Athens

· . Athenian Political Thought and the Reconstruction of American republic EDITED BY J. Peter Euben, John R. Wallach, and Josiah Ober Cornell University Press ITHACA AND LONDON JOSIAH OBER 5 H ow to Criticize Democracy in Late Fifthand Fourth-Century Athens Some twenty-five hundred long time after the revolution that made it possible, democracy is widely regarded as the most attractive form of practical (as opposed to utopian) policy-making organization yet devised. Among democracys virtues is revisability-the potential of the political political science to rethink and to reform itself while remaining committed to its core out values of justice, equality, dignity, and freedom. How is this highly desirable flexibility achieved in blueprint? The willingness to contemplate channelize may be regarded as an born(p) characteristic of elected political culture, and the energy for nondestructive political change can be institutionalized in a democratic constitution. But I maintain that actual revisions generally petition interventions from critics, and major revisions require critics who stand, in some sense, outside the prevalent political culture.

Because actualizing a democratic regimes latent capacity for major revision is predicated on the identification of structural problems by cultural critics, the regime that is to maintain its flexibility must supply social space exterior to itself: if a political remains could ever encompass the whole of society and the whole field of operations of discourse, it would lose its capacity for internally generated change; no one(a) would be able to point out that the This essay is a preliminary introduction to a book in make tentatively entitled Athenian Critics of Popular Rule. Fellowships at the midriff for Hellenic Studies (Washington D.C.) and the University of New England (Armidale, Australia) provided time for research and writing. The essay was presented in a somewhat different form at a May 1992 Cambridge University colloquium, The... If you want to get a full essay, stage it on our website: Orderessay

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