polis, "hear my decree now, on this first case of bloodletting I have judged. For Aegeus' population, this forevermore shall be the ground [the Hill of Ares] where justices deliberate .... No anarchy, no rule of a single master .... I establish this tribunal. It shall be untouched by moneymaking, grave but quick to wrath, watchful to protect those who sleep, a sentry on the land." Henceforth, justice, not tradition; reason, not custom; fact, not ordeal; motive, not myth are to guide the men of Attica, for without this new dispensation, the polis has no ethical meaning, nor does the democracy have an ethical rationale.
It is easy to see in Aeskylos not only the clearest voice of the polis, of a body politic free of arbitrary rule, but also of the democracy… To the Athenians, who apparently revered Aeskylos, the Oresteia unfolds the emergence of justice from a hazy "dark" world of tribal antiquity and its fortunes in the arbitrary domain of warriors, nobles, and the genoi, into the clear light of the polis and its orderly citizenry. The identification of the audience with the drama must have been intensely personal; it was the authentic protagonist of the play. Of Aeskylos's remaining dramas, Prometheus Bound arrests us to this very day with its message of heroic defiance against unfeeling authority and its expansive belief in humanity's sense of promise, indeed its capacity to advance toward an ever-wider horizon of intellect and wisdom. […]
To the Hellenic citizen of a polis, leaving all its mythic origins aside, the [modern] monad would have seemed as pre-human as the folk community seemed pre-political. Individuality meant citizenship. And, ideally, citizenship meant the personal wholeness that came from deep roots in tradition, a complexity of social bonds, richly articulated civic relationships, shared festivals, philia, freedom from clientage and freedom for collective self-determination through institutions that fostered the full participation and everyday practice of a creative body politic. To be such a citizen, one had to live in a polis – a city that possessed an agora, a space to convene general assemblies of the people, a theater to dramatize the reality and ideology of freedom, and the ceremonial squares, avenues, and temples that gave it reverential meaning. To remove any of these elements that made up this whole was to instantly destroy it. Without every one of them, cultivated on a daily basis by the paideia of citizenship and guided by an unerring concept of arete, the Athenian ideal of citizenship fell apart and its institutions became hollow forms. […]
The polis was no less a theater for the practice of virtue than the orchestra at the foot of the Acropolis was a home for the performance of the plays it watched. And the citizen was no less an actor in a great civic drama than the men who performed for him with masks in the City Dionysus. In both cases, the plot we call the history of Athens incorporated the layered traditions that formed its cultural biography and ideology. So central was the citizen to this plot with his "freedom for" as well as his "freedom from," that the histories of the time, when they refer to Attica, speak more commonly of "the Athenians" than they do of "Athens." Unerringly, they reveal that Athens was no mere collection of structures, no simple geographic locale, that any aggregate of people could occupy without the polis losing its authenticity. Admittedly, the city outlived the polis, and the democracy in a formal sense outlived the citizens. Democratic institutions persisted in a truncated form long after Athens's final defeat by the Macedonians at Krannon in 322 B.C. No city was a polis, in Aristotle's view, unless it had an agora; but, needless, to say, no agora could have produced a democracy unless it had the kind of citizen the historians of that day called "the Athenians."
