The Greeks and the Rational by Josiah Ober

Author:Josiah Ober
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9780520380165
Publisher: University of California Press

6.6 LEGISLATION

Socrates of Plato’s Protagoras takes the policy-making procedure of the Athenian assembly as exemplary of the practice of the “wise Athenians” in attending to experts in those technical areas in which they supposed true experts could be identified. Likewise, in his famous account of the possibility of the practical “wisdom of the many,” Aristotle (Politics 3.11) seems to have in mind the legislative procedures of a democratic state—plausibly, of the one he knew best from his long residence—Athens.20 In Athens, and other democratic Greek poleis, the citizen assembly held decision authority. That authority was not unconstrained: In fourth-century Athens, policy decisions made by the assembly as “decrees” (psēphismata) were legally required to conform to the established constitutional laws (nomoi) and were subject to judicial review. But it was the citizens themselves (represented, through synecdoche, by the part of the citizen body that attended the assembly or sat in the law court: Ober 1996: 117–20; Cammack 2021) who made the constitutional rules and reviewed the legality of decrees of the assembly when they were challenged by a concerned citizen (below, section 5.6). The fourth-century Athenian legislative process is, at this point, tolerably well understood (Canevaro 2015), and offers a case study in institutional rationality.

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