Josiah Ober is a Professor of Political Science and Classics at Stanford University. Federica Carugati is a Lecturer in History and Political Economy at King’s College London. They are the coauthors of the chapter “Democratic Collapse and Recovery in Ancient Athens (413-403 BCE)” in a new book called When Democracy Breaks: Studies in Democratic Erosion and Collapse, From Ancient Athens to the Present Day.
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What strikes me about that period is that democracy was not inevitable.
Key Highlights
- Introduction – 0:20
- Democratization – 3:28
- Breakdown – 17:36
- Rebirth – 36:48
- Final Lessons – 47:51
Podcast Transcript
When democracy breaks, does it disappear or does it recover? This is a question on the mind of many during this period of democratic recession. It’s also unclear whether there are any longterm effects. Does democratic breakdown leave scars or permanent wounds or does the experience lead to a more resilient democracy?
Today’s episode takes us back to the first well documented case of democratic breakdown. I talk to Josiah Ober and Federica Carugati about democracy in Ancient Athens. We reflect on the rise of democracy in Athens and the causes of its collapse. But what makes Athens remarkable is its recovery. It reestablished a more resilient form of democracy that lasted another 80 years. Its experience offers important lessons for today.
Josiah Ober is a Professor of Political Science and Classics at Stanford University. He’s a returning guest on the podcast from an episode this past December. Federica Carugati is a Lecturer in History and Political Economy at King’s College London. They are the coauthors of the chapter “Democratic Collapse and Recovery in Ancient Athens (413-403 BCE)” in a new book called When Democracy Breaks: Studies in Democratic Erosion and Collapse, From Ancient Athens to the Present Day.
This is the first of four episodes on When Democracy Break. It features contributions from a number of the leading scholars on democracy. The book is available open access at tobinproject.org. A link is provided in the shownotes.
This episode is produced with the support of the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at the Harvard Kennedy School. The Ash Center produces remarkable work from some of the world’s most renowned scholars. You can learn more at ash.harvard.edu.
The podcast also has many sponsors including the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Their Democracy, Conflict, and Governance Program is a leading source of research and ideas about supporting democracy globally. You can learn more at ceip.org/programs/democracy.
The podcast is also sponsored by the Kellogg Institute for International Studies, part of the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame. The Kellogg Institute was founded by Guillermo O’Donnell, one of the giants of democratic thought, more than 40 years ago. It continues to sponsor research on democracy and human development. Check them out at Kellogg.nd.edu. You’ll find a link in the show notes to their website. If you’re interested in becoming a sponsor of the podcast, please send me an email to [email protected].
But for now… This is my conversation with Josiah Ober and Federica Carugati…
jmk
Josh Ober and Federica Carugati, welcome to the Democracy Paradox.
Josiah Ober
Federica Carugati
jmk
Well, Federica and Josh, I really love this chapter. I thought this was a really important chapter for the book because we spend so much time talking about democratic breakdown and democratic collapse within the modern world, within modern settings, but democracy is much older. It has existed in premodern settings, and I think it’s really important to be able to study those to get the full scope of what democracy is, what it means to have democracy, and reasons for it to break down. I think it gives us lessons for the modern era that we can gather from ancient sources, ancient episodes of democracy. So, I loved reading your chapter, it was called “Democratic Collapse and Recovery in Ancient Athens”, part of the When Democracy Breaks: Studies in Democratic Erosion and Collapse from Ancient Athens to the Present Day.
So, the big question that I always have in my mind when I think of Ancient Athens is that it’s really the first major episode that we see of democracy in the world that really feels documented. But I always think of it as something that’s fully formed. I think of it in terms of the era of Socrates and Pericles and Plato. I don’t normally think about its origin. Can you help us understand, not just its origin, but why Athens decided to become a democracy? Why did it adopt democracy in the first place?
Josiah Ober
We really have to go all the way back to the collapse of the Bronze Age civilization around 1100 BCE, because the Greek world didn’t always have anything that was at all like democracy. As we go back to the Bronze Age era, the Greek world looks like miniature versions of the great civilizations of the Middle East and Egypt: palace structure, centralized taxation systems and so on. But it’s gone by about 1000 BCE and, at that point, the structure of these centralized palace hierarchies also disappeared. Writing disappeared from the Greek world because it was being used as an administrative language. So, in that period, the Greek world entered into the possibility of doing something new.
