Democratize Like an Athenian - by James Kierstead

How to renew our democracies

This is a guest post by James Kierstead, a senior lecturer in classics at the Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. He specializes in democracy, ancient and modern. For much of my career as an academic, I’ve been going on about how the ancient Greeks still have something to teach us about democracy. My staff profile at Victoria long proclaimed that my main interest is in ‘ancient Greek democracy and what we might learn from it today.’ Even my Twitter handle, the ambitious Kleisthenes2, plays on the theme (Kleisthenes1 was, of course, the man who introduced Athens’ new democratic…

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