5 ms·

Well, since that time, we've moved away from slavery to labor saving machines. Since we're at a point where many people are under-employed, and we expect many

by lawpoop 10y ago

Well, since that time, we've moved away from slavery to labor saving machines. Since we're at a point where many people are under-employed, and we expect many more to become so, we can probably re-institute something like this. After all, the United States was a crazy experiment to revive 2,000-year-old Greek idea called 'Democracy'. While we did have slaves at the beginning, we have managed to enfranchise all adults politically. Maybe the Ecclesia could work, too.

emodendroket 10y ago
> Since we're at a point where many people are under-employed, and we expect many more to become so, we can probably re-institute something like this. Call me old-fashioned but I don't think locking people in as a permanent underclass is a good idea. And practically speaking I'm not sure how a slave society where the slaveholders have special rights to participate in democratic society is an improvement over a system where poor people have trouble participating because of their jobs or their resources but not because they don't have the right to.
- lawpoop 10y ago
  I meant re-institute the ecclesia, not slavery. Sorry for not being clear.
dragonwriter 10y ago
> After all, the United States was a crazy experiment to revive 2,000-year-old Greek idea called 'Democracy'. Not really. Representative democracy as the substantive form of government was an established tradition in Britain and it's North American colonies long before the US (a prime motivation for the revolution was perceived increasing deviation from that norm by the central government in respect to the administration of the colonies in the period leading up to the revolution.) Insofar as the US (under the Constitution, at least) was an experiment in government, it wasn't in revive a dormant concept of "democracy", but in vigorously and fairly explicitly adopting the novel tripartite separation of powers model of Montesquieu. > we have managed to enfranchise all adults politically. No, we haven't. We have in principle (though less so in practice) eliminated certain bases of disenfranchisement, but it is not the case that the US has, at any point, enfranchised the entire adult population, even on theory, much less in fact.
- emodendroket 10y ago
  > Insofar as the US (under the Constitution, at least) was an experiment in government, it wasn't in revive a dormant concept of "democracy", but in vigorously and fairly explicitly adopting the novel tripartite separation of powers model of Montesquieu. But that model is basically based on the English government with Parliament and a king in place of Congress and a president, isn't it? There was definitely a lot of neoclassical thinking among the Founding Fathers, although I'd say more inspired by the Roman Republic than by Greek democracy (to which the American system bears very little resemblance). Anyway, curiously, a lot of early discourse uses "democrat" or "democracy" as a pejorative akin to "anarchist" or something.
  - abecedarius 10y ago
    Not that strange if you've read Plato. I read in Hannah Arendt that 'democracy' may have been a pejorative used by antidemocrats like him; actual early democrats talked about isonomy and isegoria: more or less what we call equality under the law and free speech. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isonomia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isonomia I'm not a classical scholar, but I get the impression that later times preferentially transmitted the less democratic points of view. I.F. Stone also wrote about this in The Trial of Socrates.
    - emodendroket 10y ago
      Well, it's perhaps "strange" in the sense that it goes against later thinking and our popular self-image.
  - dragonwriter 10y ago
    > But that model is basically based on the English government with Parliament and a king in place of Congress and a president, isn't it? Not really; the British system of the time was certainly an important influence on Montesquieu, but it didn't exhibit the three-way separation of powers between executive, legislative, and judicial that his model called for.
    - 10y ago

by lawpoop 10y ago

emodendroket 10y ago

> Since we're at a point where many people are under-employed, and we expect many more to become so, we can probably re-institute something like this. Call me old-fashioned but I don't think locking people in as a permanent underclass is a good idea. And practically speaking I'm not sure how a slave society where the slaveholders have special rights to participate in democratic society is an improvement over a system where poor people have trouble participating because of their jobs or their resources but not because they don't have the right to.

lawpoop 10y ago
I meant re-institute the ecclesia, not slavery. Sorry for not being clear.

dragonwriter 10y ago

> After all, the United States was a crazy experiment to revive 2,000-year-old Greek idea called 'Democracy'. Not really. Representative democracy as the substantive form of government was an established tradition in Britain and it's North American colonies long before the US (a prime motivation for the revolution was perceived increasing deviation from that norm by the central government in respect to the administration of the colonies in the period leading up to the revolution.) Insofar as the US (under the Constitution, at least) was an experiment in government, it wasn't in revive a dormant concept of "democracy", but in vigorously and fairly explicitly adopting the novel tripartite separation of powers model of Montesquieu. > we have managed to enfranchise all adults politically. No, we haven't. We have in principle (though less so in practice) eliminated certain bases of disenfranchisement, but it is not the case that the US has, at any point, enfranchised the entire adult population, even on theory, much less in fact.

emodendroket 10y ago
> Insofar as the US (under the Constitution, at least) was an experiment in government, it wasn't in revive a dormant concept of "democracy", but in vigorously and fairly explicitly adopting the novel tripartite separation of powers model of Montesquieu. But that model is basically based on the English government with Parliament and a king in place of Congress and a president, isn't it? There was definitely a lot of neoclassical thinking among the Founding Fathers, although I'd say more inspired by the Roman Republic than by Greek democracy (to which the American system bears very little resemblance). Anyway, curiously, a lot of early discourse uses "democrat" or "democracy" as a pejorative akin to "anarchist" or something.
- abecedarius 10y ago
  Not that strange if you've read Plato. I read in Hannah Arendt that 'democracy' may have been a pejorative used by antidemocrats like him; actual early democrats talked about isonomy and isegoria: more or less what we call equality under the law and free speech. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isonomia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isonomia I'm not a classical scholar, but I get the impression that later times preferentially transmitted the less democratic points of view. I.F. Stone also wrote about this in The Trial of Socrates.
  - emodendroket 10y ago
    Well, it's perhaps "strange" in the sense that it goes against later thinking and our popular self-image.
- dragonwriter 10y ago
  > But that model is basically based on the English government with Parliament and a king in place of Congress and a president, isn't it? Not really; the British system of the time was certainly an important influence on Montesquieu, but it didn't exhibit the three-way separation of powers between executive, legislative, and judicial that his model called for.
  - 10y ago