The Idiōtēs and the Tyrant

Two Faces of Unaccountability in Democratic Athens

Datos Bibliográficos

ID6350847
AutoresMatthew Landauer (0000-0002-7153-8495, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA, autor de correspondencia)
Año2014
Volumen42
Número2
Páginas139-166
Fecha de publicación2014-04-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaPolitical Theory (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0090-5917 • E-ISSN: 1552-7476
EditorialSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1177/0090591713499763
OpenAlexW2147783005
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas8

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

Aesthetics · Democracy · Identity (music · Law and economics · Political science · Politics · Power (physics · Scrutiny · Sociology · Sovereignty · Classical Antiquity Studies · Classical Philosophy and Thought · Law · Law in Society and Culture · Philosophy