aspqrz said:
:? :? :? :?
All of the Athenian courts were, by definition, open. Anyone could attend (well, any citizen, I guess, and probably not women ... I suspect well behaved foreigners were allowed to watch) and watch.
Unless you have a different definition of what "open" means.
Perhaps you are "simplifying" a bit too much again
It should be noted that I'm not talking only about citizens of Athens. Not all people living and born in Athens and the places under its control were citizens. In later ages the citizens were even a minority.
And that never, ever happend anywhere in the world today, does it :lol:
That is not the point - but the fact that Athens was not an equal democracy and the political and legislative system did not work for the advantage of all the people of Athens. In addition, see Graphe Paranomon below.
Bad example.
*snip*
Even then, he could have chosen exile.
It was his stupid choice to make a point by dying.
Hardly a political decision by the Ekklesia.
My point in this case was that he was accused at all - on a purely political basis - and that he was sentenced to death in the end, for a political basis. His defence speech was arrogant, yes, but it only pointed towards his view that he had only done the people a service by trying to wake them up. In this sense, the Athenian courts were not that different from what happened in other states, minus the effect of dictators and tyrants.
No different from courts here in Oz, in the UK, or in the US, for example.
Shaping politics by their decisions.
Which does not mean that they usurped the power of the Ekklesia.
Graphe Paranomon allowed laws that were about to be prosessed - they didn't need to be passed yet - be challenged in court. The suit was brought against the speaker who had proposed the law that was being challenged and he was, in effect, being prosecuted for misleading the people in to doing something illegal or immoral. If a law was taken to the court before the assembly passed it and the court found the case in favor of the law and the defendant, the law was passed without a need to take it back to the assembly for a vote. So in effect, the courts could pass laws without a vote - isn't that surpassing power if something is?
I guess they may have written down the laws that the Ekklesia passed, they did NOT change them. They did NOT pass them, and if you have ever been under the impression that they did, you are completely mistaken.
I'm afraid you are misreading me a little. My point in this discussion is theoretical, from the point of political science, not history. In parliamentary demoracracy, in (naive) theory, the parliament gets its objectives and jobs from the people during the vote. If a party promises to cut down taxes and the people vote it to power, it is supposed to cut down taxes. Whether it happens or not - how many political powers have failed to meet their promises... - is another thing. In Athens, the council was in much more direct connection to their voters, the citizens, so it worked much better. They were much more responsible for actually doing what the majority vote wanted. The underlying principle is still the same - people vote for something to happen and a chosen group of people make it happen.
No, it wasn't perfect. But the evidence, according to Ste Croix, is pretty plain, as long as it was a functioning democracy it was able to provide protection for the poorer citizens against the tyranny of the wealthy.
Citizen is the key in here. Not all people living and born in Athens were citizens. The Athenian democracy, when functioning properly, was supposed to look after the interests of its citizens, not all the people of Athens. Citizen as a term was a position of privilege in those days, not something synonymous to all people of the state as these days (pretty much following the French and American revolutions). Thus comparing ancient Athens to modern democracies is suspicious in the sense that universal suffrage is a quite modern thing.
Well, as others have pointed out, the USA is not a democracy, it is a Republic. Just like Oz is not really a Monarchy, but a Republic with a figurehead :wink:
Meh, semantics. According to dictionary.com, "Democracy" means:
1. government by the people; a form of government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised directly by them or by their elected agents under a free electoral system.
2. a state having such a form of government: The United States and Canada are democracies.
3. a state of society characterized by formal equality of rights and privileges.
4. political or social equality; democratic spirit.
5. the common people of a community as distinguished from any privileged class; the common people with respect to their political power.
When we are speaking about "democracy" in a daily life, it can be assumed that the word is used as defined in the dictionary. If we were having an academic discussion, then it would be wise to define what one means with the use of that word. Even then, parliamentary (and presidential) democracy is widely accepted as one form of democracy in political sciences. I'm certainly not a fan of American political system - or any two party system - but I'd still call it a democracy. (Even if you argue that a system rigged to favor two established parties is not "a free electoral system".)
Republic is a such vague term as a word to describe a political system - if we compare the Roman Republic and modern USA, the systems are definetely very different both on theoretical and practical level of operation. (Even if many democracies for some reason look at that corrupt oligarchic mess of Roman Republic as an inspiration and ancestor for their system, bah.)
Sorry if I come off as being pissed off or something in my post, that is not the case. I simply don't use smileys - a habit I've never learned - so my posts may sometimes appear to be a lot more serious than they really are. This is all a good humoured discussion in that imaginary pub mentioned earlier to me.
Though I don't think we as a species will actually start to grow up until at least we have Fusion power down pat and there isn't so much of an energy crisis and we can throw energy at other problems to solve them. And even then it's going to take another few generations to grow out of the idea that you need to grab what you can cos there isn't enough for everyone.
