Recorded on October 1, 2026, this video features 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 was 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, moderated.

This event was 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.

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.

Podcast and Transcript

An audio (podcast) recording of this panel is available through the link below or through Apple Podcasts.

[WOMAN’S VOICE] The Matrix Podcast is a production of Social Science Matrix, an interdisciplinary research center at the University of California, Berkeley.

[CORI HAYDEN]

Good afternoon. My name is Cori Hayden, and I am the director of Social Science Matrix. Welcome to you all here in the audience.

Welcome to our panelists, and especially welcome to Daniela Cammack, whose book we are delighted to be discussing and celebrating today. We’re gonna be talking about this very, very timely book, Demos: How the People Ruled Athens. And in this book, Professor Cammack draws on literary evidence along with theoretical insights of Aristotle and Hobbes to reconsider how ancient Greek democracy actually worked and who its rulers really were.

These do seem like pertinent questions. Today’s event is part of our Author Meets Critics series, and is co-sponsored by the Institute for Governmental Studies and the UC Berkeley Departments of Political Science and Ancient and Greek and Roman Studies. So thank you.

To all of our co-sponsors here. Before we move to the main event, it is my solemn duty to self-promote, or at least to Matrix-promote. So I just want to put up here on the screen for your interest a number of our upcoming events.

California Spotlights on Wealth and Poverty, New Directions panel featuring the work of some fantastic graduate students on green transitions, and a number of other panels, as you can see there. So please do get on our mailing list if you’re not already there, or keep an eye on upcoming events, and we hope to see you again here soon. In the meantime, we are here for this panel.

And let me just introduce briefly our moderator, Professor Dylan Riley in the Department of Sociology, happens to be the chair of the Department of Sociology at the moment. Dylan will then introduce our other panelists and get us going. So Dylan Riley studies capitalism, socialism, democracy, authoritarianism, and knowledge regimes in a broad comparative and historical framework.

His first book, The Civic Foundations of Fascism in Europe: Italy, Spain, and Romania, 1870 to 1945, 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. He’s got a second book in progress.

Wait, in progress or already out?

[DYLAN RILEY]

It’s not out.

[CORI HAYDEN]

It’s on its way. Called How Societies and States Count, a comparative—

[DYLAN RILEY]

Oh no, that’s been published.

[DANIELA CAMMACK]

Yeah.

[CORI HAYDEN]

Yeah, that’s what I thought. That’s what I thought.

[DYLAN RILEY]

That’s been published.

[CORI HAYDEN]

That’s long published. All right. How Societies and States Count, a Comparative Genealogy of Censuses with Rebecca Jean Emigh and Patricia Ahmed.

And then Dylan has also started yet another project, a new project investigating the connection between the meaning and substance of democracy in interwar and postwar Europe. He’s published in the American Journal of Sociology, Catalyst, Comparative Studies in Society and History, Social Science History, and New Left Review, among others, and he is a member of the editorial committee of the New Left Review. We’re really pleased to have you here running the show for us, Dylan.

Without further ado, I will turn it over to you.

[DYLAN RILEY]

Thanks a lot, Corey. Thanks a lot for all of you for being here. I hope it’s okay.

Can people hear me in the back there and everything? Okay. I’ll just get to my not very important role here.

It gives me great pleasure to introduce our distinguished panel of speakers today. Obviously, Daniela is the main event, but it’s very great that we have with us as commentators, first Professor James Porter, who is the Irving Stone Professor in Literature and Rhetoric at Berkeley, obviously. He has published on kind of a dizzying range of topics, including Nietzsche and philology, aesthetic experience in the ancient Greek and Roman world, and as well as making contributions Focused on Jewish literary and critical thought, focusing on Spinoza, Freud, Adorno, Bespaloff, and Arendt.

His most recent large monograph is Homer: The Very Idea, which came out in 2021 and I believe came out in paperback in 2023. Is that correct? And his current projects focus on existence, crisis, and faith, and a Cambridge critical guide to The Birth of Tragedy.

So, very happy to have Professor Porter today to discuss Daniela’s work. I’d also like to introduce, from the Department of Political Science, Kinch Hoekstra, whose work as well spans a quite dizzying range of political thought from Classical antiquity to Hobbes, and particularly, I would say, the connection between classical antiquity and Hobbes. And he particularly has published on Hobbes’s Thucydides, Liberties of the Ancients, together with Quentin Skinner.

He is professor of law at Berkeley Law and also affiliated professor in the Department of Philosophy and Department of Classics, as well as being on the faculty of political sciences. I think I’m right on that. I hope I haven’t completely mangled all of this stuff.

Okay. So his work really bridges kind of the areas of the classical world, I guess, and what we could call the early modern world. So that’ll be a really interesting perspective to have on Daniela’s book.

And of course, turning now to Professor Daniela Cammack herself, she is assistant professor of political science. And is an affiliate of the Department of Ancient Greek and Roman Studies here at UC Berkeley. She works broadly in the area of political thought, and particularly in the area of Greek political thought.

And she holds a BA in Modern History and English Literature from Oxford, an MPhil in Political Theory and Intellectual History from Cambridge, a PhD in Political Theory from Harvard. Her dissertation won Harvard’s Knox and Tappan Prize for the best dissertation in political science. Before she came to Berkeley in 2019, she was a junior fellow at Harvard Society of Fellows and assistant professor at Yale.

She’s published numerous book chapters and articles in various journals, but the main product, of course, is her book, Demos: How the People Ruled Athens, and that is coming out imminently. And so it’s that that we’re going to be talking about today. And without further ado, I turn the floor over to Professor Daniela Cammack.

Thank you very much.

[DANIELA CAMMACK]

Thank you guys so much. It is such a pleasure. Can you hear me okay?

Is that working right? Great. It is such an enormous pleasure to be here and to see so many lovely people in the audience, and I’m really touched.

I am so grateful to The Matrix for hosting this event. Thank you so much, Corey. Thank you to Eva and to Chuck for organizing many things, and to the panelists, to Dylan, Kinch, and Jim, thank you very, very much.

Also the sponsors, the Institute of Governmental Studies, my department of political science, and the Department of Ancient Greek and Roman Studies. I feel very well supported by all of these. Well, I was gonna say in the absence of the hard copy of the book, but actually, Kinch, can you hold up the hard copy of the book as we have it currently?

This is the third proof. I do not have the actual final version yet. The press has promised it will be with me next month.