We don’t know nearly as much as we’d like to know about the so-called Dark Age or Early Iron Age period from about 1000 to 750 BC when we get the emergence of writing once again, the Homeric epics and so on. But clearly something had happened such that the reemergence of order in the Greek world in these what become city states is not in the same way a centralized hierarchy all the way up to a king form of social order. It seems to be more open, at least in some parts of the Greek world, and that opens up the possibility for a really robust citizen centered form of government.
Athens takes that the furthest. It takes that chance of non-hierarchy to a form of highly institutionalized set of really worked out social norms of behavior that give us what you were talking about to sort of full-blown democracy in the age of Socrates, say, or Plato or Aristotle. But it was a long development up to that point, and it didn’t have to happen. It probably didn’t have to happen at Athens. A whole series of things had to develop out of that possibility of a non-hierarchical development.
Federica Carugati
I think the other bit to add is that democracy arises, from what we can tell, which is probably very limited, not from a bottom up contractual, people-led desire for equality and participation. It emerges, again, as far as we can tell, from elite dynamics which also makes Athens less of an outlier in terms of thinking about the emergence of democracy elsewhere and in other periods of time. So, it is a story of, in some respects, elite infighting and elite pacts that at some point turn towards a mobilization of the people.
Again, as far as the evidence takes us, this is led by a particular figure that emerges from the sources that anyone who has sort of taken classes in Greek history knows well and what we learn if we follow that account is that in some respects, perhaps because of the threat of a military opponent, perhaps for other reasons, perhaps because of economic reasons, perhaps because of other constraints, the process of elite infighting for the first time opens up the opportunity for the people to begin to claim some rights.
These are rights of political participation for the upper classes, gain, certainly not people-led. That is the early reforms associated with classes in particular open up the space for further reforms that make the democracy more and more robust. Again, we’re talking about Athens, of course, which is again where I think we see the evidence being more robust and leading us, of course, to write articles about it as opposed to other Greek poleis.
jmk
Now, Athens wasn’t the only democracy in the Greek world. There were other democracies that existed. Obviously, there’s other autocracies. Sparta is the most famous government that is more authoritarian. How did Athens differ from some of the other democracies that existed in the classical world? What made it unique? What made it special?
Josiah Ober
Athens is really big for a Greek city state. Now keep in mind, all city states are very small compared to modern nation states, but Athens is probably the largest of the Greek city states with a total population at its maximum of perhaps 300,000 people, total citizen body at a maximum 50,000. That’s adult male native citizens. So, this is really at an order of magnitude larger than most Greek city states, potentially two orders of magnitude larger than the smaller Greek city states. There are a few other big ones, like Syracuse, that eventually does become democratic, at least for a while. Argos, another democratic city state, is quite large, but not nearly as large as Athens. Athens also was an early mover in terms of military operations at sea and military operations at scale at sea.
So, Athens became a major sea power fairly shortly after the consolidation of the democracy in the end of the 6th century BCE. With that sea power, Athens eventually after the Persian Wars, became an imperial power and was able to then bring a great number of other city states into its ambit and became very wealthy as a result. Control of the seas led to control of an empire. So, Athens became a democratic empire, which became a real center for Greeks from around the world. So, in all of these ways, Athens had certain features that other Greek democracies didn’t have.
jmk
But when we think of Athens compared to other Greek democracies, did the other democracies have the same type of institutions? Did the other Greek democracies copy what Athens was doing or were they influenced by each other? I mean, I can’t imagine that all of this is happening in a vacuum where each city state establishes institutions completely independent of each other. I would think that they’re probably borrowing different aspects from one another. Are there key differences in the actual institutional framework between them or are they very similar because they’re coming up with ideas together, borrowing ideas from each other?
