Greek thinking, fast and slow. Euripides and Thucydides on deliberation and decision-making
Abstract
Euripides’ Suppliant Women and Thucydides’ account of Pericles’ leadership within the Athenian democracy of 431/430 BCE are good examples of classical Greek texts which ask citizen-audiences to reflect very deeply on the processes by which they come to make political or legislative decisions in a council or assembly. They also stimulate reflection among elite citizens and leaders on their own involvement in such processes. Both texts achieve these forms of reflection by anticipating recent empirical work in sociology, political psychology, ‘behavioural economics’ and cognitive science. These anticipations may reflect an elite ‘paternalistic’ approach to political rhetoric and leadership to an extent. But in the case of the mass art form of Greek tragedy, its dramatization of ‘pathologies’ and ‘errors’ of both mass deliberation and leaders’ responses to them may have contributed to Athens’ relative success as a participatory ‘deliberative democracy’ in which the masses were sovereign.
Citation
Hesk , J P 2017 , ' Greek thinking, fast and slow. Euripides and Thucydides on deliberation and decision-making ' , Insights , vol. 10 , no. 8 . < https://www.dur.ac.uk/resources/ias/insights/HeskFinal.pdf >
Publication
Insights
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
1756-2074Type
Journal article
Rights
© 2017 the Author. This work has been made available online in accordance with the publisher’s policies. This is the author created accepted version manuscript following peer review and as such may differ slightly from the final published version. The final published version of this work is available at: https://www.dur.ac.uk/ias/insights/volume10/article8/
Description
The author acknowledges the support of the Leverhulme Trust via a Research Fellowship award.Collections
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