Melissa Lane (Princeton University) will deliver a lecture entitled: "Popular sovereignty in ancient Greek democracy?  Aristotle on rule as control of magistrates."

To rule in a fifth-century Greek oligarchy meant to hold one of the offices: the idea of rule (archein) and the idea of holding an office (arche) were conceptually intertwined.  With the development of democracies, however,  the concentration and constitutionalization of power in the hands of the office-holders posed a special challenge.  For if by definition of a demokratia, the whole demos was meant to enjoy kratos (sway or power), how could hoi archontes (the officials) be the ones monopolizing the power of archein?  I argue that the identification and solution of this problem is a major theme of Aristotle’s Politics. To solve it, he resorts neither to sortition (he does not argue that the people rule because they hold offices chosen by lot) nor to a Schumpeterian pessimism (that the people only seem to rule).  Instead, he develops an account of democracy as what is justifiably translated as ‘popular sovereignty’, a sovereignty that the people genuinely possess (pace the Schumpeterian) but that they exercise not by holding the highest offices themselves (pace the sortitionist) but rather by controlling those who hold those offices.   The Politics develops a theory of popular sovereignty – of what it is for the people to possess to kurion -- in which the people rule by controlling their magistrates.  This is an account that both made sense in Aristotle’s day and resonates with certain currents in modern democratic theory as well.