Reinterpreting Democratic Advantage: Thucydides on Athenian Power

• In Event: Ancient History as Political Theory

Abstract

For Thucydides, making sense of Athenian democracy meant correctly interpreting democratic power. More specifically, it meant understanding what role the democratic regime played in constituting Athens’ unprecedented military capacity. In an attempt to identify the salient features of this analysis, several scholars have recently introduced the social scientific framework of “democratic advantage” to the interpretation of Thucydidean political thought. This paper contributes to this literature by re-approaching it from a historical perspective. I argue that the democratic advantage framework, despite its obvious anachronism, proves historically illuminating if properly contextualized, as there existed an analogous attempt in early-classical political thought to explain the comparative military advantage of classical poleis to archaic tyrants and eastern despots. Like its modern counterpart, this discourse hinged around the structural differences between autocratic and isonomic regimes and their effects on collective capacity.

This paper explores how our understanding of Thucydides’ analysis of democratic power changes when read as a participant in this discourse. Reading Thucydides in this context, I argue, helps us to recognize the ways in which he his thinking sits distinctly at odds with modern theories of democratic advantage rather than prefigures them. At the center of this project, I argue, is a multi-faceted effort to contest the idea that democracy was primarily constituted by anti-autocratic practices and institutions. Instead, I demonstrate that Thucydides develops a synthetic account of democratic power that challenges the very opposition between democratic and autocratic forms of rule. In doing so, he provocatively, if somewhat paradoxically, conceptualizes the Athenian regime as a uniquely inclusive form of collective autocracy. In pointing to the ways that Athens combined the strengths of both autocratic and isonomic models, Thucydides is thus able to explain how the democracy’s power was able to supersede that of its more conventional autocratic and isonomic predecessors.

Author

• Mark Fisher, Georgetown University