——————
The most famous definition of democracy to date, in the words of Pericles in 431 BC: ‘Our constitution is called a democracy because power is in the hands not of the few but of the many.’
This definition has been employed either directly or indirectly by activists and poets throughout history, including Britain’s Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, who quoted ‘The Mask of Anarchy’, a poem Bysshe Shelley, to a crowd of supporters in London on 7 June 2017:
Rise like lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep have fallen on you –
Ye are many, they are few.
It was a call to political arms that fell rather flat, but Pericles’ words have inspired the many at least in theory, particularly in popular uprisings in the twentieth century as democracy made its great comeback. For the first few decades after democracy originally emerged in the sixth century BC, however, the concept of putting power in the hands of the people was not properly defined. ‘Democracy’ is still an elastic term today, so it is fitting that the word first appeared in disjointed form in one of the world’s earliest theatrical works.
K. S. Radhakrishnan,
(Pic Athens, birthplace of Democracy )
No comments:
Post a Comment