Ancient and Modern Democracy. A Short Reappraisal

This paper intends to reconsider the comparison between ancient and modern democracy that most scholars prefer normally to avoid doing or do very hastily. Of course, all people know that the word ‘democracy’ comes from ancient Greek and that its etymological meaning is kratos of the demos, i.e. ‘power of the people’. It is also very frequent that they pay homage to the ancient origin of democracy, but they normally add immediately afterwards that classical Athens was a direct democracy, which is impossible to achieve today. Our political systems – they pretend - are necessarily representative governments, that have nothing to do with ancient Greece. Therefore, they tend to exclude that studying ancient democracy could be someway useful to the comprehension of the history and theory of modern democracy. The dimensions of the modern nation-state are too large to be governed as the classical polis, so they say. Giovanni Sartori, the so-called patriarch of Italian science politics, who was well known also abroad, could be quoted as a prestigious representative of this way of thinking since his famous book Democratic Theory (1962). But it was not the question of the territorial size that drove the founders of modern representative systems to reject the Athenian model of direct democracy, as can be proved by quotations from the writings of James Madison, one of the fathers of the USA constitution. His idea was that governance must be done not by common people but by people with wisdom, the kind of people that today one might call the technicians. The paper recalls some of the most distinctive features of Athenian classical democracy like participation, equality, lot and elections, how they worked in daily life.