Democracy: Ancient Models, Modern Challenges - Melissa Lane

So what makes a regime count as a democracy? My guess is that most of you would say elections, thinking of a scene like this, the inspiring moment when Nelson Mandela in 1994 cast a ballot for the very first time. The Gresham College lecture that you're listening to right now is giving you knowledge and insight from one of the world's leading academic experts making it takes a lot of time. But because we want to encourage a love of learning, we think it's well worth it. We never make you pay for lectures, although donations are needed, all we ask in return is this. Send a link to this lecture to someone you think would benefit. And if you haven't already, click the follow or subscribe button from wherever you are listening right now. Now let's get back to the lecture, But the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle, here's a photo of Aristotle, of a statue in his home. Sta in his hometown of stagger Aristotle would've said the opposite in listing the hallmarks of democracy, he wrote that the appointment to all offices. And then he has a caveat, which I'll come back to, but the appointment to all offices, small caveat, should be made by lot. And the historian Ous similarly characterized rule by the majority as taking place typically and characteristically by lottery. As you can see, Herid has one of his characters observe that rule by the majority, assign offices by lot. So while election is the key to modern ideas of democracy, it was the opposite for the ancient Greeks such as the Athenians living there in the classical period, they saw elections as inherently tending to be oligarchic and aristocratic as the scholar Bernard Manan has emphasized. After all, elections are a way of saying that for some purposes some people are better than others. Now that doesn't mean that ancient Democrats never used elections at all. The ancient Athenians actually did elect about a 12th of their annual office holders. So they elected all of their military leaders and eventually their top financial officials as well. So you can see that exception explained in the caveat in the first quotation here from from Aristotle because Aristotle says precisely that's what's characteristic of democracy is the appointment to all offices or to all, but those that require experience and skill that such appointments should be made by lot. So that's the caveat that the Greeks thought that military offices and the high financial offices required experience and skill. And so the Athenians actually did elect people to hold those positions. And an anonymous ancient Greek author co caustically commented on the same point. This is a text by someone whom scholars have come to call pseudo Xenophon because this text was preserved in the corpus of Xenophon's writings. Nowadays we tend to refer to him or her we don't know as the old oligarch. Um, and we think that this is a person, probably an Athenian commenting on Athenian democratic politics, but from an oligarchic perspective. And so this person comments that the people speaking of the Athenian people and referring especially to the common people in Athens, the people don't think they should be given access by lot to positions of general or cavalry commander. Again, those military offices that I mentioned for the people know that it is more beneficial for them not to hold these offices, not to be selected by lot into those offices, but to let the most capable men hold them. And again, the most capable men in this case then would've been ex hypothesized chosen by election. So the ancient democracies like Athens could and did use elections as tools for certain purposes. Nevertheless, they understood lottery to be the method that was more inherently democratic lottery is what better captured the spirit and values of democracy as they understood it. And conversely, if we today answer that question of what makes a constitution democratic by just saying elections, we overlook the fact that many authoritarian regimes actually make use of regular elections too. So when you stop to think about it, divine defining democracy just as elections is always incomplete in ancient Greece and also to today. So we need to say something at least like free and fair elections today, and by when we say that we would bring values as well as institutions into the frame, we would think that it matters how elections are free and how they are fair. And so then we need to explain what exactly something like freedom or liberty, I'm gonna use those words interchangeably, what and how that should be taken to mean in democratic terms. Because again, authoritarian regimes today like oligarchies and antiquity, have also laid claim to the value of freedom. So we have to investigate exactly what is freedom for ancient Democrats and what should it mean today And indeed in Aristotle's analysis of ancient Greek democracy in book six of his politics. And that was what I began by quoting his first step was actually to explain the value of liberty as Democrats understood it. So we see this here. Here's Aristotle in book six of the politics. And he says, the basis of a democratic state is liberty. So one principle of liberty is for all to rule and be ruled in turn. Another is that a man should live as he likes. And I'm not going to say much more about that one in the lecture. So that's something we can come back to in discussion. But I wanna emphasize this claim of to rule and be ruled in turn. Because notice what Aristotle says, um, a little bit further down. He says, because democratic people think of themselves as free and equal in a strong sense, that from that has arisen the claim to be ruled by none if possible or if this is impossible to rule and be ruled in turn. So what he is saying here is that democratic freedom, what's especially characteristic of democratic freedom is acknowledging that no one has more entitlement to rule than anyone else. And meanwhile you see that he