A paper on moral and political philosophy, arguing on Aristotelian grounds, that democracy is not only an instrumental good, but a good-in-itself for humans, because the exercise of constitutive natural capacities is and end, necessary for true happiness (understood as eudaimonia), and democracy...

Effective organization of knowledge allows democracies to meet Darwinian challenges, and thus avoid elimination by more hierarchical rivals. Institutional processes capable of aggregating diverse knowledge and coordinating action promote the flourishing of democratic communities in competitive...

The origins of democracy at Athens should be sought in a revolutionary moment in 508/7 B.C. and the subsequent institutional reforms associated with Cleistehenes. An revised version of the argument first offered by the author in "The Athenian Revolution of 508/7 B.C.E: Violence, Authority, and...

Athens as a case study can be useful as an “exemplary narrative” for political science and normative political, on the analogy of the biologicial use of as certain animals (e.g. mice or zebrafish) as “model systems” subject to intensive study by many researchers

Is development uniquely modern? Economists and political scientists define development in terms of features that are unique to modernity, such as high GDP growth, liberalism, and centralization. In this paper, we deploy the case of ancient Athens as an existential counter to these theories....

Analyzing the birth of political thought in Greece uniquely as a response to democracy in Athens overlooks the economic, social and legal aspects of the profound transformation that Athens underwent in the classical period. That transformation did not merely affect political structures. Without...

Opposing the tendency to read Thucydides as a strong realist, committed to a theory of behavior that assumes rationality as expected utility maximization, Ned Lebow and Clifford Orwin (among others) emphasize Thucydides’ attentiveness to deviations from rationality by individuals and states....