learning · Chinese — bilingual opening

Ancient and Modern Democracy: Two Concepts of Liberty?

Wilfried Nippel’s history shows that ancient democracy, far from serving as a simple model for modern democracy, has been repeatedly reconstructed, enlisted, and distorted by modern political struggles.

赵宇飞｜谁需要雅典？古代民主的现代用途

/ The Paper · 11 June 2026 · read the original in Chinese →

《古代民主与现代民主：两种自由概念？》，[德]威尔弗里德·尼佩尔著，赵宇飞、陆炎译，生活·读书·新知三联书店，2026年6月出版，628页，88.00元

Ancient and Modern Democracy: Two Concepts of Liberty?, by Wilfried Nippel [Germany], translated by Zhao Yufei and Lu Yan, SDX Joint Publishing Company, published June 2026, 628 pages, 88.00 yuan.

在西方政治传统中，“民主”是最重要但也最有争议的概念之一。一方面，它在当代几乎成为所有政体必须接受的正当性来源，并且人们往往会将以雅典民主制为代表的古代民主视为典范。这一点甚至连纳粹政权也不例外，希特勒的拥护者曾将他与伯里克利相提并论，并认为全体德国人收听元首的广播讲话时，乃是复兴了当年雅典的公民大会。另一方面，在十九世纪初以前的两千多年里，“民主”却算不上是一个好词。在民主制诞生之后的绝大多数时间里，它被贴上了极端民粹或暴民统治的标签，而曾经投票判处哲学家苏格拉底死刑的雅典，则是最臭名昭著的案例。

In the Western political tradition, “democracy” is one of the most important concepts, but also one of the most contested. On the one hand, in the contemporary world it has become almost the source of legitimacy that all regimes must accept, and people often take ancient democracy, represented by Athenian democracy, as a model. Even the Nazi regime was no exception: Hitler’s supporters once compared him to Pericles and held that when all Germans listened to the Führer’s radio addresses, they were reviving the citizens’ assembly of Athens. On the other hand, for more than two millennia before the early nineteenth century, “democracy” was hardly a term of praise. For most of the time after democracy was born, it was branded as extreme populism or mob rule; Athens, which had once voted to sentence the philosopher Socrates to death, was the most notorious case.

Why did attitudes toward democracy undergo so radical a reversal? What role has Athenian democracy played in modern political discourse and scholarly debate about democracy? Do we still need to return to the classics in search of models by which contemporary political practice might take its bearings? In an age when democratic systems are said to face a severe challenge from populism, these questions are especially important. In Ancient and Modern Democracy: Two Concepts of Liberty? (Wilfried Nippel, Ancient and Modern Democracy: Two Concepts of Liberty?, trans. Keith Tribe, Cambridge University Press, 2015; hereafter cited by page number only), the German scholar Wilfried Nippel proceeds from the perspectives of institutional history and intellectual history to trace how, over the past several centuries, the concept of democracy has been used, reinterpreted, and even deliberately distorted by politicians and theorists in different eras according to their own needs. Drawing not only on philological and archaeological evidence to redraw the true features of ancient democracy, Nippel also takes as his central problem the continuities and ruptures between ancient and modern democracy, and sketches a “metamorphosis” of democracy.

I一

For a very long time, people’s impressions of ancient democracy came chiefly from the judgments of ancient writers such as Plato, Aristotle, Thucydides, and Plutarch. In Books VIII and IX of the Republic, Plato describes five regimes and presents a process by which the best regime, ruled by philosopher-kings, gradually degenerates into tyranny. In Plato’s taxonomy of regimes, democracy seems exceedingly attractive, and even quite close to the best regime, but this is only an appearance. Among the five regimes, democracy is superior only to tyranny, and stands just one step away from degenerating into it. Although Aristotle disagreed with Plato’s classification of regimes, he still inherited Plato’s negative attitude toward democracy: set against polity, democracy is a “deviant constitution” in which the ruling group attends only to its own interests, rather than to the interests of the polis as a whole. Because ancient writers leveled many sharp criticisms at democracy, later readers tended to follow this view as well, praising ancient democracy little and condemning it much. That democracy was regarded for the next two thousand years as scarcely different from mob rule was, of course, directly influenced by this legacy.

