Michael

Donald Kagan, in his Pericles of Athens and the Birth of Democracy, describes a key element in the success of democratic government:

For more than two thousand years, democracy has had many powerful enemies and few friends...Most ancient writers...called democracy unstable, a scene of devastating struggles between factions and classes, where the poor majority trampled on the better-off minority, careless of the rights of the individual...The facts about Periclean Athens, as we have seen, were very different. Through the horrors of almost three decades of the Peloponnesian War, military defeat, foreign occupation, and an oligarchic coup d'etat, the people of Athens showed that combination of commitment and restraint that is necessary for the survival of popular government and life in a decent society. This restraint is all the more remarkable when we consider how simple it would have been for the Athenian majority to plunder the rich and take revenge upon their enemies...

Plato...blamed Periclean democracy for its excessive commitment to equality. Twentieth century critics, on the other hand, have largely complained of its inequalities, demanding not equality of opportunity for all citizens, but equality of result...Political equality was the cornerstone of Athenian democracy, but economic equality, as we have seen, was no part of the democratic program in the age of Pericles or after. Early in the sixth century, the Athenian peasantry had demanded a redistribution of land and isomoiria (equal portions) of the land of Attica, but the demand was not met; nor was it ever renewed. The experience of social revolutions in other states, where violations of the right to property had produced civil war, anarchy, tyranny, and poverty, showed that equality before the law, not equality of possession, was the only form of the principle compatible with prosperity, freedom and security.

Cheers,

Friedrich