Mitch Jeserich is in conversation with renowned Greek scholar, Paul Cartledge, about the history of democracy in ancient Greece. Its rise, its fall and why still matters today. Professor Cartledge is the author of several books on this topic, his latest is Democracy: A Life.
About Democracy: A Life
Ancient Greece first coined the concept of “democracy”, yet almost every major ancient Greek thinker-from Plato and Aristotle onwards- was ambivalent towards or even hostile to democracy in any form. The explanation for this is quite simple: the elite perceived majority power as tantamount to a dictatorship of the proletariat.
Democracy surveys the emergence and development of Greek politics, the invention of political theory, and the decline of genuinely democratic Greek institutions, first at the hands of the Macedonians and then to the Romans. Throughout the book, Cartledge sheds light on the variety of democratic practices in the classical world as well as on their similarities to and dissimilarities from modern democratic forms, from the American and French revolutions to contemporary political thought.