First, the good news: 1992-93 is the 2500th anniversary of the birth of democracy. It was in 507-508 B.C. that the reforms of Cleisthenes took place in Athens. In a world seemingly devoid of much to cheer about, here's an excuse to celebrate.

Now, for the quibbles. If Cleisthenes is so important, why have I never heard of him? Moreover, why should I celebrate Athenian democracy when I know from both Madison and Hamilton in the Federalist Papers that it was really mob rule, an example to be avoided at all costs in shaping a constitution for a republic in search of stability and good government? Hasn't Thucydides taught us that the fickleness of the Athenian populace led to repeated Athenian military disasters after the death of Pericles, the Athenian “first citizen” whom Thucydides sees as having ruled over Athens while permitting the masses the illusion that they were in control? Wasn't it an Athenian people's jury that forced the world's greatest philosopher to drink hemlock? Perhaps even more importantly, isn't it (politically) incorrect to call Athens a democracy? How can a militaristic society built on the backs of slaves and the revenues of imperialism, in which women couldn't own property or participate in politics, ever be something to celebrate?!

The third-century Christian convert, Tertullian, once asked, “What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?” A twentieth-century American political scientist might ask, What has Athens to do with Washington? In both cases the answer is not as obvious as the rhetorical question would imply. Historically, revelation's identity depended on its contrast with reason even as it sought reason's discredit. American democracy has always been dogged by a so-called Founding whose Fathers never intended a democracy and were scathing in their opinion of “the turbulent democracies of ancient Greece” (Madison 1961, No. 14, 84).

Tocqueville claimed to have discovered in America a democracy “more perfect than antiquity had dared dream of” (Tocqueville 1961, vol. 1(1), 34). His comparison was between Periclean Athens of the fifth century (BCE) and the New England township of the Jacksonian era. His intention was to show that American democracy was superior to any of the ancient democracies because it was stabler, more law-abiding, and respectful of property rights. Here Tocqueville was simultaneously reaffirming the virtually unanimous judgment, from Plato to the authors of The Federalist, about the innate tendency of democracy toward anarchy and expropriation of the rich, and attempting to present America as the great exception.

With the collapse of communism and consequent disrepute of Marxism, there is a danger that liberalism will overwhelm democracy and that liberal political theory will become hegemonic despite the efforts of “communitarians” and postmodernists. I want to suggest that, given these developments, Athenian democracy and classical political theory read in its terms is a worthy political and theoretical interlocutor for both. (For a more detailed argument see the “Introduction” to Euben, Ober, and Wallach 1993.) This is not to engage in yet more polis envy, indulge in yet more Hellenic romanticism about “The Glory That Was Greece,” or endorse the uncritical worship of “great books.” My aim, rather, is to avoid the self-congratulation, complacency, and presentism that too often attends “our victory” in the Cold War and to make a contribution to the ensuing debate about American political identity.

As this suggests, my concerns here are partly political. I want to indicate the strategies by which “Athenian democracy” is delegitimated as a challenge to contemporary democracy and question the way classical political theory is used to legitimate an antidemocratic political and educational agenda. That democratic Athens should be understood in terms of contemporary political controversies is nothing new. The Federalist Papers used it as an object lesson by which to justify limiting democracy in the name of republicanism, and debates over reform of the British Parliament and French Revolution found conservatives criticizing the politics of their own day in terms of the putative excesses of democratic Athens, much as Allan Bloom has done in our own time (Turner 1981, chaps. 1 and 5).

I will defend three premises. (1) If we take democracy to mean what ancient Greeks took it to mean—“political power wielded actively and collectively by the demos” (i.e., all residents of the state who are culturally defined as potential citizens, regardless of their class or status)—then Athens was a democracy. (2) Even granted that Athens excluded from regular political participation persons Greeks did not regard as potential citizens (slaves, women, most foreigners, children), the historical example of the Athenian experience with democracy should be taken seriously by democratic theorists interested in expanding “the bounds of the possible” (as well as “of the thinkable”). (3) The Athenian demos exercised its collective power in order to prevent elite political domination, and thus the “power of the people” was not a cover for elite rule.

