The Athenian Revolution : : Essays on Ancient Greek Democracy and Political Theory / / Josiah Ober.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Princeton University Press eBook-Package Archive 1927-1999
• VerfasserIn: Ober, Josiah,
• Place / Publishing House: Princeton, NJ : : Princeton University Press, , [2021]; ©1996
• Year of Publication: 2021
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (224 p.)
• Other title: Frontmatter --; CONTENTS --; Acknowledgment --; CHAPTER 1. Introduction: Athenian Democracy and the History of Ideologies --; CHAPTER 2. Models and Paradigms in Ancient History --; CHAPTER 3. Public Speech and the Power of the People in Democratic Athens --; CHAPTER 4. The Athenian Revolution of 508/7 B.C.: Violence, Authority, and the Origins of Democracy --; CHAPTER 5. The Rules of War in Classical Greece --; CHAPTER 6. Thucydides, Pericles, and the Strategy of Defense --; CHAPTER 7. Power and Oratory in Democratic Athens: Demosthenes 21, Against Meidia --; CHAPTER 8. The Nature of Athenian Democracy --; CHAPTER 9. The Athenians and Their Democracy --; CHAPTER 10. How to Criticize Democracy in Late Fifth- and Fourth-Century Athens --; CHAPTER 11. The Polis as a Society: Aristotle, John Rawls, and die Athenian Social Contract --; Bibliography --; Index
• Format: Mode of access: Internet via World Wide Web.
• ISBN: 9780691217970; 9783110442496
• DOI: 10.1515/9780691217970?locatt=mode:legacy
• Access: restricted access
• Hierarchical level: Monograph
• Statement of Responsibility: Josiah Ober.

Where did "democracy" come from, and what was its original form and meaning? Here Josiah Ober shows that this "power of the people" crystallized in a revolutionary uprising by the ordinary citizens of Athens in 508-507 B.C. He then examines the consequences of the development of direct democracy for upper-and lower-class citizens, for dissident Athenian intellectuals, and for those who were denied citizenship under the new regime (women, slaves, resident foreigners), as well as for the general development of Greek history. When the citizens suddenly took power into their own hands, they changed the cultural and social landscape of Greece, thereby helping to inaugurate the Classical Era. Democracy led to fundamental adjustments in the basic structures of Athenian society, altered the forms and direction of political thinking, and sparked a series of dramatic reorientations in international relations. It quickly made Athens into the most powerful Greek city-state, but it also fatally undermined the traditional Greek rules of warfare. It stimulated the development of the Western tradition of political theorizing and encouraged a new conception of justice that has striking parallels to contemporary theories of rights. But Athenians never embraced the notions of inherency and inalienability that have placed the concept of rights at the center of modern political thought. Thus the play of power that constituted life in democratic Athens is revealed as at once strangely familiar and desperately foreign, and the values sustaining the Athenian political community as simultaneously admirable and terrifying.