Shadowing Practice: DEMOCRACY: Ancient vs. Modern - Learn English Speaking with Video
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This is a painting of life in ancient Greece, specifically in Athens during its political golden age.
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Its male citizens enjoyed, for the first time in the history of a state, near total control over their own political lives.
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They called their form of government demokratia.
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Themos in Greek means people.
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Kratos means power to do things, which people usually translate as rule.
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Together, you have demokratia, the rule of the people.
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After the fall of Athens, the word democracy wouldn't be linked to another state for more
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than 2,000 years upon the founding of the United States of America.
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But the United States created a very different form of democracy that, to many, isn't democratic at all.
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This video is going to explore these two democracies.
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We're going to talk about where they came from, what their ideas were, how they're democratic, and also how they're undemocratic.
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At the end, we're going to circle out and ask if the word democracy is appropriate for either society.
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So this video is designed to give you a better grasp on the concept of democracy, and also how it relates to both societies.
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So that's the plan, and we're going to begin by looking at Greece.
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Ancient Greece wasn't a country in the modern sense, with one state and one government.
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Instead, it was a collection of cities that were their own states, called city-states.
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These city-states formed over hundreds of years when neighboring families, clans, and tribes joined together for protection.
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So these city-states were basically just an urban area and the surrounding countryside, all under one sovereign jurisdiction.
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The most famous city-state, and also the best documented one, was Athens.
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In 507 BC, the Athenians adopted a system of popular government that lasted nearly two centuries,
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with a brief interruption in 404 BC when Athens lost to Sparta at the end of the Peloponnesian War.
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The classical Athenian democracy permanently ended in 321 BC when Athens was defeated and subjugated by another powerful neighbor, Macedonia.
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The invention of democracy didn't happen in a vacuum.
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If you look at the position of Greece on a map and consider the prominent civilizations at the time, like the Persians, the Egyptians, and the Phoenicians,
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you can see how it was positioned to be a sort of focal point among the flourishing civilizations at the time, as they interacted, traded, and even fought with one another.
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So from that came a sort of swirling mixture of genes, cultures, and challenges that shaped Greek civilization and culture.
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A similar phenomenon continued throughout the Athenian Golden Age, which made Athens a remarkably alive city in its time.
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It's hard to definitively say more precisely how it happened, since we're talking about ancient history here,
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but one thing that came to distinguish this flourishing Greek culture was its respect for wisdom.
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So the Greeks respected wisdom, similarly to how 19th century Americans respected capitalistic enterprise.
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So the Greeks made their sages into heroes, and had popular sayings like, Wisdom should be cherished as a means of traveling from youth to old age,
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for it is more lasting than any other possession.
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In particular, they were interested in practical wisdom, wisdom that you could make function actively in the world.
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The Greeks' focus on practical intellectual pursuits led them to develop a new philosophy of rule.
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You could ask the question of any society, who rules, or where's the highest political authority.
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The answer to that question for most of history was a person, like a king or a pharaoh.
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But to the Greeks, these were barbarians.
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They weren't free-thinking people.
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The Greeks instead answered the question with law.
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That, on one hand, was thought to free people.
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It was thought that getting everyone in society, including its leaders, to be subject to the law gave people a certain amount of protection in their lives from arbitrary uses of power.
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It was also thought to have a civilizing effect on people.
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It was thought that getting people to follow the law made people more driven by reason, and less driven by emotional impulses.
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Here's how Aristotle put it, "...just as man is the best of the animals when completed," which here basically means living in a Greek city-state,
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"...when separated from law and adjudication, he is the worst of all." So the Greeks believed that they could civilize all of society,
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including its leaders by making everyone in that society subject to the law.
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So that concept is called rule of law.
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You don't have to be a democracy to have rule of law.
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You can have a king, for example, who's also subject to the law.
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But it's a fundamental aspect of Athenian democracy, as well as American democracy.
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It's also thought to be a necessary component of democracy more generally.
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If you think about it, you probably won't be able to rotate out unwanted people by election who are holding office, if those people in office are not subject to the law.
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So rule of law is understood to be a western idea
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because the ancient Greeks are understood to be the people who discovered it.
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Again we're talking about ancient history here, and the further we go back in time, the less sure we can be about what we know.
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So we can't say definitively that the Athenians are the ones who invented rule of law.
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But we are pretty confident that it was a Greek invention, and it certainly paved the way for the Athenian democracy that followed.
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Another major conceptual development that led to democracy is captured in the Greek word isonomia, which translates to equality for all under the law.
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So you can think of democracy as a manifested expression of isonomia, an expression of political equality in a state with rule of law.
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But how did this come about?
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How did this become a thing?
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For one, rule of law is naturally somewhat equalizing.
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It brings people of all classes politically closer together.
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tumbling towards those at the top and elevating towards those at the bottom.
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So once you have rule of law, calls for political equality might not be far behind.
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But we think the main reason why political equality emerged as a popular concept in Greece
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and in its most extreme form in Athens boils down to Greek military culture.
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In Greek culture, battle and conquest were glorified.
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The warriors who won battles brought honor and prestige onto themselves.
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Since armies were needed to defend every city-state against potentially larger opponents, far more people served in the military than we're used to now.
