Hi, thanks for tuning in to ancient Greece, Declassified.

Episode 5 Democracy and Demagogues in ancient Athens.

If you're listening to this podcast, then you probably live in a country that calls itself a democracy.

The idea of democracy has found so much support across the world in recent decades that some political thinkers have argued

that eventually the whole world will adopt Western liberal democracy.

Not everyone shares their confidence about this, but most political thinkers do seem to agree on a weaker claim,

namely that given the choice between democracy and autocracy, where

one person rules absolutely, most people will choose democracy. In other words, the desire for democracy

is now considered normal. But this way of thinking is historically abnormal.

For most of history, the majority of people, including the most educated of them,

did not see democracy as something desirable.

They saw it either as irrelevant to their situation, a mere historical curiosity,

or as downright negative, a recipe for mob rule.

As our guest today, Josiah Ober writes in his most recent book called The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece, quote, democracy and growth defined the normal conditions of modernity.

Autocracy, while still prevalent, is regarded as aberrant, so that most autocrats pretend to be

Democrats.

These conditions were not normal or even imaginable for most people through most of human

history, but for several centuries in the first millennium BCE, democracy

and growth were normal for citizens in ancient Greece. How that happened and why it matters is what

this book is about. End quote. Ober points out that there were also a few other brief moments in

history where some degree of democratic self-governance appeared,

for example in the Italian city-states during the Renaissance and in the Dutch republics of the 16th century.

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