DEMOCRACY: GREEK VERSUS MODERN
If the political institutions required for democracy must include elected representative, what are we to say about the Greeks, who first applied the word democracy to the governments of their city-states? Wouldn’t we be pushing our present perspective to the point of anachronistic absurdity if we were to conclude that like Lenin Mussolini and other twentieth-century antidemocrats, the Greeks
simply misused the term?
After all it was they not us who first created and used the word democracy. To deny that Athens was a democracy would be rather like saying that what the Wright brothers invented was not an airplane because their early machine so little resembled ours today