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For example, even aristocrats might serve as cavalry, since they were wealthy enough to own horses and the land that was needed to support them.
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If the cavalry prominently served in a battle and won, they'd bring glory onto themselves, and with that, power.
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So over time, a link developed between military service and political power, the power to administer the state.
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So that made the composition of armies in ancient Greece inherently political.
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The types of people serving in armies were positioned to win power.
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Athenian citizens were the ones who democratically capitalized on that.
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If you think about Greece, it's notably characterized by islands and the Aegean Sea.
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You can think of the Aegean Sea as the heart of Greece.
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Athens became unique in Greece when it used wealth from a silver mine it controlled to take advantage of the Aegean Sea.
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Between 507 and 480 BCE, they build up a powerful navy.
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It was the greatest navy the Greek world had ever seen.
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And who, overwhelmingly, works in an ancient Greek navy?
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The answer is oarsmen.
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The people who literally rowed the boats.
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So you might see where I'm going with this.
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The next question should be, what type of person worked as an oarsman in this ancient Athenian navy?
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The answer was poor Greek men.
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The Greek word for them was thetes.
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We don't know how many thetes there were living in ancient Athens, but there were presumably quite a lot of them.
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Athenian literature sometimes refers to them as the masses.
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Athens also had a land army that was more standard for the time, consisting mostly of hoplites.
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Hoplites were heavy infantry.
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They were basically the middle class of Athens, people who were wealthy enough to own shields and weaponry.
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The important point here is that between the Thetes and the Hoplites, you have a clear majority of the adult male Athenian population,
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again in circumstances where war can bring glory and power.
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In that same period, as you might have guessed, Athens uses its land army and its navy to win a stunning series of victories.
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Its Hoplite army unexpectedly defeats the much larger Persian army in the Battle of Marathon, making them heroes around all of Greece.
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They also won a string of battles around Greece in 506.
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But probably the most important victory of all went to the navy in the Battle of Solomus in 480,
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again defeating the Persians and effectively saving Athens from subjugation,
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which was reported to have caused the masses to have gained a newfound confidence in themselves, which was directly linked to the Athenian Democratic Revolution,
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to the ushering in of Isonomia.
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That revolution is typically thought to have occurred in three major phases, three major reforms, and each reform is linked to a person.
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The first reform is linked to a man named Solon.
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Solon was responding to a class war that was ravaging Athens around 600 BCE.
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There was a massive wealth disparity between rich and poor, and the government, the army, and the courts were controlled by the wealthy.
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Many in Athens were deeply in debt and unable to pay it off.
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So Solon was brought in as a moderate to mediate between the classes and keep Athens from destroying itself.
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One of his main accomplishments was to convince all Athenians, regardless of class, to obey the law.
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So he created a new set of laws that were applied, without distinction, to all free men.
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So he's a good figure to peg the beginning of rule of law on in Athens.
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Solon also cancelled the debts, but probably more importantly for the long run, he politically reorganized Athens.
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He broke Athens into four groups depending on their income, which is where we get thetes from.
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Each group was then given a different amount of political privilege.
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The thetes were given the fewest political privileges.
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They were given access to the assembly, which is a voting body which we'll get to, and they were also given access to the courts,
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so thetes could now litigate and serve in the jury.
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Under Solon, the most powerful political authority was called the Council of the Areopagus, which only the wealthy could serve on, and whose members served for life.
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The second reform was through a man named Cleisthenes.
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Cleisthenes was involved in a power struggle around 508 in Athens.
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There seemed to be simmering anger against elites at the time, which Cleisthenes used against his opponent.
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He aroused the people to revolt, sweeping him into power and establishing him as a populist dictator.
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He wanted to break the hold that powerful aristocratic families had over parts of Athens, So he politically reorganizes Athens into 10 tribes,
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which were further broken into subgroups down to deems.
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So these deems are essentially local districts.
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It was through that infrastructure that Athenian citizens would go on to exercise many of their democratic rights.
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Each tribe could elect members to a newly created Council of 500, which we'll get to.
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And they could also elect one of ten generals to lead the military.
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But under Cleisthenes, you still had the Council of the Areopagus, and Thetes, importantly, couldn't hold public office.
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The last major reform happened under a man named Pericles.
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Pericles came from a noble family, which was reported to have descended from Cleisthenes.
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He lived in the mid-5th century, which was the era of Athenian naval dominance.
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There were calls for political equality, and Athenian opinion was split into two camps.
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One side believed that elites should govern Athens, and the other believed that the people, the Deimos, should govern Athens.
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By allying with the people calling for political equality, Pericles rose to power and became the most influential man in Athens.
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He then worked with a colleague named Ephialtes to break the power of the Council of the Areopagus, which brought about the golden age of Athenian democracy.
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So without further delay, here's a description of what that society looked like.
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You could ask the question of any society, where are policy decisions made?
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Are they made in a throne room or in a private council somewhere?
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In democratic Athens, policy decisions were made on a hill not far from the Acropolis called the Pnyx the Pnyx.
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Ten times a year, the citizens of Athens would come together and meet at the Pnyx.
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Once there, an issue would be raised and then a debate would occur.
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Everyone there would have equal right to participate in that debate, which was the Athenian basis of free speech, called Isegoria.
