CHAPTER 8
Athenian Experiment

To save the democracy we thought we had, we must take it to where it’s never been.¹

Frances Moore Lappé

Between the time of the Mesopotamian and Egyptian empires and the time of the American Revolution, the era of Empire was punctuated by two celebrated human encounters with egalitarian greatness. The first was Egypt’s golden age (1990-1786 BCE). The second, and better known, was centered in ancient Athens, a Greek city-state known for the graceful beauty of its art and architecture, its belief in the nobility of human achievement, and its devotion to human freedom. Our word democracy comes from the Greek word dēmokratiā: literally, “people power.” The two preceding chapters sought insight into the challenges of the Great Turning from the experience of five thousand years of Empire; this chapter seeks insights from the Athenian experiment in popular democracy and the reflections of its three most fabled philosophers. As the violence and domination of Empire manifest the lower orders of human possibility, so the mutual caring and partnership of the mature democracy of Earth Community manifest the higher orders of human possibility. The realization of the potential of a democratic society goes hand in hand with the realization of the potential of each citizen. Together the practical politics of the Athenian experience and the philosophical reflections of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle illuminate the importance and implications of this relationship and thereby provide a framework for a deeper understanding of the work of bringing the still limited democracy of our own time to full fruition.

ATHENIAN DEMOCRACY

Perhaps the proximity of Athens to the island of Crete, the center of the Aegean society—believed to be the last, most peaceful, and most equitable 143of the Goddess societies—had something to do with igniting the Greek imagination to the possibilities of an egalitarian form of government. Remnants of the Aegean civilization survived until the eleventh century BCE and retained a presence in the temples of the Greek city-states in which priestesses continued to play a central role. It is also noteworthy that Athens had never been the subject of armed invasion and no military caste had ever imposed its rule.

Athens was ruled as a monarchy until roughly 750 BCE, when the nobles began to wrest power from the king to establish a hereditary aristocracy that lasted until around 600 BCE. Rich mineral deposits and splendid harbors made trade a foundation of economic life and of a vibrant urban culture. The Athenian merchant fleet plied the Mediterranean under the power of sails and galleys of up to two hundred slave rowers, buying cheap in one place and selling dear in another.² Rural aristocrats who had the resources to sustain them through the five years required to bring grape and olive cultures into profitable production prospered in the rocky Athenian countryside and expanded their land holdings by buying up the lands of failed grain farmers.

Less fortunate farmers who could only afford to plant grains faced the changing fortunes of the harvest and competition from cheap imports from regions better suited to grain production. Forced to borrow against their land at exorbitant interest rates to survive the bad years, they were being driven from their land in large numbers. Sharecroppers who worked land owned by others for a one-sixth share of what they produced survived the bad years by borrowing against their future labor and that of their families. The almost inevitable default on their loans resulted in their sale into slavery. The resulting social tensions created a growing political crisis.

Rise and Fall

Political tensions came to a head in 594 BCE, with threats of revolution in the air. The urban middle class sided with the peasants in a demand for political liberalization and a radical redistribution of wealth. To forestall a potentially violent revolution, all parties agreed to appoint Solon, a respected Athenian statesman, member of the Council of Areopagus, poet, and tradesman, as a magistrate with absolute power to carry out reforms.

Solon canceled outstanding debts, freed all debtors from bondage, made it illegal to enslave debtors, limited the amount of land any 144individual could own, provided loans on favorable terms to small farmers to assist their conversion to grape and olive production, and expanded the political franchise to all but women, residents born to foreign parents, and slaves. No one was wholly satisfied. The aristocracy resented its loss of privileges. The middle and lower classes felt the aristocracy retained too much power.

Athenian political democracy gained little real traction until Cleisthenes, a liberal-minded aristocrat, enlisted the support of the masses to gain the office of chief archon, or highest magistrate (525–524 BCE). He is known as the father of Athenian democracy for granting full rights of citizenship to all free men who resided in the territory of Athens at that time and establishing the Council of Five Hundred as the chief organ of government. The council, whose members were selected by lot from male candidates over thirty years of age submitted by the townships, had supreme authority over executive and administrative functions and the power to prepare and submit legislative proposals to the assembly.