also mentions in the last line of the passage there democratic equality. And that means counting everyone for one and not taking anyone to be worth more politically than anyone else. And some of you may have heard me explain an aggression lecture last week that democratic equality was called by Aristotle arithmetic in counting each person as one as opposed to geometric equality that would weigh worth and merit differentially. So these values combine these democratic views of freedom and equality to suggest that while people would rather not be ruled by anyone else since they're all equal, and they would be less absolutely free when they're subject to someone else as their ruler. But the next best thing is where democracy stakes its claim on the rotation of office ruling and being ruled in turn, meaning that nobody gets to rule forever or claim a special natural right to do so. So starting from those interpretations of the values of freedom and equality, Aristotle then compiled a longer list of hallmarks of democracy. And here is that list in part, and I'm going to, this is a kind of summary. I'm going to expand a little bit on each of these bullet points. So this is Aristotle's list and he starts from those definitions that we just considered. So he writes, such being our, our foundation, namely that account of liberty that we just saw, the characteristics of democracy are as follows. So first of all, we is the one that we already looked at that the appointment to all offices or caveat all, but those which ex which require experience and skill should be made by lot. That's the first bullet point here. Then he goes on that no property qualification should be required for office or only a very low one. I'll come back to that, that the tenure of all offices should be brief and that no office is perpetual again, no one gets to hold office forever. We have rotation, ruling and being ruled in turn. Then he goes on that all should be eligible to be chosen as jurors and more broadly to sit as judges in the most important matters. And we'll, he talks here about juries and also about the boards of auditors who were selected by lot to hold the office holders to account. And then finally that the assembly should vote and be decisive on all issues or at least the most important. So this is Aristotle's list of the characteristic hallmarks of democracy. Now look at that list. Elections barely feature. They're only there in that all but skilled clause in the first bullet point. But they're not the hallmark of ancient democracy as Aristotle observed it or analyzed it. But conversely, it's not crucial according to the second bullet point that everyone should be able to stand for office. There can be a very low property threshold that would mean that the very poorest cannot stand. That's what the second bullet point allows. What's really most important is that the offices rotate, no offices perpetual. And here we have a freeze. The second figure from the right is an Athenian office holder, an Aon who's being handed something by the child who's at the far right. So no office is perpetual. The Aon, the A Contes only served for a single year and all the Athenian offices were held to terms of one year. Also that there are popular judges who decide on lawsuits. And here we see one of the pebbles that was used in order to allocate jurors to cases. Um, and they also through lottery, chose the auditors as I mentioned in my first Gresham lecture of this academic year, and that everyone, all male citizens should be able to vote in an assembly. And this is where the assembly in Athens met on the hill of the p nicks. So it's striking that on the one hand, election isn't the sign of democracy for Aristotle or the Greeks that he's observing, but even the choice between election and lottery was not really so significant as a matter of practice, lottery was more democratic, but they could still use election for some purposes. What was really important was that both were means of choosing office holders who held powers of decision for a short term and that their actions as well as key state policies and most court cases were decisively controlled by the rest of the citizen body. Now, since at least the 18th century, commentators have dismissed ancient Greek politics, including ancient Greek democracy as a model that's irrelevant to the commercial bureaucratic, large scale societies that had already come into being in the 18th century and that most of us continue to live in today. And commentators have dismissed those ancient models by setting up two fundamental oppositions between ancient and modern politics. So these oppositions and they overlap, as I'll explain, are between ancient and modern liberty, which was argued by Benjamin Al and what we've come to call direct democracy versus representative democracy. And I'm going to talk about this in the work of James Madison, though he, he didn't use exactly those terms. So first of all, I want to talk about this distinction between ancient and modern liberty that was introduced in a lecture in 1819 by the French political thinker Benjamin Kal. And Kal argued that Athenian style democracy and Greek politics generally was just suited to modern economic and social life. And this is because modern people, modern in the 18th century, already as constant saw things, uh, already in the 18th century, in the early 19th century when he was speaking modern people are caught up in the pursuit of their commercial interests. They as opposed to having the leisure to pursue politics, which had been bought for the Athenians in effect by the enslavement of others. So constant further claim that this made modern ideas of freedom, something completely different from how the ancient Greeks thought of freedom. He was thinking of Sparta even more than Athens, but talking about Athens too. So on Conant's view, ancient liberty meant as he wrote, exercising collectively, but directly several parts of the complete sovereignty. But modern