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Once the issue was sufficiently debated, a vote would be held.
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The people there would then raise their hands to show their support for a particular position.
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Whenever side won, a simple majority would become new policy in Athens.
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What I just described was called, in Athens, the Ekklesia, the Assembly.
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The issues raised in the Assembly were prepared by the Council of 500, whose members were chosen randomly from the public by lot.
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Of the two, the Assembly was the far more powerful body.
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The Assembly could vote down bills drafted by the Council.
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They could change the bills on the floor.
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They could send the bill back with instructions for redrafting, or they could replace it with an entirely new one.
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So the real exercise of sovereign public authority rested directly on the assembly.
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The citizens gathered on the Pnyx could pass virtually whatever policy they wanted.
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So the most important policy decisions that had to be made in Athens were made in the assembly, which included foreign policy.
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So, as you might expect, that led to some dramatic assemblies.
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In the mid-fourth century, for example, Philip of Macedon was marching on Athens.
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The assembly then had to vote on whether to fight or to try to negotiate.
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The wrong decision could have meant the fall of Athens and even the destruction of Athenian culture.
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So this must have been a deeply political society.
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And considering how long democratic Athens lasted, this must have been a fairly competent public.
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Speaking to that competence, there were very few elected public officials in this society.
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Short of a few exceptions, generals, naval architects, and superintendents of the water supply.
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All public officials were chosen randomly from the citizenry by lottery.
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These officials all had their power tightly controlled by the assembly.
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The highest public officials were the generals.
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They only served one-year terms and were subject to performance reviews by the public.
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If their performance was found lacking, they would be dismissed.
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That being said, they didn't have term limits, so generals like Pericles could be re-elected for life.
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So the influence of a general over a lifetime could give a sort of continuity of purpose to Athenian politics.
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But all generals, including Pericles, had no formal power outside of the military.
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Their only ability to influence public policy rested on their ability to persuade the public.
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So what we're looking at here is a public that directly and thoroughly has control over its own political affairs,
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which is what we would now call a direct democracy.
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The Athenian public also directly expressed their political power through the Dekasteria, the people's courts.
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I think it's worth spending a moment describing what it looked like, because it didn't really resemble modern courts.
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For one, there were no lawyers in the system.
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You could hire a speechwriter, but all cases had to be registered and argued by private citizens.
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There also were no judges.
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All cases were decided by the jury, and that jury was massive.
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The average size was around 500 people, big enough to be unbribable, and also big enough to represent public opinion.
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The jurors were again chosen randomly from the public by lot.
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That meant that there weren't really any professionals in the system.
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You could even call it an amateur law system.
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So legal outcomes could be unpredictable.
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Speakers could fool the jury by, for example, incorrectly citing laws or distorting history.
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So those were the three main institutions, the assembly, the council of 500, and the law courts, all directly controlled and managed by the Athenian public.
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But who exactly was that public?
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Who had access to those institutions?
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Athenians, like all Greeks, saw the world in terms of binaries.
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You were either man or woman, free or slave, Greek or barbarian, citizen or alien.
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Within that, the Athenians permitted one half of those binaries into their democracy.
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They permitted free, male, Greek citizens of Athens.
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So slaves weren't permitted, women weren't permitted, non-Greeks weren't permitted, and non-Athenian citizens weren't permitted.
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It's still normal today to exclude non-citizens from your politics.
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The rest of these exclusions were relatively normal for their time, but I think it's worth spending some time addressing them.
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The Greeks again believed that their city-states civilized people and freed them, so they believed that they lived as free people in their city-states.
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They also believed that people elsewhere in the world, the barbarians, lived as subjugated people.
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They lived as subjects to a ruler.
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So to them, foreigners and slaves were essentially the same.
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They both had the psychologies of subordinated people.
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So to the Greeks, their politics were incompatible with both foreigners and slaves.
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They saw their free politics as being incompatible with the psychologies of subordinated people.
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Speaking of slaves, the Athenians had quite a lot of them, probably somewhere between 80 and 100,000 slaves, which was about a third of the total Athenian population.
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Athenian male citizens wanted to spend their time on things that they thought were valuable, but that don't necessarily create wealth.
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They wanted to spend their time on things like government, war, literature, or philosophy.
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But someone has to work to create wealth, and this was before machines were invented, so slaves were the Athenians' answer to that.
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So the work provided by slaves made it possible for
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so many Athenian men to spend time in government or to serve in the military.
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That being said, the Athenians seemed to be relatively generous towards their slaves, in contrast to the United States of America,
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where slaves and their families were passed down from generation to generation, making their outlook on eventually gaining freedom pretty hopeless.
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In Athens, it wasn't unusual for well-behaved slaves to be freed as their owners reached the end of their lives.
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Slaves in Athens also enjoyed some legal protections.
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If they were badly beaten by their owners, they could flee to a temple, and their owner might be forced to sell them.
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Slaves were also allowed to participate in business, provided they gave their owners a share of the earnings.
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And better-off slaves reportedly dressed similarly to free Athenians.
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The Athenian government also employed a number of slaves.
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Many of them were given an allowance and were allowed to live where they pleased.
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Considering the standards of the time, Athenians were known for being mild to their slaves.
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And it was even common judgment
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that it was better to be a slave in Athens than a poor free man in an oligarchic state.
