PO110 ESSAY-Direct Democracy in Ancient Greece and the Modern World.docVIP

Direct Democracy in Ancient Greece and the Modern World by Hao Chen PO 110 Dr. Loren King December 2, 2004 Chen 1 Generally speaking, the modern democracy’s origin comes from the direct democracy in ancient Greece. Some people argue that primeval society had democracy as well. But in primeval era, civilization in human society was in a fairly low level. It has very slight influence to the modern world. In theory, direct democracy is the best form of democracy. However, in ancient Greece there were many problems in practice. In the modern world, directly democracy is often rather than completely adopted in politics and it plays important role to defend the people’s equal political right. First of all, what is the democracy for? Comparing to authoritarian society, democratic society inclines to more equal political power for citizens. Democracy is that “political power originates with the people rather than with those who rule.”1 So the best form of the democracy should make people as equal as possible. In political field, the completely equality has two assumptions. Firstly, every person has the right to express his/her own political opinion freely and his/her opinion can be heard by all the other people. Secondly, every person has the same weight influence to all the political decisions. In theory, directly democracy in ancient Greece is the best and complete form of democracy. At the time, every citizen held the completely equal political power directly. In Athens, citizens gathered in the citizen meeting to express their own opinion freely, discuss the political issues and make the political decision by equal vote.2 On the contrary, the representative Chen 2 democracy doesn’t provide such opportunity to every citizen. Under representative democracy system, citizens select their representatives to render public decisions on their behalf in