But in the absence of that, I’m gonna just walk you through what you would see if you looked at the book with the front cover, the title, The frontispiece, little bits and pieces from the preface and introduction, and I think that’s going to be all we have time for. But my hope is that from that sampling, we can get basically everything you need to get out of the book, the epigraphs in particular. So you don’t need to bother reading the rest, even though it clocks in at 600 pages and 18 chapters.

Okay. So the front cover. There we go.

This is a painting by Rudolf Müller, a Swiss artist from 1863. This is the front part of my cover is just showing this Acropolis here and the Bema. So the crowd that played the key role in Athenian democratic politics gathered around the Bema.

This is the speaker’s platform here. And, you know, this is 1863. It’s completely deserted.

There would have been in the fifth century, probably six to eight thousand, probably about 6,000 people, gathering around the speaker’s platform, and then increasing numbers. So by the end of the classical period, possibly if there was standing capacity, up to 20,000 people. I have a couple of… Mock-ups here that have been made at the beginning of the classical era, kind of the era of classical Greek democracy, so Athenian democracy, the 5th century.

The crowd actually stood on the grassy slope of the hillside looking down at the speaker. The red up there is where the bema, the speaker’s platform, was, you could see on the painting. This is where someone like Pericles would have stood, down at the bottom of the hill, with the crowd just kind of randomly arranged on the slope, with a fairly simple, if you imagine, kind of a fairly simple architectural framing.

In the fourth century… Hang on, did I just go on too far? No, that’s correct.

This is what the space looked like. It was reconstructed after the civil war, middle of the classical period in Athens. There was a really egregious civil war fought against the Thirty Tyrants who had usurped governmental power, fought by the demos, and what that means I’ll say more about in a minute.

This is at the end of the Peloponnesian War. There had been 30 years of warfare. The polis was very strapped for money and resources.

Nonetheless, they fought the civil war against the oligarchs, and the first thing that they did was they reconstructed this space. One of the first things they did, they reconstructed the space. This is the result.

They built a massive retaining wall around the bottom of the hill with these steps going up and reoriented the whole space so that now the Crowd was looking slightly down at the speaker. You can’t quite tell that from this angle, but with the speaker’s platform at the top of the hill. This is a huge undertaking, and the stones show signs of haste.

I mean, the whole construction looks hasty from the archaeology. This gave a capacity of maybe 6,000 to 8,000 people. Around the same time, in the 390s, the Athenians started paying people to show up.

This is an important fact. I’ll come back to it later. But it started off at one, then two, then three obols a day.

Three obols a day, roughly you can think of as like equivalent to a day’s low-paid wage labor. Then in around about the 330s, 340s, they rebuilt the space again. This is when it was really massive.

So, 13,000 to 14,000 people seated, up to 20,000 standing. In the same era, they seem to have boosted pay. Well, they certainly did boost pay at some point.

but it seems to have been around the same time. I’m keeping an eye on the time. Okay, good.

Yeah, in this era, they gave nine obols for the most important political meeting of the month. Well, every 35 days, every 35 or 36 days, and six obols for the others, the other three. And there were no known issues with attendance.

They seem to have been able to fill the space sufficiently for their purposes. And this was the kind of epicenter of policymaking, lawmaking, basically deciding what was beneficial, what was advantageous for the political community. And it was an open public meeting.

All adult male citizens could show up, and they, in the most important meetings of the month, made a point of inviting impeachments from anyone that wanted to lodge one against anyone in a standing office. They had votes of confidence in all officeholders. They also requested a report on the kind of grain security of the community, the state of the defense of the realm, and they asked for anyone to come forward who had heard a deceitful promise being made to the demos, something that hadn’t been fulfilled.

So this was really an opportunity for… Anyone that wished, any volunteer,

(speaking Greek)

whoever wishes, to come forward and to kind of complain or register concerns about office holders and leaders within the community. Now, all these details are well known. I’m not pretending to have discovered anything here.

This is all kind of standard stuff. Where I think there’s been a lot of scope for different interpretations over the years, it relates to the way that this political system is understood with respect to the concept of rule. So since the mid-19th century, there’s been a dominant paradigm in the literature, starting with Grote and Mill, that this is a kind of paradigmatic instance of self-rule.

This is what we see in action in this space is a whole community, admittedly male citizens only, but a whole community of male citizens ruling over themselves. And this is said to be the crux of the meaning demokratia. Demos meaning the whole people, and the kratos in demokratia meaning basically power.

You get something like people power, the power of the people, meaning the power of the whole people, maybe the capacity of the whole people to make good things happen in the public realm. That’s a definition offered by Josh Ober down at Stanford. And the emphasis has very much been on this is maybe a matter of principle.

The principles that are emphasized are equality, including especially equal right of public speech, kind of equal speaking rights, thinking about the fact that anybody could ascend the bema and give a speech to the crowd. Also free speech or frank speech, candor, parrhesia, saying everything. There’s also been some understanding, at least since Mill, that the result of this openness and inviting anyone to come to the bema was kind of better epistemic results, so better policymaking procedures or better policy ideas, that you invite proposals from everybody and you get better results, better in the sense of more effective for the community, more beneficial.

So, more recently, there’s also been an increasing emphasis on the idea that consensus was a big goal. This is not about the tyranny of the majority. This was about the kind of entire community wanting to come together.

Among deliberative democrats, people emphasize things like the importance of dialogue. They say the demos deliberating is like the whole people having a discussion among themselves about what is the best kind of course of action. Something like maybe Occupy Wall Street, some people have compared this to.

There is another view in the ancient sources. So in the ancient sources, we see, from virtually all the sources we see, a view that the demos did not mean the whole people, or rule by the demos did not mean rule by the whole people. Instead, it meant rule by the common people, meant rule by the lower classes.

This is very prominent in Plato, Aristotle, lots of other writers. But it’s said that you only find that understanding of demokratia in elite sources, and that this is prejudicial, that this is actually just a sign that they didn’t like demokratia. They were smearing it by saying this is just the rule of ordinary people over an elite, a wiser elite, a richer elite, over the kind of leading members in the community.

And the crucial methodological upshot that has followed Epitomized by Mogens Hansen, who’s an absolutely wonderful historian, died fairly recently. But he argued very strongly, and others have followed him, to say that if you want to understand the meaning of the word demos, if you want to understand the meaning and kind of purpose of demokratia, you cannot look at pretty much most of our sources. So all poetry, all drama, all comedy, all philosophy, all history is kind of all ruled out of bounds because in all of those sources you find the authors using the word demos to mean the lower classes.