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But I doubt that was of much consolation to the slaves working in the silver mines.
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It's a bit more controversial how Athenian men regarded Athenian women.
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Thucydides infamously reported Pericles to have said, at the end of his funeral oration, female excellence meant to be least talked about among the men,
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whether for good or for bad.
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In keeping with that, average female citizens were rarely talked about in Athenian literature.
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Aristotle opened his politics claiming that, while on one hand, men and women need each other for reproduction,
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on the other hand, some are naturally rulers and others are naturally ruled.
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Rulers, he says, use their minds, and the ruled use their bodies.
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Which seems to be implying that men are naturally a ruling class over women.
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Since women weren't invited into politics, that seems at least fairly representative of Athenian public opinion.
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So this was a deeply patriarchal society.
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The woman's place was understood to be not in politics, but in the home, out of sight.
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As probably the strongest piece of evidence for that, we don't even know the name of Pericles' wife.
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That being said, not all All male citizens were always allowed into their democracy.
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Under Kleisthenes, a procedure was introduced that allowed the Athenian public to banish someone from their society.
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The procedure was called an ostracism.
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If 6,000 people in the assembly voted in an ostracism, then the person with the most names would be forced to leave Athens for 10 years.
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So that's something that happened to high-profile people, typically disgraced politicians, and presumably during tense times, considering how many boats needed to be cast.
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So ostracisms probably worked to relieve domestic pressures.
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If someone was causing a lot of trouble in Athens, and the Athenian public wanted them gone, they had the means to do it.
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I think it's worth reflecting on that process, and what it seems to say about Athenian society.
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When the Athenians wanted someone gone, they didn't kill them, and they didn't throw them in jail, never to be seen again.
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Instead they just forced them to leave for 10 years, and after that 10 years, they'd be allowed to come back.
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So it was a fundamentally peaceful process, and I think a civil one.
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That being said, there is some evidence of fraud during those ostracisms, so the process might have sometimes been manipulated.
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Illiterate voters, for example, might have been used for political purposes.
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So what happened to this system?
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What happened to Athenian democracy?
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Why do we talk about it in the past tense?
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Well, democracy in Athens became expensive.
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The assembly voted to institute pay for more and more public positions, namely in the military and the jury.
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Money for those positions had to come from somewhere, and Athens found the answer in empire.
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So democracy in Athens came to depend on empire.
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They increasingly stretched their power over the rest of Greece.
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They also sent ambitious campaigns abroad to Egypt and Sicily.
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Things reached a breaking point.
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in Greece turned against the Athenians.
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Resistance to Athenian policy came from nearly every state in Greece.
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The viability of democracy was also an open question in Athenian time.
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It was notably rejected by aristocrats and the upper class.
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That led to divisions at home and a lack of intellectual support from many of the brightest minds at the time, like Plato, Socrates, and Aristotle.
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By Aristotle's time, the most extreme oligarchs were reported to have sworn the following oath.
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I will be evil-minded to the demos, and will plot whatever evil I can against them.
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Athens would go on to suffer a string of defeats that would lead to its fall.
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The end of the line for the old-style Athenian democracy came in 321, when Athens, subordinated under Macedon,
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added a wealth criterion for citizenship.
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Democracy disappeared in Athens and wouldn't reappear for thousands of years, this time in a modern form, influenced by the United States.
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We're about to turn our attention there, but I'd like to close this section out by reading a speech
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that Pericles was reported to give to the citizens of Athens.
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was a dark time in the city, plague had struck, and the tide of the war against Sparta seemed to be turning against Athens.
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I think it gives a sense of both the intelligence and the grandeur of the time.
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It reads, Even if we should ever be forced to yield, for everything that grows great also decays.
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The memory of our greatness will be bequeathed to posterity forever.
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That we of all the Greeks ruled over more Greeks than anyone,
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that in the greatest wars we held out against enemies in alliance and individually,
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and that we lived in a city that was the most ingenious and the greatest.
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We see the wisdom of Solon's remark that no more good must be attempted than the nation can bear.
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Thomas Jefferson, corresponding with Walter Jones, 1801.
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If you think about it, democracy in Athens, as told by its literature, manifested itself as a class struggle, a struggle between the many and the few.
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Democracy was implemented when the many won that struggle and took control of politics.
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But the few always resented the many.
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Democracy in Athens ended with the few reclaiming power and the many losing it.
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Democracy in America, by contrast, manifested itself as less of a class struggle and more of a moderate compromise,
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probably most powerfully embodied in the philosophy of James Madison, the principal framer of the Constitution.
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For that to make sense, we need some context.
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I think the best place to start is to look at the state of democracy before the founding of the United States.
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In the mid-1700s, ancient Greece was thousands of years in the rearview mirror of history.
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Available literature at the time was limited, so people's understandings of ancient Greece at the time were also accordingly limited.
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So that meant that even though they created what's considered the first modern democratic nation.
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Only a few of the US founders were at all familiar with ancient Greek history or political thought.
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What little they knew mostly came from only two sources, Thucydides and the biographer Plutarch, with Plutarch being probably by far the bigger source.
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That translated into the founders not showing much interest in ancient Athens.
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They mentioned it sparingly and typically in a passing fashion.