All citizens, thirty thousand adult males at that time, were entitled to participate in the assembly, with six thousand required for a quorum.³ The assembly had the power to debate and pass or reject proposals from the council. It also had the power to declare war, appropriate money, and audit the accounts of retiring magistrates.

The highest point of Athenian democracy was reached during the thirty-year tenure (461–429 BCE) of Pericles as chief strategus, or president, of the Board of Generals, a body comparable to the British cabinet, whose members were chosen by the assembly for one-year terms with unlimited eligibility for reelection. During this period the assembly acquired the authority to initiate legislation without the prior recommendation of the Council of Five Hundred.⁴

At this point Athenian democracy came as close to the practice of direct democracy—securing the right of every citizen (although a small percentage of the population) to direct participation in the political process—as has been achieved by any state before or since. Yet it fell far short of realizing the democratic ideal of universal suffrage, as the rights of citizenship were denied to women, slaves, and those born to foreign parents.⁵ Indeed, by some accounts the treatment of women, and even more so of slaves, was as bad as that found in the most brutal of ancient civilizations.⁶

There were other problems, as illustrated by the trial of Socrates, who was condemned to death by the council for nonconformity. Ultimately, 145Athenian democracy became the victim of its own imperialist ambitions. Reaching out to dominate its neighbors through military force, Athens provoked a war with Sparta in 431 BCE that ended in defeat for Athens in 404 BCE. The war was accompanied by corruption, treason, and growing brutality. Defeat dealt a serious blow to trade and democracy. Culturally, Athens remained strong for a time, and the democrats regained their hold until Athens was defeated by Philip of Macedonia at the battle of Chaeronea in 338 BCE.

Lessons

Perhaps the most sobering, but essential, lesson of the Athenian experiment in democracy is its uniqueness, limited scale, and relatively short tenure. By the most generous definition, Athenian democracy, with all its serious flaws, lasted only 250 years, from the appointment of Solon and the start of the process of democratic reforms in 594 BCE to Athens’s ultimate defeat and subjugation by Philip of Macedonia. At its peak, the population of the peninsula of Attica, which defined the boundaries of Athens as a city-state, was about 315,000 persons. Of those, 43,000 were enfranchised citizens and 155,000 were slaves.⁷

Consider the stunning implications. With the possible exception of Egypt’s golden age, Western historians take no note of any comparable group of people enjoying equivalent political rights and freedom during the nearly three-thousand-year period between the fall of the early Aegean Goddess civilization and the birth of the United States in 1776. Other examples are found primarily among relatively small tribes of indigenous peoples.

Freedom and democracy are not divine gifts. They are earned and maintained by a vigilant, mindful, and mature citizenry through sustained struggle, and once lost they are not easily regained. Imperial ambition is their almost certain undoing. These are sobering lessons for our own time.

Solon’s choice to respond to the stress of growing economic injustice with internal economic and political reforms that lessened the divide was a distinctive feature of the Athenian experience. It stood in stark contrast to the more common imperial response of leaving a growing economic divide unchecked while seeking to relieve the tension by acquiring new lands for resettlement through the military conquest and enslavement of foreign populations. The conventional response affirms 146the culture and institutions of Empire. Solon’s choice, although only partial, created the necessary economic foundation for Athenian democracy.

Unfortunately, the challenge Athens presented to the classic imperial cultures and institutions of Empire was as temporary as it was partial. Only slaves sold into bondage for payment of their debts gained their freedom under Solon, and slavery remained an important institution. Women never gained political franchise, and Athens on occasion succumbed to the temptations of wars of conquest. In the end the partial nature of the economic reforms and the failure to develop a mature, inclusive democratic culture dedicated to securing the same rights for all people left in place the seeds of the undoing of the Athenian experiment in popular democracy.

