“What Will You Tell Them When They Ask You?” Reflexive Accountability in a Democratic Regime

Abstract

In a democracy, ordinary citizens enjoy formal unaccountability, a condition that characterized classical Athens and that persists in a modified form in modern representative democracies. Popular unaccountability is both constitutive of democratic rule and inherently risky: Will citizens vote responsibly, and what might encourage them to do so? This article returns to classical Athens to analyze a paradigmatic scene of democratic politics whose dynamics remain relevant today: Elite orators addressing large, empowered, and formally unaccountable audiences. As the Athenian case indicates, democratic plurality, answerability, and intersubjective identity together create the conditions for what I call “reflexive accountability.” “Reflexive accountability” refers to citizens endeavoring to hold themselves accountable to those on behalf of whom, or in whose interest, they are expected to make political decisions. Political orators addressing empowered audiences initiate reflexive accountability when they ask citizens to imagine what they will say when other citizens, neighbors, or family members ask them how they voted and why. Reflexive accountability, as a distinctly democratic form of accountability and as a democratic ideal, is a litmus test for a healthy democratic regime, one in which citizens are encouraged to hold in mind those who will be affected by their actions and to take seriously another’s claim to a persuasive account of the soundness and justice of their vote.

Democracy is marked by a paradox: political accountability is celebrated as a cardinal virtue of democracy, yet political unaccountability is a defining feature of supreme rule. For the dēmos to rule supreme, it must hold others to account while remaining itself unaccountable. In a democracy, ordinary citizens enjoy political unaccountability, a condition that held in classical Athens and, in a modified form, continues in modern representative systems. Athenian citizens voting en masse in the assembly or as jurors in the popular courts faced no institutionalized scrutiny or threat of state-sanctioned punishment for their votes. In representative democracies, citizens are formally unaccountable when they vote in elections and referenda, though they exercise power indirectly rather than through direct rule. These forms of institutional unaccountability carry inherent risk and raise enduring questions for practitioners and theorists alike: Will citizens vote responsibly? What might encourage them to do so?

This paradox helps to explain democracy’s long-standing ambivalence toward the figure of the tyrant. In antiquity, Athenian democracy defined itself against tyranny, yet it also figured the dēmos as a tyrant (tyrannos) insofar as the people exercised the power of a unified and unaccountable ruler. Representing the dēmos as a tyrant could serve condemnatory or cautionary purposes, but it could also be neutral or celebratory, denoting nonhereditary, unaccountable rule by one—the sine qua non of political supremacy. Indeed, early modern theorists such as Bodin, Grotius, Hobbes, and Pufendorf would later draw on this Greek figuration to theorize sovereignty, including popular sovereignty. They argued that the tyrant’s political unaccountability (aneuthunos or anupeuthunos) was essential to sovereignty itself. ¹

This article takes the formal unaccountability of the dēmos seriously as a condition of supreme or sovereign rule, while also attending to a distinctive way that the dēmos may hold itself accountable. The challenge for democracy, as Kinch Hoekstra has put it, is for the dēmos to remain “the uncontrolled controller” while practicing self-control, where the “self” is a diverse multitude. ² I return to classical Athens to analyze a paradigmatic scene of democratic politics that remains relevant today: elite orators addressing large, empowered, and formally unaccountable crowds. The tyrant analogy helpfully underscores the democratic audience’s formal unaccountability, a condition that shapes democratic deliberation, including the rhetorical strategies orators use to secure votes. ³ Yet it cannot adequately capture the kind of political agents the people acting in concert are, or their relationship to those affected by collective decisions. Both are crucial for understanding democratic rule.

By reconstructing democratic deliberation in the Athenian popular courts—arguably the “supreme” democratic institution by the fourth century BCE—I argue that democratic plurality, answerability, and intersubjective identity together create the conditions for a form of accountability that I call “reflexive accountability.” Figuring the dēmos as a unitary and unaccountable ruler obscures this democratic possibility. While I develop this concept from a reconstruction of classical Athenian practice, I advance reflexive accountability as an enduring democratic ideal.