These premises do not mean that the people's power was in some ontological sense “pure,” or “undistorted”—indeed it was arguably through the tightly coiled and convoluted “distortions” of social and political power that the Athenian democratic order counterbalanced elite social power. Nor can Athens, with its acceptance of slavery, exclusion of women and foreigners from political participation, and jingoistic “blood and soil” doctrine, be considered a readymade model for a just, modern political society. It can be argued (incorrectly I believe: Ober 1989a, 20-35), that democracy in Athens was fundamentally dependent upon slavery, or empire, or the exclusion of women and foreigners.

Recent archaeological and textual studies by classical scholars give us new ways of thinking about Athenian democracy. Morgens Hansen, for example, has calculated the seating capacity of the Pnyx, the site where the Athenians held their assemblies. By figuring out how much space a seated adult Athenian male would occupy, he has concluded that the assembly in the fourth century B.C. could have held at most 6,000 people. That is a third or fourth of the potential participants (Hansen 1983, 18). Another classical scholar argues that attendance was considerably below this and concludes: “The Athenians had never seen a full meeting of the citizen body, though the very idea of democracy is predicted on it. From the very start they must have accepted that any assembly was bound to be a sample of the citizenship—and not even a random sample” (Carter 1986, 193). Other questions worthy of being asked but not asked before are now raised: How were votes actually counted? How does one calculate a closely divided vote when there are 6,000 people sitting in the assembly?

In one of the classic books on Athenian democracy published in 1957, the author claimed: “Prima facie the Athenian democracy would seem to have been a perfectly designed machine for expressing and putting into effect the will of the people” (Jones [1957] 1964, 3). Hansen, with his calculations of the seating capacity of the Pnyx, and scholars questioning the degree to which and how citizens really engaged in the political life of Athens, are motivated by this perspective on ancient democracy.

When you're stymied on the measurement of one of your critical variables, put that project aside and write another essay on what Thucydides really meant (Singer 1975).

The trouble with Classical Realism is that it is difficult to distinguish … dialectical insight from a refusal to define concepts clearly and consistently, or to develop a systematic set of propositions that could be subjected to empirical tests (Keohane 1983).

In the study of ancient Greek democracy, Thucydides' account of the war between the Peloponnesians and the Athenians surely deserves a privileged place. As a cardinal instance of the genre Hegel (1975, 14) called original history, Thucydides' work provides a uniquely direct point of contact with Athenian democracy in its most radical and imperial—phase: the chief figures of that work “express the maxims of their nation and of their own personality, their consciousness of their political position and of their moral and spiritual nature, and the principles that underlie their designs and conduct.” Thus, from Thucydides we get much more than a reconstruction of events. We also get access to the ancient Greeks' own understanding of the world they made and destroyed.

In the last 40 years, universal recognition of the Supreme Court's important policy-making role, the prevalence of divided government, and heightened conflict over value-laden issues such as abortion and school prayer have led to ever more elaborate Senate review of Supreme Court nominations (Freund 1988; Ross 1987, 116-23). Senate hearings into nominees' views on constitutional issues comprise the most visible element in the expanded confirmation process. Yet most recent nominees have won Senate approval while revealing little of their legal or political philosophies. As Powe (1976, 893) has concluded, “Senate questioning [of nominees] has proved astonishingly ineffective in eliciting the desired information.” The ability of nominees to hide their beliefs on vital constitutional questions raises serious doubts about the Senate's ability to give informed consent to presidents' Supreme Court nominations.

This article examines confirmation hearings on recent, pre-Clinton Supreme Court nominees to answer two questions. First, given the recognized importance of Supreme Court appointments and the correspondingly systematic scrutiny of nominees, how do nominees get away with revealing so little of their views on vital constitutional issues? Second, given the answers to the first question, can the hearings be reformed so that senators may air a nominee's views more thoroughly and give—or withhold—truly informed consent to these nominations?

People worry about the public-relations presidency: an institutional pattern of action giving high priority to public support, especially as shown by the opinion polls. These worries have been accentuated by actions in the White House and news media. “I don't live by the polls,” Bush told reporters early in 1990, parrying the implication that he did live by them. Daily polls that benefitted the White House were taken during the six months before the Gulf War by the Wirthlin Group (Ronald Reagan's second-term pollster) on behalf of “Citizens for a Free Kuwait.” These included very sophisticated tracking and feedback devices. Bush, in fact, became the first president to mention his own popularity polls in a State of the Union address in January 1992. Yet, Bush could as well have accused reporters of living by the polls. Each change in his public approval ratings was accompanied by featured news stories. At the close of the war, even before the planes had returned to their bases, commentators began speculating on how soon the president's popularity would fall.

