Shouts, Murmurs and Votes: Acclamation and Aggregation in Ancient Greece

TODAY we usually consider individuals’ political judgments, once transformed into votes, to be discrete and countable. Such a view underlies the use of majority or supermajority rule: we choose a precise vote threshold, a proportion of such individual judgments, to be necessary for the adoption of a policy or the election of a candidate. Yet the activity of counting inherent in the notion of aggregation—the idea that the outcome of democratic decisions ought to be determined by calculating the specific number of votes—was not always taken to be the critical means by which we might discover collective preferences. Systems of acclamation both preceded and endured long past the invention of aggregative mechanisms. Acclamation took the form of shouts or murmurs or, in a more complicated sense, the estimation of waved hands: what is salient is that these votes were heard or observed qua unified whole, rather than counted. Here