POSTPONED
This event, originally scheduled for April 20th, has been postponed. Please stay tuned to the Matrix website and/or newsletter for future updates.
Join us for an Authors Meet Critics panel on the book Demos: How the People Ruled Athens, by Daniela Cammack, Assistant Professor of Political Science at UC Berkeley, with a courtesy appointment in the Department of Ancient Greek and Roman Studies (formerly Classics). The book is scheduled to be published in May 2026 by Princeton University Press.
Professor Cammack will be joined in conversation by Alison McQueen, the Nehal and Jenny Fan Raj Civics Faculty Fellow in Undergraduate Teaching and an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at Stanford University; and James Porter is Irving Stone Professor in Literature and Distinguished Professor in Rhetoric. Marianne Constable, Professor in the Department of Rhetoric, will moderate.
The Social Science Matrix Authors Meet Critics book series features lively discussions about recently published books authored by social scientists at UC Berkeley. For each event, the author discusses the key arguments of their book with fellow scholars. These events are free and open to the public.
This event is co-sponsored by the UC Berkeley Department of Political Science and the Department of History.
About the Book
Historians and political theorists have long believed that they knew the meaning of the ancient Greek word demokratia. To democracy’s detractors, it meant mob rule; to its supporters, it meant the rule of the entire citizen community over itself. This book argues, by contrast, that the ancient Greeks shared a conception of demokratia that partly overlapped with each of these interpretations while transcending them both. Demokratia was the organized rule of the mass over its leading men. Ordinary citizens, assembled in large numbers, ruled over their own politicians and thereby over the community as a whole.
This regime was underpinned by kratos, the power of the stronger, epitomized by the victories of the Athenian demos in civil conflicts in 508, 411, and 404 BC. But it was routinely manifested by the supreme political authority — or “sovereignty,” to use Hobbes’s term — of large crowds of ordinary men acting as policymakers, citizen-judges, and lawmakers. Especially in the years 403 to 322, which Aristotle correctly diagnosed as the era of “ultimate democracy,” the Athenians pulled off a feat unmatched by democrats today: making use of talented and ambitious politicians without being ruled by them. Demos asks: can we do the same?
Panelists
Daniela Cammack is Assistant Professor of Political Science at UC Berkeley, with a courtesy appointment in the Department of Ancient Greek and Roman Studies (formerly Classics). She holds a B.A. in Modern History and English Literature (2002) from Oxford, an M.Phil. in Political Theory and Intellectual History (2005) from Cambridge, and a Ph.D. in Political Theory (2013) from Harvard, where her dissertation, Rethinking Athenian Democracy, won Harvard’s Noxon Toppan Prize for the best dissertation in Political Science. Before moving to Berkeley in 2019, she was a Junior Fellow in Harvard’s Society of Fellows and an Assistant Professor at Yale. Over the past decade, she has published in numerous edited volumes and journals including Political Theory, History of Political Thought, The Journal of Political Philosophy, Polis, The Journal of Politics, Classical Quarterly, Classical Philology, and The Journal of Sortition. Cammack studies the differences and similarities between ancient and modern democratic ideas and practices, focusing on the themes of crowd power, deliberation, representation, and sovereignty. Authors of special interest are Aristotle, Hobbes, and Rousseau. Her first book, Demos: How the People Ruled Athens, will be published in May 2026 by Princeton University Press. A sequel, entitled What was Democracy? A Short History, is in progress and also under contract with Princeton.
Alison McQueen is the the Nehal and Jenny Fan Raj Civics Faculty Fellow in Undergraduate Teaching and an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at Stanford University. Her research focuses on early modern political theory and the history of International Relations thought. McQueen’s book, Political Realism in Apocalyptic Times (Cambridge University Press, 2018), traces the responses of three canonical political realists — Niccolò Machiavelli, Thomas Hobbes, and Hans Morgenthau — to hopes and fears about the end of the world. A second book project, Absolving God: Hobbes’s Scriptural Politics, tracks and explains changes in Thomas Hobbes’s strategies of Scriptural argument over time. She is also working on treason and betrayal in the history of political thought.
James Porter is Irving Stone Professor in Literature and Distinguished Professor in Rhetoric. His teaching and research has followed a few different trajectories. One is a study of Nietzsche’s thought, early and late (Nietzsche and the Philology of the Future and The Invention of Dionysus: An Essay on ‘The Birth of Tragedy’ (both Stanford University Press, 2000). Another is a study of models of aesthetic sensation, perception, and experience in ancient Greece and Rome, which he explored in The Origins of Aesthetic Thought in Ancient Greece: Matter, Sensation, and Experience (Cambridge University Press, 2010; pbk. 2016). A continuation of this inquiry is The Sublime in Antiquity (Cambridge University Press, 2016; pbk. 2020), which received the C. J. Goodwin Award of Merit from The Society for Classical Studies (2017). A further strand is Jewish literary and critical thought in authors from Spinoza to Freud, Adorno, and Arendt. His most recent book is Homer: The Very Idea (University of Chicago Press, 2021; pbk. 2023), which captures some of his interest in classical reception studies. He is co-editor of the preeminent series in this field, “Classical Presences” (Oxford University Press, 2005– ), and a member of the collective that published “Postclassicisms” (Chicago University Press, 2019). All of these topics spill over into his teaching, and many of them have begun their life there, because he finds that the classroom is one of the most productive places you can ever be.
Marianne Constable (moderator), Professor in the Department of Rhetoric, is a widely interdisciplinary legal scholar whose work on law crosses into both humanities and social sciences. Recipient of the James Boyd White Award from the Association for the Study of Law, Culture and the Humanities in 2011, she is the author of Our Word is Our Bond: How Legal Speech Acts (Stanford U. Press, 2014), Just Silences: the Limits and Possibilities of Modern Law (Princeton U. Press, 2005), and The Law of the Other: The Mixed Jury and Changes in Conceptions of Citizenship, Law and Knowledge (U. of Chicago Press, 1994; winner of the Law and Society Association’s J. Willard Hurst Prize in Legal History). An expert on law and language, she has co-edited two books on law and society, another in interdisciplinary legal studies, and a special issue in legal history. She has written numerous articles on such topics as Foucault and immigration law, Nietzsche and jurisprudence, the rhetoric of “community,” Arendt and the rhetoric of sustainability, law in the liberal arts, the paper shredder, and language in politics. She is currently completing a history of the “new unwritten law” that ostensibly exonerated women who killed their husbands in Chicago a hundred years ago; she also has some shorter pieces on philosophical dialogues in the works.