Surely we can allow the Athenians some latitude,after all they were the first urbanised society to try democracy,they wouldn't have regarded our 'representative' democracy as democratic by their standards.

King Hazza,
Speaking of 'democracies'-Swiss women didn't get the vote nationally until 1971.

To anyone that might be interested I'd recommend-

"Greek Ways-How the Greeks created Western Civilization" by Bruce Thorton.

Mac: Of course Bruce Thornton is a fully paid up subscriber to the never-ending war on terror. One of his colleagues is Victor David Hanson--a psycho-path to his toenails.

Plus what do we really know about life back then? Efforts like Thorntons are just exercises in conjecture, and "romanticizing" the GEEKS. And more importantly part of the USA culture wars.

Plus the world is now essentially ruled by the mind created by TV. And anyone who pretends that the USA is anything but a hollowed out shell, or a grotesque caricature of what a democracy could potentially be,if the majority of the citizens were well-informed,is seriously deluded.

How many even bother to vote? Such being the very minimum civic responsibility in a democratic country.

One in four people in the USA believe that Obama is the "anti-christ"--whatever that could possibly be. The Left Behind series of "novels" are consistent best sellers in the USA too. As far as I know the outlook produced by those "novels" is quite an influential factor in USA politics altogether, including high levels of the former Bush administration.

Check out the WIKI entry.

True Mac- but as people in most Western societies only acknowledged Womens' rights during the male employee shortages during WW1 and WW2 when they NEEDED women to be granted proper rights to participate in society, I'm not too convinced of the lack of enlightedness of the Swiss and their democracy as opposed to the lack of pressing social conditions (actually IS a product of their democracy) to force the issue to be addressed as early like the other nations did.

Ho Hum,

OK,I don't know anything about Thornton's other affiliations,however his is definitely not the only book I've read on Classical Greece,nor will it be the last. Of course historians re-intepret history in terms of contemporary culture--this practice certainly doesn't invalidate history as a discipline. You certainly have a jaundiced view of the new Athens,for all its many faults the USA is still one of the great achievements of Western civilization,although I'll concede that its militarism is alarming.

King Hazza,

Yes,but some countries gave women the vote a decade before WW1 and as to womens' rights in general, some of these were wound back after the war ended.Women in the USA and the UK didn't get the vote nationally until after WW1.I agree that the factors involved are complicated and there's no clear cause and effect.

Fascinating stuff, David, and congrats on the book.

Interesting comments attributed to General Stanley McChrystal at the Nato assault on Marjah. Once the Taliban had been expelled by his troops, he said, "we have a government ready to roll out" to deliver the services people wanted.

The suppositions you mention, about the peaceful credentials of democracies, have given licence to ill-conceived attempts to implant the institutions that characterise western democracies in other countries, at gunpoint if necessary.

I wonder if you are going to look at the political economy of warfare in classical Athens, in the collection. US warmaking, in our own day, is imbricated with the military-industrial complex - updated, in an influential formula, by James der Derian, as the military-industrial-media-entertainment network.

Both the ever-more-highly mediated nature of conflict, and the increased rapidity and flexibility of capital accumulation that have characterised the business environment in the so-called 'shareholder value revolution', can be linked with the intensification of US warmaking in the post-Cold War era.

Perhaps the expectations unleashed by democracy among the Athenian property-owning class could only be satisfied, in economic terms, by constant conquest.

Democracies certainly aren’t unique in their pursuit of constant warfare. Reading this article by David Pritchard you would think they were somehow unique in their military aggression.

He seems to conveniently forget William the Conqueror, Napoleon Bonaparte,Ghenghis Khan,Hitler,
The Japanese, The Spanish Armarda, The Scottish Clans, The Papal wars, The Russian Revolution,
Mankind has always waged war , what is so different about ancient Greece? Don’t forget the Muslim leader Mohammed and his conquering exploits. History is full of wars why single out Greece, this seems like the usual attempt to bash America by way of association.

The book would I am sure be a fascinating cultural look at ancient Greece and is no doubt wonderfully written and researched but if it is suggesting the idea that Greece because it was a democracy was more prone to military aggression, then I think that is a presupposed political mind set which history does not support.