Chapter 11 : DEMOCRACY

Democracy is a political system, or a system of decision-making within an institution or organization or a country, in which all members have an equal share of power.

Modern democracies are characterized by two capabilities that differentiate them fundamentally from earlier forms of government: the capacity to intervene in their own societies and the recognition of their sovereignty by an international legalistic framework of similarly sovereign states.

Democratic government is commonly juxtaposed with oligarchic and monarchic systems, which are ruled by a minority and a sole monarch respectively.

Democracy is generally associated with the efforts of the ancient Greeks, whom 18th-century intellectuals considered the founders of Western civilization.

These individuals attempted to leverage these early democratic experiments into a new template for post-monarchical political organization.

The extent to which these 18th-century democratic revivalists succeeded in turning the democratic ideals of the ancient Greeks into the dominant political institution of the next 300 years is hardly debatable, even if the moral justifications they often employed might be.

Nonetheless, the critical historical juncture catalyzed by the resurrection of democratic ideals and institutions fundamentally transformed the ensuing centuries and has dominated the international landscape since the dismantling of the final vestige of the empire following the end of the Second World War.

Modern representative democracies attempt to bridge the gulf between the Hobbesian 'state of nature' and the grip of authoritarianism through 'social contracts' that enshrine the rights of the citizens, curtail the power of the state, and grant agency through the right to vote.

While they engage populations with some level of decision-making, they are defined by the premise of distrust in the ability of human populations to make a direct judgement about candidates or decisions on issues.

Although it is believed that ancient Greece was the beginning of democracy, in recent decades scholars have explored the possibility that advancements toward democratic government occurred elsewhere first, as the appearance of the earliest civilizations in Neolithic Greece, Egypt and the Near East came long before Greece developed its complex social and political institutions.

Phoenicia;

The practice of "governing by assembly" was at least part of how ancient Phoenicians made important decisions.

One source is the story of Wen-Amon, an Egyptian trader who travelled north to the Phoenician city of Byblos around 1100 BCE trade for Phoenician lumber. After loading his lumber, a group of pirates surrounded Wen-Amon and his cargo ship.

The Phoenician prince of Byblos was called in to fix the problem, whereupon he summoned his mw-'dwt, an old Semitic word meaning assembly, to reach a decision.

The details from there are irrelevant; what is germane to the history of democracy is that Byblos was ruled in part by a popular assembly (drawn from what subpopulation and equipped with exactly what power we cannot know exactly)