Chapter 14 Democracy’s Forgotten Futures and the Greek Political Legacy

Or, What Histories of Dēmokratia Do Contemporary Critiques of Democracy Need?

In: Brill's Companion to the Legacy of Greek Political Thought
Author:
Alexandra Lianeri
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Type:
Chapter
Pages:
399–427
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004679344_016

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Abstract

This essay examines the role of histories of Greek democracy in contemporary attempts to conceptualize political alternatives and outsides to the democratic present. Focusing on historians such as Moses Finley, Paul Cartledge, and Josiah Ober, it foregrounds dēmokratia’s critical potential as formed in comparative juxtapositions, but also in what is described as relational perspectives, wherein visions of the Greek democratic past are overdetermined by crisscrossing legacies of different ages. These include a plural legacy of political modernity consisting of oppressive teleological narratives of ancient and modern European democracies, but also an ambiguous and often unruly notion of dēmokratia. The path to democracy’s critique appears here as neither a return to a distant past, nor a repudiation of dēmokratia’s futurity, but as a transformative movement and a troubling alterity, an outside to democracy that needs to be confronted, mediated, and re-appropriated into a porous and mobilised political present. This return to the Greek political legacy is no longer prophetic of a victorious future, but reflexive and ambivalent, holding on at once to the many sides, voices, and actors of stories of ancient and modern democracies.

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Series:  Brill's Companions to Philosophy: Ancient Philosophy, Volume: 8 and  Brill's Companions to Philosophy, Volume: 8
Cover Brill's Companion to the Legacy of Greek Political Thought
E-Book ISBN:
9789004679344
Publisher:
Brill
Print Publication Date:
16 Sep 2024
Front Matter
Introduction
Part 1 The Reproduction of Greek Political Thought
Part 2 Greek Thought in New Environments
Part 3 Variation and Adaptation
Part 4 Greek Thought and the Potential for Dissent
Back Matter

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