Federica Carugati
So, we know a little about the process of diffusion, but we can’t really trace what’s going on. Still, we definitely see a process of diffusion in the sense that democracy becomes more popular as a form of government as the classical period rolls on. Nonetheless, we don’t have a window into the processes that enable the city states to borrow or to share expertise and information about governance. But we definitely see a sort of convergence towards a model and if you look at Eric Robinson’s book from 2011 on Democracy Beyond Athens, he clearly recognizes a model, a pattern, of Asian-Greek democracy that essentially revolves around the big four democratic institutions that we see emerging in Athens with popular courts, the popular assembly, usually an agenda setting council.
But then it is very difficult to tell within each institution what variation there might’ve been across city states. This is a tremendous loss because I think that the very history of Athens would benefit tremendously from knowing more about how other city states borrowed and adapted, or maybe developed different types of mechanisms that regulated the actual day to day governing in these institutions.
Josiah Ober
One example is the institution of ostracism at Athens, which seems to work pretty well for some time. It certainly doesn’t go off the rails, at least until the late fifth century. It works very differently at Syracuse where they have a similar institution, but they tweak it in ways that causes it to go off the rails very quickly. It becomes a destabilizing institution instead of a stabilizing institution. We can see these kinds of similarities and differences. Why did Syracuse adopt its form of ostracism? Because they learned it from Athens? Maybe, but we don’t know for sure. Why did they do it differently in terms of the details that caused it to ultimately go off the rails? We don’t know that either.
jmk
I guess I’m less interested in how the different democracies learn from each other thn in the bigger question of why Athenian democracy lasted so long, because I think it’s really remarkable how long Athenian democracy lasted, even with the interruptions that we’re going to get to in a moment. It has a remarkably long track record especially for a democracy that exists in the premodern era. So, can you give us a little bit of a better idea of what the institutions were that allowed for that stability for it to survive as long as it did?
Federica Carugati
Survival and stability are two somewhat different questions and I think there have been informed speculation, so to speak, about the survival of the fifth century democracy. This goes all the way back to Moses Finley’s idea that in some respects the stability and the survival of the fifth century democracy depended in large part on the empire that Josh was talking about earlier. So, in some respects, a level of economic prosperity that lifted all boats made, particularly those in Athens that may have preferred a different form of government, content with the status quo, so to speak, insofar as the survival of the fourth century democracy is concerned.
The striking thing is that the economic basis of the democracy changed dramatically if nothing else, because the empire is no longer in existence. So, the question of how, in fact, the democracy not only survives the collapse, but reconstructs itself on a fundamentally different economic basis is, I think, something else that the case of Athens can shed light on in terms of lessons that perhaps other cases don’t.
Josiah Ober
Part of the answer I think has got to be, as Federica says, the economic background. It’s essential, but there also is institutional design. The Athenians get some early institutions that either through luck or genius or some good tweaking in the early period turn out to be really quite robust and are used throughout the democratic period. Federica mentioned the courts, the assembly, the council, and the system of magistrates. Those stay pretty much the same. Substantial changes in the law and the use of law, and Frederica’s done fundamental work on that, but the procedure of the law courts themselves remain quite similar. So, they get some good institutions that they get used to. They learn how to use their institutions pretty well and they turn out to be pretty robust or at least worthy of reinstituting after they collapse.
The other question, and this is always a difficult one to put your finger on, but it’s the background culture of democracy, the norms of behavior, such that, around here, we ‘fill in the blank’, and at least some of that ‘fill in the blank’ was act as democratic citizens rather than move immediately to a civil war of mutual hatred and extermination. Now, that was a possibility. It flared up, but there seemed to have been at least some background cultural norm that was available to be reinstituted to pull Athens out of the collapse period.
jmk
So, Josh, I loved how you emphasize that Athens had very strong institutions that was able to hold its democracy together for such a long time. I think it’s a really important point to make early on in this conversation as we transition now to talk about some of the breakdowns that happened within Athenian democracy. Now you highlight two different episodes of democratic breakdown that both happened during the Peloponnesian War.
The reason why it’s key to remember that they did have strong institutions is that you guys bring up an insight that I did not recognize: the idea that there were institutional flaws within those institutions that no matter how strong they were, there were still some issues with the institutions that existed. I had always just thought that it was the stress of war that broke down Athenian democracy. That was the easy answer. Can you kind of talk a little bit about the episodes about how institutional flaws actually led to democratic breakdowns during the Peloponnesian War?