Drawing on the latest findings of existing historical and archaeological research, Nippel revisits the developmental history and institutional arrangements of Athenian democracy. One of his main aims is to restore the true face of ancient democracy and to clear the ground for the discussion that follows. In Nippel’s view, two key points must be grasped in order to understand Athenian democracy.

First, Athenian democracy took shape and evolved gradually in history; it cannot be treated as something that remained unchanged from beginning to end. Although Solon was later honored as the “father of democracy” and established both the rules by which political rights were divided according to property classes and the institution of the citizens’ assembly, Athenian democracy did not begin to assume its basic scale until Cleisthenes reorganized the Council of Five Hundred on the basis of the tribes within the polis. In the decades that followed, the archonship was established, the citizens’ assembly, the Council of Five Hundred, and the people’s courts came to hold power, while the Areopagus Council, composed of former archons, was stripped of its authority. Thus the Athenian democracy familiar to later ages had largely taken shape by the mid-fifth century BCE. By the beginning of the fourth century BCE, Athenian democracy underwent another major reform, establishing the important institution of the “indictment for illegal proposals” (graphe paranomon). Therefore, whether or not the criticisms made by Plato and other writers were fair or accurate, their descriptions of democracy were based chiefly on the politics of the Athenian polis in the decades around the Peloponnesian War. In the several-hundred-year history of Athenian democracy’s evolution, those decades were only a small “slice,” and cannot stand for the whole of ancient democracy.

Second, the actual operation of Athenian democracy’s various institutions differed greatly from the common impression that has long prevailed. Take ostracism as an example. Traditionally, it has been held that the Athenians created this institution after drawing lessons from the age of Peisistratus, in order to exile political figures in the city whose power had grown too great and thereby prevent tyranny. Later writers who defended ostracism, such as Harrington and Grote, accepted this account as well. As for critics of ostracism, such as Constant, Hume, Niebuhr, and Fustel de Coulanges, they held that the institution violated liberty, and even accused it of being a typical manifestation of the “tyranny of the majority” in ancient democracy. Nippel points out that both defenders and critics misunderstood the real function of ostracism in Athenian democratic politics. According to the findings of contemporary archaeology, the institution continued to operate even in periods when no one aspired to become a tyrant. At times, ostracism votes developed into organized campaigns to smear political opponents, becoming part of the ordinary political struggle among rival politicians in the citizens’ assembly, and having nothing to do with preventing tyranny, violating liberty, or the tyranny of the majority. Beyond ostracism, the stipends for council members, slavery, the indictment for illegal proposals, the liturgy system, and other core institutional arrangements of Athenian democracy all require similar clarification.

A bust of Themistocles. Despite his distinguished military career, he was exiled by ostracism around 471 or 472 BCE and fled to Argos.

An ostracon used in 482 BCE to vote for the ostracism of Themistocles.公元前482年用于投票放逐地米斯托克利的陶片

In short, both the attacks on Athenian democracy by Plato and other ancient writers and the many traditional impressions formed over the next two millennia may obstruct us from clarifying the true face of ancient democracy. If we take them as the basis for understanding ancient democracy without discrimination, we are very likely to perpetuate long-standing misunderstandings.

II二

Once the true face of ancient democracy has been clarified, the next question is this: in the development of modern democracy over the past several centuries, to what extent has the legacy of ancient democracy been accepted or rejected? Supporters of democratic systems have often tended to stress the continuity between ancient and modern democracy, while downplaying the difference between Athens’s participatory democracy and the representative democracy prevalent today. For example, at the end of the last century, American and Greek scholars held a series of academic conferences celebrating “2500 Years of Democracy.” This formulation directly traced the origins of modern democracy back to Athens 2,500 years ago. It not only deliberately ignored the long-standing negative attitude toward democracy, but also lightly passed over the differences between ancient and modern democracy.