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But there was an ancient society that they were more interested in.
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Intellectuals at the time, in both America
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and Europe showed far more interest in classical Rome and the concept of republicanism that's associated with its society before Caesar.
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That meant that leading up to the revolution, there were two main political philosophies on the table, republicanism and monarchism.
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So it was republicanism that ended up replacing monarchism.
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There's a few things to say about that.
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For one, the concept of republicanism wasn't precisely understood at the time.
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For example, Alexander Hamilton said that it was used in a variety of senses.
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And John Adams said, even after the founding, that he never understood what it was, and thought that no man ever did or will.
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To further confuse things, the words republic and democracy were
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so closely associated in the minds of the colonists that they are often used synonymously.
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We have an understanding now that the word republic is different because it refers to a representative government.
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But that distinction had only barely begun to exist at the time.
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It was apparently invented in 1787 for polemical purposes by James Madison,
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who argued that pure democracies have a small number of citizens who assemble and administer the government in person,
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while republics have a scheme of representation.
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But that was a distinction with no basis in prior history.
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Pretty much all of the earlier republics, including Rome, fit into Madison's definition of a democracy.
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So throughout history and throughout 18th century America, the words democracy and republic were used interchangeably.
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They didn't refer to different types of popular government, and instead reflected differences in language.
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Democracy came from Greek, the rule of the people, and republic came from Latin.
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Res publicas meant thing of the people.
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So that was a lot of mental work to basically bring us back to square one.
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The American founders were setting out to transform America from a monarchy into a republic.
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But the words republic and democracy were interchangeable at the time.
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So they were setting out to do something that was closer to the spirit of classical Athens than you might think.
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Even though understandings of republicanism were messy at the time, there was still a clear enough idea of what it was.
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As a historian at the time put it, you can think of it as the difference between subjects and citizens.
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I'm basically
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describing democratic Athens here.
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But as you're probably aware, American democracy only partially resembles Athenian democracy.
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So there's more to the picture here than the American people simply collectively owning sovereignty.
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I think the best way to explain the particular character of
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American democracy is to break the story of the creation of American democracy down into two storylines.
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The first storyline is similar enough to the Athenian one.
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That's the story of rejecting authoritarian power and spreading the ideas of freedom and equality under the law.
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Basically the spreading of isonomia in America.
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Even before the revolution, Americans didn't feel close to the English monarchy.
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It felt to them like an extraneous, overlaid power, too far across the ocean for its majesty to be felt.
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They also felt tired of the system it was based in, which was a system of patronage,
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which is a system where your connection and loyalty to others determines your prospects in life, including your prospects in politics.
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Americans over time came to see patronage in starkly negative terms.
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They came to see it as a form of dependency, dependency on the authorities above you.
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And it became patriotic to free yourself from these dependent connections and influences.
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There was also, importantly, a sort of proto-industrialization happening at the time, as huge numbers of farmers and artisans started to take up manufacturing and trading.
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Average Americans were becoming noticeably wealthier and were even starting to engage in luxury.
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This was a new concept, the idea that anyone could work and become wealthy.
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Work before then had been thought of as something that you necessarily had to do for bare survival.
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Basically, the poor worked and stayed poor.
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So the colonists were enthusiastic about what was happening to them
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and were simultaneously worried about the possibility of losing their newfound wealth.
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They saw themselves as being especially vulnerable to the English monarchy.
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So that led to the development of a new Republican philosophy of property.
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Americans came to see property as something that makes people equally free and independent property became people's source of personal authority.
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They thought that anyone could work to own property, and owning it could protect you from the outside world.
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So as these ideas came together, Americans came to reject monarchism and the old set of values that were associated with it,
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like loyalty, order, stability, and hierarchies.
352
And they came to support republicanism and the new set of values associated with that, liberty, equality, and independence.
353
A veneration of property came along with it, since property was thought to make independence possible.
354
Equality in particular became a rallying call for those seeking to challenge authority and superiority.
355
By equality, they mostly meant equality of opportunity.
356
They were rejecting patronage and trying to dream up a new world based in merit.
357
A world where all offices lie open to men of merit, of whatever rank or condition.
358
But equality also came to mean something new, something like equality of spirit, the idea that all people are inherently equal inside.
359
Best captured in Thomas Jefferson's statement in the Declaration of Independence, all men are created equal.
360
That was the radical opposite of monarchy.
361
From here, the storyline's familiar.
362
The Americans declared independence, fought a war with England, and won it.
363
They then had an opportunity to form a government, a new government based on principles of their choosing,
364
and the principles on their minds were liberty, equality, and independence.
365
We can call that the end of Storyline 1.
366
You can associate it with thinkers like Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson.
367
But we still have Storyline 2.
368
You can associate this one with John Adams, James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton.
369
This storyline is a storyline about skepticism, skepticism towards republicanism and democracy.
370
Part of that skepticism began pretty much right away.
371
The declaration had barely been signed
372
when some of the revolutionary leaders began expressing doubts about the republican virtue of the American people.
373
There were new popular leaders emerging who were far less educated and far less broad-minded than many other revolutionary leaders had expected.
374
These new leaders promoted their own local selfish interests at the expense of what the founders saw as the public good.
