Origins of demokratia ideology
The invention of demokratia in Greece
by Michael G. Heller
Published — Social Science Files; February 14, 2025
By the late sixth century BCE political authority in Greek polities that resulted from ‘public’ decision making processes was increasingly embodied in written text that seemed to be genuinely contra-elite and representative of a community’s mutualistic bonds and the binding rules of independent—and often interdependent—bordered societies in which the community of people, as a whole demos, legally held sway.1
Rules and enforcement mechanisms were publicly displayed for the common knowledge of all. Literacy rates were high enough for such displays to be generally understood. The holding of legal-administrative positions of governance was strictly temporary and rotative in order to ensure that no single person could ever consolidate a position of personal authority. A major role of the officials, who might in many cases have taken an oath of public office, was one of judicial arbitration between disputing parties. The enforcement mechanism, when penalties were called for, was typically the payment of a fine that might be deposited in a public treasury.
The general impression one obtains of the motivation for creating these judicial methods and structures is that such small societies were highly competitive and mistrustful internally. Formal publicly recognised and enforceable rules combined with the discipline of rotative positions of authority, and the keeping of public records of the transactions of officialdom, created a sense of trust. Administrative officials increasingly sat in public ‘assemblies’ of representative ‘councils’ to deliberate and vote proposals raised by community members. The function of officials was generally known and understood. This transparency can be contrasted with the earlier Homeric societies whose assemblies were less representative, operationally more closed, and where final decisions were made by elite householders who were specialists in the arts of violence. In post-Homeric Greece the tables seem to be turned. The mute threat of violence by the people of the demos against elites who did not fulfil their promises or toe the line with assembly decisions appears to have had real force.
In retrospect it seems justifiable to assume that formally ‘open’ demos-centred decision making processes in Greek polities would increasingly have been perceived by the people as legitimate, representative, honourable and honest governance. In this pre-constitutional stage it might equally have been anticipated that supreme rulers could justifiably reappear — either by the will of the people or against the will of the people — if the prevailing communalistic distributions of demos power through the assemblies were seen to be reverting to more ‘crooked’ forms of decision making.
One aspect of the strengthening of demos identity through the seventh and sixth centuries is the deliberate formal-legal creation of artificial groupings of people. In Social Science Files I have already discussed the ‘invention’ of ‘administration’ and the ‘invention’ of ‘the organisation’ alongside the invention of agriculture as crucial steps in the evolution of fifth and fourth millennium BCE Mesopotamian governance.
In his Polis (2024) John Ma discusses at some length an analogous “invention of groups” along with the “invention of government” (presumably in Greece?), which sought to ensure an “openly fair sharing of power” in the early seventh century BCE.
This invention of groups appears to have arisen from a straightforward and logical recognition of the fact that the evolved power of the demos, by now visibly articulated in written decrees and laws, would become far stronger in plenitude. Deliberate artificial enlargement of political constituencies could have been the bases on which the communalistic-participatory ideology and praxis of ‘demokratia’ would be built. The implication is that distributions of people-in-common began to be engineered into categories in such a way as to bargain and broker a greater distribution of demos-centred power. And the means of achieving this goal evidently included the creation of “fictional” tribes, subdivisions, and kinship groups as forms of “fictitious association”.
Rather than physically moving populations into polities it was possible to rename and, thereby, to re-border people. The artificial bonding of these new groupings might be enhanced in communal gatherings for feasts, but also in the fighting of wars between polities that could be defined ‘tribally’. Communalistic conflict between polities would reduce conflicts within polities. Since Greece’s Dark Age and Homeric era settlements had relearned the millennia-old formula of all stable social settlement — the utility of walls to define boundaries, and of monuments, public buildings, public spaces and shrines to symbolise integration. Then they invented a new form of social engineering.
This analysis is interesting in light of my earlier conclusion that the most important motive and cause of communalistic governance was avoidance of conflict. It suggests the possibility that conflict — the preventing of which I have previously concluded was the primary cause of prehistoric communalistic governance — could be harnessed communalistically and turned outwards as hostility toward competing tribal societies.
In instrumental terms conflict was an obvious means of defining borders. Societies could border and bond through communalistic action that includes aggression against other tribes. It offered scope for expanding the binding force of the administration of law in practical ways that reflect combined ideologies of ‘demos’ (people) and ‘kratos’ (power and strength) which make ‘dēmokratia’.2 Indeed, a modern historian can now recognise that whereas all the most elemental techniques or technologies of societal bordering, bonding and binding were rediscovered by ancient Greeks, the difference in ancient Greece was the conscious and written construct of an ideology of demos that could be monumentalised in laws and juridical-organisational structures.
