Princeton University Press
The Athenian Revolution: Essays on Ancient Greek Democracy and Political Theory
Key Metrics
- Josiah Ober
- Princeton University Press
- Paperback
- 9780691001906
- 9.11 X 6.03 X 0.57 inches
- 0.71 pounds
- History > Ancient - Greece
- English
Secure TransactionBook Description
Where did democracy come from, and what was its original form and meaning? Here Josiah Ober shows that this power of the people crystallized in a revolutionary uprising by the ordinary citizens of Athens in 508-507 B.C. He then examines the consequences of the development of direct democracy for upper-and lower-class citizens, for dissident Athenian intellectuals, and for those who were denied citizenship under the new regime (women, slaves, resident foreigners), as well as for the general development of Greek history.
When the citizens suddenly took power into their own hands, they changed the cultural and social landscape of Greece, thereby helping to inaugurate the Classical Era. Democracy led to fundamental adjustments in the basic structures of Athenian society, altered the forms and direction of political thinking, and sparked a series of dramatic reorientations in international relations. It quickly made Athens into the most powerful Greek city-state, but it also fatally undermined the traditional Greek rules of warfare. It stimulated the development of the Western tradition of political theorizing and encouraged a new conception of justice that has striking parallels to contemporary theories of rights. But Athenians never embraced the notions of inherency and inalienability that have placed the concept of rights at the center of modern political thought. Thus the play of power that constituted life in democratic Athens is revealed as at once strangely familiar and desperately foreign, and the values sustaining the Athenian political community as simultaneously admirable and terrifying.
Author Bio
Josiah Ober, Mitsotakis Professor in the School of Humanities and Science, works on historical institutionalism and political theory, focusing on the political thought and practice of the ancient Greek world and its contemporary relevance.
He is the author of a number of books mostly published by Princeton University Press, including Mass and Elite in Democratic Athens (1989), Political Dissent in Democratic Athens (2008), Democracy and Knowledge (2008).
He has also published about 75 articles and chapters, including recent articles in American Political Science Review, Philosophical Studies, Hesperia, Polis, and Transactions of the American Philological Association.
His book on The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece was published in Spring 2015, from Princeton University Press. It documents and explains the remarkable Greek efflorescence of ca. 800-300 BCE, the Macedonian conquest of the late fourth century, and the persistence of economic flourishing into the Hellenistic era.
Other work in progress includes a general theory of democracy, a study of rational cooperation and useful knowledge in Greek political thought.
Source: Stanford Department of Classics
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