Greek Tragedy and Contemporary Democracy

Reviews / Votes

The West often lazily claims it inherited democracy from ancient Greece. It did no such thing of course. Two and a half thousand years of intervening history, intervening cultures and contaminations later, the West went 'democratic' in a way very different from Greece. But Mark Chou makes an extraordinarily lucid and elegant argument that we have many great things to learn from the Greeks as to what democratic pitfalls are to be avoided, and what we must do to make our own version of democracy multivocal and actually democratic. Chou's reading of Aeschylus is brilliant and moving. * Stephen Chan, School of Oriental & African Studies, University of London * In this important book, Chou shows how tragedy was crucial for the cultivation of democratic ethos in ancient Greece as well as in what ways it is relevant for the development of global democracy today. Tragic vision provides nuanced appreciation of how our political orders are not only threatened by but constituted through forces of disorder, and how alternative political realities can best be narrated if fictionalized and dramatized. In an era where dramatization primarily functions for prioritizing events and justifying policy, Chou's recovery of the tragic as a site of multivocality and as a mode of political thinking, provides an admirable, timely and necessary antidote. * Costas M. Constantinou, University of Cyprus *