Matthew Landauer

ABSTRACTIn Democracy and Political Ignorance, Ilya Somin argues that the supposed informational advantages of “foot voting”—exercising exit options and making market-based choices—over voting at the ballot box tell in favor of decentralizing and limiting government. But the evidence Somin offers for the superiority of “foot voting,” based on an analysis of the politics of the Jim Crow-era South, is unpersuasive and internally inconsistent. Second, even if Somin is correct that foot voters have greater incentives to acquire information than ballot-box voters do, this would not in itself be a good reason to favor foot voting. For Somin shows little interest in considering why we might value democratic decision making. Thus, Somin's argument is unlikely to persuade anyone not already committed to the superiority of market-based solutions to social and political problems.

Classical Athens has left to political theorists a dual legacy: a crucial historical case of democratic practice, and a rich tradition of political reflection. A growing number of scholars have placed the relationship between these two legacies at the center of their research. I argue that these scholars collectively offer us a model of a broad, engaged, Athenian public sphere. Yet I also caution that we should avoid overly harmonizing pictures of what that public sphere was like. I focus in particular on two prominent claims in the literature: that Socratic philosophy can be read as an expansion of Athenian accountability practices, and that ancient dramatists, philosophers, and historians were alike engaged in a project to educate citizen judgment. I argue that both claims threaten to obscure arguments over the appropriate role of the judgment of the demos in democratic politics.

Ancient Greek elite theorists and ordinary democratic practitioners shared a distinctive account of the institutional features of democracy: democracy requires both institutions that empower ordinary citizens to decide matters and the widespread diffusion of agenda-setting powers. In the Politics, Aristotle makes agenda control central to his understanding of what it is to be kurios in the city, to his distinction between oligarchy and democracy, and to his analysis of the preconditions for democratic control of the polis. For democratic citizens, isēgoria (the equal right to speak and make proposals in the assembly) was more than an expression of the democratic commitment to equality. It was also an institutional tool to resist oligarchic domination of the agenda. Institutionalizing isēgoria was part of the Athenian response to a crucial problem for democratic theory and practice: how to ensure that popular participation reliably translates into popular control.

We often talk loosely of the “tyranny of the majority” as a threat to the workings of democracy. But, in ancient Greece, the analogy of demos and tyrant was no mere metaphor, nor a simple reflection of elite prejudice. Instead, it highlighted an important structural feature of Athenian democracy. Like the tyrant, the Athenian demos was an unaccountable political actor with the power to hold its subordinates to account. And like the tyrant, the demos could be dangerous to counsel since the orator speaking before the assembled demos was accountable for the advice he gave. With Dangerous Counsel, Matthew Landauer analyzes the sometimes ferocious and unpredictable politics of accountability in ancient Greece and offers novel readings of ancient history, philosophy, rhetoric, and drama. In comparing the demos to a tyrant, thinkers such as Herodotus, Plato, Isocrates, and Aristophanes were attempting to work out a theory of the badness of unaccountable power; to understand the basic logic of accountability and why it is difficult to get right; and to explore the ways in which political discourse is profoundly shaped by institutions and power relationships. In the process they created strikingly portable theories of counsel and accountability that traveled across political regime types and remain relevant to our contemporary political dilemmas.

Athenian democracy is rightly recognized for its extensive network of accountability institutions. This essay focuses instead on popular unaccountability in democratic Athens: ordinary citizens participating but not speaking in the Courts and the Assembly were unaccountable. I explore possible justifications of popular unaccountability, including arguments from democratic sovereignty and epistemic arguments, and stress the importance of a third strand: the identification of jurors and assemblymen with deservedly unaccountable, because comparatively weak and powerless, idiōtai (private citizens), whose political activity failed to reach a level requiring intense scrutiny and control. Nonetheless, such a justification was always tenuous in light of the power jurors and assemblymen collectively wielded in the city. As I show through a reading of Aristophanes’s Wasps, it was always possible to destabilize the juror idiōtēs identity and replace it with a much more troubling image: the identification of the juror with the dangerously unaccountable tyrant.

Parrhesia, or frank speech, is usually understood as a practice intimately connected to Athenian democracy. This paper begins by analysing parrhesia in non-democratic regimes. Building on that analysis, I suggest that most accounts of parrhesia overlook the degree to which its practice at Athens implied a comparison of the demos to an unaccountable ruler -- a tyrant. As a practice, parrhesia was paradigmatically undertaken by speakers addressing an audience with the power to sanction them in the event that their advice proved uncongenial. As such it could be useful in both democracies and autocracies, serving as a possible counterweight to flattering rhetoric. But in both regime types it was in essence a remedial virtue, necessitated by a basic structural feature common to both autocratic and Athenian democratic decision procedures: at the centre of both was an unaccountable decision maker able to hold its advisors to account