Medialab Prado

There are two suppositions. The first is that there is no continuity between Greek and modern democracy, something which is obvious if we consider that since the fall of democracy in the fourth century b.c. to the reappearance of the idea in the eighteenth century, there was too long an interval between them for any continuity to be possible. The second is that in a single concept the only common element is the same word, but in each case it refers to realities which are not only different but are sometimes not even easy to relate with one another.

From a Greek perspective, modern democracies are not really democracies at all, just as from our point of view Greek democracy had enormous deficiencies which make it difficult for us to consider it as such. Athenian democracy was a direct democracy in which all of the citizens present in the agora decided, each one being entitled to participate. But today we reject that model because it excluded not only minors and foreigners, as continues to be the case today, but also women and slave, which causes particular indignation, even though in Europe women were only allowed to vote in the 20th century and slavery was only abolished in the 19th. Modern democracy is a representative democracy, i.e., the citizens elect the people who, previously grouped into parties, will take decisions on their behalf. Another fundamental difference is that while there was no one or nothing which could limit the agreements taken by citizens in the agora, the decisions taken by the universally elected representatives are subject to the law: democracy.

Differences which are ultimately due to the different support systems of democracy: the city-state in Greek democracy and the state in modern democracy. It is worth asking ourselves if a democracy that excludes a majority of the population can be comparable to one in which all citizens of legal age participate in the election of their representatives. But when that participation is reduced, the democratic nature must also be questioned. The Greeks would not consider our representative government to be a democracy since it eliminates the very thing that they considered the essence of democracy: the participation of all citizens with voice and vote in the assembly. They would call our form of government an “elective oligarchy”.

All of this makes it very difficult to compare Greek democracy with modern democracy. But if one were to try, the first prejudice one would have to dismantle would be that there is only one true democracy: western. A comparison of Green and modern democracy, as different as they are, would at least serve to demonstrate just how weak this argument is.