liberty met the freedom to busy oneself with private life as constant. Also put it the enjoyment of security in private pleasures. So for constant ancient Greek liberty was active participation in political decisions, but this was out of reach and out of step with modern concerns. So that was Constance version of the opposition. And the second opposition, which I'm just calling between ancient democracy and modern democracy, had been advanced a generation or so before by James Madison who had studied at Princeton University. So he's someone of whom Princeton is, is proud. And he was later. And, and this distinction was later given this label direct democracy versus representative democracy. See, so this distinction overlaps with Constance in holding that the ancient Greeks had the luxury thanks to slavery of spending a lot of time directly doing politics, whereas modern citizens have to spend our time earning a living. So we can't participate as actively, nor do most people wish to do so. But Madison added the point that it's not practical. He claimed in modern large scale societies for people to be directly engaged in key political decision making. So he emphasized, for example, in Federalist Paper 10, that the institution of representation could allow for political freedom because people could self-rule by electing the representatives who would then make decisions on their behalf. And Madison also answered, added that he thought that representation could help avoid a mob rule psychology that he and other critics of ancient Athens thought had taken root there. So I wanna just take a moment to explain that concern about mob psychology, because often when we talk about ancient democracy, this, this sort of concern is lurking in the background. So let me take two examples that are often given in which people then interpret ancient Athens as having engaged at least at times in a kind of mob rule. So the first is an infamous vote by the Athenian assembly in 4 2 7, BCE to punish the people of an allied p who had sought to secede from that alliance. So this was the P of Menini, and this is a view of modern menini. So the Athenian assembly voted to impose a draconian punishment on the middle linean to kill all of the men of the p and enslave the women and children. But the very next day, the Athenian assembly reconvened and it decided to reverse that decision, and that led to a desperate rush to send out a faster ship to try to get the message there in time. We read about this in Acidities and fortunately, the second ship arrived just in time. Now the Athenians thought better of that initial draconian impulse, but the drastic reversal of these two votes only a day apart, has led many observers to argue that ancient Athenian decision making was inherently impulsive, vulnerable to whim and so deeply flawed. And similarly, many commentators have been highly critical of a different decision a generation later in 3 9 9 made not by the assembly, but by a popular jury to convict Socrates of impiety and corrupting the youth and to sentence him to death by drinking poison, um, in the form of hemlock as we see here. So against these kinds of stories about how ancient democracy could go wrong, Madison argued that electing a senate, especially an upper house, would help to moderate passions and foster more reasoned debate. So in my next Gresham lecture, I'm going to zero in further on this question of the relationship of democracy to knowledge. But for today, I want to return to the oppositions that ancient and modern liberty and ancient and modern democracy, these oppositions that constant and Madison set up. So on these views, again to summarize, instead of ancient liberty coming from direct political participation, modern liberty is supposed to be freedom from having to participate in politics. And there's some intuitive plausibility to this claim. So think of the way that many people today try to find a way out of jury service if they've been randomly called. Many people try to find ways to not actually have to serve, to give excuses to, to not serve, as opposed to the Athenians who tended to flock to the courts eager to make themselves important by serving. And in one of Aristophanes's comedies, the Wasps, um, he mocks an elderly man named Phil Cleon as what he calls a Phil Sase. And one person has translated that as quote, a jury service addict. So the ancient Greeks were jury service addicts. We tend to be jury service averse. Um, I hope, I'm not speaking for anyone in this room, but I've observed this with unnamed colleagues, um, and friends. But must we accept the terms of these stark oppositions? So rather than put ancient and modern liberty, ancient and modern democracy in these two opposed buckets, I think we can gain more insight by comparing distinct powers of decision and control that we find in both systems. Indeed, the Athenian political leader, parles pictured here, emphasized that the Athenian majority were the ones who decide what is to be done. So I wanna really emphasize this role of deciding. And so if democratic freedom is a way of exercising decision and control, sometimes that's done directly other times at a distance or through a representative, sometimes as an office holder or an assembly member. Other times by getting to control others as a member of a board of auditors or as a juror getting to decide a lawsuit. So in my view, ancient and modern democracies are more like two different mosaics with different concentrations of stones in different places, not so much like two utterly different art forms altogether, which is I think the picture that we get from Madison and Kung. So they share this idea that all should sit in judgment, all should get to decide even though they can implement that idea in different ways. And so in the final part of the lecture, I'll explore how the stones might be rearranged in the modern mosaic to capture some of the spirit of the ancient one a bit better. But before that, my next