>>and Michael Pollak replied:
>>
>>I don't think there'd be any direct correlation. Rousseau, for example,
>>wrote admiringly of all three...
What is striking about Rousseau is that he is far more interested in *Rome* as a model of democratic community than in ancient Athens -- which we tend to think of as significantly more democratic than Rome, which seems oligarchical by comparison. The "Social Contract" has the occasional nod towards Sparta (Lycurgus is Rousseau's favourite example of a lawgiver), but he returns approvingly to Rome again and again, with the detailed discussion of the Roman comitia (IV.4) and his recommendations of a set of institutions closely modelled on the Roman Republic (censorship, tribunate, dictatorship) at the end of the book.
Why does the arch-democrat Rousseau dislike Athens so much?
In the "Discourse on Political Economy" he says this: "Do not, therefore, raise the democracy of Athens as an objection to me, because Athens was not in fact a democracy, but a most tyrannical aristocracy governed by learned men and orators". And it's this last comment which gives a clue to his view: he doesn't like learned men and orators. In ancient Rome, the plebs got to cast votes from time to time, but never to discuss anything in a public forum -- and this was much more congenial to Rousseau, who rather liked voting, but who agreed with Plato, various Roman orators and Hobbes (who called a parliamentary regime "an aristocracy of orators") that political debate provided opportunities for clever speakers to manipulate the opinions of others, and thus to get more influence on the determination of the general will than they ought to possess. Much better to shut up, try not to think too hard, and vote.
And I suppose that something of this atittude filters through to Marx, too, when he praises the Paris Commune for being a "working, not a parliamentary body", with the delegates "revocable and bound by the mandat impératif of his constituents" (which alone makes debate superfluous), abandoning the habit of only "deciding once in three or six years which member of the ruling class was to misrepresent the people in Parliament". The dictatorship of the proletariat (two concepts with impeccably Roman origins) seems to be quite close to Rousseau's direct democracy of assemblies of silent voters, the concession to the scale of modern, e.g., France being the democratic centralism of the commune system on a national scale.
For people in search of bibliography on views of ancient republics, Martin Thom's pleasantly idiosyncratic "Republics, Nations and Tribes" (Verso, 1995) is good on late C18th views of ancient cities.
Chris voiceoftheturtle.org