A society divided between the enfranchised and the disenfranchised must create a moral justification for denying the humanity and right of participation of the disenfranchised by exaggerating the virtues of the former and the vices of the latter. The racism, sexism, and classism that inevitably follow bar the development of a mature democratic culture that recognizes the natural rights of every person by the fact of their birth. So long as the culture defines some people as inherently less worthy than others, the only question becomes how the division of society between the free and the slave will be decided; the underlying cultural and institutional foundations of Empire remain in place.

The Athenian experience points to the difference between the more mature and less mature democratic forms. The less mature democracy centers on securing the individual rights of members of particular favored categories of persons in relation to the institutions of the state. A more mature democracy seeks to secure the rights, affirm the responsibilities, and support the full human development of all persons through their full and active engagement in civic life to create what three celebrated Athenian philosophers referred to as the “good society.”

POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY

The most celebrated of Athenian philosophers—Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, the fabled three—were men of exceptional intellectual power and curiosity. Their inquiries into the nature of the good society remind us of the deeper purpose of democratic governance and the barriers that make the attainment of this purpose so challenging. 147

The Good Society

The fabled three believed that truth is real, is discoverable through disciplined intellectual inquiry, and is the proper basis for a good society. Underlying all their work was a belief in the goodness of Creation and in the human capacity to reach beyond competitive power and greed in the quest for a good society.

Much like most contemporary democracies, the Athenian democracy of their day was primarily concerned with protecting the rights of the individual. The fabled three began from a different starting point. Their goal was a virtuous politics and a good society, which by their definition is a society that nurtures the full development of the qualities that make us distinctively human. This distinction embodies an insight at the core of contemporary studies of human maturity, that is, that the concept of individual rights and responsibilities has a very different meaning to those who function at the self-centered lower orders of human consciousness than it does to those who have achieved the inclusive perspective of the higher orders of consciousness. Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle believed that the good society needs the kind of leadership that comes only with the wisdom and discipline of a mature consciousness. They were thus less concerned with securing individual rights than with solving the puzzle of how a society might best identify and appoint wise leaders of a mature moral consciousness who would guide the society to achievement of its higher-order possibilities.

Socrates (470–399 BCE) laid the foundation with his belief in the ability of man to discover enduring principles of right and justice as a guide to virtuous living independent of selfish desire. He equated true happiness with goodness and taught that the highest obligation of the statesman is to tend to the spiritual health and development of the souls of the nation’s citizens. The idea that those who understand the nature of true happiness recognize that the pursuit of unlimited wealth and power leads ultimately to misery and the loss of one’s humanity was a foundation of his political philosophy. Presumably, Thomas Jefferson had Socrates’ definition of happiness in mind when he proclaimed in the U.S. Declaration of Independence that the pursuit of happiness is an inalienable right.

Socrates was an outspoken critic of Athenian democracy because he believed it wrong to put decisions of governance in the hands of men who lack true insight and to treat the views of all citizens as equal on 148matters of morality and justice. He thus articulated one of democracy’s basic dilemmas: all persons may be created equal in the eyes of God, but many fail to achieve the mature understanding and capacity for moral judgment essential to the practice of a mature citizenship that looks beyond individual advantage to the well-being of the whole.

The Republic

Plato (428–348 BCE), Socrates’ most distinguished student, taught that the ethical foundation for human affairs is to be found in an ordered universe that is both spiritual and purposeful. In his search for an ideal state free from the turbulence of self-seeking political competition between individuals and classes, Plato proposed a plan in Republic for a society divided into three classes: the working class, the soldier class, and a ruling class that would be specially prepared to rule by rigorous intellectual training. An educational screening system would sort out the candidates by aptitude and moral character to assure that the men who ruled would be those best suited to serving the interests of all.

Plato favored what he called a true aristocracy, or rule of the best. He distinguished true aristocracy from both oligarchy, which he defined as domination by merchant princes, and democracy, which he dismissed as subjecting the state to the irresponsible will of the masses. In short, he accepted the dominator hierarchy of Empire as organizing principle, but sought reforms that would reduce many of the more destructive aspects of political competition by assigning the positions of power to people of an advanced moral sensibility.