step will be to expand on ancient Greek deia. So I'm going to step back for a few moments to explain its etymology as a term and how it emerged historically. And then I'll come back to talk about ways that we might try to integrate some elements of damia into modern democracy. So let's actually look at the terms that the Greeks used for different kinds of constitutions in order to see what was different about Damia as they understood it. So here are three canonical types of Greek constitutions. And you can see, or perhaps if it the print, the type is too small. I will explain that mo, that two of them, the first two are both form formed from the same root. So monarchy means a soul or unique, a single ruler or office holder. So monarchia is formed from the root rk, which means rule or office. And oligarch is formed from the root for a few people and the same root for or office. So both of these are straightforward in a monarchy, one person rules and in an oligarchy, a few people rule, they monopolize the positions of office, the positions of political authority. But as you can see, dmo cretia is different. It doesn't have that re root. Its root is not rule or office, but the word cratos, which means strength or power, and damos as we'll talk about more in a moment, means people. So damia doesn't say that people rule or hold office, it says the people have the power. Deia is people power, but self, evidently this can't mean, and it doesn't mean that all the people rule and that they all simultaneously hold the offices. That wouldn't be possible. So there has to be a different kind of power that's involved in this cratos of the demos. So the classist and political scientist, Josiah Ober, has interpreted this cratos as what he calls the power to do things. And so building on that idea, I wanna suggest that we should understand, again, this democratic power to do things specifically as a power to decide again to decide between rival speakers to decide as a member of a jury to make decisions. If you do get to hold office for a term, Soia was the power to make things happen, as Ober says, by deciding on what should happen. So, so, so far I focused on Kratos, but DEOs also has significance in understanding the original meaning of democracy. For it could be interpreted in one of two ways. DEOs could mean the people as a whole, but it could also mean specifically the common people. So how are these two meanings related? So when we think about democracy today, we tend to assume that democracy means all the people, the people as a whole. But democracy then tends to decide by majority rule. So it turns out that it's the many whoever they are who will in practice decide on behalf of the whole people. And so this is why Aristotle wrote in the politics that in a democracy quote, the majority is supreme, or as parles, again, put it in name. Our Athenian constitution is called a democracy because it is managed not for a few people like an oligarchy, but for the majority. And as all of these participants and observers of ancient democratic life tended to emphasize the many or the majority in an ancient Greek society was always in practice, the common people, the relatively poor as contrasted with the elite. So that's how we get from the demo mosts as all the people to the demo mosts as the common people. The common people exercise the majority power within the people as a whole. And so it's their preferences that they have the power to enact. But again, that doesn't mean that the poor held every political role. And actually as we saw from the beginning, those who were elected to serve as generals and financial officials in Athens actually tended to be overwhelmingly from the wealthy elite. So one historian remarks, and I quote the poor in Athens regularly elected the rich, measured and well educated to the chief positions in the state. So again, when they used election, they did pick people kind of who were from the elite typically, but what mattered the people power was not that even the people all got to talk in the assembly. The same historian points out that even the speakers in the assembly tended to differ in social position as I as he puts it from the majority of the citizens. And that's a historian named mm Markle the Third. So rather the people power, the power of the majority lay in being able to decide which speaker's advice to follow, being able to decide on a court case and again to rotate in and out of the lower offices by lot. Now I want to take a moment to acknowledge that these sorts of ideas are not only found in ancient Greece. And I wanna take just one further case. The scholar Tejas Parer has described how a group of three Indian historians writing in the early 20th century, as he puts it, held up a historic Indian constitution as an alternative to representative democracy. And these historians were talking about the third century BCE Morian empire, especially under the emperor as Soca. So this is actually just a century after the classical Greek period that I'm talking about. And Perisher traces how these historians emphasized that there were territorial assemblies that were open to citizen participation. Some of them even use lot to choose subcommittees and all officials had to render accounts at the end of their terms of office. And this was advanced by these historians, Radha Ud Mukherjee and his colleagues as a model for modern democracy in India. This is the modern Indian Parliament. Or to take another example, Karl Marx celebrated the way that the revolutionary Paris commune in 1871 pictured here was also formed of municipal counselors as Marx wrote, chosen by universal suffrage, responsible and revocable at short terms. That's marks on the Civil War in France. So in highlighting ancient Greek models of democracy, I really wanna highlight these ideas of rotation, of lottery, of accountability that actually I think have a much wider purchase and come to us from many different traditions. And again, that might encourage