From Deliberative Democracy to Consent Democracy

The political system of Athens experienced a rebalancing in the period between 404 and 307, which cannot be adequately captured with the keywords “decline” or “crisis”. The comprehensive analysis of Athens' public finances opens up a new approach to this hinge period between classical and Hellenism and explains the evident change in the political order through the gradual and consensual transformation of the broad-based deliberative democracy into one led from above, but through the attribution of competencies and moral-political trust Consent democracy carried into the ruling elite. Thus an adaptable mechanism had been created, as it was then to prevail in many places in Hellenism and which was constitutive for it.

Dorothea Rohde teaches and researches at Bielefeld University. Her research interests include ancient social and economic history, Roman religious history and the history of science.