When Citizens Judge: Democratic Judgment in the Courts and Theater of Athens

Abstract In When Citizens Judge, I compare judgment in the popular courts and in the theater of democratic Athens, examining how citizens reflect on questions of inclusion, political identity and the public good in these alternative sites. The Athenian case provides a particularly useful occasion for theorizing democratic judgment in theatrical settings, where citizens are brought together in a congregation of leisured listening, and legal arenas, where citizens as jurors must reach a definitive decision that carries the weight of penal sanction. My project proceeds along two tracks simultaneously: I argue that both the courts and the theater were spaces in which citizens reflected upon and reconstituted their common project; at the same time, I challenge the perceived unity of the Athenian public sphere. The dominant view is that Athenians learned vital lessons at the theater (about the excesses of empire, the instability of civic boundaries, or the tragic limits of human agency), and that these lessons informed their political judgment in the popular courts and in the Assembly. My research challenges this view both at a historical level and by rethinking the theory of judgment that undergirds it. I draw attention to the puzzling disunity of the Athenian public sphere, and in particular the dissonance between judgment in the theater and in the courts. Instead of theorizing judgment as a faculty or capacity that one develops in one site and then exercises in another, I argue that we should theorize judgment as a situated political practice. This requires attending to what I call “institutional charge,” including the political and institutional pressures placed on the judge, the required outcome or telos of a given judgment, the institutional constraints on narrative, and the civic role and relationship between the judges and those judged. Theorizing judgment in this way helps to explain the puzzle of the Athenian public sphere and is a resource for studying judgment in the contemporary context.

Récupéré en direct depuis OpenAlex et désinversé. Les résumés ne sont pas conservés dans cette base de données : les index inversés représentent 8,6 Go des 9,3 Go de texte de la base, et le serveur dispose de 13 Go libres.