A doctorate, a Texas post, and a return to Athens

The notes read Woodruff’s First Democracy as a book that asks what democracy is by going back to the Athens in which, they write, it was first born. Woodruff took a doctorate in ancient philosophy at Princeton and holds a tenured post in the philosophy department of a Texas state university, as they name it. From 2006 “to the present,” in the wording they used when they wrote, he has also served as dean. He teaches ancient philosophy and classics there, and in the city of Austin he has given public lectures on ancient philosophy, literature, and ancient Greek. He has published translations of writings they attribute to Euripides, Sophocles, Plato, and Thucydides. The book itself, they add, works with Athenian figures and events, and they name Socrates, Thucydides, and Aesop among them.

Most countries today, they observe, claim to be democracies, including some that are military dictatorships or close to dynasties; the question is whether the name is working as it should. Modern democracy, in their wording, is democracy inside liberalism, and liberalism and a democracy of the many sit together only with difficulty.

Seven ideas, and majority rule as a stand-in

Democracy, they quote from the book, is a political system by the people and for the people — a starting point, they add, but not a definition. The definition they take from Woodruff is a system that tries to carry out seven ideas: freedom from tyranny, harmony, rule according to law, natural equality according to nature, civic wisdom, reasoning in the absence of knowledge, and a general education. Majority rule, they write, is a stand-in, an idea bad in itself that resembles the real thing closely enough to be mistaken for it.

They recall Rousseau’s remark that modern citizens are free only when they vote, and they add that devices for citizens to check secret influence behind the scenes, and the hijacking of state affairs, have been wanting. Tyranny, in this account, is a system in which one person’s desire becomes a political decision and the judgment of the members is pushed aside; democracy, for the author, is the best means of protecting members from that.

Harmony, Arginusae, and a paideia of respect

Harmony, they write, is agreement to live together inside a political harmony: not uniformity, but a cooperation that accepts difference. No one may claim that they, or their principles, stand above the law. The law here is closer to customary law confirmed by agreement than to a Hammurabi-style written code. After the sea battle of Arginusae, they write, an angry people executed the generals without giving them a chance to speak in their defence, and rule according to law failed. Athens, they add, did not pursue equality before international law, and met resistance and anger from those it dealt with.

Athenians, in this reading, held that all human beings share a nature that forms opinions and wants to act politically. Civic wisdom is the virtue of deliberation that lets members reach a harmonious judgment in the face of an uncertain future; the belief that politics has no separate experts makes it important that citizens can choose well among the opinions of competing intellectuals. Probability, or reasoning without knowledge, is a condition of sound debate. Paideia is a general education that teaches justice and respect, and makes every member a teacher of the others; respect includes the sense that I may be wrong and the other may be right. Drawing lots, they add, might be considered if it too can serve the people. The point is not to go back to the first democracy, but to set a clear aim. The same Korean report, at fuller length, is on CampusDown.

Sources

1. The notes, a student reading of Woodruff’s First Democracy, with seven ideas, majority rule as a stand-in, the aftermath of Arginusae, and a deanship from 2006 left as the notes then dated it.

Last updated: 15 November 2026