And they want to say we have to cancel that. The only sources that are safe to use are inscriptions. Things that were generated.

Ten minutes? Oh my God. Sorry.

Okay. Really? I thought it was 4:40 I had until.

I was looking at that one. Oh well, okay, never mind. Never mind.

Okay, so the only sources that are safe to use, we’re told, are inscriptions, so the documents generated by the community and the speeches that were given before democratic institutions such as the assembly and the courts and the council, of which we have quite a lot. Okay. I… Think that this is a mistake.

This is a colossal mistake. I think that the self-rule— not just I think. in the book I argued that the self-rule paradigm is really an inheritance, our inheritance from these 19th century liberals who recognized that democracy had been criticized for centuries as rule by the poor, and in resisting that interpretation, they kind of threw out the baby with the bathwater.

They threw out the description of democracy as rule by, let’s say, ordinary people over leaders. I’ll change it a bit. They threw that out.

They said no. They incorporated or they kind of assimilated The idea of people as whole people, the holistic meaning of the word people, and they anachronistically absorb that into the meaning of demos in a way that just isn’t really borne out by the sources. My understanding of the sources is that actually demokratia absolutely meant rule by ordinary people over leaders.

It’s almost like a fraud has been played on us for years in saying that this was actually about the self-rule of the whole community over itself. That was not their goal. The goal of democrats was that ordinary crowds, the crowds that filled this space, that faced these speakers, would be the prevailing power.

So this is the second part of the intervention I want to make, is that the definition, the meaning of kratos is not just kind of power in general or like the power capacity to do things. It’s specifically the power to prevail. And what we see consistently in all the sources, I argue, is that you have the power of the Non-leading mass, the ordinary people who don’t go up onto the bema to make speeches, to prevail over the generals, the orators, the officeholders, even the councilors who are predominantly ordinary men.

But the year that they’re in office, they’re not really an ordinary man. They’re a councilor. Okay, so how do I get there?

I mean, the one thing that struck me very early on was the discrepancy or the distance between the speaker and the crowd, that this cannot be a picture of egalitarian dialogue. Like, this could be 13, 14, 20,000 people, standing in front of someone unamplified. You know, there is a massive power discrepancy there between the one who is speaking and able to influence and the voters in the crowd.

Also, the fact that the Athenians kept on wanting to expand the size of the crowd. They wanted more people to come, but I don’t think they wanted more people to come in order for them to really ascend the bema particularly. They wanted more people to come for some other reason.

And the large theme of the book is the power of numbers, that you need huge numbers of people to coordinate and act solidaristically if you are going to be able to hold your leaders to account. The kind of crucial moments, historically where this happened in the plainest way around about 508, the very beginning of the classical era, when we’re told that demokratia kind of got started. That was when there was basically a few days only, but basically a civil war that the demos, meaning the ordinary assembled masses, fought against people who wanted to command them against their will.

They fought against an Athenian and some Spartan invaders, and their victory then enabled a kind of different structure of the council, made it more demotic, and some other organizational features. But predominantly, I think it marked the moment where you could see the switch in the balance of power between Wannabe leaders and the crowd. The next kind of crucial moment militarily was the Civil War.

I mentioned already the Civil War in the middle of the period, so 404, 403. Two minutes, is that? Was that to me?

[PARTICIPANT]

No, no.

[DANIELA CAMMACK]

Oh no, sorry. Okay, no worries. Either way would be fine.

The next crucial was the Civil War of 404, 403. But in peacetime, how do you pull this off? How do you pull off ruling over your leaders?

As a crowd of thousands, without being drawn up under arms the whole time. And bearing in mind that, again, I want to say that the traditional view is right. These are lower-class guys.

These are working-class men. They have families to look after. They have work that has to be done.

They cannot spend their whole time doing politics, and they didn’t. So, a huge part of the book is to emphasize that this is part-time rule. There are parts drawn from larger masses.

Nobody ever had to participate. There was no duty to attend or do anything at all. This was purely voluntaristic, but with the incentive of pay, very important.

But it wasn’t only the assembly that was so important, it was really the courts. And so the kind of next big theme of the book, these are some ballots. I mentioned that in the assembly they invited impeachments.

They had votes of confidence. The Athenians devised a bunch of indictments and charges that they threw at leaders. So among them, I mentioned the one about making a deceitful promise to the demos.

They also did scrutinies of everyone who was gonna to take up an office before they took up the position. They invited the impeachments kind of midstream. They had audits of every officeholder also.

As soon as they stepped down from office, both ethical and financial, what had happened to the money that they’d been in charge of, and did anyone have any complaints about their role in office? Again, they also invited those complaints during the assembly meetings. They had a lovely, to my mind, incredibly important—no, it’s historically very important and particularly politically exciting charge, the graphe paranomon, which basically was someone, an orator, in the course of acting as an orator, breaching the norms.

And how they breached the norms was left quite open. But anyone could bring a charge of saying this guy, this politician has broken the norms in some way, is failing to follow the kind of correct behavior. These charges all went to the courts, smaller but still massive by our understanding.

So… Oh, hello. It’s my daughter and my husband.

So… Yeah, they were panels of 500 or 1,000 or 1,500 men drawn from whoever showed up that morning at the courts wanting to take part. Trials lasted no more than a day, and their job, kind of paralleling the job done in the assembly, which was to give a determination, show what they deemed to be beneficial.

The job of people in the courts, the men in the courts, was to show what they deemed to be right. So they were really in charge of the interpretation of the laws and the norms in the polity in a really direct way. These are the ballots that they used for the secret voting that were worked on for a long time.

This is the frontispiece. All right, how am I doing for time? That clock says 6 minutes.

What do you think? 5?

[PARTICIPANT]

We’ll go for that clock.

[DANIELA CAMMACK]

5, we’ll go for that one. All right, perfect. Okay.

So just to kind of give a couple more details then, more than 50% of the generals whose names we know ended their careers through being impeached and kind of ended their careers through being kicked out through the courts. Possible penalties, not just for that, but for other things, included fines, disenfranchisement, exile, and death. The main thing I want to emphasize is that this is a regime where ordinary people had real power over their leaders.

And one of the most important things is that they had the power to determine the meanings of the charges. So impiety is very well known as a charge that was, offered to Socrates, but treason also. None of these things were defined in the laws themselves.

