6 Thucydides ' Criticism of Democratic Knowledge Josiah
نویسنده
چکیده
I BEGIN WITH A QUANDARY that is very familiar to Martin Ostwald: Classical Athens saw the invention of both democracy and political theory, yet while we have a number of examples of criticism of democracy, no systematic defense of democracy-no democratic theory-survives from an Athenian pen. I propose that the conundrum is best explained by assuming that from the late fifth through the late fourth century B.C., democratic ideology was in a sense hegemonic: It so thoroughly-dominated the Athenian political landscape that formal democratic theory was otiose. What implications does this proposition have for reading works of political criticism? Democratic hegemony surely made criticism of democracy difficult, not because such criticism was forbidden, but because the existing political terminology tended to be monopolized by democratic discourse. In Athens, legitimate government and democracy were assumed by most citizens to be more or less synonymous; to speak or even to think about politics meant to speak and think within an idiom defined by democratic discourse. 1 Thus a formidable epistemological task faced the critic of democracy-how to construct a way of knowing about the world of political affairs that would not be colonized by the hegemonic tendencies of democratic discourse. In his text, which I propose to read as a work of political criticism, Thucydides set out to investigate power, human nature, and their relationship to democratic Athens' potential and to its political failure. His solution
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