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Notes -
If you haven't, I bet you'd be interested in learning about the state of Athenian democracy—Thucydides is pretty good, especially the Landmark edition.
I'm not sure to what extent I buy that the word democracy is different. Sure, it's different from what we call democracy now, in that we usually mean by that an often large representative republic, where we elect or appoint people to various functions, and they do the actual ruling, but their getting there is in some way dependent on popular appointing. Athenian democracy was far more direct: they had deliberative assemblies that were, if I remember correctly, open to all male citizens (note: citizen≠resident). Their trials were also before enormous juries, with hundreds of people. And this is all in a relatively small city-state. But I would think fundamentally, it mostly just has in view the form of government it has, in which there is (largely direct) popular rule, and the other tendencies you describe are just a result of the usual popular tendencies in such a setting. But yes, I agree that we find many of the same tendencies among people today, and a portion of this probably is downstream from our form of regime.
The setting of the Republic, as with the Platonic dialogues in general, is during the Peloponnesian war against Sparta, which Athens eventually lost. They were briefly ruled oligarchically, due to the Spartans, then democracy was restored, before they were conquered by Philip of Macedon, Alexander's father. During the Peloponnesian war, in most greek cities there were differing factions who sought democratic and oligarchic rule, promoted by the Athenians and Spartans respectively.
If I remember correctly, Socrates describes democracies as making philosophy more possible than most of the other regimes.
One other note: drawing of lots isn't all that crazy! We use random chance, to an extent, in our own jury process. Drawing lots has the downside of not letting you choose the most qualified people, and the upside of avoiding any negative effects from what sorts of people would seek out the position.
This glosses over some things that are worth mentioning, don't you think?
Well, yes.
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