They were left to the grasp of the concepts and the language of the men who were doing the judging. So they didn’t have complete discretion to decide what the words meant, obviously, but they voted secretly for either the prosecutor or the defendant based on their own understanding of the meaning of the words, and no one could tell them otherwise. There was no form of accountability for the assemblygoers or for the judges, whereas for every officeholder and the orators, there were these massive and very direct forms of accountability.

I had another couple of things to show you. This is stuff that you can see in the Agora Museum if you go to Athens. This is the random allotment machine, the kleroterion, how they selected people at random from the crowds that turned up.

Their name tags here, the ballots there. They put a lot of effort into the system. All right.

In the book, as I mentioned, it’s like 400 pages before notes. There’s a lot of evidence in there, drawn from all the evidence that we have, but you can really get most of what I want to say out of the epigraphs. So here are the epigraphs.

The first one is Aristotle. As far as I know, by the way, neither of these lines has ever been foregrounded in an account of demokratia before. In some places there is no demos.

They don’t have the custom of the open public meeting, just special councils, and trials are judged by specific groups. This line struck me 20 years ago when I started learning ancient Greek. I was taught the meaning of the word demos.

I was taught it as people. Around about the same time I was reading Aristotle’s Politics the first time, and I was carefully picking out every demos I could find. And I was like, wow, this one can’t be the whole people.

You know, like, how can you say in some places there is no whole people? This makes no sense. Equally, it can’t be the lower classes.

This is not that you can’t have, like, a community with no working classes. What this is getting at is there is no assembly, there is no constructed open public meeting where you gather everyone together and they become a collective entity, and that collective entity is given decision-making power. And the term here I’ve translated, the open public meeting, ekklesia.

There’s no ekklesia, i.e. there’s no kind of regular Public meeting. There’s just special councils, ad hoc councils,

(speaking Greek)

is there. And he connects it, interestingly, he connects this idea of there being no demos to what the judicial practice is also. I take that as being quite significant in the way that the assembly and the courts work together.

So trials are judged by specific Greeks. By that he means by specific officeholders. Two minutes.

Perfect. Thank you very much. All right.

The other bit of evidence is not exactly evidence. I just wanted to tell you that the second most important theoretical touchstone in the book is Hobbes. Which is a big surprise to some people, because, you know, he’s a 17th-century philosopher.

I consider him to be the most, along with Aristotle, the most important analyst of demokratia. That when he’s writing about democracy, he’s thinking of the ancient Greeks. He translated Thucydides, among other things, many other things.

But that is the context he’s thinking of. And in a sense, the whole book is really to say, you know, no one has taken his definition of demokratia seriously in the world of political theory, pretty much. Kinch has, like Kristen has said, but like, but it’s like among kind of historians of political thought, he is… this bit of his work is not scrutinized, I think, as carefully as it should be.

So he says in De Cive, two things constitute democracy, of which one, namely an ongoing schedule of meetings, constitutes a demos. The other, which is a majority of votes, to kratos, or the power to prevail. He picks on something incredibly important.

It wasn’t just That you have public meetings. It’s not even regular schedule because that’s how it’s normally translated. I think a better one is an ongoing schedule.

In the fourth century, unlike in the fifth century in Athens, the demos itself took charge of its own convening. It mandated when it was to be called, and it mandated what would be on the agenda in a way that is completely anomalous, actually, in the history of political systems, as far as I know. In every other case, even when you have these mass meetings, they’re called by officeholders.

They’re called by generals, they’re called by councillors, they’re called by, you know, in Rome, the consuls, tribunes. The convening power of the crowd is in the hands of some of the leading Officeholders, and that can be a disaster, has been a disaster for this kind of democracy, this demokratia. So Hobbes notices that and says specifically, it has to be an ongoing schedule.

You cannot close the meeting without knowing when the next one’s going to take place, and it can’t be in the hands of some random councillors who could change their minds. And the final thing. The other, a majority of votes, to kratos, or the power to prevail.

I think Hobbes really hits the nail on the head here, and this line puzzled me for quite a long time. What does he mean, a majority of votes gives you kratos? I mean, I translated potestas as the power to prevail, which is a slight stretch, but I do defend it in the book.

But how can a majority of votes give you the power to prevail? It’s the answer that I see in the sources I think Hobbes saw is that being in a crowd Looking around, seeing where the majority lies is the foundation of demotic solidarity. It is the acknowledgement or the recognition that you are in a crowd of many and you can take on your own leaders.

You can actually fight them and win. And you know that other people are going to be there fighting with you because you saw them putting their hands up. We have absolutely nothing like that in modern politics.

We have the hope and belief from opinion polling that there are people out there who think like us. We never stand in a crowd of like 20,000 people. semi-threatening our leaders.

When our leaders see crowds of 25,000 people or whatever, it’s because they’re on the campaign trail and they’re all there to support them. This dynamic was completely different. So the final thought I want to leave with is, in the eyes of ancient Greek democrats, what we have is a system they knew perfectly well.

They called it oligarchia, oligarchy. It’s a particular kind of oligarchy. It’s electoral oligarchy.

It’s the kind of oligarchy where an electorate, a large electorate, elects people to positions of power on a ruling council, a legislative council, other positions as well. And those people who are elected are ruling. They are ruling over the electorate.

And that is not just… The distinction that’s normally drawn between ancient Greek democracy and modern democracy is, oh, they were doing direct democracy and we do representative democracy. And I want to give the ancient Greek view, which is like, no, we’re just not doing democracy.

Like, we are just doing oligarchy, as they knew perfectly well. They had that system, and Aristotle talks about it in Larissa, in Abydos, in other places. This is a system they knew well.

There’s a lot more in the book. That’s just the first few pages. So these guys are gonna talk about the next 600.

Thank you.

(applause)

[DYLAN RILEY]

Yes.

[JAMES PORTER]

Thank you for the invitation to come here. It’s a great honor. And I’m going to start with a few disavowals.

I am not a political theorist, and I do not teach the problems of Athenian democracy, except tangentially when I teach and write about Athenian rhetoric. I must also admit that I have not given Daniela’s very big and complex book the kind of close reading that it deserves. My response, then, will be a reflection on what I take to be the main premises of the argument, which I acknowledge in advance that I may well have misunderstood.

That is why most of my reflections will take the form of questions, and I will leave Hobbes to Kinch, I think. Daniela’s bracing study makes a novel proposal about the meaning of demos in the ancient Greek term demokratia, democracy, a term that combines two Greek words, as we just heard, demos, people, kratos, power. If we take the term literally, we end up with the idea that democracy in Athens during the fifth and fourth centuries BCE gives power, kratos, to the people, demos.