us in thinking that we can recover them in important ways, um, today. So how did democracy come into being in Athens and in other Greek city states? And this is the penultimate part of the lecture before we we turn to lessons for today. So it wasn't an all or nothing affair and it's actually surprisingly difficult to pinpoint a single date. There's not one date that we can say that all historians would agree that's the date that Athens became a democracy. And this is because there were so many different values and institutions that had to emerge and coalesce before something that we recognized as de Moraia took full shape. So Athens was a polls, it was one of about a thousand different p communities in ancient Greece. We often call it as a ps a city state. And we can see it here. Um, looking up, um, at the Parthenon, um, as the historian moans Herman Hanson has suggested perhaps we should call translate policy instead as a citizen state, because what was really important about it was the body of participating citizens. And Apol is typically consisted of a single urban core, like this urban center of Athens that was surrounded by an agricultural hinterland. And it would be typically populated by anywhere from a few thousand people up to a quarter of a million who inhabited Athens at its peak. And we think there were somewhere between 30 and 60,000 citizen men with full citizen privileges again at its peak in the time of Parles. So here's just a brief timeline, and I'm going to talk about some of the moments in this timeline in more detail. Some of you heard me talk two lectures ago about Solan, the Athenian law giver in the early sixth century who laid the foundations for Athenian democracy. Then we have the fifth century, and many people put an end to the classical period at least, of Athenian democracy in the late fourth century in 3 2, 2 BCE. But so what happened in Athens to democratize it in the course of this period? So here we can draw on an amazing text I've put here ascribed it to Aristotle. It may actually have been by his students, it's called the Constitution of Athens or the Constitution of the Athenians. And it was long thought, completely lost until a large part of it was discovered in 1891 on a papyrus in the British Museum. And this was one of a huge number of constitutions that Aristotle Circle wrote. And all the rest of them were lost except for this one part that we have of the one about Athens. And what's really interesting in this document is that it highlights the moments that it thinks were democratizing moments in that whole history that we just looked at. And so I wanna highlight a few of those points. So first of all, um, the Constitution of Athens says, well, Solen had certain features that acted in democratizing the constitution. Again, it's kind of anachronistic solen didn't use the word damia, that's a fifth century word, but looking back, Aristotle and his students thought Solan had done these actions that had led to the institution of democracy. And here I'm gonna highlight especially the right of appeal, of a appeal to the de Caston, the popular court. And we'll come back in a moment to why that's so. But then there's this other interesting moment, . So you may have noticed on the previous slide, Kanese comes to power in 5 0 8 to 5 0 7 in a popular revolution against a family of tyrants that had ruled Athens then for a couple of generations. And what Kanese did was to reorganize the tribes. And again, this text says these changes made the constitution much more democratic than it had been under Solen and Parles. It makes the state still more democratic. And one way that Parles did that was to introduce pay again for those who were serving in the popular courts. So this is another version of Aristotle's game, right? What are the characteristics of democracy? Why are these the characteristics that help to make Athens more democratic? So again, we see, especially under Solen, the the third bullet point under Solen, the importance of the people controlling the courts because it's the right to vote in the courts to be decisive in the courts. That gives them the power to control the Constitution. We can also translate that to be sovereign in the Constitution. This is because a jury has the ultimate power over, over each individual person's fate who's on trial, right? So the jury's power to decide on the fate of each person is the ultimate case of democracy as all ruling over each. Now, you might think that in this story, K's role is a little bit strange, right? We don't usually think of reorganizing tribes as a key feature of democracy. Again, if I'd asked you at the beginning what makes democracy, many of you would've said elections. I don't think anybody would've said reorganizing the tribes. But what's important about what ese did is that he created a sense of identity as a democratic citizen. So he replaced the sort of archaic tribal affiliations, which put people at odds with one another with these tribes that were made to give you a new identity as a democratic citizen. And each tribe consisted of a grouping of localities, local deems that then populated each tribe with representative political concerns. And the deems became so important that each Athenian would introduce themselves according to their father's name and their deem membership. So Socrates would've introduced himself as Socrates, son of SCUs from the dean of que. So Kai's role here reminds us that democracy will only work if people see it as central to their identities and their concerns. So how does this potted history bear on the com comparison and contrast between ancient and modern democracy? Well, it offers many points we might want to discuss, but in one way it brings us back to where we began because it highlights the significance again, of lottery. So the courts, again, were chosen by lottery and we see that both under solen and under parles. This law, this role of the jurors chosen by lot is crucial in having made