The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics (15 page)

 
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See
ASEAN
.

 
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From about 500 BC to 321 BC the city-state of Athens was a direct democracy. Any citizen could (and all public-spirited citizens were expected to) attend the sovereign Assembly. The agenda for the Assembly and the daily government of the city were controlled by the Council; judicial and auditing functions were conducted by large juries. Membership of both Council and juries was by lot; any citizen had a better-than-evens chance of being president of Athens for one day, and chief justice for another.
Pericles , who flourished
c.
430 BC, was the first ideologue of democracy, which he justified on the grounds that it promoted tolerance and public-spiritedness. He also introduced attendance payments, at about the same level as a workman's daily income, for jurors (later extended to council and assembly members). As
Aristotle
noted, this slanted attendance towards the poor, who otherwise would have had no opportunity to take part. Like our other principal sources,
Plato
and
Thucydides
, Aristotle was no friend of democracy; they pictured it as expropriating the propertied and vulnerable to ignorant demagogues. However, a relic of the democratic enthusiasm for participation survived in the language we inherited from the Greeks; in classical Greek,
idiotes
mean ‘private citizen’ and the pejorative meaning which gives English ‘idiot’ derives from democratic ideals. Serious discussion of Athenian democracy as a possible model did not revive till our own time when it began to be explored as a possibly viable alternative to representative democracy in an age when computer technology has removed the barriers to large-scale participation in decision-making.

 
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(354–430)
Theologian and political philosopher. Augustine's political theory is incidental to his theology and philosophy of history. The principal source is
De Civitate Dei
(The City of God), written in response to those who attributed the fall of Rome (AD 410) to the abolition of pagan worship. This occasioned a sweeping account of the historical roles of Church and State, and a philosophico-theological discussion of the relationship between them.
Augustine postulates two symbolic cities, Jerusalem (the City of God) and Babylon. These are primarily moral and spiritual symbols: the celestial or spiritual, and the terrestrial or worldly. The one is governed by the love of God, the other by the love of self. But these cities cannot be equated with Church or State. An officer of State may belong to the celestial city, and a Church official to the terrestrial, depending on whether love of God or self-love motivates them.
Augustine defines a state as ‘a multitude of rational creatures associated in common agreement as to the things which it loves’ (
De Civitate. Dei
19. 24). The things which it loves, however, can be good or bad. Of itself it is neither just nor moral; it is worldly. This is a consequence of original sin. Yet, it is for this very reason it is necessary to have a State. For the State to be just and moral it must follow the Christian principles of love of God and of each other for his sake. It is the duty of the Church to imbue the State with these principles. This gives the Church superiority over the State, though no right to interfere in secular matters. It may, however, invoke the power of the State, e.g. to suppress heresy. Thus were sown the seeds of the medieval Church—State controversy.
CB 

 
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A ballot prepared by public officials listing all the candidates for office. So called by late nineteenth-century American reformers, who wished to substitute such ballots, as used in Australia, for the earlier American practice whereby parties prepared their own lists of their candidates and handed them to their supporters. As ‘Australian’ ballots are now virtually universal, the term is obsolete.

 
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