Critics and Critiques of Athenian Democracy

Page 2 of 5

• 1. Invention of political theory
• 2. Views of the masses
• 3. Background of Athens
• 4. Restoration of democracy
• 5. Find out more
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Views of the masses

Why, to start with, does he not use the word democracy, when democracy of an Athenian radical kind is clearly what he's advocating? Chiefly because of a fatal ambiguity: to its opponents democracy was no more, and no better, than mob-rule, since for them it meant the political power of the masses exercised over and at the expense of the elite. That was one, class-based sort of objection to Greek-style direct democracy. Others were rather more subtly expressed.

Intellectual anti-democrats such as Socrates and Plato, for instance, argued that the majority of the people, because they were by and large ignorant and unskilled, would always get it wrong. In these intellectuals' view, government was an art, craft or skill, and should be entrusted only to the skilled and intelligent, who were by definition a minority. They denied specifically that the sort of knowledge available to and used by ordinary people, popular knowledge if you like, was really knowledge at all. At best it was mere opinion, and almost always it was ill-informed and wrong opinion.

A further variant on this view was that the masses or the mob, being ignorant and stupid for the most part, were easily swayed by specious rhetoric - so easily swayed that they were incapable of taking longer views or of sticking resolutely to one, good view once that had been adopted. The masses were, in brief, shortsighted, selfish and fickle, an easy prey to unscrupulous orators who came to be known as demagogues. Demagogue meant literally 'leader of the demos' ('demos' means people); but democracy's critics took it to mean mis-leaders of the people, mere rabble-rousers.

'Then there was the view that the mob, the poor majority, were nothing but a collective tyrant.'

Then there was the view that the mob, the poor majority, were nothing but a collective tyrant. A very clever example of this line of oligarchic attack is contained in a fictitious dialogue included by Xenophon - a former pupil of Socrates, and, like Plato, an anti-democrat - in his work entitled 'Memoirs of Socrates'.

'What', asks the teenage Alcibiades pseudo-innocently, is 'law'? 'Why', answers his guardian Pericles, who was then at the height of his influence, 'it is whatever the people decides and decrees'. 'What?', replies Alcibiades; 'even when it decrees by fiat, acting like a tyrant and riding roughshod over the views of the minority - is that still "law"?' 'Certainly', says Pericles. 'So', persists Alcibiades, 'democracy is really just another form of tyranny?' 'Oh, run away and play', rejoins Pericles, irritated; 'I was good at those sorts of debating tricks when I was your age.'

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Published: 2001-01-01