the constitution more democratic. And again, that's because elections restrict the opportunity to exercise decision and control, but lotteries open it up. And so now in the conclusion to this lecture, I want to explore some ways in which lotteries might help us to introduce wider opportunities for decision making and popular control. And so they might help us to channel a bit of the spirit of ancient deia into the mosaic of modern democracy. So of course we already use lottery today, we use it for jury selection just as the Athenians did. And indeed the great historian of ancient Greece, George Groat pointed that out in the 19th century, challenging his contemporaries who tended to just dismiss Athenian lotteries as sort of archaic. And behind the times grate said, well, we, we use lottery too in the case of juries. So modern political scientists have suggested why not extend lottery further. We could extend it to choosing office holders to making public policy decisions and even to auditing official performance. So in the case of choosing office holders, right, we might for example, use lottery to select candidates for pri for primaries or for shortlists. We might use it to select municipal officials or to rotate presiding roles in parliamentary institutions. The Athenians rotated their equivalent to the speaker of the house among lottery chosen participants from the 10 tribes. So a number of modern scholars crats have argued that we should use lottery much more extensively than we do. Scholars like Barbara Goodwin and Alex Guerrero to supplement and in some cases even replace election. Now, we can also use lottery to choose bodies of citizens who can vote on public policy questions. And this is again, akin to the Athenian council that was chosen by lot and managed key policy decisions. And there have been a number of movements and experiments with what people call citizens juries. I think they're better called citizens assemblies.'cause in this case they're not juries, they're really assemblies. Sometimes political scientists call them deliberative mini publics. So these have been championed by James Fishkin, Len Landor and others to try to bring lotteries into modern policy decision making. Now in many cases, these include an extensive period of study and education for the people chosen by lottery to serve on these bodies before they vote on what policy suggestions they would recommend. And often their votes are merely advisory. So they might put a proposal forward and then it has to be enacted by a legislature or a full citizen referendum. So for example, citizens assemblies of different kinds were used very success successfully in Ireland to prepare the referenda on marriage equality in 2015 and on abortion in 2018. So these were a kind of example, not a full Democrat, but of channeling the power of lottery in a, in a new way. But there's been much less experiment today with democratic lottery chosen auditors, which I've argued today and in my previous lectures was really an essential part of ancient democracy and ancient constitutionalism more broadly. So I'd like to suggest that we do experiment with boards of lottery selected citizen auditors, um, who could field questions and complaints and be given powers to question and publish on the performance of public officials that would help to capture the underlying democratic characteristic that Atheris, who was a democratic leader in ancient Syracuse, is said to have asserted this is, sorry, this is an image of ancient lottery. This is how they assigned the jurors to different cases. Um, but atheris asserted that the best judges of what they hear are the many. So again, the power of the majority, the power of lottery, we can channel that further. So in drawing this conclusion, I'm inspired by the political thinker, CLR James pictured here, who likewise turned back to the Athenian model as an inspiration for contemporary democracy in his native Trinidad and as an inspiration more generally. And he did this, especially in his 1956 essay called Every Cook Can Govern. Now, James did describe Athens as a direct democracy, but he thought that it was relevant to modern politics from the standpoint of what he called history as a living thing. And I want to conclude with his words he wrote, we today who are faced with the inability of representative government and parliamentary democracy to handle effectively the urgent problems of the day. We can study and understand Greek democracy in a way that was impossible for a man who lived in 1900 when representative government and parliamentary democracy seemed securely established for all time. So James, in 1956 thought that the capacity of representative government to adequately address the issues of the day was already under threat. We today, I think, have even more reason to think so. And so with James, I think we can not only appreciate the values of Greek democracy, but also seek ways to realize them are fresh in our institutions and practices today. Thank you. Thank you Melissa for yes, another triumph. It's lovely to hear you. Um, as ever, we've got quite a few questions coming in online. I'll try and grab the spirit of one or two together. Um, and this first one is the models you've suggested for particularly for lottery chosen auditors. Do you think that those have, uh, are there any systems in the world where that could be implemented as it were immediately? So the per person here is talking about different, you know, it doesn't apply in different countries which we call democratic. Can they use these to arrive at a system which might work in every place? Or are there somewhere it appears to be something you could imply impose more quickly? Yeah, I mean, I think I, that's a, that's an interesting question. You know, I think it's always easier in some ways to experiment at the more local levels. So again, it might be something that one can introduce locally and then bring it up nationally. You know, it's going to work