Sphinx

One of the less remarked-upon policies of the UK Labour Party in recent years has been to restore the relevance of the Athenian political system as a workable analogy for contemporary democracy. Besides all the dramatic changes in ideas and ideology since the fifth and fourth centuries BCE, charted at length by scholars like Paul Cartledge and Wilfried Nippel, the fundamental objection to the deployment of classical comparisons has always been the modern switch from direct to representative democracy, from decisions being taken directly by the votes of the demos to decisions being taken by their elected representatives. The consensus – leaving aside recent arguments that the internet now makes a return to direct democracy possible – has been that this is the only practical means of realising the ideals of democracy in the complex world of modernity.

Such a position always runs the risk of looking much too like technocracy, or a kind of oligarchy, giving the people the illusion of power while keeping it as much as possible in the hands of the elite in practice – a modern version of Thucydides’ judgement on the dominance of Pericles in what only appeared to be a democracy. So, especially when those representatives seem to be making a pretty shoddy job of things and/or going against the expressed wishes of the majority, there’s always a case to be made for restoring real power to the people, not only to address their frustrations but in the belief that this will lead to their energetic engagement, with positive results (what we might term the Herodotus principle, that Athens began its rise to greatness when its people took power into their own hands). This seems to have been the impulse behind the changes to the rules governing the election of the Labour leader; it’s certainly one of the claims being made about Jeremy Corbyn’s impact in that role; and now both the candidates for this year’s round are proposing in different ways to extend the role of the party membership in making policy and telling their elected representatives what to do. At which point, classicists can start rubbing their hands with glee…

Rather than firing up all my “Thucydides highlights tendency for people to fall into group-think and make terrible decisions based on emotion and over-optimism” references, however, I’ve found myself this morning thinking instead about the occasions when the Athenians quite consciously followed a technocratic approach: waging war. Not even the most committed ancient democrat thought that military decisions should be made on the basis of a vote; the demos voted on strategy – whether or not to make war, whether or not to send an expedition to Sicily – and voted for the generals who would put those strategic decisions into practice as they thought was best. Arguably this was a recognition both of the specific qualities required for the job, and of the fact that democratic deliberation wasn’t suitable for the battlefield, whether because of its susceptibility to emotion or simply because it needed so much time. Similarly, detailed negotiations with other states were handed over to ambassadors (although of course the treaties themselves needed to be properly ratified).

The relevance of this to the current state of the Labour party? Nothing, perhaps; the situations are incomparable in so many ways. It’s also easy to see how a case for recognising the essential role of expertise in certain areas can easily slide into the position of Socrates (or Blair…) that insists on excluding the demos from any meaningful decisions on the basis of its lack of expertise.

Perhaps the most striking difference between then and now is that the Athenians were for the most part making decisions about their own affairs, without much need to worry about how they looked to others; they might have been wiser to worry slightly more about the effect on some of their allies/subjects, Thucydides implies, but they were able to kick them into line when necessary. The Labour Party doesn’t have that luxury; it needs policies that are attractive to a broader constituency – that can, so to speak, bring the Persians onside, whereas at the moment they are showing every sign of going over to the Spartans for the long term – and so there might be something to be said for listening to the people with experience of winning over Persians…