Federica Carugati
I think that the story we tried to tell in the chapter is somehow the following. At some point under the stress of war, things begin not to look as good as they used to and when we try to reconstruct the causes of that instability, the story of the collapse is relatively simple and we don’t need to get into Greek terms and extremely complicated dynamics to simply make the point that democracy collapses twice in the span of about six years. It is once reestablished essentially as it was before and the second time it gets reestablished with fundamental changes of the constitutional order. What those changes reveal, doing some work of reverse engineering, is what we have come to associate in the article as one of the fundamental flaws of its early democratic design.
Again, coming out of a period of elite infighting and needing to shore up the power of the people, the power of the actual demos against powerful economically and politically factions. The early democracy emerged as fundamentally guided by the assembly, an assembly in which people participate on a first come, first serve basis with relatively few constitutional constraints on what happens once the assembly ends. We see those decisions through the eyes of Thucydides in large part. We see that system of decision making coming under immense strain as the Peloponnesian War continues to rage. There are these moments in Thucydides where we see the assembly, of course, according to Thucydides, making increasingly bad decisions.
So, what we see as a fundamental institutional flaw is actually a lack of check on the assembly when and if subject to a particularly intense pressure to revise its decisions. Those institutions are simply absent early on. Throughout the fifth century, the assembly does not have a system to check itself. There is no other institution that can perform a checking and balancing function as we will call it today. So, as the war continues and Athens begins to suffer from significant demographic, economic challenges, it is not difficult for the elites to realize that this assembly that doesn’t have constitutional checks can decide several things about how to extract revenue from the elite. So, the social contract that has essentially shored up the decision-making process in times of prosperity begins to come under significant pressure.
As the economic basis of that particular type of institutional setup collapses, the elites begin to agitate ever more for constitutional change. That is in fact what we see in the sources with particular episodes that suggest that there is a fundamental faction in Athens that is very much interested in limiting the franchise in order to prevent that social contract from falling apart.
Josiah Ober
So, I think that really is the core issue, as she says, reverse engineering from the corrections that are made in the 4th century, which allows Athens to come back. We can really see that it was the fact that, for example, a very skilled orator could come before the assembly and convince them to do foolish things. Once the assembly had voted to do that foolish thing, that was it. That was Athenian law. That was carried out without any review.
There was really no way to stop a bad decision. There was no way to go back to revise that decision, except call another assembly, which required that same people or a lot of the same people, who had just chosen to do X, then two days later, choose to do not X. You start doing that too often and you have policy chaos. So, this really was a pretty serious flaw under the pressure of military conflict.
jmk
There’s a line in the book that, I think, brings this problem to light. You guys write, “The Athenian democracy in the fifth century BCE lacked the capacity to credibly commit itself to a future course of action. That is the assembly was unable to convince relevant agents that it would keep promises made via legislation.” I think that line really stresses the way that this issue about the assembly having just unchecked power really becomes a serious problem during a period of war where you need to be able to commit to actions and negotiate with agents outside of your city state. It needs to be able to tell them that we’re going to make a decision and that this decision is going to be able to stick.
Is that really one of the big reasons why the assembly’s unchecked power was such a problem during a time of war, particularly during the Peloponnesian War, where you’re facing off against Sparta and then the assembly isn’t just changing its mind, but it’s changed its mind in terms of potential negotiations with the foreign adversary?
Federica Carugati
One way to think about this is that the agent to which the credible commitment must be made are actually a number of different agents with very different incentives. In some respects, these are Athens allies. They need to be convinced that Athens will maintain its promises towards them in exchange for whatever number of ships and men and other resources it needs to continue fighting the war and to some extent protect them, because this is a coalition war. The second constituency is what I was mentioning earlier, which is the Athenian elites. So those who are bent towards oligarchy are somehow lost, but there is a large number of people who are still believing in democracy. We’ll also know that in a situation in which Athens has lost its sources of revenue, the assembly might well turn to them and expropriate in order to continue funding the war.