This tendency to emphasize that modern democracy was directly inspired by ancient democracy has also found a considerable market in political theory. Take the founding and constitution-making of the United States as an example. A popular republican view often holds that the founding of the United States and the establishment of its democratic system were deeply influenced by ancient democratic political practice. Hannah Arendt is a relatively typical case. In On Revolution, she stresses that the actions of the revolutionaries in the American independence movement were “to an extraordinary degree under the guidance and inspiration of Roman examples” (Hannah Arendt, On Revolution, trans. Chen Zhouwang, Yilin Press, 2007, p. 182). For Arendt, the American Founders quite consciously regarded themselves as heirs of the Greeks and Romans, and in their revolutionary enterprise and legislative founding put into practice the public life and life of action that had once appeared in ancient democracy. J. G. A. Pocock, a representative figure of the Cambridge School, held a similar view. In the tradition he sketched as “Atlantic republicanism,” the American founding should be placed within the intellectual genealogy of civic humanism, and this civic humanism, to a large extent, continued the tradition of ancient polis democracy, especially the Aristotelian tradition (J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition, Princeton University Press, 1975).

J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition.波考克著《马基雅维里时刻：佛罗伦萨政治思想和大西洋共和主义传统》

Historians often maintain a guarded skepticism toward grand narratives of this kind. Still taking the American founding as an example, the American Founders did indeed repeatedly invoke ancient cases in political discussion; in constitutional debates they also mostly used the names of ancient Greeks and Romans as pen names, such as Publius, Aristides, and Brutus; and in official buildings they deliberately imitated classical architecture. Yet as time went on, the American Founders increasingly emphasized the changes and distance separating antiquity from the modern age, and refused to take ancient democracy as a model for the American political system. Hamilton, for example, believed that the composition and structure of contemporary society were far more complex than those of antiquity, and therefore that “to look for models to be followed from ancient Greece or ancient Rome would be as ridiculous as trying to imitate the Hottentots or the Lapps” (p. 129). In other words, ancient democracy was not the object imitated by the American system, nor could it possibly serve as its model. The republican line of thought that links the American founding and constitution-making with ancient democratic politics may appear to have abundant evidence, but the connection between the two is in fact merely superficial, and does not mean that the former was substantively influenced by the latter to any great degree.

The French Revolution was another modern political movement said to have been deeply influenced by ancient democratic ideas and practices. Since the end of the eighteenth century, commentators have traced the outbreak of this political movement to a “cult of antiquity” (p. 148). The red liberty cap, the emblem of the Jacobins, has commonly been seen as modeled on the liberty cap worn by ancient Roman slaves when they were freed. At the same time, major revolutionary leaders such as Robespierre and Saint-Just continually referred to antiquity in their political rhetoric and symbols. Yet the revolutionaries’ understanding of antiquity was in fact neither so deep nor so ample; they often had not read ancient works to any serious extent, and even Robespierre himself may not have supported Athenian-style direct democracy. Moreover, even revolutionary leaders relatively familiar with antiquity, such as Desmoulins, often took a critical attitude toward ancient democracy. In Nippel’s view, during the French Revolution “people placed greater emphasis on identifying with ancient models of civic virtue than on wishing to replicate ancient institutions” (p. 178), and therefore we should not overestimate the substantive significance ancient democracy had during the Revolution.

From the two cases of the American Revolution and the French Revolution, we can see that in many major political movements and events in the history of modern democracy that are thought to have been deeply influenced by antiquity, the substantive role played by ancient democracy may not have been especially prominent. Borrowings of ancient Greek and Roman allusions, names, and images are not enough to prove that modern democracy took the ideas and institutions of ancient democracy as its model.

