Athenian judicial ballots (4th century BC)
Demos: How the People Ruled Athens
(under contract, Princeton University Press; expected early 2026)
So two things constitute a Democracy, of which one (a regular schedule of meetings) constitutes a Demos, the other (which is a majority of votes) to kratos or the power to prevail (potestas).
Thomas Hobbes, De Cive VII.5
​
Some places have no demos.
Aristotle, Politics 1275b5
Historians and political theorists have long believed that they knew the meaning of the ancient Greek word demokratia. To democracy’s detractors, it meant mob rule; to its supporters, it meant the rule of the entire citizen community over itself. This book argues, by contrast, that the ancient Greeks shared a conception of demokratia that partly overlapped with each of these interpretations while transcending them both. Demokratia was the organized rule of the mass over its leading men. Ordinary citizens, assembled in large numbers, ruled over their own politicians and thereby over the community as a whole.
This regime was underpinned by kratos, the power of the stronger, epitomized by the victories of the Athenian demos in civil conflicts in 508, 411, and 404 BC. But it was routinely manifested by the supreme political authority—or “sovereignty,” to use Hobbes’s term—of large crowds of ordinary men acting as policy-makers, citizen-judges, and law-makers. Especially in the years 403 to 322, which Aristotle correctly diagnosed as the era of “ultimate democracy,” the Athenians pulled off a feat unmatched by democrats today: making use of talented and ambitious politicians without being ruled by them. Demos asks: can we do the same?
"The Secession of the People to the Mons Sacer" by B. Barloccini (1849)
A Short History of Democracy:
An Ancient Greek Perspective
(under contract, Princeton University Press)
“It is thought that elections are oligarchic.”
Aristotle, Politics 1294b
For decades, ancient Greek demokratia has been viewed through the lens of modern democracy. What if we flip the gaze? Using the vantage point argued in Demos: How the People Ruled Athens, this book will examine the post-classical political landscape through classical Greek eyes, arguing the strengths and weaknesses of popular politics in Hellenistic Greece, republican Rome, revolutionary England, America and France, and contemporary liberal democracies from a “demokratic” perspective. It will close by assessing the prospects for something like demokratia today. The provisional title is ambitious given the range of times and places it hopes to cover, but apt in that the book's real target is traces of ancient Greek-style demokratia, which have had a short history so far.
.jpg)
Polling at Covent Garden, 1807
​
The hustings outside St Paul's Covent Garden at an election, from The Microcosm of London (1808).
© London Lives.