Hence its common gloss by scholars and non-scholars: people power, the power of the people, or rule by the people. If the word demos is captured by any of these meanings, then by extension it comes to stand for the city-state that encompasses the people at large, which is to say the imagined community of all citizens, what is sometimes called the capital D Demos. And I’m quoting here from Daniela.

If the demos is all of this, then democracy translates into collective self-rule of the people by the people. Daniela wants to challenge this common consensus, which she believes rests on a fundamental misunderstanding of Athenian democracy and is guided by a wistful or wishful anachronism, a desire to see democracy as the rule by the whole people over itself. In short, when we look at Greece as the birthplace of democracy as we know it, as the origin of our ideals of equality and freedom for all, we are projecting modern liberal democratic assumptions onto the ancient political landscape.

Athenian demokratia, Daniela argues, was a very different kind of animal because neither half of its root terms matches ancient Greek usage. We’ve misunderstood the Greek political language. A radical retranslation is needed.

Daniela makes this case for a new understanding of demokratia by insisting on a rigorous restriction on the scope of both terms in this combined word form. In pursuing its thesis about the restricted meaning of the word demos, by examining a wide and nearly exhaustive array of evidence from Thucydides to Aristotle, she seeks to produce nothing less than a new taxonomy of Athenian democracy. Her study is at once painstakingly philological, politological, And historical.

The result is a view that the demos does not signify the people who live under a democratic constitution, that is, all the people who live in Athens, all Athenians. Rather, it designates more restrictedly the people who are eligible to assemble in public bodies in order to exert their power in the political business of the state as its ruling element. The demos on this view means the assembled people, whenever the people gathered to conduct their political business, such as attending assemblies to hear debates or serving as judges on popular courts, as they had the right to do in virtue of being Athenian citizens.

This restriction on demos is prudent because the right to citizenship was not universal. Women, males under a certain age, foreigners permanently living in Athens, and slaves were excluded from the politics of the state. The restriction is prudent in a further sense.

Not all those who had the right to assemble for official business did so on any given occasion. Juries and the legal assembly, the ecclesia, had numerical limits that were far below the population count of eligible citizens, somewhere in the range of 20,000 to 30,000. Hence, the assembled demos had a representative function beyond a practical one.

It represented those citizens who were not present on any given occasion. The assembled demos is nicely described by Daniela as, I quote, “a concrete, though ephemeral, political body that gathered to exercise its functions and then dispersed into non-functionality.” The implication is that the demos was both a concrete body and an abstract idea, as abstract as any imagined community, in fact.

It was like a container that could be filled and emptied as time went on. It is the abstract component of this definition, if it’s imagined, if not imaginary status, that is of interest to me. The demos was a theoretical body, even when it was not empirically occupied, much like the right to citizenship for the same reasons.

Here, democracy becomes entangled in theoretical pretensions that affect its empirical character. And there are other factors to consider as well. One of these is the distinction that Daniela introduces between those who rule, namely the demos, and those who lead and govern, namely civic leaders, officeholders, counselors, generals, orators, and the wealthy elite.

In a word, the politicians. In short, and here I quote, “The term demos did not denote anyone who had public standing as individuals because the demos represented the nameless, anonymous crowd, a collective body unlike the leaders who led by virtue of being individuals who stood out from the crowd.” That’s a quotation.

The power dynamics of Athens, the kratos of the demokratia, as Daniela wants to read it, favored the faceless crowd, the popular enfranchised masses, not the individuated elite leaders. The leaders led, but the demotic crowd ruled. Or as Daniela puts it, “The demos was a part of the citizenry, the non-leading part.”

End of quote. This functional distinction raises questions in my mind. On Daniela’s argument, the demos ruled but did not lead.

If you cannot lead, how can you rule? Much of the book is concerned with making intuitive this counterintuitive problem. One answer it gives is that the masses kept their elite rulers on a very short leash through judicial action, which could run from fines to impeachment to exile or execution.

Perhaps so, but recall that the demos, though they had a voice, were for the most part mute participants in the proceedings. They played the audience to the elite rhetoricians, whose oratory could and did sway their opinion and bend them to their own will. The latter were demagogues, a Greek word that means precisely to lead the demos.

The elite could not only lead, but also mislead the demos. As she says, no doubt mistakes were made. Think Socrates, think Syracuse, Corcyra, Mytilene, or Chaeronea.

Demosthenes and Aeschines made a career of swaying their audiences in opposite directions in the 4th century. A century earlier, Cleon, a demagogue under Pericles, berated the demos for its fickle susceptibility to bad arguments, all the while making one of his own. Thucydides says of Pericles himself, and I quote, “That he controlled the mass of the people with a free hand, leading them rather than letting them lead him, not only as a shapeless crowd, as a homilos, but as a political body, a demosia.”

One that could freely, i.e., easily restrain, he could freely restrain while pretending to give them a free choice. They were a toy in his powerful hands. Thucydides’ conclusion, he writes that, I quote, “What was happening under Pericles was democracy in name, but in fact the domination of the leading man.”

End of quote. Leaders were being led, and the Athenian democracy proved to be a tyranny that was founded on empire. That’s Thucydides’ term.

More confusingly still, the elite could count themselves as part of their constituency when it proved serviceable. At other times, they addressed the demos as a “you.” Was this a rhetorical trick?

Orators did it all the time. Pericles did this too, as in his puzzling equivocation and elision, quote, “We ourselves decide our doings even if we do not contemplate them completely by ourselves.” End of quote.

So who’s the “we” here? It’s the elite who lead. How then does the demos rule and govern?

Putting so much clout in the hands of the demos reminds me of an inversion of the claim that an egg, the demos, is only a chicken’s way of making another chicken. On Daniela’s argument, we have to say that a chicken, the elite, is only an egg’s way of making another egg. Did the popular demos truly have this much power over the elite in Athens?

Technically speaking, on the restricted meaning of demos as assembled people, they did not. But practically speaking, I wonder if the facts don’t point the other way. Here, the restriction feels like a stipulation, a statement of theory, but not a fact.

There is a certain passivity to the demos on Daniela’s account that reinforces the impression. And I’m quoting here from Daniela: Not the least attraction of this system was the minimal effort it required from most Athenians. There was no need for ordinary men personally to keep close tabs on their politicians.