Several things stand out from Bush's approval ratings in his first three years in office. His polls were strikingly high in absolute terms and relative to the polls of his predecessors at the same points in their administrations. Another notable feature was that they were more erratic. Where Reagan's polls changed by more than five percentage points only twice in the same period, Bush's changed by this amount 13 times, leading modern presidents in this kind of fluctuation. Bush's approval ratings climbed with the invasion of Panama in January 1990, fell the next month, and then fell further.

Just nine days after what was to have been a routine confirmation hearing, John S. Arnick, a 23-year member of the Maryland House of Delegates, withdrew his name from consideration for a position on the Baltimore County District Court. Arnick became the first gubernatorial nominee for a judgeship since 1968 who did not receive confirmation. This event touches upon a number of underlying subtexts of interest to political scientists, especially those who follow state legislatures and their processes—judicial confirmation procedures at the state level, prevalence of “insider-vs.-outsider” mentality within a state legislature, persistence of sexism in the environment of a state capital, impact of women legislators on the political culture and procedures, citizen attentiveness to the political process, and the consequences of the growing use of radio shows and telephone calls to influence the actions of elected officials.

Seven-term representative, Beverly Byron (D) of the Sixth District in Maryland, was the first incumbent to be defeated in the 1992 primaries. Her loss was perceived as a harbinger of major change in Congress, and marked an exception to Fenno's notion that Americans hate Congress yet love their own member of Congress.

Her opponent, Thomas Hattery, fit the pundits' expectations as an agent of change. A young, progressive state legislator, Hattery won by aggressively campaigning against Byron as an out-of-touch incumbent whose lifestyle and views no longer matched those of her district. Yet, his “outsider” persona masked a highly professionalized and well-funded campaign.

Only eight months later, the man who had capitalized on citizen dissatisfaction with Congress went down to defeat by Roscoe Bartlett (R). Bartlett, a successful businessman and educator with no elective experience and highly conservative positions, captured 54% of the vote, including majorities in counties that had given Hattery strong primary support. The tables had turned: Hattery had become the insider whom the historically conservative Sixth District voters repudiated. Paradoxically, although the Sixth District race exemplified change, Bartlett differed little from the previous incumbent.

For some 70 years, peoples of highly diverse origins and cultures were part of a political system called the Soviet Union. The leadership of the Soviet Union took great pride in attempting to organize that diversity into a “melting pot,” in which citizens of each ethnic background were to enjoy the same basic rights and privileges. Extraordinary political effort was expended by Soviet leaders to promote and advertise the success of this union of equals.

We will provide an empirical assessment of the attitudes of youth in two former Soviet republics, how they now see each other, and how they feel various minorities in each new republic should be treated politically. It involves the use of a common instrument in each of these new states that was designed to measure how each ethnic group feels about the other former Soviet peoples and basic ethnic policies in their own states. In addition, data on a variety of other political and social issues are examined, primarily to examine whether certain quality of life indicators are more positively responded to in a former Soviet republic than in Russia proper.

Marx is reputed to have said that “there is nothing so practical as a good theory.” Seventy-odd years of Soviet theorizing have left little useful practical theory behind, as demonstrated by the transformations currently taking place in Russia's borderlands. As the Soviet Union crumbles, the successor states face a unique and troubling situation. For over 70 years, their administrative structures have been centralized; their economies, transportation and communications systems, and the physical infrastructure all controlled from Moscow under a coherent ideological regime. The successor states find themselves adrift ideologically and administratively, but the centralized physical infrastructure remains.

How are these states to design new administrative structures? How are they to cope with the utter failure of their theoretical principles? How may they cooperate in the use of the physical systems while establishing their political independence? Soviet administrative theory—the “scientific theory of socialism” as it was called—has been unable to provide even the most basic guidance for the process, and western administrative theory is not equipped to address the special problems of the new states. The insights of the neo-institutionalists can provide guidelines for these urgent problems.