Then, of course, there is the Athenian populace that might think that in fact under this tremendous amount of pressure, maybe this particular system of government in which we all gather on a hill and try to figure out what’s best is not the most effective way of making decisions. The problem that the democracy begins to face once it loses the execution of a cultural and economic basis that maintains it as stable before is really that the credible commitment begins to collapse in the face of a bunch of actors that may have an interest in maintaining the structure, but also begin to see its cracks and the potential threat that comes through it.
Josiah Ober
So, you ultimately end up then with a credibility problem and that’s what you’ve got to solve if you’re ever going to pull out of this period of breakdown where Athen’s allies, Athenian elites, indeed, big parts of the demos itself doubt the capacity of the state to commit to any course of future action.
jmk
Why is this a problem unique to democracy? I can imagine somebody who’s a king, an autocrat, somebody who’s in charge that’s facing just increasing pressure from a war that realizes that they need to find new sources of income and decides to expropriate finances from the elites. I can imagine an autocrat deciding to change the terms which he came to power under and change laws because a war is ongoing. I can also imagine that as the war changes the calculus that’s going on in terms of your connection to your allies, that even a king, even an aristocracy might change its mind in terms of how it conducts its war in relation to its allies, in relation to its adversaries.
Why is this problem unique to a democracy, because in some ways I would think an assembly would make it less likely to change its mind since there’s so many people who have to change their mind as opposed to just one or a few people who would need to be convinced? In a monarchy just a single person might need to be convinced, but in a democracy, you need to convince large numbers of people in an assembly.
Josiah Ober
I think one way to answer that is the credibility of commitment is a general problem for all political regimes and indeed we see credible commitment problems cropping up all over the place in human history. You go back to the Magna Carta in the UK. There’s King John who’s got a credibility problem and he’s got to cut some kind of a deal with the barons and the ecclesiastical authorities. They try to create modes of credibility insurance. You take oaths. You swear to the higher authority.
But I think at least one way to think about this is it’s really not a uniquely democratic problem. But in this case, I think, especially because of the power of persuasion and the chance that in a given day, you would get an orator who was extraordinarily skilled… I mean, the orators are highly trained at this point. One of the things that terrorizes Plato and Aristotle later is the power of rhetoric. They become very good at what they’re doing. You can get orator X persuading the demos to do this on day one and then a different orator persuading the demos to do something else on day two.
The question is, does the demos have the kind of settled preferences that you can assume that a rational individual has, settled preferences to keep certain things in place because a new state of the world could be very much worse for the agent. Collective agents, potentially anyway, can have a harder time maintaining this coherence of ranked preferences over outcomes over time. It’s not an impossible problem to solve, but I think that’s one of the problems the Athenians face.
Federica Carugati
Yeah, I don’t have a lot to add besides just simply saying that the commitment problem is the fundamental problem of the stability of political regimes. The solutions that various types of democratic and various types of autocratic governments can mobilize are fundamentally different. I think that through Athens, we get a somewhat different version of the high taxation, high representation, low coercion equilibrium that we see, for example, coming out of the study of early modern representative versions of democracy. When we look at authoritarian regimes in history and today, the problem is somewhat similar, but the solutions are a range.
jmk
At the same time though, I do have to admit that my inclination is that in a democracy, you’re more likely to see dramatic change from one policy to the next because the whole idea of democracy is almost institutionalized change. It allows you to go from one idea to another as the populace changes its mind. We see that even in modern democracies, like in the United States, Barack Obama worked very hard to get a nuclear deal with Iran. Donald Trump gets elected. He gets rid of the nuclear deal with Iran. Joe Biden gets elected. He starts trying to work on a new one. Barack Obama tries to bring the United States into the Paris Climate Accord. Donald Trump pulls us out. Joe Biden brings us back in. We see those swings even in modern representative democracies that we have today.
So, my question isn’t about modern politics to you, but it would be whether democracies are just intrinsically vulnerable to those more dramatic swings in terms of policy shifts? When they see one thing not working, is it very likely for people to swing the other direction, especially under the persuasion of a highly skilled orator?
Josiah Ober
The one way to think about this is democracy’s strength is its capacity to change. Democracies are innovative in a way that typically autocracies are not. Autocracies get locked into deals between power brokers that are very hard to change. So, democracy, I think, does have an innovation advantage and we can see that it works out through the ways in which democracies have, at least throughout much of history, at least the history that we can study, been relatively wealthy. They’re able to take advantages of changes in circumstances. But that capacity to change under the wrong circumstances then becomes a weakness.