Rather, they could rely on rivalry among the politicians to bring dubious behavior to public attention, end of quote. I’m ignoring that. The demos react but do not act.

Their theoretical and concrete existence represents, quote, the indispensable precondition of demokratia. But not its actual condition. Are they a pretense for elite power more than a reality?

Here I can only agree: people power does look to be an inaccurate translation of demokratia. Likewise, I agree that Athenian democracy cannot be called a government founded on collective self-rule. The elite leaders are functionally not part of the demos, though rhetorically they could claim to be.

Nor were slaves, women, and foreigners. Their exclusion was the predicate upon which the power of the demos was founded. Daniela knows that this last fact was a glaring deficiency of Greek democracy, a mark of its failure, even a blight on the ideal of a freedom that it valued but restricted.

My final question then is this, and it goes to the deeper reason of why we care how we define Athenian demokratia. When we look to the Athenian demos, are we looking for a failed theoretical ideal? And there a quote: a vision of human freedom that could embrace everyone, not merely a few, but one that ancient Greek democrats failed to realize.

That’s another quote. If so, then how does the new definition of the demos help us find it, which is Daniela’s ultimate concern with the study? And how does that finally differ from the anachronistic modern liberal views of democracy that it is designed to replace?

Okay, thank you very much.

(applause)

[KINCH HOEKSTRA]

All right. So can people hear me? Among the most established positions in accounts of ancient Greek political thought are the following: Ancient Greek democracy was direct rather than representative.

The demos was the entire citizen body. Demokratia was thus self-rule by all of the citizens. The assembly was the primary democratic institution in ancient Greece, and the Athenians moderated what had been a radical democracy at the end of the 5th century and the beginning of the 4th by legal checks on the assembly, better approximating what we call the rule of law.

These positions are more or less widely shared by prominent ancient historians, and certainly amongst historians of political and legal thought. Some of them can be considered foundational in the field. Daniela Cammack mounts a powerful attack on every single one of them and more in her series of stimulating articles that have led up to this book, and especially in this still more impressive book.

With Demos, I really do think that Daniela has written an extraordinarily powerful work that should redefine the study of Athenian democracy. In providing a structuring theoretical interpretation, she also provides a bracing model for political theorists to think with as they search for alternatives that are simultaneously democratic, based in facts rather than fantasies, and sharply different from current ideas and institutions. Daniela argues that Athenian democracy and modern democracy are not two species of the genus democracy.

They are distinct political forms that misleadingly share a name but do not share an essence. Our democracy, so-called democracy, as she just said, would be understood by the Greeks as a variety of electoral oligarchy. But this is not just because we elect our government.

It is because we lack the mechanisms of control over that government. We lack mechanisms like large popular courts, where even the most powerful citizens are subject to immediate democratic will, or the mechanisms whereby citizens audit the finances and performance of all public officials. At a basic level, she argues, we lack a demos.

That is, in Daniela’s understanding, we lack the regularly scheduled public meetings in which citizens exercise sovereignty. There cannot be demokratia without a demos, and Daniela draws the striking conclusion that not only is there not a single modern demokratia, therefore, but there is no demos in any modern polity. Offering comments on Daniela is a bit odd because I’ve been in conversation with her throughout, and on some of the central issues of this book, my zeal for these theses is because I’ve been converted, and it’s the converted skeptic that you’re hearing.

That conversion was part of this slow process of argument, looking back at the sources, revisiting my own received assumptions, and so on. I’ve learned a lot. The study of ancient Athenian democracy has, in some hands, amounted to a kind of antiquarian autopsy of strange institutions.

Daniela is able instead to offer her study as one that offers a far-reaching political theoretical reconstruction of the democracy, in part thanks to her unorthodox choice of her two primary interpretive partners. As you’ve heard, one of these partners is named Aristotle. She loves Aristotle.

And the other is Thomas Hobbes. Aristotle has often been sidelined, along with other ancient philosophical interpreters, as having given us an account of democratia that was irreparably distorted by elitism. The accounts of the philosophers as hostile critics of democracy were not trusted.

A primary example of this bias, it was thought, was the presentation of demokratia as rule by the poor rather than rule by all. But Aristotle, amongst others, really insists on this, and Daniela argues that the evidence suggests that we should follow Aristotle here. While he was a critic of democracy, he criticizes what democracy was, according to Daniela, rather than claiming it was what it was not.

A range of insights and the possibility of a systematic theoretical reconstruction are newly open to us once we see that Aristotle’s account of democracy is mostly accurate. Still more enterprisingly, still more controversially, Daniela draws heavily on the political philosophy of that great Grecian, as his biographer called him, Thomas Hobbes. Rather than treat Hobbes primarily as an inventor of modern philosophy who rejected the ancients, Aristotle above all, she sees that Hobbes is deeply indebted to Aristotle, and that Hobbes might be understood as, in a sense, the last of the great Greek philosophers.

Understanding Hobbes’s political theory is fleshed out on the skeleton of Athenian institutions and other social and political practices provides her with a series of insights that she grounds in the ancient texts. While Aristotle has sometimes been used as a resource for Athenian democratic thought, most often in some way against the grain, the use of Hobbes is especially distinctive. It is bound to cause some critics distress.

Not just because he’s a theorist, and that makes historians nervous at times, but it will also feel like an anachronistic imposition of a later mode of thought. But she tries to treat Hobbes like an acute classicist, in a sense, testing his outlook against the evidence, and at the same time drawing inspiration from his theory to look anew at the sources. So, speaking of Aristotle and Hobbes is gonna bring me to just two questions for Daniela today.

Both of them are questions about the relation between democracy and judgment. Danielle is offering us a picture that’s meant to be a reconstruction of Athenian democracy, but it’s also clear that she is a fan. And often what she’s wanting to do is to show us that fundamental criticisms of Athenian democracy, when properly understood, can be replied to.

But one of the things I wonder whether is sufficiently replied to in the book is about education, or the lack thereof. So both Aristotle and Hobbes highlighted what they saw as a weakness of demokratia, being that it put the uneducated in charge. With a lack of education, the many in sovereign authority were not up to the task in terms of knowledge, insight, or psychic control.

It is clear that some replies are out of bounds for the Athenian democrats. To hand over control to those who claim to be, or even those who are more knowledgeable and so on, is to give away their rule, and thus to destroy the democracy rather than save it. This is vividly expressed, for example, in the Old Oligarch’s Constitution of the Athenians.

