Changes

Flash forward to 1863, Gettysberg, Pennsylvania. In his famed funeral address President Lincoln hailed his own state’s political system as a form of democracy, ‘government of the people, by the people, and for the people’. But what a difference a millennium or two had made! From the originary, Athenian meaning of democracy to the Americans’ etiolated, watered-down, version of indirect, representative, parliamentary democracy was a very long stretch indeed. Since then democracy in its various Western forms has taken a few mighty steps forward, not least the move to full adult suffrage regardless (in theory) of gender, race or creed. It has also taken several steps back – in the ugly shape of totalitarian dictatorships of various stripes. It currently suffers from more or less fake appropriations flying under the banner of populism. It’s these vicissitudes of democracy, its twists and turns from antiquity to modernity, its more or less radical transformations, that my 2016 book Democracy: A Life and its new (2018) Afterword seek to chart.

There were many different and separate states in ancient Greece, and several different forms of democracy. The ancient Athenians alone had – over a period of getting on for two centuries – at least three significantly different versions of Project Democracy. After the revolution of 508/7 BCE that brought an early form of democracy into fledgling being a further flurry of reforms in 462/1 gave political access to ever widening layers of the qualified Athenian people: that is, free and legitimate adult males over the age of 18. 50-60,000 at most, out of a total population – including citizen females and subadult children, resident foreigners and slaves – of 250,000 or so, all confined to a space the size of Derbyshire or Luxembourg today.