375
Jay's rebellion in 1786 likely made things worse when thousands put up armed resistance to paying debt and taxes,
376
which ended in an attempt to overthrow the standing government.
377
Something that added to their skepticism of democracy was their philosophy of the nature of power.
378
They believed that concentrations of power were dangerous and that it had the tendency to grow out of control if object.
379
For example, George Mason said, From the nature of man, we may be sure that those who have power in their hands will always, when they can, increase it.
380
That extended towards the public.
381
They believed if a majority of Americans gained a certain amount of power, they'd use that power to further increase it and oppress everyone else.
382
Here's Hamilton saying it.
383
Give all power to the many, they will oppress the few.
384
Although for what it's worth, it worked in reverse.
385
Give all power to the few, they will oppress the many.
386
The reading materials available to the founders at the time also turned their opinions against democracy.
387
Reading Plutarch, Thucydides, Xenophon, Plato, and Aristotle all made the founders believe that pure forms of democracy,
388
where the people directly control politics, were dangerous.
389
The founders believed, rightly or wrongly, that pure democracies drove themselves into self-destruction over time with their policies.
390
And yes, their language was that dramatic.
391
Here's Madison.
392
Madison.
393
Democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention, have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property,
394
and have, in general, been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.
395
The state that was most held to that charge was the purest democracy of all, Athens.
396
So they believed that pure democracies like Athens needed to be saved from themselves with institutional safeguards,
397
and the lack of those safeguards is what drove those societies into ruin.
398
So you have these two conflicting storylines, and they don't easily reconcile with one another.
399
How do you make the public sovereign if you don't trust them?
400
But time was ticking.
401
The provisional government was running out of money, and new government had to be made.
402
But what would that government look like?
403
The prospect was overwhelming.
404
No one had ever successfully made a popular government at anything close to the scale of the United States.
405
John Adams, in his frustration, said, The lawgivers of antiquity legislated for single cities.
406
Who can legislate for 20 or 30 states, each of which is greater than Greece or Rome?
407
The answer came more than anyone from James Madison.
408
He said that politics consist of conflicting interests.
409
Any one group that stands behind a particular interest is a faction.
410
He then says, We should expect factions to look out for their own interests, which might be against other people's interests and might be against the community's interests.
411
So in this scheme, there's not a limit on the amount of factions there can be, and factions can be majorities or minorities.
412
He then says, we should design a government where it's difficult for any one faction to gain control over the whole thing.
413
In practice, that meant making three branches of government, each with limited power, and each with the ability to check the power of the others.
414
The legislative branch was further broken into two chambers, One intended to represent the many, and the other intended to represent the few.
415
Only after both chambers approve legislation can it be sent to the president to sign into law.
416
So the complexity of the system makes it difficult for any one faction to grab the reins of government for itself.
417
It'd be much more difficult than, say, persuading a single assembly.
418
A network of further checks was laid in place either at the time or shortly after, guaranteeing individual rights by law, like property rights or free speech.
419
limits the government's power against citizens, but also limits the majority's ability to use the government against other citizens.
420
An independent judiciary places the highest legal decisions outside of public control.
421
Limiting national power against state power is another one, protecting minority populations in states against national majority populations.
422
It was also decided to make America a representative democracy, and they had a few reasons for that.
423
For one, it made practical sense.
424
In a country the size of the United States, it didn't make sense to expect average citizens to commute to wherever decisions were made, or to keep up with the intricacies of politics.
425
The larger a country is and the more connected it is to other countries, the more complicated its politics become.
426
It seemed to make more sense to hire representatives who could travel
427
and spend their time keeping up with the complexity of politics.
428
Representatives were also thought to be a check on what they saw as the emotional excesses of popular crowds.
429
Madison argued
430
that passing the public's views through representatives allowed the cooler wisdom
431
of an elite few to best discern the interests of the country.
432
You can take it or leave it, but that was his logic.
433
He was trying to prevent, for example, the public from voting for short-term policies that would doom the country in the long run.
434
Most of what makes this system democratic is that these representatives are chosen by the citizens, so the representatives have to compete against each other in an election.
435
They have to run for office and convince the public that they're the right person for the job.
436
That also makes this government somewhat accountable to the people, in that these representatives probably want to please the public in order to attain and secure their jobs.
437
So going up to the very highest offices, the citizens choose who they want to represent them.
438
And if they don't like their performance, in the next election cycle, they can peacefully rotate them out of a job.
439
So what they ended up with was a government where the people had control over the very highest officials in charge, like the president and members of Congress,
440
and that the people get to pick who they are and get rid of them if they don't like them.
441
But they also created a government that's difficult and even near impossible to control in its entirety.
442
In short, the American people can only hope for, at best, partial and somewhat indirect control over their government.
443
Exclusions at the time made the initial system even more undemocratic.
444
American politics have in some ways become more democratic over time, and in other ways less democratic.
445
For the sake of not repeating myself, I think the best place to cover that will be in the conclusion.
446
So, let's get to that.
447
I started this video out saying I would end it by squaring the concept of democracy against both societies.
448
So it's time to do that.
449
Let's start with a definition.
450
I'd say democracy is a form of political organization where the people living under political institutions simultaneously exercise control over them.
