Mirko Canevaro, Majority Rule vs. Consensus
Are the claims of the best historians of Athenian democracy “untenable”? An absence of homonoia about majority rule…
[clunk]
In his chapter Majority Rule vs. Consensus: The Practice of Democratic Deliberation in the Greek Poleis, published in 2018, Mirko Canevaro wrote:
Section 1
Introduction
[The topic of this chapter is the belief that] decision-making in the ancient Greek poleis by and large happened by majority.
This is a belief that is held as self-evident by most Greek [sic] historians, and rarely (if ever) discussed.
To give only a few authoritative examples, Françoise Ruzé argues that consensus-based decision making had been by the fifth century replaced by majority rule. Rhodes states that in the Athenian Assembly, when one or more motions were presented, ‘the final decision was made by a simple majority’. Hansen holds that city-state cultures (including those of ancient Greece) were characterised by ‘a political decision-making process whereby laws and decrees [. . .] were often passed by majority votes after a debate in an assembly’. Liddel states that the Athenian way of ‘solving the problem of how the theory of popular rule might be translated into a legitimate democratic reality’ was by ‘allowing the people to propose or to make decisions by majority vote’. Balot states that ‘political debates in Athens were settled by majority vote, full stop’. And even Ober, who has stressed in recent years that Athenian democracy was much more than simple majority rule, still holds that it was also characterised by majority rule.
Thus, everyone seems to agree that the standard mode of decision-making in the Greek poleis, and in particular in democratic Greek poleis, was by majority. The issue among historians and social scientists is rather to identify the correct setting for its emergence. …
My contention in this chapter is the following: the evidence, if properly scrutinised, shows that the idea that the primary mode of decision-making in Greek political assemblies was majority rule is untenable.
All the epigraphical evidence we have for counted votes in political assemblies refers to unanimous (or close-to-unanimous) decisions. A careful analysis of the workings of the Athenian Assembly shows that the guiding principle was in fact consensus … Consensus implies … a deliberative process by which a final proposal for collective action is put forward only after discussion that has identified the prevailing sentiment … unanimity was in fact the result of a process of consensus creation that involved significant and institutionalised democratic deliberation. …
Section 4
Conclusions
I have argued that in political assemblies the norm was not simple majority rule, but the pursuit of consensus, fostered through sustained and institutionally facilitated deliberation. I should stress that this is true only in political assemblies. The evidence both from Athens and from other poleis shows not only that in the law-courts the votes were precisely counted, but also that the rule (and the norm) was a split vote governed by majority rule. No debate and deliberation was involved, and therefore there was no expectation of consensus. …
[The] interesting point in the context of the present discussion is … not that the Athenians did not know and practise majority rule. They obviously did: this was the standard and preferred mode of decision-making in the law-courts and in elections, and was probably always at least a possibility in political decision-making.
But for the Athenians, unlike in much modern democratic thought and in the formal arenas of modern politics, majority rule was only one of many available systems for making collective decisions, and not necessarily their preferred one, or the one considered most typical of and compatible with democracy. Elections certainly were not the standard mode for selecting magistrates, and lottery (which avoided majority decisions) was much more widely practised. And the whole procedural and institutional apparatus for making decisions in political settings (assemblies and councils) seems, as I have argued, to have attempted by all possible means (vote by show of hands, extensive deliberation, wide powers to the proedroi) to avoid split decisions governed by majority rule, and to produce consensus.
Xenophon even mentions an obligation to reach homonoia (‘same- mindedness’, ‘consensus’):
[Quote] ‘everywhere in Greece there is a law that the citizens shall promise under oath to agree, and everywhere they take this oath’. [end quote]
[In an earlier (omitted) passage the author observes that (quote) “Xenophon is not known to be terribly objective when it comes to Athenian democracy”. (end quote)]
This is consistent with the focus in our sources on homonoia, and the omnipresent fear of stasis, originating in irreconcilable differences among citizens that undermine and ultimately dissolve the unity of the city. As Cartledge puts it, at the time of classical Athens ‘every vote on a major policy issue threatened the outbreak of stasis’, and with every decision to be made the polis had to walk the dangerous line between stasis and stability. Sometimes the verb used by the Greeks to indicate a vote is diaphora, which has, however, a much wider semantic range and is never neutral; it marks a disagreement, a division that threatens the integrity of the polis, and as such needs to be resolved. … The constant danger of stasis makes division in two disturbing, even when it materialises in a peaceful political forum. And the victory of one opinion over another, when both opinions command similar amounts of support, is not the end to which decision-making should aspire. …
… And yet scholars have normally assumed that the omnipresent appeals to homonoia in ancient political philosophy, which are matched by corresponding concerns in the ‘lower’ political thought of inscriptions, and in oratory, are entirely aspirational, and mask the reality of stern ideological divisions that materialised in … the omnipresence of majority rule. What I have tried to show in this chapter is that this was not necessarily the case. Divisions existed, and were indeed the reason behind the concern for homonoia.
But homonoia did not have a place only in the realm of aspirational and normative political reflection and rhetoric. It stood behind actual institutional design, and was pursued on a daily basis through complex and sophisticated institutional means: mechanisms and procedures (backed by strong ideological tenets) that left room for heavily polarised debate and deliberation, but at the same time expected that citizens would engage with one another’s opinions, strive to achieve the common good, and ultimately come to a joint decision – not one that would leave half of the city disgruntled, but one that all could embrace. …
… It goes beyond the aims and ambitions of this chapter to find out how effective all this actually was in making decisions in Athens. Nor is it my aim to argue that consensus decision-making is the only way to make choices that advance the interests shared by the members of a community – in fact, I do not even argue that the Athenians and the other Greeks always and invariably achieved consensual decisions, let alone that their decisions were generally and absolutely good decisions. …
… But if, as has been argued, one of the reasons for the success of the ancient polis was the ability, through institutions that were both democratic and epistemic, to mobilise (and distil) diffused knowledge into good policy choices that advanced the shared interests of the citizens, then I suspect that the substantial institutional investment in deliberation and towards consensus when making political decisions played a part. It must be relevant that the very institutions that governed political decision-making … actively promoted … meaningful and reflected engagement with others’ ideas, expertise and opinions, towards the formation of shared interests and choices.
[You have now reached the end of this Social Science Files exhibit.]
The Source has been:
Mirko Canevaro, ‘Majority Rule vs. Consensus: The Practice of Democratic Deliberation in the Greek Poleis’, in Ancient Greek History and Contemporary Social Science, edited by Mirko Canevaro et al., Edinburgh University Press 2018
Social Science Files collects and displays multidisciplinary writings on a great variety of topics relating to evolutions of social order from the earliest humans to the present day and future machine age.
‘The Heller Files’, quality tools for Social Science.