So, the ability to recognize a change in the state of the world as opposed to a king who’s always done things this way, knows how things are done, was raised to believe that the world is like this, says, absolutely not, we’re not going to do that. You get this capacity of a democratic community to see that the change has happened or to recognize the change has happened and to act accordingly. But, sometimes, under the stresses of the extremely high stakes stresses of war, you begin to get mistakes and this strength turns into really potentially a fatal weakness.
Federica Carugati
I guess I’m a little bit less optimistic than Josh. I think that looking broadly at how democracies have fared throughout history, it seems to me that a fair statement is that democracies are better designed for change, particularly change that is driven by fundamental shifts in culture, in preferences by a majority of the population. That is certainly something that democracies do better than autocracies. But I think that the actual state of democracies today makes this comparative advantage somewhat less, I don’t know, effective. This is a world of somewhat captured representative institutions in some respects and autocrats have a strong incentive to do some of the things that democracies have done well, for example, like achieve a high level of growth.
So, I think that this puts us in a somewhat different situation where the comparative advantage of democracy also needs to be accompanied by the correct culture and the correct constitutional or any institutional incentives to harness what I don’t think we see as often. The example that you started from just in the haphazard changes in the presidency of Donald Trump seems to me to be exactly the sort of bad example of a democracy’s ability to respond or to activate change in a way that I don’t know that I want the democracies that I live in to be able to do. But I certainly want a democracy that I live in to be able to respond to changes in people’s preferences more readily than perhaps autocracies do.
jmk
So, these breakdowns happened during the Peloponnesian War. It exposes some institutional flaws within Athenian democracy, but Athenian democracy survives intact during the Persian Wars. What’s the difference between the two? Why is it that Athenian democracy seems to thrive during those wars, but seems to break down during the Peloponnesian wars?
Josiah Ober
Part of it has got to be the amount of time. The Persian Wars are, relatively speaking, brief. There’s one big battle in 490 BCE, the Battle of Marathon. The Athenians win it for, once again, reasons we could go into that ends that phase. Ten years later, the Persian king invades Greece through the overland routes, and this time there’s no question Athens is going to be wiped out or brought into the Persian Empire under bad circumstances given the bad blood between the Persians and the Athenians before the war. So, it’s really at this point, either we hold together, Benjamin Franklin’s famous line, either we hang together or we hang separately.
The Athenians seem to take that challenge, use it as a way to bind themselves together, commit to a course of action. The great naval battle at Salamis is a big risk, big payoff, and the war is soon over. Another major battle and it’s done. The Peloponnesian War lasts 27 years. That is a long, grinding war. Athenians did, despite a nightmarish plague that wiped out at least a quarter of their population in the first stage of the war, quite well in the first 10 years of the war. They held together for a long time.
War begins again due to the Athenian invasion of Syracuse – one of these mistakes, clear in retrospect, but then it grinds on for another dozen years. It was such a long period of stress without a single moment of existential, if we don’t hold together at this moment, you can hear the thump of the Persian boots coming towards Athens and then it’s all over. So, I think that’s at least part of it. It was a stress test that lasted a remarkably long time.
jmk
So, was the breakdown of democracy during the two episodes that you highlight inevitable? Based on the institutional construction, was it necessary for democracy to break down? Was there a way for Athenians to reconstruct their democracy without resorting to a democratic breakdown or a democratic interlude in between?
Federica Carugati
What strikes me about that period is that democracy was not inevitable. I think that a lot of people are looking at the glory of a fifth century Athens and just expected democracy to be the result of those events. I think that there was absolutely no reason why we would expect the democracy to not only get reestablished in the aftermath of the second period of collapse, but to flourish again. That seemed to me to be extremely unlikely, therefore, worthy of attention. The first case is problematic in various respects, but it is a somewhat brief interruption of democracy.