better in places where you have, um, kind of, you know, reasonably free press so that people will be able to have issues brought to their attention that the auditors can then further investigate, and where the auditors can also publish their conclusions and have their conclusions kind of hold sway with the electorate. So I think those would be cases where we would wanna look at, you know, which sorts of places would be most hospitable. But I think, you know, I hope that we can be bold and we can try things out. And you know, the, the purpose of this is to encourage political experimentation. It may not work everywhere, but that's not a reason, um, not to try. So almost following on from that, do you have any theories as to why modern people will shy away from jury service when the Athenians did not? What is it that makes us hesitant? Yeah, I mean, I think that this is where Constant and Madison are observing something that is valid that we should take account of. So they would say, you know, it literally costs people time away from work. And the jury pay that we have, that remember we saw was introduced in Athens by Parles. But in those days it was, it was an amount that was actually kind of meaningful, at least to the poor people who were receiving pay for each day that they saw it on a jury. And again, Aristophanes portrays that in the wasps. I think nowadays jury pay probably hasn't kept pace with at least many people's salaries. And so they feel that they're going to, you know, really be, um, shortchanged. It's also true that Athenian trials were much more limited in the time that they could spend. It would be concluded in a single day. And so, you know, the difficulty of having to serve on trials that can go on for weeks or months when you don't know how long that service will be is also very difficult of course for people who have caring responsibilities and other kinds of responsibilities. So I don't mean to minimize those difficulties, but again, actually by articulating them that way, maybe then we can see some other pointers for things that we might change. Maybe we need to increase jury pay and maybe we need to look for ways of limiting trials. Now of course, that might introduce further difficulties. We don't wanna short change people's opportunity, um, as defendants for justice, but again, there might be ways that we can overall seek to re reframe the way that our institutions, um, are operating. Uh, my question is whether you could have too much of, of a good thing. Mm-Hmm, <affirmative>. So you mentioned at the beginning of your talk about terms of office, and that led me to think about the US Congress with two year terms of office, you could barely, barely settle in within two years and here only four or five years for a parliamentary term. Uh, shouldn't we, what are your thoughts about duration and what was the duration in ancient Greece and, uh, what are your thoughts about a 10 year parliament<laugh>? Thank you. Thank you. That's an excellent question. So this is actually interesting. So as I, as I mentioned, the typical ancient Greek term of office was only a year. Now, some offices you could be reelected. So the generals, for example, in Athens could be reelected year after year. And again, that goes with the thought that they were elected because they were seeking people with experience and skill. And so it sort of made sense that you would allow them to go further. So in that sense, they kind of recognize the deum that you're talking about, that if you think experience and skill are what you're really looking for than a, you know, sort of very limited term of office might undermine your ability to achieve that. But at the same time, I think there's still something very interesting in the idea of the more limited terms. So remember marks on the Paris Commune, you know, these very short terms because again, it, it leads to more ruling and being ruled in turn. You know, it brings in fresh, fresh blood, it stops people from developing a kind of mentality of being part of a political elite. So I think there are actually real trade-offs here. And again, I would say I think the, the important point is we should identify the values that we think that different institutional arrangements can achieve. And then again, we should experiment with them, you know, but I don't think, again, there's any perfect, you know, perfectly democratic way to do it. If you do it one way, you'll satisfy some values, but maybe sacrifice others and vice versa. So we should just be more aware, perhaps of the values that are always at stake when we set up institutions and make those choices. Of course, we've been experimenting with having prime ministers for just four weeks or so,<laugh>. So question at the front here. Yes, Peter, Thank you. Um, thank you so much Melissa. Um, I'd like to ask you a bit more about this power of decision, um, in a jury. The assumption is that if you get the, if the jury selection is fair, it's not biased, say towards race or gender or something, that, that people would be kind of interchangeable and that in principle, any reasonable jury would arrive at the same decision, partly because the terms of the decision are set in advance by law. And in the case of democracy, though, you mentioned that case where the, you know, the Athenians decide literally one thing one day and then reverse the decision the next day. Um, and, and what is it that holds the decision, you know, that binds it in some way, I suppose, what is it, you know, how can we be confident that when you choose people by lot say, that will arrive broadly at the same kinds of decisions that someone isn't, you know, put in for their year and, and suddenly does everything upside down, you know, compared to the previous year. What is it that gives it a certain kind of stability if it isn't in the end? Something like the class purpose of the poor, in fact that the whole thing really makes sense as a way of empowering the poor because the poor have