451
To be transparent, I got that wording by reformulating a statement
452
that Sean Mullins made in The Rise of American Democracy when he said,
453
Democracy appears when some large number of previously excluded ordinary persons, what the 18th century called the many,
454
secure the power not simply to select their governors but to oversee the institutions of government.
455
Virtually all the definitions I've seen center around the same idea.
456
The idea that democracy is government by the people, with the people being understood as broadly as possible.
457
But I prefer definitions that are less abstract and more precise.
458
Another way to say it is that you have democracy when the people living under a government control it.
459
If we can accept that, then the task of figuring out whether a society is democratic or not becomes relatively simple.
460
We have two main factors here, the people and their control.
461
To figure out then how democratic a society is, you have to answer, how broadly realized is this concept of the people?
462
When we're talking about democracy, we're talking about realizing the people in terms of political equality.
463
Are there exclusions?
464
Is there one type of person being privileged over another?
465
That reduces democracy.
466
It makes that society less democratic.
467
The second factor is control.
468
How thorough is the people's control over their institutions?
469
For our purposes today, we're only going to square this against Athens and America, and we're going to start by looking at Athens.
470
The control that Athenian citizens had over their government was incredibly thorough.
471
The citizens directly controlled the three most powerful organs of government, the Assembly, the Council of 500, and the Law Courts.
472
Its few elected officials were heavily constrained in their power, subject to the law and supervised by the people.
473
It's hard to imagine a society where the people have greater control over the institutions of their government.
474
So in that way, Athens was highly democratic, even purely democratic.
475
But who were the people?
476
In Athens, only adult male free citizens had political rights.
477
So that's only around 10 or 20 percent of the population.
478
So that means that between 80 and 90 percent of the Athenian population didn't have access to political privileges.
479
If you could just parse that sentence, that pretty much tells the story.
480
So Athenian democracy was both remarkably thorough and remarkably narrow.
481
It was thorough in the amount of control that the people had over the government, and narrow in the amount of people enjoying those privileges.
482
You also have to remember that those exclusions were normal for the time, so you have to take historical context into account.
483
If that society existed today, it'd be more controversial to call it democratic.
484
But as it stands, it was an ancient society.
485
Since their control over government was so thorough, and their exclusions were normal for the time, I think it's safe to call ancient Athens democratic.
486
America is basically the opposite story.
487
American democracy began as a limited democracy, similar to the democracy under Kleisthenes, if you remember him.
488
As I described over the last third of this video, the control that the American people had over their government from the beginning was partial,
489
mostly just in the form of elections of representatives.
490
The people who held those privileges in the beginning was, like Athens, a narrow band of people, white male property holders.
491
So given that, I think early American democracy was at best a limited democracy.
492
The controls over government were too partial, and there was too much political inequality.
493
There were too many groups being excluded from politics.
494
The limitations on the public's ability to control their government that I described in this video all still exist,
495
so the American public's ability to control their government is still, at best, partial.
496
In some ways, it's become even more limited, for example with the rise of institutions like the CIA and the FBI, which are effectively outside of the public's control.
497
But the scope of people included in American politics has significantly expanded over the last, say, 200 years.
498
Proprietalist people, women and slaves, were all seen as dependents in early America and therefore unworthy of political privileges.
499
After a civil war and a string of civil rights movements, virtually all adult citizens in America now formally have equal political rights.
500
Only a few exclusions still stand, like non-citizens and children and criminals in some circumstances.
501
So the people in America is now realized about as broadly as it's been at anywhere at any time.
502
But their ability to control the government is limited in that it mainly rests on elections.
503
To make a judgment, I think America is a democracy.
504
The ability to hire and dismiss your policymakers and your leaders is a powerful one.
505
It's arguably the most powerful one, short of private citizens directly citing policy themselves.
506
But the power of the public is limited enough to make me roughly agree with the democracy theorist Robert Dahl
507
when he said that he believed
508
that Madison went about as far as it's possible to go while still remaining in the rubric of democracy.
509
Which is to say that American institutions are about as undemocratic as they can be, while still deserving the name.
510
I think many hear that and automatically condemn the United States.
511
But I think it's important to say, as a last note, that that's not necessarily the case.
512
Democracy isn't a concept that has to be maximized at all times and under all circumstances.
513
It's not self-evident that the more democracy we have, the more fully we're able to realize a democracy, the better off we are.
514
So it could be that more democracy would be good for America, but also maybe not.
515
So think for yourself.
516
That's it for me today.
517
Thank you very much for watching, and goodbye.
הורד אפליקציה
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FOR YOU
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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson
This C1 speaking lesson is built on the video “DEMOCRACY: Ancient vs. Modern”. The speaker keeps coming back to these words: democracy, Athens, Athenian. This video has 517 sentences and 7626 words to shadow. The speech runs for 44:54. The speaker talks at a natural 170 words per minute, close to everyday conversation. 83% of the words are among the 3,000 most common in English; the rest is worth studying before you start.