The oligarchic regime really doesn’t seem to get their stuff together at any point, to commit or to fulfill any of the promises that they make to allies, internal and external. They lose battles. It’s just a complete disaster. So, in that respect, democracy makes itself a viable constitutional option in its aftermath, in part because all the oligarchs just do such a bad job at trying to restructure the constitution under a different basis. But that shouldn’t obfuscate, I think, the fact that as presented oligarchy was a very good idea. They had a plan. They knew where to get the money, namely Persia. They knew how to use the money, namely to reestablish the fleet that had been destroyed in Sicily. They wanted to do that by restricting the franchise. It made a lot of sense.
The restoration of democracy that ensues, maybe because the oligarchs did such a bad job and maybe because the breakdown is in fact so brief, is reestablished after the first collapse is very similar to the one that had collapsed before. There are reforms, but there is no indication of major constitutional change. The second breakdown coincides, of course, with the loss of the war. The regime is backed by Sparta. It is a very different story. I think that in some respects, we should be focusing in terms of trying to understand and appreciate the reasons for the recovery. That is certainly the moment where things really could have gone in a different way.
I think that what happens, again, based on the relatively limited fragmented, potentially biased sources that we reconstruct these episodes from, suggests that the oligarch seems unable to restructure the government on a solid basis. They promise things that they don’t follow through on, including extending the franchise to a larger body beyond the 30 tyrants. That’s how the second oligarchy regime is known. They seek the support of Sparta in a lot of their dealings with Athenian citizens, particularly the resistance that begins to get together. Sparta is essentially divided itself, so it fails to come to the aid of the tyrants, of the oligarchs.
So again, it is difficult to take the historians out of the context of telling you it’s complicated. But it was complicated and even with limited sources, it is obvious that the defeat of these regimes is not just something that you can attribute to fate or luck or doing a bad job. There are lots of forces that contribute to these events. But again, I think in both cases, the oligarchic sympathizers try to present oligarchy as a very viable constitutional alternative democracy, given the conditions that Athens is experiencing in these particular historical junctures. But those promises just simply don’t seem for a variety of reasons to pan out.
So, democracy is reestablished, but once again, the experience of oligarchy has fragmented the culture and destroyed the institutions. The Peloponnesian War has completely devastated the economic basis. The question of what democracy emerges after the 30 tyrants is actually a very real question that the Athenians must have asked themselves. The constitutional reforms that we see emerging from the evidence are a clear answer to some of the problems that have caused democratic fragility in the preceding decade.
jmk
What are the reforms? How is democracy different after the episode of the 30 tyrants than beforehand?
Federica Carugati
Yeah, so this is the story of reverse engineering that we were talking about earlier. I think that the major reform is to essentially create a procedure that makes the courts an institution for the revision of policy made in the assembly. You can call it a judicial review. You can call it bicameralism. This has been debated among ancient historians and political scientists. But what emerges in the aftermath is the possibility that the decisions made in the assembly get a second hearing by a body of citizens that is selected through very different structures than those that essentially regulate access in the assembly. That is, constitutionally speaking, it comes under the structure of judicial as opposed to legislative organization and institutions.
Basically, what happens is that through the procedure known as graphe paranomon, the decisions made in the assembly can be indicted as unconstitutional and can get a day in court. This procedure was available before, but it becomes a part of the constitutional structure in the aftermath of 403, in the aftermath of the 30 tyrants. This is the reform that emerges more clearly from the sources alongside a series of new laws that essentially regulate the background of that procedure and y that, I mean, the very meaning of unconstitutional. Of course, in a world in which reading and writing is not as widespread, in which there is no written constitution, the idea that you establish a procedure that says you can indict as unconstitutional some proposals, requires also that you explain to the citizenry what unconstitutional might mean. So, we see those procedures emerge.
Josiah Ober
All of this is possible because of a background or a recreated, reimagined commitment to the idea of law. The idea that we Athenians, law loving, law creating, law obeying people, now we can debate what the law should be and we can think about how to change it. The notion that the oligarchs had failed in some profound way because they did not respect law. They didn’t create, they didn’t maintain a lawfulness about their regime opened up the possibility for something of a consensus around lawfulness. Then the question is, what will we fill in? What does lawfulness mean in institutional terms?
jmk
The way that you’re portraying it, it comes across that the rebirth of democracy within Athens created a stronger, more resilient form of democracy going forward that allowed it to survive until Alexander’s conquests. But I can imagine some critics thinking that this is a less democratic form of democracy. That they were able to save democracy by making it somewhat of a diminished form of democracy. How did people in Athens at the time think of it? Did they think of it as a stronger, more resilient form of the democracy they already had or did they think of it as taking a step backwards away from a more extreme form of democracy?
