An excerpt from
Ancient Athenian Democracy and Democracy Today: Culture, Knowledge Power

Dr. Josiah Ober, Professor of Classics at Princeton University

March 6, 2003, Daugherty-Palmer Commons
(As transcribed by Joseph Rieu, Student Researcher, Center for the Study of Democracy)

"Ancient Greece remains an important topic and an important part of our cultural landscape. Postmodern architecture is filled with classical Greek references. U.S. senators quote Thucydides in discussion and debates of foreign wars. And there are at least three movies currently being made in Hollywood with Ancient Greece as their basis....But perhaps our most enduring and often cited legacy from the Ancient Greek past is democracy, a form of government that was invented in ancient Athens some 2500 years ago....

Democracy is now clearly one of our more favorite political terms, right up there with freedom, justice, and rights. Yet, democracy is a term that describes a political regime, that is concerned intrinsically with the organization of public authority within the established community. The regime described by democracy is comprehensive, in that all the systems are interested in organizing the moral practices that are implied by our chosen favorite political terms. So, democracy is a powerful concept, simply because it implies that it is possible for us to live according to principles of freedom, rights and justice. [However], there is still a large gap between these ideals and political reality, and this demands a change....

There is a large body of American scholarship devoted to the issue of constitutional interpretation. One need only glance at the recent example of the 2000 presidential election to understand the importance of this scholarship. The outcome of this election posed a rather strange spectacle for students of democracy. In the end, the will of the people, in the guise of the popular vote, was overridden by a constitutionally established but ordinarily hidden entity of supervoters, in the guise of the electoral college, in addition to the state's interpretation of political dispute, in the guise of the government and the Supreme Court of Florida, was overridden by the national government in the guise of the United States Supreme Court. The 2000 election was rather an unusual event but a central example of modern emphasis on problems of elections, of elections, and of distributions of institutional authority....

A lot has been learned in the past half-century about the culture of Athenian democracy as well as the institutional forms of Athenian democracy. About political ideology and discourse, about the public and private practices of Athenian citizens which contributed to their understanding of 'we, the people,' 'we, the demos. I suggest that approaching Athenian democracy as a political culture, rather than as a constitution, will have a lot to tell us about the modern situation....Once we move to political culture, we find that the system of democracy, in antiquity and potentially today, is about the aggregation, the bringing together and the distribution of knowledge, knowledge in the service of collective power... I do offer Athenian democracy as a strong alternative to those disheartened by organizations that are governed by oligarchy or tyranny, and also as a resource for anyone interested in the potential strongly democratic self-governance at, for example, one's own place of work....The elements of Athenian culture are especially resourceful. The first of these elements is a set of core values, concerned with the individual, that is to say, a cultural commitment to evaluate the freedom, equality, and the security of each citizen. The second of these elements is the commitment of each citizen both as the polis, as an organization, and they are collectively and directly its rightful rulers. And finally, there is the commitment to the idea that there is nothing but the participation of each citizen in day-to-day practice of self-governance which makes the core values rule, that is which renders the people free, equal and secure in fact."