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It didn’t work out so well for the Athenians... My naive guess (as someone who is not at all a historian) would be that democratic states historically tended t
by jordan_curve 6y ago
It didn’t work out so well for the Athenians...
My naive guess (as someone who is not at all a historian) would be that democratic states historically tended to have more functional economies and thus won wars more often.
On the other hand, democracies can be particularly susceptible to demagoguery during wartime. This is what caused the collapse of the Athenian empire (at least if we’re to trust Thucydides’ account).
- nimbleal 6y agoDemocracy in the modern sense (universal suffrage, very large polities) is too recent an experiment to have strong data on that — the vast majority of the democratic experiment has been conducted under a US hegemony. I’m not sure the (also very limited) Ancient Greek example bears enough resemblance to the modern idea to be a useful comparison (I suggest also as a non-historian).