Download or read book The Athenian Republic written by Raphael Sealey and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 1990-09-24 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book traces continuity in the development of the Athenian constitution, whereas previous studies have usually looked for catastrophic changes. Sealey selects three features of Athenian law which are important for the structure of society and the location of authority: (1) the legal status, and to a lesser extent the socioeconomic condition, of the different kinds of inhabitants of Attica; (2) the distinction, recognized in the fourth century, between "laws" and "decrees," analyzing what the Athians understood by "law"; and (3) the development of the Athenian courts. At an early stage the Athenians conceived the ideal of the rule of law and adhered to it continuously. They did so by means of a static concept of law and maintenance of an independent judiciary. The book is designed to be of importance not only for specialists in classical studies but for general historians, political scientists, and those concerned with the history of law. The book is within the reach of an advanced undergraduate and graduate audience.

Download or read book The Athenian Republic written by Raphael Sealey and published by Penn State University Press. This book was released on 1987 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book traces continuity in the development of the Athenian constitution, whereas previous studies have usually looked for catastrophic changes. Sealey selects three features of Athenian law which are important for the structure of society and the location of authority: (1) the legal status, and to a lesser extent the socioeconomic condition, of the different kinds of inhabitants of Attica; (2) the distinction, recognized in the fourth century, between "laws" and "decrees," analyzing what the Athians understood by "law"; and (3) the development of the Athenian courts. At an early stage the Athenians conceived the ideal of the rule of law and adhered to it continuously. They did so by means of a static concept of law and maintenance of an independent judiciary. The book is designed to be of importance not only for specialists in classical studies but for general historians, political scientists, and those concerned with the history of law. The book is within the reach of an advanced undergraduate and graduate audience.

Download or read book Democracies and Republics Between Past and Future written by Carlo Pelloso and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2021-03-30 with total page 122 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Democracies and Republics Between Past and Future focuses on the concepts of direct rule by the people in early and classical Athens and the tribunician negative power in early republican Rome – and through this lens explores current political issues in our society. This volume guides readers through the current constitutional systems in the Western world in an attempt to decipher the reasons and extent of the decline of the nexus between ‘elections’ and ‘democracy’; it then turns its gaze to the past in search of some answers for the future, examining early and classical Athens and, finally, early republican Rome. In discussing Athens, it explores how an authentic ‘power of the people’ is more than voting and something rather different from representation, while the examples of Rome demonstrate – thanks to the paradigm of the so-called tribunician power – the importance of institutionalised mechanisms of dialogic conflict between competing powers. This book will be of primary interest to scholars of legal history, both recent and ancient, and to classicists, but also to the more general reader with an interest in politics and history.

Download or read book Democracy s Slaves written by Paulin Ismard and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Challenging the modern belief that democracy and bondage are incompatible, Paulin Ismard directs our attention to ancient Athens, where the functioning of civic government depended on skilled, knowledgeable experts who were literally public servants—slaves owned by the city-state rather than by private citizens.

Download or read book Democracy and Knowledge written by Josiah Ober and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2008-09-15 with total page 363 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When does democracy work well, and why? Is democracy the best form of government? These questions are of supreme importance today as the United States seeks to promote its democratic values abroad. Democracy and Knowledge is the first book to look to ancient Athens to explain how and why directly democratic government by the people produces wealth, power, and security. Combining a history of Athens with contemporary theories of collective action and rational choice developed by economists and political scientists, Josiah Ober examines Athenian democracy's unique contribution to the ancient Greek city-state's remarkable success, and demonstrates the valuable lessons Athenian political practices hold for us today. He argues that the key to Athens's success lay in how the city-state managed and organized the aggregation and distribution of knowledge among its citizens. Ober explores the institutional contexts of democratic knowledge management, including the use of social networks for collecting information, publicity for building common knowledge, and open access for lowering transaction costs. He explains why a government's attempt to dam the flow of information makes democracy stumble. Democratic participation and deliberation consume state resources and social energy. Yet as Ober shows, the benefits of a well-designed democracy far outweigh its costs. Understanding how democracy can lead to prosperity and security is among the most pressing political challenges of modern times. Democracy and Knowledge reveals how ancient Greek politics can help us transcend the democratic dilemmas that confront the world today.