III三

Since the influence of ancient democracy on political movements such as the French Revolution was not as great as many people imagine, the next question naturally arises: why, for a long period after the Revolution, did politicians, classicists, and political theorists across Europe pay so much attention to ancient democracy, and devote such great effort to debating its nature, especially its effect on individual liberty? Did they care about this theme merely out of pure academic interest? The answer is plainly no.

Although ancient democracy had little substantive influence on the French Revolution, largely because Robespierre and others continually cited antiquity, many people after the Revolution still blamed the Jacobin Terror on a fanatical infatuation with antiquity. In this sense, criticism of ancient democracy implicitly contained criticism of the French Revolution and the Terror. In other words, ancient democracy became a tool by which people used the past to satirize the present.

Constant was one of the most influential thinkers of the post-Revolutionary age, and his famous distinction between the “liberty of the ancients” and the “liberty of the moderns” was plainly a reflection on the Revolution. In Constant’s view, the liberty of the ancients was collective liberty, and the premise for realizing this liberty was the individual’s complete submission to collective authority. The liberty of the moderns was individual liberty, a liberty that emphasized the happiness of private life and freedom from constraint. Constant suggested to his readers that the disasters brought by the Terror during the Revolution were the evil consequences of attempting to imitate antiquity in modern society (Benjamin Constant, The Liberty of the Ancients Compared with That of the Moderns, trans. Yan Kewen et al., Shanghai People’s Publishing House, 2017). Later scholars such as Fustel de Coulanges, Burckhardt, Acton, and Max Weber were all strongly influenced by Constant when they discussed antiquity. Analysts belonging to this line of thought tended to emphasize ancient democracy’s suppression of individual liberty, and to criticize the lack of individual liberty in the ancient world.

Benjamin Constant, The Liberty of the Ancients Compared with That of the Moderns.贡斯当著《古代人的自由与现代人的自由》

The two nineteenth-century British thinkers George Grote and John Stuart Mill represent another line of thought opposed to the tradition just described. Their “rehabilitation” of ancient democracy occupies a pivotal place in the intellectual history of the concept of democracy.

Over several decades, Grote completed his monumental twelve-volume History of Greece and offered a defense of Athenian democratic politics. For instance, Grote held that ostracism helped forestall an “individual appetite for power” (p. 255), refuting the charge that this institution constituted a “tyranny of the majority.” In addition, he devoted particular effort to comparing ancient and modern institutions, and argued that many institutional arrangements in Athenian democracy were superior to their modern counterparts. The Athenian courts, for example, where jurors enjoyed immunity, were better than the Anglo-American jury system, in which jurors might be punished in political trials (p. 256). Nippel reminds readers that one of Grote’s original motives in rewriting Greek history was precisely that the Greek histories then in circulation were filled with political prejudices brought about by the French Revolution (p. 252). Although Grote’s treatment of ancient history was more rigorous and reliable on the level of historiography, this does not mean that his historical writing lacked any intention of using antiquity to illuminate the present.

George Grote, History of Greece.格罗特著《希腊史》

In Mill, this intention is even more obvious. Mill emphasized that the Greeks were the “originators of political liberty” and a model for modern Europe to emulate (p. 260), and held that “Athenian democracy had the advantage over modern representative government” (p. 263). Mill endowed Athenian democracy with a significance in world history, a view that would find a clear echo in the later Max Weber. Grote’s and Mill’s defense of Athenian democracy can to a large extent be seen as a critical response to Constant. In their view, political liberty and individual liberty should be compatible within Athenian democratic politics. When they made such a judgment, it clearly represented their expectations for British parliamentary democracy in their own contemporary political environment: in modern democracy, it should also be possible to achieve what had already been accomplished in ancient democracy.

