The Origins of Democratic Thinking: The Invention of Politics in Classical Athens

The Athenians invented democracy - and as they grappled with the implications, they also invented democratic political theory. By reconstruing Protagoras the sophist, Thucydides the historian, and Democritus the cosmologist in the context of political developments and contemporary scientific, literary, and philosophical works, Cynthia Farrar’s seminal study reveals the emergence of a distinctive and still cogent understanding of democratic order. All three thinkers wrestled with democracy’s insistence on separating political from social identity and status. Unlike Plato and Aristotle, they constructed democratic theories that were genuinely democratic: addressed to citizens, and inviting them to interpret what their own and collective well-being demands in the world as it is. In a new introduction, Farrar makes the case for the continued relevance of the ideas explored in this book by recounting her own attempts to adapt Athenian structures of democratic citizenship and to reinterpret their democratic theory for the modern world.