Download or read book A Companion to Greek Democracy and the Roman Republic written by Dean Hammer and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2014-11-17 with total page 565 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Companion to Greek Democracy and the Roman Republic offers a comparative approach to examining ancient Greek and Roman participatory communities. Explores various aspects of participatory communities through pairs of chapters—one Greek, one Roman—to highlight comparisons between cultures Examines the types of relationships that sustained participatory communities, the challenges they faced, and how they responded Sheds new light on participatory contexts using diverse methodological approaches Brings an international array of scholars into dialogue with each other

Download or read book Democracy s Beginning written by Thomas N. Mitchell and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2015-10-15 with total page 375 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A history of the world’s first democracy from its beginnings in Athens circa fifth century B.C. to its downfall 200 years later. The first democracy, established in ancient Greece more than 2,500 years ago, has served as the foundation for every democratic system of government instituted down the centuries. In this lively history, author Thomas N. Mitchell tells the full and remarkable story of how a radical new political order was born out of the revolutionary movements that swept through the Greek world in the seventh and sixth centuries B.C., how it took firm hold and evolved over the next two hundred years, and how it was eventually undone by the invading Macedonian conquerors, a superior military power. Mitchell’s history addresses the most crucial issues surrounding this first paradigm of democratic governance, including what initially inspired the political beliefs underpinning it, the ways the system succeeded and failed, how it enabled both an empire and a cultural revolution that transformed the world of arts and philosophy, and the nature of the Achilles heel that hastened the demise of Athenian democracy. “A clear, lively, and instructive account…. [Mitchell] has mastered the latest scholarship in the field and put it to good use in interpreting the ancient sources and demonstrating its character and importance in shaping democratic thought and institutions throughout the millennia.”—Donald Kagan, author of The Peloponnesian War “[Mitchell’s] close scholarship shines in documenting the transition of Athens from financially and morally bankrupt oligarchy to emancipated democracy 2,500 years ago…with a commendable attention to detail that beautifully captures the essence of ancient Greek culture and politics.”—Roslyn Fuller, Irish Times

Download or read book Democracy beyond Athens written by Eric W. Robinson and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2011-09-22 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What was ancient democracy like? Why did it spread in ancient Greece? An astonishing number of volumes have been devoted to the well-attested Athenian case, while non-Athenian democracy - for which evidence is harder to come by - has received only fleeting attention. Nevertheless, there exists a scattered body of ancient material regarding democracy beyond Athens, from ancient literary authors and epigraphic documents to archaeological evidence, out of which one can build an understanding of the phenomenon. This book presents a detailed study of ancient Greek democracy in the Classical period (480–323 BC), focusing on examples outside Athens. It has three main goals: to identify where and when democratic governments established themselves in ancient Greek city-states; to explain why democracy spread to many parts of Greece in this period; and to further our understanding of the nature of ancient democracy by studying its practices beyond Athens.

Download or read book Athens Victorious written by Greg Recco and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2008-01-17 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Plato's Republic is typically thought to recommend a form of government that, from our current perspective, seems perniciously totalitarian. Athens Victorious demonstrates that Plato intended quite the opposite: to demonstrate the superiority of a democratic constitution. Greg Recco provides a brilliant rereading of Book Eight. Often considered an anticlimax, Book Eight seems to be a mere catalogue of mistakes but is in fact one of Plato's most neglected literary creations: a mythic or epic restaging of the Peloponnesian War that pitted Sparta's militaristic oligarchy against Athens' democracy. In Plato's reenactment, Athens wins. Recco argues that the values identified in Book Eight as distinctively democratic were the very ones that served as the unannounced touchstones of moral and political judgment throughout the dialogue.Athens Victorious is an important reinterpretation ofThe Republic. It is an excellent resource for students and scholars of Classical Studies, Philosophy, and Political Theory.

Download or read book The Perpetual Immigrant and the Limits of Athenian Democracy written by Demetra Kasimis and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-08-16 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Argues that immigration politics is a central - but overlooked - object of inquiry in the democratic thought of classical Athens. Thinkers criticized democracy's strategic investments in nativism, the shifting boundaries of citizenship, and the precarious membership that a blood-based order effects for those eligible and ineligible to claim it.

Download or read book Democracies and Republics Between Past and Future written by Carlo Pelloso and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-03-30 with total page 106 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Democracies and Republics Between Past and Future focuses on the concepts of direct rule by the people in early and classical Athens and the tribunician negative power in early republican Rome – and through this lens explores current political issues in our society. This volume guides readers through the current constitutional systems in the Western world in an attempt to decipher the reasons and extent of the decline of the nexus between ‘elections’ and ‘democracy’; it then turns its gaze to the past in search of some answers for the future, examining early and classical Athens and, finally, early republican Rome. In discussing Athens, it explores how an authentic ‘power of the people’ is more than voting and something rather different from representation, while the examples of Rome demonstrate – thanks to the paradigm of the so-called tribunician power – the importance of institutionalised mechanisms of dialogic conflict between competing powers. This book will be of primary interest to scholars of legal history, both recent and ancient, and to classicists, but also to the more general reader with an interest in politics and history.