After the mid-nineteenth century, political movements continued to unfold across Europe. The Revolutions of 1848, the Paris Commune, German unification, and a series of other political events profoundly influenced people’s attitudes toward and understandings of democracy. After the twentieth century began, Italian fascism quickly arose, and Mussolini borrowed many elements from antiquity to provide legitimacy for the Italian fascist regime. Likewise, in Weimar Germany, praise or condemnation of Athenian democracy often also contained praise or condemnation of the political reality of Weimar democracy. After the Nazis came to power, because Hitler placed great importance on ancient Greece and Rome, and because German academia was swept along by the political current, research on antiquity often came to serve political purposes, whether actively or passively. As mentioned at the beginning of this essay, German scholars of the time compared Hitler to Athens’s most outstanding statesman, Pericles, and used the comparison to defend Nazi ideology. It can be seen that, down to this period, discussions of ancient democracy were often endowed with an intense significance for real politics: they were used to support or oppose a regime then in power, or to express the author’s own political position.

After the end of the Second World War, of course, this practice of using antiquity to satirize the present gradually diminished in academic research. Compared with the first half of the twentieth century, discussions of ancient democracy in this period were relatively less strongly political. Still, from scholars’ assessments of Athenian democracy, we can continue to see how contemporary political discourse and issues seeped into academic research. Readers familiar with scholarship on ancient history, upon seeing the title of Nippel’s monograph, will surely think of a work of the same name once published by the renowned American classicist Moses Finley: Ancient and Modern Democracy. At the beginning of that book, Finley sharply criticized the fact that “most voters in Western democracies are apathetic and ignorant” (M. I. Finley, Ancient and Modern Democracy, trans. Guo Xiaoling and Guo Zilin, Commercial Press, 2016, p. 5).

Moses Finley, Ancient and Modern Democracy.芬利著《古代民主与现代民主》

One of Finley’s purposes in writing this book was to use the example of ancient democracy as a comparison with modern democracy, calling on citizens to participate more actively in elections and in all kinds of political activities. It hardly needs saying that in recent decades, in the context of the wave of political correctness and the culture wars, a number of works have appeared, such as Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization. These scholarly studies attempt to deconstruct and criticize ancient democracy, arguing that Athenian democracy, which excluded women, slaves, and foreigners, has no standing to serve as a model for modern democracy in its pursuit of political and social equality for all.

Martin Bernal, Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization.马丁·贝尔纳著《黑色雅典娜：古典文明的亚非之根》

Overall, Nippel’s several-hundred-page monograph, expansive in scope, explores the continuities and ruptures between ancient and modern democracy. Nippel argues that although modern democratic political systems inherited many ideals from ancient democracy to a certain degree, the substantive role played by ancient democracy in the development of modern democracy was in fact not very large. Over the past several centuries, all kinds of political events have continually shaped people’s views of ancient democracy. At the same time, classicists, political theorists, and historians holding different political positions have also used the study of ancient democracy to express their own political attitudes, and even to carry out political propaganda. In this process, the image of ancient democracy, represented by Athenian democracy, has displayed entirely different faces, like Proteus, the sea god in ancient Greek myth who could change shape at will. One might say that the reception history of ancient democracy in the modern world can itself be called a “metamorphosis” of democracy.

Proteus, god of the sea (c. 1686).海神普罗透斯（约1686）

As Nippel says in the “Introduction,” debates over ancient democracy can hardly be “neatly divided into ‘academic’ and ‘political’ dimensions” (p. 7). The important value of Ancient and Modern Democracy may lie in reminding us that when we read works by thinkers and scholars from the past several centuries discussing ancient democracy, it is necessary to discern carefully the overtones they have hidden between the lines. Of course, scholars are not the only ones who hide such overtones; politicians have long been equally adept at using discussions of ancient democracy to proclaim their own values. When Trump repeatedly stresses in speeches and statements the inseparable connection between the United States and ancient Greece, and says that the Founders drew inspiration from ancient Greece in shaping the principles of democracy; when he declares that the United States has inherited the political and cultural legacy of ancient Rome, he is in fact placing America in the position of orthodox heir to ancient democracy. Is part of his intention not precisely, in the context of the culture wars, to refute those arguments that seek to detach ancient democracy from modern democracy? In this sense, he too has added a new footnote to this “metamorphosis” of democracy that has continued for several hundred years.