“It all has to do with the root of the word “democracy,” which comes from two Greek words: “demos,” meaning “people,” and “kratos,” which translates as “power.” The original use of the word demokratia in ancient Greece therefore meant something like “people power” or, as some have translated it, “the capacity of the people to do things.””
“The ancient Greeks took this “capacity of the people to do things” very seriously in the way they organized political life, and it is this form of democracy — not the modern one we are familiar with — that Paul Cartledge takes as his basis for Democracy: A Life.”
“The original democracies didn’t even have political parties. This wasn’t so much a reflection of the times as part of the general philosophy: in a city that practiced people power, there could be no intermediary between those people and the exercise of that power. What the Reformation did for religion, the Athenians did for political involvement, emphatically removing the professional politician as interpreter and conduit of “the will of the people.””
“Cartledge explains his subjects’ peculiar method of state organization in some detail to bring home his point — that when the Greeks said “people power” they meant exactly that.”
“Cartledge goes to some effort to show how later historians and statesmen were anxious to portray Greek democracy as a horrible mistake, the unworkable aspiration of starry-eyed dreamers that was preprogrammed to end in chaos. Under the onslaught of these propagandists, the vast majority of whom never experienced Athenian democracy — and indeed were often born several hundred years after it ceased to exist — the idea of political equality came to be regarded as a myth, the notion of the collective people holding power a danger to be shunned, suppressed, and preferably forgotten.”
“The truth was that democracy was a dangerous idea — to the kings, emperors, and high clergy who controlled information in the centuries after it ceased to be a living form of government.”
“Even during this tumultuous period and the equally turbulent American and French Revolutions, few people advocated anything like Greek-style democracy, and those who did touch on such ideas tended to languish in obscurity.”
“Instead, political conversation since the Renaissance has vacillated between the pros and cons of outright dictatorship versus an electoral process that is factually only open to the rich and well-connected.”
“That we unreflectively refer to this limited electoral system and the debate that surrounds it as “democracy” strikes Cartledge as nothing short of a “calamitous verbal collapse” that has “devalued” the true content of the word “demokratia.””