Greek Tragedy and Contemporary Democracy

Description

This engaging work tells the story of democracy through the perspective of tragic drama. It shows how the ancient tales of greatness and its loss point to the potential dangers of democracy then and now. Greek Tragedy dramatized a variety of stories, characters, and voices drawn from reality, especially from those marginalized by Athens's democracy. It brought up dissident figures through its multivocal form, disrupting the perception of an ordered reality. Today, this helps us grasp the reality of Athenian democracy, that is, a system steeped in patriarchy, slavery, warmongering, and xenophobia. The book reads through two renditions of Aeschylus' Suppliants as democratic texts for the twenty-first century, to show how such multivocal dramas actually address not only the pitfalls of our contemporary democracy, but also a range of environmental, security, socio-economic, and political dilemmas that afflict democratic politics today. Written in a very accessible manner, Greek Tragedy and Contemporary Democracy is a lively book that will appeal to any political science and international relations student interested in issues of democracy, governance, democratic peace, and democratic theory.

Mark Chou is Lecturer in Politics in the Faculty of Education and Arts at Australian Catholic University. He is also the author of Theorising Democide: Why and How Democracies Fail.

The West often lazily claims it inherited democracy from ancient Greece. It did no such thing of course. Two and a half thousand years of intervening history, intervening cultures and contaminations later, the West went 'democratic' in a way very different from Greece. But Mark Chou makes an extraordinarily lucid and elegant argument that we have many great things to learn from the Greeks as to what democratic pitfalls are to be avoided, and what we must do to make our own version of democracy multivocal and actually democratic. Chou's reading of Aeschylus is brilliant and moving. * Stephen Chan, School of Oriental & African Studies, University of London * In this important book, Chou shows how tragedy was crucial for the cultivation of democratic ethos in ancient Greece as well as in what ways it is relevant for the development of global democracy today. Tragic vision provides nuanced appreciation of how our political orders are not only threatened by but constituted through forces of disorder, and how alternative political realities can best be narrated if fictionalized and dramatized. In an era where dramatization primarily functions for prioritizing events and justifying policy, Chou's recovery of the tragic as a site of multivocality and as a mode of political thinking, provides an admirable, timely and necessary antidote. * Costas M. Constantinou, University of Cyprus *