Although Solon, Cleisthenes, and the eighty-four-year rule of the Five Good Emperors of ancient Rome approximated Plato’s ideal republic, throughout five thousand years of history the imperial norm has more often resulted in rule by brutal and arrogant psychopaths than by wise and selfless sages. The logic of rule by wise saints is difficult to question, but it creates a problem: Who will judge the qualifications of the available candidates, and who will guarantee the integrity and wisdom of the judges?

RESOLVING THE LEADERSHIP DILEMMA

Athens dealt with the leadership dilemma by limiting the vote to those deemed worthy—which turned out to be those who were sufficiently 149organized to demand representation. This solution had a deeply pernicious consequence.

As noted earlier, a society divided between the enfranchised and the disenfranchised must create a moral justification for the domination of one group by another. This invites abuse of power expressed through racism, sexism, and classism, thus undermining the ethic of equal rights. Yet an ethic of equal rights is the essential foundation of democracy and of a society dedicated to supporting all individuals in the realization of true happiness through the full development and expression of their talents. To deny to whole classes of people that which is the sacred obligation of the society to nurture is both illogical and immoral.

Civil Society

Aristotle (384–322 BCE), who was in turn Plato’s most distinguished student, shared with Socrates and Plato the belief that ethics is not a matter of adherence to moral absolutes. Rather, ethical behavior follows from a mature and considered choice for the true happiness achieved through a virtuous life of intellectual contemplation and a balanced disposition free from the extremes of excess and moral deficiency. Aristotle taught that a proper moral education seeks not to inculcate specific rules of behavior, but rather to help the student recognize the reasons for virtue and to experience the pleasure inherent in virtuous action.

Aristotle believed that, although each individual is born with a capacity both for virtue and intellectual contemplation and also for savage lust, brutality, and gluttony, the former capacity is what makes us distinctively human and is the capacity we properly strive to cultivate. He believed that ethics and politics are inseparable one from the other, because the highest development of the individual, which he took to be the measure of the moral standard of a society, is inseparable from the problems of political association.

Aristotle conceived of the state as a community of politically engaged citizens who share a common set of norms and values cultivated through a rigorous process of education devoted to developing a highly refined capacity for reason. He called such a state a “political society,” the Greek term later translated into Latin as societas civilis, or civil society. According to political theorists Jean Cohen and Andrew Arato, Aristotle’s ideal was a state whose citizens were sufficiently united by 150their goals and lifestyles to be able to function as a “single homogeneous, organized solidary body of citizens capable of totally unified action.”⁸

Collective Wisdom

In his struggle with the problem of how the good society might best select wise leaders, Aristotle arrived at the pragmatic conclusion that the government best suited to supporting man in the development of his highest nature will be controlled by a strong, numerous, and educated middle class in a state unburdened by extremes of wealth and poverty. He reasoned that, although the individual members of a polity may not be the best of men, they are more likely as a collective to arrive at a reasoned judgment in their choice of leader than are the members of a smaller group, even though those who make up the smaller group may be individually wiser. Aristotle thus arrived at a democratic solution to the leadership dilemma based not on a theory of individual rights but rather on a theory of collective wisdom.

Aristotle is also among those great political philosophers, including notably Thomas Jefferson, who recognized that the institution of private property is an essential foundation of a strong and democratic middle-class society. He also recognized, as did Jefferson, the essential need for governmental intervention to prevent a concentration of ownership by any individual beyond that required to support modest comfort, as well as the need for government to assist the poor in becoming property owners by helping them buy land for small farms or otherwise become established in self-owned trades or professions. Aristotle considered such measures integral to each citizen’s prosperity and self-respect, which are in turn a foundation of responsible political participation. His wise counsel, with some glaring exceptions, is of considerable relevance to the present human circumstance.