Download or read book The Athenian Revolution written by Josiah Ober and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2020-09-01 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Where did "democracy" come from, and what was its original form and meaning? Here Josiah Ober shows that this "power of the people" crystallized in a revolutionary uprising by the ordinary citizens of Athens in 508-507 B.C. He then examines the consequences of the development of direct democracy for upper-and lower-class citizens, for dissident Athenian intellectuals, and for those who were denied citizenship under the new regime (women, slaves, resident foreigners), as well as for the general development of Greek history. When the citizens suddenly took power into their own hands, they changed the cultural and social landscape of Greece, thereby helping to inaugurate the Classical Era. Democracy led to fundamental adjustments in the basic structures of Athenian society, altered the forms and direction of political thinking, and sparked a series of dramatic reorientations in international relations. It quickly made Athens into the most powerful Greek city-state, but it also fatally undermined the traditional Greek rules of warfare. It stimulated the development of the Western tradition of political theorizing and encouraged a new conception of justice that has striking parallels to contemporary theories of rights. But Athenians never embraced the notions of inherency and inalienability that have placed the concept of rights at the center of modern political thought. Thus the play of power that constituted life in democratic Athens is revealed as at once strangely familiar and desperately foreign, and the values sustaining the Athenian political community as simultaneously admirable and terrifying.

Download or read book Athenian Democracy written by Charles River Charles River Editors and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2017-10-17 with total page 78 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: *Includes pictures *Includes ancient accounts of Athenian democracy by Aristotle, Plutarch, and others *Includes footnotes, online resources and a bibliography for further reading *Includes a table of contents In today's modern world every political regime, even the most authoritarian or repressive, describes itself as democracy or a Democratic People's Republic. The concept of rule by the people, on behalf of the people, has come to be accepted as the norm, and very few would overtly espouse the cause of dictatorship, absolute monarchy or oligarchy as the most desirable political system upon which to base the government of any country. It is also generally accepted that democracy, as a political ideology, began in Greece, specifically in Athens, in the 7th century B.C. and reached its zenith in the 5th century under the leadership of Pericles. Dating an exact starting point is impossible, but at the beginning of the 7th century B.C. Solon inaugurated a series of reforms that began the movement away from rule by individuals, or tyrants, and by the end of that century the reforms of Cleisthenes provided the basis of the Athenian democratic system that culminated in the radical institutions introduced by Ephialtes and Pericles in the 5th century. The result was the first, and possibly only, truly participative democratic state. Of course, not every inhabitant of Athens enjoyed the right to vote. Only full citizens could do that, and they represented approximately 30% of Athens's male population, numbering between 30,000 and 60,000 during Athens' Golden Age and declining rapidly throughout the Peoloponnesian War. The remainder was made up of metics and slaves, who vastly outnumbered free citizens and, indeed, almost all other slave populations in Hellas, a fact which the Athenians often conveniently chose to forget when singing the praises of their democracy. There is a very strong indication that foreign chattel slaves were an utter necessity to Athens' economy, and though they did not serve as fleet rowers as they would have done in Rome, they still carried out the myriad of unpleasant and demeaning jobs which allowed Athenian citizens the free time to actively participate in the city's politics. In many ways, without slaves, there would have been no democracy in Athens. Women also had vastly inferior rights in Athens than those of many other poleis (chiefly Sparta), and were virtually regarded as the property of their fathers, brothers and husbands. Women enjoyed no political rights and precious few legal ones, they were forced into arranged marriages at an extremely young age, and they were even fed differently from their brothers while growing up, leading to an average mortality age that was extremely lower than that of men of comparable social class. Ironically, between 322 B.C. and the 19th century, Athenian democracy was almost totally forgotten. If there was any mention of democracy in Athens at all, it was in reference to so-called but largely mythical notions of Solonian democracy as recorded in Plutarch's Life of Solon or Aristotle's Politics. At the beginning of the 19th century, scholars such as August Boeckh began the evaluation and study of democratic Athenian institutions, and inscriptions and the writings of Thucydides and Demosthenes, among others, were used to re-construct those democratic bodies and to gain an understanding of their workings. Later in the century, academics, particularly George Grote, provided new insights into the Athenian democratic processes, and today there is a much fuller understanding of what contributed to Athenian political life. That said, the questions of how and why Athens came to develop the political system it did remain a major area of academic contention. Athenian Democracy: The History of the World's First Democracy in Ancient Athens looks at the history of the democratic government Athens formed, as well as its legacy.

