Deliberation and Discussion in Classical Athens *

DELIBERATIVE democracy has often been associated with classical Athens. “The idea of deliberative democracy and its practical implementation are as old as democracy itself,” wrote Jon Elster in 1998. “Both came into being in Athens in the fifth century B.C.” Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson agree, drawing on Thucydides to suggest that the Athenians “saw discussion ‘not as a stumbling-block in the way of action’ but as an ‘indispensable preliminary to any wise action at all’,” and calling Aristotle “the first major theorist to defend the value of a process in which citizens publicly discuss and justify their laws to one another.” David Held characterized Athenian public deliberation in Habermasian terms as “free and unrestricted discourse” governed by the “force of the better argument,” while Ryan Balot holds that Athenian democrats aimed at “true democratic deliberation—a public conversation in which ideas are floated freely, objections and dissent are confidently and respectfully aired, further revisions and refinement of different opinions can take place, and a collectively supported decision issues in the end.” More recently, Mirko Canevaro has argued that the Athenian assembly employed “deliberative procedures and institutions meant to foster debate, exchange of points of view and ideas, and reasoned arguments, and