Ancient Greek Democracy, Aesthetics, and the Cultivation of the Political

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

This panel discusses the roles of aesthetics and culture in ancient Greek democracy. To the Ancient Greeks, politics was much more than just the technicalities of government, but encompassed a range of meanings about the (good) governing of one's own life, relationships with others, relationship with the polity, and shared symbolic habits and customs. This panel brings together scholars who take very seriously the fact that, for the Greeks, cultural taboos, collective habits, shared mentalities, common anxieties, and the conceptual "aesthetics" of governing were part and parcel of daily politics. To examine questions like "What is good order?"; "What role does cultural imagination and fantasy serve in visualizing ideal (or non-ideal) constitutions?" and "How can we imagine together?," especially as it relates to the Greek world, this panel brings together scholars who, revisiting well-known texts of Plato, Aristotle, Polybius, and others, examine how the normative language of democratic rule, through its appeal to the symbolic world, can reinforce political order, habituate the political sensibility of citizens, and institute distinct forms of obedience and oppression.

Sub Unit

• Division 1: Political Thought and Philosophy

Individual Presentations

• Plato the Taboo-Breaker: Myths, Cultural Change, and Democratic Degeneration - Tae-Yeoun Keum, University of California, Santa Barbara

• Ethopoetics and Ethopolitics: On the Government of Habit - William Tilleczek, McGill University

• Polybius, Cheirokratia, and the Fate of Democracy - Matthew Landauer, University of Chicago

• Democratic Eukosmia and Athenian Sumptuary Legislation - Emily Salamanca, Princeton University

Chair

• Jill Frank Cornell University

Discussants

• Aemann McCornack Princeton University

• Nina Valiquette Moreau University of Chicago