In summary, there were two significant historical developments that generated the typologically distinct nature of Greek polity governance prior to the constitutional solidifications soon to be witnessed in Athens. These were: a) disciplined distribution and rotation of administrative authority among legally-empowered officials to judge, arbitrate and enforce written rules while remaining answerable to frequent popular assemblies; and b) the creation of sizeable fictitious unit identities of communality and association that transcended economic units, and both solidified and expanded the legal construction of the physical and ideological demos-in-power.
From an early stage, the structure of governance combined strict legality with regular and open participation in decision making assemblies. This was ‘dēmokratia’. Ma suggests the term is applicable for fifth century Argos: “Argos is clearly a dēmokratia, with decision-making institutions as well as large estates under popular control”. [190]
The trend intensified through the sixth and fifth centuries, as can be seen from the proliferation and geographic spread of new public laws, continuous (even permanent) recording of public decisions, and administrative enforcement mechanisms affecting any of a society’s political and economic activities. This ‘nomothetic’ transformation encompassed almost all the most significantly progressive Greek polities, and placed demos ‘power’ at the centre of society, and demos (or its representations) at the heart of all decision making processes relating to the governance of society. Regardless of ‘authenticity’ of participation, appearances suggested full access to decision making.
Rules relating to holding of public office become more detailed and nuanced in direct response to regular public consultation, new or recurrent nuisances of public concern, the emergent demand for rights of appeal against legal judgements, and as a result of the accumulation of official knowhow. These legalistic imperatives driving further development of demokratia were manifested in relation to the continuity and gradual differentiation and layering of multiple administrative and judicial responsibilities according to public need and in recognition of individual seniority. There emerged specified penalties for contraventions of specified laws, enforcement procedures, and stipulated periods of delay before the reassumption of public office by particular persons. Laws were also mixed with polity-specific forms of religious ritual. A curse becomes a lawful penalty, and vice versa, a penalty is transformed into a curse.
It seems that, a) each and any of these changes to the usage of law and legal process resulted from ‘public’ decision making through ‘councils’ and ‘assemblies’, and b) the body and authority of law was an explicit expression of the ‘power’ of the demos and, as such, took precedence over individual ‘power’. Potential conflict over interpretation and intent between decisions made in an assembly and longstanding written or sacred rules was more or less a technical problem that arose repeatedly. Yet one political fact was never in doubt during these centuries of ideological ‘democratic’ consolidation in polities that would become the historical exemplars of Greek modes of governing: the accountability of officials to the decision making of the demos. Officials themselves were fined if they fell short of public expectations in their enforcements of law.
To conclude, I argue for the following contrast, which sets up a separate discussion. Ancient Greek developments in law were principally concerned with safeguarding the cohesion, predominance, control and authority of ‘the people’ as a participatory unity and ruling centre of society. We will see how it played out in Athenian constitutional law which encompassed at least three functional spheres of political governance.
More or less concurrently, but in radical contrast, early Roman law was primarily concerned with the liberty and rights of individuals in the context of polity-wide participatory disunity among multiple coexistent mechanisms of public assembly governance. In Rome, the laws did not prioritise a single ‘whole people’ personified in assemblies. Rather, as I have highlighted in Social Science Files, the emphasis in Rome was on matters pertaining to the family unit, the aristocratic groups and their dependants, and ‘economic’ rights concerning real estate, notions of ownership, private property vis-a-vis public utilities, possession, and individual obligations.
The contrast can be overstated, but perhaps it is worth an exaggeration. Early Roman laws of governance dealt with “private persons, things, and actions”.3 The early Greek laws of governance aimed to forge a public consciousness of a single public power.
The Goldfish by Paul Klee, 1925 Germany
Footnotes
The following discussion of the early evolution of Greek polity laws relies mainly on John Ma’s Polis: A New History of the Ancient Greek City-State from the Early Iron Age to the End of Antiquity, Princeton (2024), especially pp. 77–80, 104–9, 139–41. I have drawn on previous archived Social Science Files that discuss the early Greek polities, and consulted many of the writings of loyal longtime Social Science Files subscribers Paul Cartledge, Michael Gagarin, the late Mogens Hansen, and Josiah Ober to check for any ambiguities.
Ma (2024) also discusses extensive cooperation between polities that practised dēmokratia.
Peter Stein, Roman Law in European History, Cambridge University Press 2004:19.