Federica Carugati
So, let me just say, one thing before we get into a broader discussion of this very good question. I think that the democracy was stronger and more resilient only with the benefit of hindsight. I don’t think that anyone in Athens in 403 after passing this relatively minimal reform of a procedure already in existence, would have thought now the democracy is ironclad. I think that only with 2000 years of hindsight, we might be able to tell that if only because it actually lasts for another 80 years. But again, I don’t think that this was obvious to any Athenian at that time. I don’t think it was also obvious to them that the reforms had brought something much less democratic. Of course, it depends on how we define democracy and how they define democracy.
But the procedure of gathering and making decisions in a popular and participatory and inclusive way, of course, for adult males, remained in place. The courts were not manned by the elites. The courts, the places where this review of legislation took place, were not manned by different people. It was citizens selected by law as in other court cases. So, the popular form of participatory institution was not negated by the reforms and that leads me to think that there would have been a sense that democracy had been negated.
Josiah Ober
The strongest argument that you could make that the post-war, fourth century democracy is not genuinely democratic, is what some political theorists have called the fugitive democracy theory. That is that as soon as there is any kind of institutionalization, as soon as you have any kind of constitutional organization, you’ve betrayed the essence of popular power. That, I think, is such a foolish standard, to be blunt, that the argument is irrefutable. In one sense if we define democracy as popular power without any constitutional form and anything that is not that is not democracy, then if that’s your definition, you can say that the fourth century was a sellout. Some theorists have said that. But I think they’ve just got the wrong end of the stick.
I think in some ways, it gives up on the very idea that democracy, like every form of government, must be able to provide basic security and basic welfare for an extensive population. If you can’t do that, then collective self-government is not going to be a very compelling argument to people who are living in fear and starvation.
jmk
Let’s bring it all together. Is that what the Athenian case teaches us then about democracy in our own age? Is that the lesson that we should take from both the collapse and rebirth of democracy within Athens?
Josiah Ober
So, you mean that we really do need a kind of constitutional order and the constitutional order does need to have respect for something that is the law that we agree to give to ourselves, the law that means that we don’t simply make new law every time we gather together as a group? Yes, I think that’s true. I think that democracy to really be a working operation in the long run does need some form of self-regulation just as I suppose that many human lives go much better when they have some form of self-regulation. When I’m able to moderate my own momentary whims in a way that allows me to have a more consistent set of behaviors over time, I may not get to do a few of the exciting things I had whimsically imagined I wanted to do, but I think my life is going to go better. I think in the same general sense an institutional system that has some constraints is likely to go better in the long run.
Federica Carugati
Yeah and I think that taking a step back to the actual substantive lessons that this case teaches us, for me, for example, I think that in some respects modern democracies have gotten the message. Beside the paroxcystic recent reactions, modern democracies, those that have lasted longer, those that have achieved the significant levels of well-being, which it is, in fact, an achievement of modern democracy, have gotten the message of constitutionalization and institutionalization. The theorists that think about democracy and rule of law have gotten that message as well. I think that what Athens gives us is a window. into the dynamics that can make that commitment actually fall through as we try to explain in the article. But also as a process of a collective commitment, not as a process of top down values.
Again, this is the optimistic view of the Athenian evidence. The pessimistic view of the Athenian evidence is, of course, that it took a civil war. Not that necessarily we need to end the podcast on this note, but I think that it is important to use this very peculiar case, in part because it is so well documented to reflect on the dynamics of the collapse and recovery. This is what we have, we have tried to do in this article.
jmk
Federica and Josh, thank you so much for joining me today. The article once again is “Democratic Collapse and Recovery in Ancient Athens.” Again, it’s part of the When Democracy Breaks book that just came out. Thank you so much for joining me today. Thank you so much for writing the chapter.
Josiah Ober
Federica Carugati
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