a kind of convergent interest. You know, that might have been why someone like CLR James was invested in it. Yeah, thank you very much. It's a, it's an excellent question. I think for the Athenians, I think something like that is probably the right answer, that they're assuming that, you know, there's a general sort of set of interests and preferences that people who share a certain class position, and I've been emphasizing these, this class difference between the poor and the rich throughout these lectures because it's so salient in the Greek texts. Um, I think that they do think that there are kind of generally common interests that are likely to be shared, but, and I am gonna talk about this a bit more next time, again, Josiah Ober has emphasized also though that by serving in these offices, um, or on a jury chosen by lot people gained experience, um, even through the process of being in those roles. And again, that might help address the previous question because, you know, it's not that you only have the experience and knowledge that you bring into the position, you also have the experience and knowledge that you gain by being on the, in the position. And again, they often would have boards that had representatives of members of the different tribes, and so therefore you would be with people that you hadn't otherwise interacted with, you would be able to kind of gain knowledge from people who were from different parts of the policy, from yourself. So there, so there were sort of some mechanisms that were built in that we're trying to, you know, help people to form better decisions. But that's again, something I really wanna look at next time. It's a huge topic, whether ancient democracy fostered knowledge or ignorance and, you know, how could it do that better? So my lecture next time will be on expertise. Well look at Socrates and Aristotle, but I'm also going to talk about this question of the relationship of knowledge, um, and democracy. And Just take one more question from online if I may, because it, I think it addresses something about scale and complexity. Yeah. Um, I mean Athens for all its relative size was in fact quite small. Yeah. So, um, are the roots of democracy and the aims of globalism fundamentally Iraq inable. And I think you could argue instead of using the term globalism, you could say the complexity of modern life. It's just too much going on for people to be able to be on top of. Yeah. So this is, this is an incredibly challenging question. And again, I think it's not just a question for ancient democracy, as it were. I think it's a real question for modern democracy. Um, I think the way that we might try to think about that again, is to think about sort of layers, federations, you know, multiple different kind of overlapping systems. So, you know, you can have local institutions, you can have regional institutions, you can have national institutions, you can have international institutions Actually in the Hellenistic period of, of, um, Greek history. So just after the classical period, um, the Greeks really developed a number of federations that were actually then an inspiration to the American founders, for example, when they were thinking about the idea of how do you have a federation or, or a confederation as they initially had in the United. And, you know, before we had the American constitution, we had the Articles of Confederation and they were actually explicitly inspired by these ancient Greek models to say maybe these are ways that independent societies can join together. So, you know, I think that, um, we can, you know, we need to look at layering interaction, you know, multiplicity, sort of redundancy even of different kinds of democratic systems. The late David held a political theorist at the Open University, had a book on models of democracy that was very much talking about, you know, how can we kind of have different kinds of democracy at these different levels. So I think we shouldn't give up on that aspiration, but again, we need to kind of further our institutional experimentation. What I was gonna ask is About, uh, slavery slaves. Is it the modern, I would say the modern version of democracy leads to anti-slavery? At least that's for the myth we tell ourselves. Um, would you say that the ancient Athens would've got there eventually? Yeah, that's an, that's an important question. And you know, I am emphasize that constant certainly thinks that slavery is what underwrote this ancient model of participatory politics. And that's part of his reason for thinking that it can't exist in modernity because, you know, we don't have these other people who are being forced and exploited and dominated to do the, the sort of work, um, for the few elite. Um, and in that context, even the poor Athenians were elite compared to the people whom they were enslaving. So I think that's right. Um, you know, there are a few, um, statements against slavery that, that survive from ancient Greece. There are, there's an anonymous, um, kind of comment that we find in the side of a, of a manuscript of, of a papyrus. Um, there, there's, there are, there are claims that are made that say slavery is not natural. It's just a human institution. Um, now, you know, we might then draw the conclusion, well, if it's a human institution, it can be changed, it can be abolished. There's not much sign that ancient Greek, uh, thinkers or actors drew that conclusion. But by saying it's not natural, you know, at least it was sort of, it opened the door to that thought. Um, you know, would they have gotten there eventually? I, I don't know. I mean, it's a, it's a stain on their record certainly, you know, as, as, as we, I think are right to see it, um, um, in that way. Um, you know, there's a very complicated history of, of sort of, um, subsequent ideas of slavery and how they're challenged and reinforced. Um, you know, and it's a very long and important history, um, that, that we need to, to remember. Thank you. Thank You.