REGISTER
Join us on October 1 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).
Professor Cammack will be joined in conversation by James Porter, Distinguished Professor and Irving Stone Chair in Literature in the Department of Rhetoric at UC Berkeley, and Kinch Hoekstra, Chancellor’s Professor of Political Science and Law at UC Berkeley. Dylan Riley, Professor of Sociology at UC Berkeley, will moderate.
This event is co-sponsored by the UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies and the Departments of Political Science and Ancient Greek & Roman Studies.
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.
About the Book
In ancient Greece, demokratia meant “rule by the people”—but what people, and how did they rule? Scholars have long argued that demokratia signified the rule of all adult male citizens over themselves. In Demos, Daniela Cammack counters this view by arguing that demokratia meant rule by the crowd that assembled when a public meeting was held. This crowd was the demos, which the Greeks distinguished from orators, generals, councilors, public benefactors, and other civic leaders. Drawing on literary and epigraphical evidence as well as the key theoretical insights of Aristotle and Hobbes, Cammack explains how constantly changing masses of ordinary ancient Greek men ruled while their leaders were ruled over.
This political system relied on kratos, the power to prevail militarily, epitomized by the victories of the Athenian demos in civil conflicts around 508 and 404 BC. In peacetime, the superior strength of the demos revealed itself in large, frequently summoned crowds of ordinary citizens acting as policymakers, legislators, and (crucially) judges, who wielded great power over politicians. Aristotle characterized the years 403 to 322 as the era of “ultimate democracy,” and it was during this period that the Athenians pulled off a feat unmatched by modern democrats: making use of talented and ambitious leaders without being ruled by them. By contrast, the Greeks called rule by elected office-holders “oligarchy.” As people today lose faith in democratic institutions, Cammack’s account prompts us to ask if we’ve been doing democracy all wrong—or even at all.
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.
Kinch Hoestra is Chancellor’s Professor of Political Science and Law at UC Berkeley. He works on the history of political, moral, and legal thought, especially ancient, renaissance, and early modern political philosophy. Recent contributions to ancient political thought include “Athenian Democracy and Popular Tyranny,” “Thucydides and the Politics of Necessity” (with Mark Fisher), and “The Liberties of the Ancients” (with Quentin Skinner). Another focus of Hoestra’s research has been the philosophy of Thomas Hobbes (including studies of his theory of equality, obligation, democracy, tyranny, mixed government, natural law, and the rationality of justice); he co-edited The Oxford Handbook of Hobbes. Work that bridges these two areas includes “Hobbes and Aristotle on the Foundation of Political Science” (with Nicholas Gooding), “Hobbes’s Thucydides”, “Thucydides in the Renaissance and Reformation”, and “The Melian Dilemma”. From 1996 to 2007, he was a member of the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Oxford, where he regularly taught graduate students in the Faculty of Classics and the Department of Politics and International Relations.
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. Current projects include Existence, Crisis, and Faith: Selected Essays and Letters by Rachel Bespaloff, a Cambridge Critical Guide to The Birth of Tragedy (co-edited with Michael Forster), and The Cynics: A Very Short Introduction.
Dylan Riley studies capitalism, socialism, democracy, authoritarianism, and knowledge regimes in a broad comparative and historical perspective. His first book, The Civic Foundations of Fascism in Europe: Italy, Spain, and Romania 1870-1945 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), argues that fascist regimes arose paradoxically on the basis of strong civil societies in the pre-fascist period. Reviewers have called this book “the most original and provocative new analysis of the preconditions of Fascism that has appeared in years”, and “brilliant and courageous”. A second book, How Societies and States Count: A Comparative Genealogy of Censuses (with Rebecca Jean Emigh and Patricia Ahmed in preparation for Palgrave), argues, against state centered accounts of official information that censuses work best where there is intense interaction between state and society. He has started a new project investigating the connection between the meaning and substance of democracy in interwar and post-war Europe. Riley has also published articles in the American Journal of Sociology, American Sociological Review, Catalyst, Comparative Studies in Society and History, Comparative Sociology, Social Science History, The Socio-Economic Review and the New Left Review. He is a member of the editorial committee of the New Left Review.