Download or read book Athenian Democracy at War written by David M. Pritchard and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2018-11-29 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Studies all four branches of the Athenian armed forces to show how they helped make democratic Athens a superpower.

Download or read book What s Wrong with Democracy written by Loren J. Samons and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2007-04-23 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This is unlike any recent work I know of. It offers a challenging, often refreshing, and what will certainly be a controversial assessment of classical Athenian democracy and its significance to modern America. Samons is willing to tread where few other classicists are willing to go in print. He reminds readers that the Athenian democracy offers just as many negative lessons as positive ones, and topics like the popular vote, the dangers of state payments to individual citizens, the naturally acquisitive foreign policy of democratic governments, and the place of religion in democracy all come up for discussion and criticism. Samons has written an original and very provocative book."—James Sickinger, author of Public Records and Archives in Classical Athens "Professor Samons' lively and challenging account of ancient Athens raises important questions about democracy, ancient and modern. It will surely arouse keen interest and debate."—Donald Kagan, author of The Peloponnesian War "In this elegantly written, carefully researched, and perceptive book, Samons presents a penetrating analysis of ancient Athenian democracy's dark sides. His book is as much about the errors and weaknesses of our own political system as it is about those of ancient Athens. Whether or not we agree with his critique and conclusions, this book is not merely thought-provoking: it is annoyingly discomforting, forcing us to re-examine firm beliefs and to discard easy solutions."—Kurt A. Raaflaub, author of Discovery of Freedom in Ancient Greece "In this marvelously unfashionable book, Samons debunks much of what passes in the current-day academy as scholarship on classical Athens, demonstrating that it is an ideologically-driven apology for a radically defective form of government. In the process, he casts light on the perspicacity of America's founding fathers and on the unthinking populism that threatens in our own day to ruin their legacy."—Paul A. Rahe, author of Republics Ancient and Modern: Classical Republicanism and the American Revolution "We are in the greatest age of democracy since antiquity and in the most need of guidance about the wisdom of government by majority vote. Precisely for that reason Professor Samons offers a bold and unbridled look at the nature and history of democracies, ancient and modern. He reminds us that we are capable of doing as much evil as good when constitutional protections and republican oversight are not there to moderate the instant desires of the majority. This is an engaging, provocative, and timely study of ancient Athens and modern America that should serve as a cautionary reminder to both romantic scholars and zealous diplomats."—Victor Davis Hanson, author of The Other Greeks

Download or read book Ancient Greek Democracy written by Eric W. Robinson and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2008-04-15 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book invites readers to join in a fresh and extensive investigation of one of Ancient Greece’s greatest inventions: democratic government. Provides an accessible, up-to-date survey of vital issues in Greek democracy. Covers democracy’s origins, growth and essential nature. Raises questions of continuing interest. Combines ancient texts in translation and recent scholarly articles. Invites the reader into a process of historical investigation. Contains maps, a glossary and an index.

Download or read book From Democrats to Kings written by Michael Scott and published by Abrams. This book was released on 2010-09-16 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A popular history of how the ancient world turned from a democracy to a monarchy and “shine[s] a light on the culture that bloomed as Athens faded.”(The Daily Mail) Athens, 404 BC. The Democratic city-state has been ravaged by a long and bloody war with neighboring Sparta. The search for scapegoats begins and Athens, liberty's beacon in the ancient world, turns its sword on its own way of life. Civil war and much bloodshed ensue. Defining moments of Greek history, culture, politics, religion and identity are debated ferociously in Athenian board rooms, back streets and battlefields. By 323 BC, Athens and the rest of Greece, not to mention a large part of the known world, has come under the control of an absolute monarch and a model for despots for millennia to come: Alexander the Great. In this superb popular history, Michael Scott explores the dramatic and little-known story of how the ancient world went from democracy to monarchy in less than 100 years. A superb example of popular history writing, From Democrats to Kings gives us a fresh take on the challenges we face today as democracies—old and new—fight for survival, in which war-time and peace-time have become indistinguishable and in which the severity of the economic crisis is only matched by a crisis in our own sense of self. “Accessible and punchy . . . a wide readership cannot fail to be entertained as well as instructed about a world that is both familiar and alien, modern as well as ancient.” —Paul Cartledge, author of Thermopylae “Gloriously entertaining and provocative.” —Tom Holland, author of Rubicon, Persian Fire