Defending Democracy in Classical Athens: A Historical Case Study and its Theoretical Consequences

Abstract

Classical Athens as a historical case study of democracy offers insight into the practices how a democracy could protect its regime and constitutional order. In order to envisage the way the Greek democracy exercised this protection, the paper focuses on the ideas and practices with which the Athenians tried to halt the erosion of democratic order and protect themselves from unbalanced power relations, that is, from the situation when someone gains supremacy over the others and changes the complete character of the political order. However, it was not just an egalitarian democratic order which gave actual power into the hands of citizens, but a regime which did not know the modern idea of separation of powers. Thus, the paper’s main concern is the classical repertoire of those practices which helped to control excessive power, and to maintain democratic order under the circumstances of egalitarian power shares and majority rule. This problematization may be embedded into the current theoretical discourses on the various crises of democracy (sometimes in the form of ‘populism’ as a phenomenon), and may be understood as an empirical case study offering theoretical starting points for contemporary theories of democracy.