> ...ancient Rome/ancient Greece? What I gleaned (and can now recall) is the Iroquois introduced the Old World to the novel concept of "freedom". In the Old W

> ...ancient Rome/ancient Greece? What I gleaned (and can now recall) is the Iroquois introduced the Old World to the novel concept of "freedom". In the Old World, democracy was an elite decision making process. All the peoples still belonged to their king, country, state, whomever. Everyone's lives remained tightly constrained and most people had few options. People had duties and obligations. To the Iroquois, IIRC, people were autonomous, group decision making was participatory, and no one was excluded from the process. I roughly equate this relationship between people and the state to our concept of anarchism (left-libertarianism). Maybe one illuminating contrast is Old World government was top-down and the Iroquois was bottom-up.