CIVIL SOCIETY: Evolutions of Citizenship and Democracy along history

Looking for a frame to allow all stakeholders engagement in collective processes for decision-making on their cities future, I had a look at the history of citizenship and democracy ideas. These two concepts have evolved many times from the Ancient Greece to nowadays and looks to be a good basis to imagine what could be the governing regime of societies to come.

To mention this article: “CIVIL SOCIETY: Evolutions of Citizenship and Democracy along history” Julien Carbonnell, 2019, medium.com.

In the context of political tensions in Athens, Socrates (470 BC — 399 BC) has been considered as corruptor of youth, for expressing uncommon religious and political ideas and sentenced to suicide by drinking a poison.

Introduction:

As far as we commonly consider Antic Athens as the cradle of our modern political regime, most of the historians and political scientists keep very cynical about the idea of a democracy where the majority of the population were slaves (on 5M people in ancient Greece, 3,5M were slaves).

If we can’t consider that the antiquity knew democracy like we live in, we can’t neither consider that the antiquity knew capitalism economy like we do: having a business in ancient Athens had nothing to do with nowadays enterprises. The temptation of explaining old societies with our modern point of view is a common mistake and nothing would be more inexact than succumbing to a millenium temptation to explain 500BC society by 2000’s ones. In the antiquity, an…