For Men like Me

For all of his wisdom and the importance of his contributions to political theory, however, Aristotle’s vision included a crucial flaw: a defense of slavery and the male domination of women.

For that some should rule and others be ruled is a thing not only necessary, but expedient; from the hour of their birth some are marked out for subjection, others for rule.… Again, 151the male is by nature superior, and the female inferior; and the one rules, and the other is ruled; this principle, of necessity, extends to all mankind.… It is clear, then, that some men are by nature free, and others slave, and that for this latter slavery is both expedient and right.⁹

In effect, Aristotle’s vision of the good society was built in part on a self-serving elitist fantasy in which women and a permanent slave class toil to support a philosopher class of male citizens in the good life of refined leisure and reflective contemplation. He shared with Socrates and Plato this hypocritical chauvinism that ultimately was the seed of the undoing of Athenian democracy—and the inevitable undoing of any democracy that persists in similar contradictions.

Another crucial flaw in Aristotle’s vision that has no place in the good society is his ideal of the civil society as “homogeneous.” Diversity is essential to a society’s vitality, as it is to the vitality of all living systems.

Enduring Principles

Setting aside for the moment the flaws of their elitist chauvinism, the great Athenian philosophers defined a number of enduring and ennobling principles of considerable relevance to our own time.

• Humans have a capacity for both good and evil, and nurturing the former is an essential task of the good society.
• The state is a unifying force essential to civilized life, because of the need to nurture our positive nature and to restrain our destructive impulses. The priority is to nurture the positive.
• Wise rulers who understand the nature of the good society and the proper role of the state in supporting its realization are required to guide the state in its responsibilities.
• Economic democracy based on a just distribution of ownership rights is an essential foundation of political democracy.
• The most promising solution to the challenge of assuring that those elevated to positions of power meet a minimal standard of maturity and wisdom is to vest the power to choose in a materially comfortable, strong, and well-educated middle class and to make the development and maintenance of what is essentially a classless society a priority of the state.

On reflection, it seems almost axiomatic that if a society is to be ruled by the good and the wise, the state must give priority to supporting a cultural and institutional context that nurtures the goodness and wisdom of its citizens. Think of it as the experience of Ricardo and the Hacienda Santa Teresa writ large.

This of course poses a classic conundrum: if the wise state is a product of a wise citizenry, and a wise citizenry is the product of a wise state, which comes first? Perhaps what comes first is neither the wise state nor the wise citizenry, but rather a vision of the benefit and possibility of an inclusive and egalitarian world ruled by wise and mature citizens who share power and rotate leadership roles to create a dynamic, democratic leadership of the whole. The vision then becomes a template for what the people of an organized civil society join in living into being.

Democracy and political maturity must evolve in tandem through the engagement of all in the responsibilities of citizenship. Proper schooling and a strong civic culture are important, but in the end democratic citizenship is a practice, and the experience of doing it is our best teacher.

The political philosophers Cohen and Arato observe that for democracy to work, all citizens —not just the elites—must be supported in developing through practice a political consciousness and a sensibility that embraces the needs and well-being of the whole.

For it is through political experience that one develops a conception of civic virtue, learns to tolerate diversity, to temper fundamentalism and egoism, and to become able and willing to compromise. Hence the insistence that without public spaces for the active participation of the citizenry in ruling and being ruled, without a decisive narrowing of the gap between rulers and ruled, to the point of its abolition, polities are democratic in name only.¹⁰

The contemporary phenomenon of global civil society may be an early manifestation of the human capacity to actualize on a global scale Aristotle’s ideal of a society able to achieve coherence primarily through nonhierarchical self-organization. In sharp contrast to the self-limiting social homogeneity of the Aristotelian ideal, however, global civil society is inclusive of a diversity of races, religions, classes, languages, genders, and nationalities that Aristotle could scarcely have imagined. 153Global civil society manifests a leadership of the whole around a unifying vision of a possible world grounded in universal human values of justice, sustainability, and compassion.