Key vocabulary in this video
The 15 most advanced words in the video, with pronunciation and meaning:
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| republicanism noun | The political ideology of being a citizen in a state as a republic under which the people hold popular sovereignty. | |
| storyline noun | The plot of a story; one of several within a story, usually interwoven. | |
| exclusion noun | /ɪksˈkluːʒən/ | The act of excluding or shutting out; removal from consideration or taking part. |
| faction noun | /ˈfæk.ʃən/ | A group of people, especially within a political organization, which expresses a shared belief or opinion different from people who are not part of the group. |
| thorough adjective | /ˈθʌɹoʊ/ | Painstaking and careful not to miss or omit any detail. |
| isonomia noun | Equality before the law; possession of equal rights; equal distribution of rights and privileges. | |
| ostracism noun | /ˈɒs trəˌsɪz əm/ | Banishment by some general consent. |
| skepticism noun | /ˈskɛp.tɪˌsɪ.zəm/ | The practice or philosophy of being a skeptic. |
| monarchy noun | /ˈmɑnɚki/ | A government in which sovereignty is embodied within a single, today usually hereditary head of state (whether as a figurehead or as a powerful ruler). |
| incompatible adjective | /ˌɪŋkəmˈpætɪbəl/ | Of two or more things: that cannot coexist; not congruous because of differences; unable to function together due to dissimilarities. |
| monarchism noun | Rule by a monarchy. | |
| oppress verb | /əˈpɹɛs/ | To keep down by unjust force. |
| patronage noun | /ˈpeɪtɹənɪd͡ʒ/ | The act of providing approval and support; backing; championship. |
| subordinate adjective | /səˈbɔːdɪnət/ | Placed in a lower class, rank, or position. |
| undemocratic adjective | Not democratic. |
Phrasal verbs you will hear
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| come together verb | /ˈkʌm tʊˈɡɛðɚ/ | To assemble; to congregate; to combine. |
| figure out verb | To come to understand; to discover or find a solution; to deduce. | |
| keep up with verb | To manage to remain beside or just behind someone or something that is moving away from one. | |
| build up verb | To erect; to construct. | |
| come back verb | To return to a place. | |
| end up verb | To bring to a conclusion. | |
| grow out of verb | To emerge from (something); to take a particular shape as a result of (something); to come to exist from (an origin). | |
| lead up to verb | To set in motion; to act as a causal or preparatory event or sequence of events. |
Sentences worth repeating
Short, complete lines from the video that you can reuse in everyday conversation:
- Why do we talk about it in the past tense?
- How do you make the public sovereign if you don't trust them?
- Let's start with a definition.
- How thorough is the people's control over their institutions?
- That's it for me today.
דקדוק בסרטון הזה
המבנים שהדובר משתמש בהם הכי הרבה, עם המילים המדויקות מהסרטון:
| מבנה | בסרטון |
|---|---|
| משפטי תנאי (Conditional sentences) if + clause, will/would + verb — תנאי ותוצאה שלו | If that society existed today, it'd be |
| סביל (Passive voice) be + past participle — הדגש הוא על מה שקורה, לא על מי שעושה את הפעולה | be linked · is designed · was defeated |
| משפטי זיקה (Relative clauses) who / which + clause — מידע נוסף על אדם או דבר | people who discovered · ones who invented · ones who democratically |
| הווה מושלם (Present perfect) have/has + past participle — פעולה שקרתה בעבר ועדיין יש לה חשיבות או השפעה עכשיו | have ever been · have been · I've seen |
Pronunciation to watch
The speaker uses 63 contractions and reduced forms, such as we're, didn't, don't. Say them the short way, as you hear them.
- The “sh” and “zh” sounds: exclusion /ɪksˈkluːʒən/, faction /ˈfæk.ʃən/, flourish /ˈflʊ̈ɹ.ɪʃ/, civilization /ˌsɪv.ɪ.laɪˈzeɪ.ʃən/, invention /ɪnˈvɛnʃən/
- Long words — get the stress right: ostracism /ˈɒs trəˌsɪz əm/, skepticism /ˈskɛp.tɪˌsɪ.zəm/, incompatible /ˌɪŋkəmˈpætɪbəl/, subordinate /səˈbɔːdɪnət/, remarkably /ɹɪˈmɑɹkəbli/
How to practise with this video
- Listen to the whole video once without speaking and note the words you do not know.
- Start at 0.75× speed, shadow it sentence by sentence, then go back to normal speed once it feels easy.
- Record yourself and compare with the original, paying attention to words like republicanism, storyline, exclusion.
מהי טכניקת השאדואינג?
שאדואינג היא טכניקת למידת שפה מבוססת מדע שפותחה במקור להכשרת מתורגמנים מקצועיים ופופולרית על ידי הפוליגלוט ד"ר אלכסנדר ארגואלס. השיטה פשוטה אך עוצמתית: אתה מקשיב לאודיו באנגלית ילידית וחוזר עליו בקול רם מיד — כמו צל העוקב אחרי הדובר עם עיכוב של 1–2 שניות בלבד. בניגוד להאזנה פסיבית או תרגילי דקדוק, שאדואינג מכריח את המוח והשרירים בפה לעבד ולשחזר דפוסי דיבור אמיתיים בו זמנית. מחקרים מראים שזה משפר משמעותית את דיוק ההגייה, האינטונציה, הקצב, הדיבור המחובר, הבנת השמיעה ושטף הדיבור — מה שהופך אותו לאחת השיטות היעילות ביותר להכנה לIELTS Speaking ולתקשורת באנגלית בעולם האמיתי.