But as I read Aristophanes, for example, I think he appeals to the demos itself to have self-control to ensure that the demokratia flourishes. In Plato’s theory, the rulers must undergo a long and rigorous education in order to develop self-control and rule well. So where is the educational foundation for the rulers in demokratia, or rather for the sovereign in demokratia?

Even with something like our obligatory mass education, the level of politically relevant education of the citizen body is arguably debilitatingly low. Daniela discusses, for example, the youth training program called the Ephebeia in chapter 15, but this seemed to Aristotle and Hobbes to be inadequate to prepare citizens to withstand the misinformation and manipulations of the Athenian public sphere. Didn’t they have a point?

Others, for example Josh Ober, has stressed the epistemic advantage of the widely shared court and assembly attendance, for example, and office holding being rotating as a form of education, citizen education. But there’s not very much of that in Daniela’s book, or that emphasis in Daniela’s book, and so I’d ask Daniela what she sees as the Athenian democratic answer. And my final question about the basis of popular judgment in democracy is this.

In chapter 14, Daniela argues for the view that the Athenians, quote, seem to have approached what is right in the law court as something intersubjectively constituted. Quote, whether a defendant deserved censure for a given act was not for them one that had an objectively correct answer, unquote. She contrasts this with Plato’s view that we can have objective knowledge of what is just.

Daniela’s analogy here is with language, which is not subjectively or objectively constituted, but intersubjectively. So… With language, for example, the word justice has seven letters and ends in E. If I disagree and stop— personally disagree and stop using the E at the end, this does not change the intersubjective fact of the matter.

I’m spelling it wrong. If the community of language users stops using the E at the end, they agree to do it some other way, however, then the intersubjective fact of the matter has changed. But I think there is something of a puzzle here.

Suppose I’m a judge, juror, a dicast in Greek terms, tasked with giving my verdict about whether someone is guilty of a given crime. I may refer to some intersubjectively influenced factors, such as how for us or around here that crime is defined, but it doesn’t seem to be intersubjective all the way down, as I think her account may suggest. My judgment of whether justice has seven letters is fully explained by my appeal to the community consensus.

But as one of 501 dicasts, one of 501 judges or jurors, how am I supposed to come to a vote about whether someone is guilty of a given crime? By asking what the other 500 or the citizen body think, or asking myself what I think they think, given that the trial does not have a general discussion phase. If they’re doing their job on this account, when I ask what the others think about this, well, the others are thinking that they should determine the case in accordance with what the others think.

I would agree that the decision is a matter of how things seem to the assembled deciders, but I don’t think their process of decision-making should simply be understood as appealing to, quote, “what we believe.” Rather, I take the ideal to be that each assemblygoer or dicast tries to come to the right answer, potentially regardless of what they think the others may think, and they vote accordingly. And then the majority of those votes constitutes what seems to be right to the body, which is determinative.

Do I have another minute?

[DYLAN RILEY]

Sure.

[KINCH HOEKSTRA]

That sounded like a no. I’ll skip it. So I was gonna talk about the dicastic oath, which I’ll do, depending on how Daniela pushes back.

So I’ll just say, this therefore makes me inclined to doubt Daniela’s view that the question, what if the dikastai, the judges or jurors came up with the wrong verdict? She says that that’s an inapposite question. It’s not the right kind of question.

But I think the Athenians did in due course think of some verdicts as wrong. And even though, insofar as they were democratic verdicts, they also thought of them as authoritative. So those are just two questions in case Daniela wants to have a go at either, but I’ll simply conclude by saying that Demos is a colossally impressive book, and you’ll enjoy it.

[DANIELA CAMMACK]

All right, thank you both so very, very much. I really appreciate the time that you put in thinking about the book, engaging with it, and coming up with these questions. So, Jim, I’ll start with you.

Oh, thank you. Oh, sorry. No, not for me.

This is okay. Okay, so at the beginning of your comments, when you mentioned the demos being an abstract ideal, I thought, oh, great, because this is something I didn’t have a chance to speak about. But then I got a bit concerned, and I just wanted to pose a counter question to you.

In thinking about the demos as actually being an imagined community, an abstract ideal, a container, but not necessarily a concrete body kind of all the time, would you say the same things about a council? Does that seem equally abstract? Is that right?

Okay, okay, all right. So, because my sense is that we don’t have the same feeling that the demos, the people, the assembly is this kind of a container or an abstraction in the way that we would with, say, a ruling council. I mean, I take it that we think of a ruling council as the individual people that showed up, and that’s absolutely why I want to say that the demos is.

And I thought that some of your comments, I’ll have to check them in writing, but the idea of the demos is fundamentally, or most importantly, an imagined community. That is exactly what I want to push back against. I really feel it’s quite a deep misunderstanding.

And I think at the end, when you were talking about how there are the exclusions of the women and the foreigners and the slaves from the body of the demos, that that undermines, I guess, the idea of demokratia, as far as you’re taking it. You would want to say that this is, demokratia is predicated on those exclusions, and that this is a lessening of the democratic ideal. I want to say thank you so much for putting into words exactly the thing that I want to say.

This is a misunderstanding, that the demokratia was not predicated on those kinds of exclusions. They were never intending to include those people because they were in this community, in this region, they really were thinking of The ordinary adult men, this I didn’t emphasize so much in the talk, but the ordinary adult men who would be responsible for fighting on behalf of the community, against outsiders and against their own internal enemies, their own leaders, the commanders who sought to command them against their will. So there’s a military element here which I think helps to explain those exclusions and again kind of concretizes it a bit.

This isn’t about an abstract ideal of the people that is supposed to be somehow manifested. It goes the other way around, that what they developed was the mass of solidaristic fighting men who realized that they didn’t need to take orders from people they didn’t want to take orders from. And yet the exclusion of women and minors was always actually because they were aiming to protect them.

They didn’t want them on the battlefield. The exclusion of slaves and foreigners, like they wouldn’t have trusted them to be fighting with them. But so it’s part of the politics that these are concrete human beings with their own particular, situatedness.

They’re not trying to be standing as the entire community. They’re standing as a part of it all the way through. So, okay, that’s one thought I wanted to just address.

The other thought, the big thought that Jim offered was the idea that demagogues mislead, and so this is dangerous. This shows that the demos is not really ruling because there are leaders like Pericles, and others who are manipulating the demos, being very influential, standing on the bema, shaping their thoughts. I think you said something like treating them like a toy in their hands.