THE ENLIGHTENMENT

The Enlightenment, the next period of significant inquiry into the nature and potential of humankind and the democratic state, followed the death of Aristotle by some two thousand years. Presenting a powerful challenge to the absolutism of the institutions of both state and church, the Enlightenment began in England about 1680, spread rapidly to most of the countries of northern Europe, and established its center in France. John Locke (1632–1704) and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78) were two of the Enlightenment’s most influential political philosophers.

Locke articulated the ideals of liberalism, which gave primacy to protecting the natural property rights of the individual (which he defined broadly to include life, liberty, and estate) as absolute and inalienable. He reasoned that to secure the orderly protection of their property rights, individuals ultimately agree among themselves to establish a government to which they surrender certain powers. Because a government properly exercises only the authority expressly granted to it by the people, the people may overthrow it if it exceeds or abuses that authority. Focused on property rights as the foundation of liberty and dismissive of the idea that it is the purpose of government to serve some larger good, the propertied classes embraced Locke’s concept of liberty and the responsibilities of government with particular enthusiasm as it lent a patina of democratic legitimacy to their privilege.¹¹

Much like Locke, Rousseau grounded his political theory in a concept of popular sovereignty and a “social contract” by which the people create a civil society with morally binding laws and duties through their mutual agreement. Rousseau reckoned that binding laws require both a legislative body to make the laws and an executive body to see to their enforcement. The power to make and enforce laws necessarily passes, respectively, to the legislative and executive bodies created by the social contract and thereby to those individuals the people commission to fill those offices and to act in the name of the popular will. The people are thereby morally bound to abide by the law as established and enforced by the chosen officeholders until the people choose to replace them or 154change the form of government—rights that remain irrevocably with the people. Rousseau’s conception was more inclusive and revolutionary than Locke’s and presented a great challenge to elite privilege.

More than two millennia passed between the end of the democratic experiment of ancient Athens in 338 BCE and the next democratic experiment in Western culture that began with the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America in 1776. This long gap is a sobering reminder of the challenge facing those committed to carrying the democratic experiment forward to a new level of maturity.

Athens’s turn to democracy began with a wise strongman leader who responded to the social tension of growing inequality with domestic economic reforms that strengthened economic justice rather than with efforts to defuse the tension through foreign conquest. Although only partial, these economic reforms were a sufficient step in the direction of economic democratization to provide an underpinning for the political reforms that followed.

Unfortunately, Athenian democracy never matured. Even at its height it was concerned primarily with securing the individual rights of a privileged minority. The majority—women, slaves, and persons born to foreign parents—were excluded in a denial of democracy’s essential principle that every person acquires certain inalienable rights by the fact of his or her birth.

The great Athenian political philosophers—Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle—began not with a concern for individual rights, but rather with a definition of the nature of the good society as one that nurtures the full development of the higher qualities of the mind of each person through a combination of education, disciplined reflection, and civic engagement. Such a society requires a wise and mature leadership, thus raising the question: who will decide who is sufficiently wise and mature to lead?

Aristotle, who believed the choice of leadership is best left to the collective wisdom of the largest possible group of well-educated, involved citizens, articulated a concept of a leadership of the whole grounded in active civic engagement in all spheres of community life. This vision— minus Aristotle’s blatant sexism, racism, and classism—is the vision of 155a mature democratic ideal. The distinction between democracy in its more and less mature forms is important to our understanding of the challenges now facing the nation that embarked on the first, yet partial, democratic experiment of the modern age.

The ideas of the Enlightenment philosophers reignited democratic passions and made major contributions to shaping the political institutions of modern democracy. In contrast to the Athenian political philosophers, however, Locke and Rousseau were primarily concerned with limiting the role of government to maintaining order and protecting individual rights. They took a less expansive view on questions relating to human perfectibility, the good society, civic participation, and the role of the state in supporting each individual in achieving the qualities of wisdom and moral judgment that are foundations of the more robust and mature democracy of Earth Community. The modern democratic experiment has suffered accordingly.