Course Syllabus

PS 41C. Democracy Ancient and Modern

Hub seminar, Pathways Program

Weekly 3-hour seminar: Wednesdays, 4-7pm, Dwinelle 109

Prof. Daniela Cammack

Fall 2024

 

Office hours: Mondays or Tuesdays 11.30-1.30pm or other times by appointment, SSB 750B or on zoom if necessary (https://berkeley.zoom.us/j/4237973582). An appointment is required: please sign up for a 15 minute slot here. If you can’t make any available window, we can make an appointment at another time. Please email me at daniela.cammack@berkeley.edu.

 

Course description: Demokratia, democratia, democracy. What did this term mean to the ancient Greeks who coined it, to the Romans who borrowed it, and to the early modern Europeans who discussed and reconstructed it? Who or what was the original demos, how did it rule, and how different is the form of “government of the people, by the people, and for the people” that predominates today? Focusing on three key times and places within the history of democracy—Classical Athens, Republican Rome, and Revolutionary France—and ending with the recent attempts by Iceland and Chile to reform their constitutions by crowdsourcing and a citizen convention respectively, this course offers a chronological and thematically coherent exploration of the idea and practice of democracy, intended to broaden our imaginative horizons with respect to what democracy has been, is, and could become. 

 

Course objectives: Familiarity with a variety of interesting and important examples of ideas and practices called “democratic,” from a range of authors and three different historical and geographical contexts; the capacity to reflect on the most important differences between ancient and modern democracy; the ability to analyze closely some important passages within the history of political thought and to discuss how they fit into the wider intellectual and historical picture.

 

Requirements: attendance and informed engagement in seminar (30% of the final grade); ten 100-150 word forum posts, submitted before class (20% of the final grade); and two c.1000 word essays (each 25% of the final grade).

 

• At the end of the course, the ten forum posts will receive a collective grade: check, check plus, check minus. Please aim to vary the style of your submissions over time. You can’t do everything in one short post, but over the course of the semester, you should try to show that you can raise interesting questions and puzzles about our readings; engage in close reading of a few key lines, explaining why you find them significant; and assess the relations between different authors/sources, considering similarities/resonances and differences/contrasts among them.

 

• There will be three opportunities to write two 1000-word essays. Everyone must write one on ancient Greece. Then, you may choose between writing on republican Rome or on revolutionary France. More guidance will follow in a separate document.

 

• All texts will be available in a coursepack and on the course website. I’ve used publicly available editions where possible and made my own annotations / modifications to the translations, which I hope you’ll find useful. I recommend that you use the hard copy if possible, so you can dip in and out and annotate freely without spending more time staring at a screen. Funds have been made available by the Pathways program to subsidize the purchase of a course pack, so you will all get one for free.

 

• Plagiarism / Academic integrity: I take my responsibilities and integrity as a teacher and researcher very seriously and I will hold you to the same standard. Passing off others’ work as your own is a betrayal of your position as a member of the scholarly community and moreover inhibits you from developing and refining your views of the material we study, which I take to be the point of your education. This includes using AI since that is generated from other people’s publicly available materials; it even includes re-using your own previous work without acknowledgment. The university’s policy on academic honesty is available here. If you have any doubts or queries about it or about how to make appropriate use of others’ ideas, please come and talk with me.

 

• Accommodations: I am open to making a range of accommodations, whether on an ad hoc or ongoing basis. If you need an accommodation (outside DSP, which I follow as a matter of course), please come and talk to me about your situation.

 

CLASS SCHEDULE

 

Wed Aug 28

1. What is democracy? What was demokratia?

1a. Abraham Lincoln, “Gettysburg Address” (1863)

1b. EIU Democracy Index 2022 report extract

1c. Russia-Chinese Joint Statement of February 4, 2022

1d. Aristotle, Politics V.6 (on electoral oligarchy), trans. Reeve

1e. Herodotus, Histories 3.80-83 (written c. 430 BC, dramatic date 522 BC)

 

Module 1. Classical Athens

 

Wed Sep 4

2. 6th- and 5th-century Athens

2a. Ps. Aristotle, chs. 1-28 (written c. 330 BC, events down to 411 BC)

2b. Thuc. 2.34-46: Pericles’ Funeral Oration (written c. 400 BC, events 431)

2c. Thuc. 2.47-65: plague, invasions, Pericles’ response (events 431-429 BC)

 

Wed Sep 11 – NO CLASS, professor in UK

 

Wed Sep 18

3. The “Old Oligarch”

3a. Ps. Xenophon, “Constitution of the Athenians” (written c. 424 BC), trans. Cammack

 

Wed Sep 25

4. Two Oligarchical Revolutions (events 411–403/2)

4a. Ps. Aristotle, chs. 29-41

4b. Thucydides 8.65-68, trans. Jowett

4c. Xenophon, Hellenica 2.3-4, trans. Warner

 

Wed Oct 2

5. The 4th-century system

5a. Ps. Aristotle, chs. 42-69 (describes system in place 403-322 BC)

5b. Aristotle, Politics, VI.1-6 (down to 1321a), trans. Reeve

 

Wed Oct 9

6. Plato and Aristotle on rule by a mass

6a. Plato, Apology, trans. Fowler

6b. Plato, Republic: the Ship, the Beast, and the account of dēmokratia (written c. 380 BC (?), dramatic date 431-406 BC?), trans. Shorey

6c. Aristotle, Politics 1277a-1282a, 1286a-b (written c. 340-322), trans. Rackham

 

Sunday, October 20: papers on Greece due

 

Module 2. Republican Rome

 

Wed Oct 16

7. Early Rome

7a. Livy, extracts from books 1 and 2, trans. Foster

 

Wed Oct 23

8. Mid to Late Republican Rome

8a. Polybius, Book 6, trans. Shuckburgh

8b. QT Cicero, “How to win an election” (64 BC), trans. Shuckburgh

 

Wed Oct 30

9. The Roman Tribunate and the Gracchi

9a. Dionysius of Halicarnassos, 6.87-6.90 and 7.14-7.18, trans. Cary

9b. Cicero, De Re Publica 2.58-2.63, trans. Keyes

9c. Cicero, Laws 3.16-3.26, trans. Keyes

9d. Plutarch, Tiberius Gracchus 8-end, trans. Perrin

 

Module 3. The French Revolution

 

Wed Nov 6

10. Rousseau

10a. The Social Contract

 

Sunday, November 10: Papers on Rome due

 

Wed Nov 13

11. France, 1789–1797

11a. Sieyès, “What is the Third Estate?” (1789), extracts

11b. Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen (1789)

11c. Robespierre, “On the Silver Mark” (1791)

11d. The Jacobin Constitution of 1793

11e. Gracchus Babeuf, Prospectus for Le Tribun du Peuple (1795)

11f. Gracchus Babeuf, “Analysis of the Doctrine of Babeuf” (1796)

 

Wed Nov 20

12. The end of the Revolution

12a. Benjamin Constant, “The liberty of the ancients as compared to that of the moderns”

 

Sunday, December 1: Papers on the French Revolution due

 

Wed Dec 4

13. Participatory democracy: SDS, Iceland and Chile

13a. Students for a Democratic Society, Port Huron Statement (extracts)

13b. The Icelandic draft constitution of 2013

13c. Hélène Landemore, “Inclusive Constitution-making: the Icelandic Experiment”(2015)

13d. The Chilean draft constitution of 2022 (online: https://www.constituteproject.org/constitution/Chile_2022D