Pericles treated the crowd like a toy in his hands. And on that I want to say, Absolutely, 100% agree with you. This was something that we have the sense that Plato cared about this a great deal, and Aristotle cared about it somewhat.

Thucydides certainly cared about it. We have so much less of the sense that the demos itself cared about this, and yet that’s what I want to say in the book, that the ordinary men were Just as alarmed by the manipulations of their leaders, if not more so, because they were the ones that suffered from them. And Pericles is a really great example of someone who, even though he was widely respected as a great leader and he’s actually a great strategist and he led them well before he died early in the Peloponnesian War.

One chapter in the book tries to argue that the power that Pericles had to convene or not convene the demos according to his own preference highlights a vulnerability that essentially shows the weakness of fifth-century demokratia. But it was repaired in the 4th century. This is another strand of the book is that usually people look to the 5th century, the era of Pericles, as like the high point of radical democracy, and they say it got more moderate in the fourth century.

And I want to say no, it got tightened up in the fourth century precisely because of people like Pericles, who were in many ways was a wonderful leader. And yet, there were vulnerabilities in the system revealed in part in 411 and 404, when there were oligarchical coups, but that were later repaired partly by this mandating the convenings, and mandating the meetings, the open public meetings. Okay, so you also said something about the minimal effort and passivity of the demos.

And there I want to say, I don’t know if that’s… I don’t want to… Yeah, I don’t…

What do I want to say? Okay. Yeah, I think that we misapprehend the power of the vote.

colossally by looking to the speakers and speech acts and thinking that that is the center of the exertion of power. I mean, the crucial thing about the demos, I take it, is that it is active as a decision maker, as the deliberator, as the decider, and that in the crowd voting and revealing, disclosing to all the individual members of the crowd where the majority lies, that is about the most active thing that a political agent can do. And yeah, you’re kind of thinking, your argument that some of the ways the Athenians are doing this showed that kind of minimal effort.

You know, that they’re, I don’t know, sitting on the sidelines somehow, or I don’t know. I think there’s… Yeah, we’re looking at kind of the wrong bits of the picture.

Thank you very, very much. Okay, to Kinch, super quickly. So let’s see, there was the question about education.

And that also is a major Platonic theme, also an important theme for Aristotle, very, very critically intended most of the time, that these crowds cannot— Why should they be ruling? They don’t have the skills. They don’t have the expertise.

They don’t have the learning. And on that, I guess the question that kind of comes to my mind first is learning to do what? One thing, learning to be skeptical of their leaders, I think is important and something that we underestimate the significance of.

The virtues that Aristotle associated with kind of excellent political Capacity were courage, fair-mindedness. Thank you. Restraint and common sense.

And I do think that the Athenians, when they instituted the ephebeia, the training program for young men, they were quite consciously hoping, that this would help their young men. So I didn’t mention this, but a two-year kind of military and sacral training program for young men, like that, I think the goal of that really was to increase their sophrosyne, their restraint, particularly on the battlefield, but not only, not only then. That is like a project that was kind of ongoing for the Athenians.

But I also want to say, again, this is kind of relative, if we compare it with us and our capacities to manifest the skepticism that we may feel towards our leaders. We are not well trained in coordinating among ourselves against our leaders at all. That is something that they did seem to work quite hard at, that they had a lot of experience in, and they tried to train people in, including things like taking their sons to the assembly and to the courts to see what was going on before they were of age.

But I guess, yeah, the kind of the question of what do you need to know? I think one thing that they wanted to feel that people knew was to be suspicious of their leaders, to expect that they were going to be manipulative and to have already designed Judicial actions against them such that when they tried to overstep the bounds, they could be pretty certain that someone was going to catch them out. And yeah, that is an area that I think we don’t think of enough as being an important goal of political education.

I mean, we’re just spectacularly bad at it. I think we all accept that our politicians are going to lie to us and mistreat us, and we’d think that there’s no way to fix that. And I think the Athenians actually were super good in terms of practical judgment at working out, well, okay, how about if we give everyone an audit at the end of the year?

These are the things that I think they would look to us and be like, you guys have no idea. You’re trying to run a democracy without even having demotic courts? Like, you’re crazy.

Anyway, okay, there was another question about homicide. I think I need to stop. But, well, maybe I can say one thing.

On the wrongness or rightness of the verdicts, I take it that each individual judge is disclosing what he thought was right. I mean, they vote either for the defendant or for the prosecutor. And they revealed what seemed to each one individually to be right in the full anticipation that there would be disagreement.

In fact, it was the rule that if you didn’t have sufficient disagreement among the judges on a public charge, then, the prosecutor, rather, I should say, if the prosecutor didn’t get a fifth of the votes on a public charge, then he was fined for having Brought a frivolous prosecution. So they expected disagreement, and they built that in. They believed people would disagree, but they still wanted to know kind of what’s the most effective solidaristic mechanism for bringing most people behind this verdict and being like, these are our community’s norms.

What do we do? All we can do is ask people, what do you think? How does this seem to you?

So in the book, I have scare quotes around, like, what’s the wrong or the right decision. And I guess I just don’t want to get drawn into the Platonic argument, which I think is in reaction to this, which is to say there really is an answer out there. The transcendental kind of answer beyond the minds of the judges, beyond the people who live in this community, to the question of what is right, say, in Socrates’s trial, like, should he have been convicted or not?

There isn’t an objective answer to that question distinct from or independent of the views of the judges about what was acceptable within their own community, and that ties to their religious conceptions in a very deep way. You know, they don’t seem to have thought the gods particularly cared about political trials. Whereas Plato made a point of arguing that the gods do care, that actually you can be wrong in all kinds of ways, you might not even know it, but the gods— the god, one god— has his eye on the ball.

I think that the freedom of the Athenians in just taking upon themselves, embracing the agency of saying we are the ones who are making the decision, and all it’s going to be based on is how things seem to us. We’re not making a claim about how things really are. Philosophically.

I think that’s something incredibly bracing, and I think that we’ve lost it in part because of the success of the Platonic model that came later. I think some of that Platonic model is visible in Kinch’s comments and in Jim’s comments, but that’s our heritage. Like, that’s what we’ve inherited from this culture, far more than the Athenian democrats’ views.

So I have been trying to stiffen the punch for the Athenian democrats. Thank you.

(applause)

[DYLAN RILEY]

Well, thank you all for coming. Thanks so much. This has been such a stimulating discussion.

[WOMAN’S VOICE] Thank you for listening. To learn more about Social Science Matrix, please visit matrix.berkeley.edu.