Rhodes, P.J.: Ancient Democracy and Modern Ideology

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In his essay Ancient Democracy and Modern Ideology P.J. Rhodes considers both modern and ancient attitudes toward democracy, particularly the radical Athenian democracy of the fifth and fourth centuries B.C. Rhodes discusses the various approaches classical scholars have adopted in their study of democracy. Historians range from those who

"...in their own eyes if not in their critics' keep the effect of their ideology on their scholarship to a minimum, to those who are ideologically committed and proud of it; from those who seek correct answers to factual questions, to those who seek to penetrate the mentalite of the actors in the drama; from those whose notion of relevance is that history makes us aware of problems and of possible responses to them, and helps us to understand how we arrived where we are now, to those who seek in the past definite models and lessons for the present; from those who believe that we cannot make of history whatever we like, to those who think that we cannot do anything but make of history whatever we like."

He concludes that historians who are on "the objective and dispassionate end of the spectrum" are "likely to do better history."

Rhodes' short book presupposes too much knowledge on the part of its audience--about the ancient world and about classical scholarship--to be of interest to the general reader. But the overview he provides of some 200 years of scholarship on ancient democracies and "constitutional antiquities" would be a handy introduction to the subject for undergraduate and graduate students.