As I will show, in extant Athenian forensic oratory we find litigants encouraging a deliberative process that is markedly unavailable to the tyrant: jurors are often asked to imagine what they will say to their fellow citizens, neighbors, children, and wives when they are asked by these other Athenians how they voted and why. ⁴ Jurors are asked, in other words, to imagine and to anticipate offering a coherent account of their political decision and defending their judgment in terms that would make sense to, and persuade, fellow members of their democratic city. I argue that we should name this practice and deliberative relationship specifically. Reflexive accountability describes the deliberative practice of endeavoring to hold oneself accountable to those on behalf of whom, or in whose interest, one is expected to make political decisions. Reflexive accountability depends on a broader culture of accountability that Athens had and that scholars of Athenian democracy have celebrated ⁵ ; at the same time, the formal unaccountability of the dēmos and resulting political asymmetry ⁶ between speakers and their audiences condition reflexive accountability.

Reflexive accountability entails the empowered decision-maker’s effort to formulate a coherent account of his decision, one that might enable him to maintain a coherent political and relational identity. This kind of deliberation is a logos-centered activity that ultimately takes place quietly, within the judge’s own head. However, it is not an independent or autonomous decision-making process akin to something like the application of Kant’s categorical imperative. It is a situated political practice occasioned by democratic rhetoric: Political orators encourage reflexive accountability when they call upon their immediate audience to take seriously their responsibility to act according to shared, democratic commitments. However, rather than simply invoking an abstract commitment or principle and imploring citizens to vote according to that principle (e.g., “you should vote according to the law” or “the common good must be your guide”), orators encourage reflexive accountability when they draw attention to the citizens’ relationship to others and the discursive conditions of those relationships.

Imagining those who will be affected by one’s decision, and considering whether it is possible to persuasively defend oneself in the presence of their company, can encourage more responsible and just decisions; it also identifies and publicizes the distinctive nature of the democratic citizen’s rule, which, unlike the tyrant’s, is expected to maintain and conform to collectively determined laws and ideals. Unlike a tyrant, the Athenian citizen was encouraged to situate his decision within a broader conception of “who we [the dēmos] are,” and that broader political identity was intersubjectively and dialogically constituted. I have chosen the term “reflexive” because, just as subject and object coincide in reflexive verbs (where the action is performed upon oneself), reflexive accountability denotes a form of accountability that one performs upon oneself. This reflexivity operates first and foremost at the level of the individual, where the formally unaccountable citizen, prompted by elite speech, holds himself accountable to other members of the political community. At the same time, reflexive accountability names a practice through which the dēmos holds itself accountable or exercises “self-control,” to return to Hoekstra’s formulation, where the “self” is a diverse multitude.

Reflexive accountability is not functionally equivalent or commensurable to external, institutional checks on decision-making—for example, formal audits—or penal sanction. Its function is not to constrain or punish but, rather, to encourage more reasonable and responsible decision-making, and its practice depends on the orator and the ordinary citizens responding to his speech. Reflexive accountability is an albeit fragile form of accountability whose presence may serve as a litmus test for a healthy democratic regime, one in which citizens are encouraged to hold in mind those who will be affected by their actions and to take seriously another citizen’s claim to a persuasive account of the soundness and justice of their vote.

Athens “Culture of Accountability” and the Tyrant

If you were a male citizen in democratic Athens, on several occasions during your life (and more if you were a prominent citizen or “politician” ⁷ ), you would be called upon to account for your actions and character before a panel of ordinary citizens. Those citizens, randomly nominated to determine your case, would judge whether you had upheld the written and unwritten laws and whether your actions had been advantageous to the city. This might occur in the form of an official scrutiny or audit before or after serving as a magistrate (dokimasia and euthunai, respectively), a defense speech before a popular jury (or a prosecution speech, insofar as you would need to persuade your judges that you prosecuted for good and just reasons), ⁸ or defending a proposal you had made during an assembly meeting, for which you could be punished, were it deemed illegal or disadvantageous to the city. ⁹ To the extent that you assumed these political positions, whether voluntarily or because you were selected by lot, you would be accustomed to defending yourself before your peers and being subjected to their authoritative judgment.

To participate in politics in fifth and fourth century Athens entailed participating in a political and discursive regime that placed account-giving—and judging others’ accounts—at its center. The personal and political stakes of persuading one’s audience were high: institutionalized accountability mechanisms might issue in punishments ranging from fines to exile or death, and informal social disciplining, like gossip and public shaming, complimented state-sanctioned punishments. Following Peter Euben, ¹⁰ scholars of Athenian democracy have foregrounded and celebrated the city’s “culture of accountability.” ¹¹ Popular oversight of political elites and officeholders was a “cornerstone of popular sovereignty” and integral to Athens’s relatively stable and successful democratic experiment. ¹² What’s more, Athens’s culture of accountability supported philosophy, at least in its Socratic form: Plato’s Socrates’s ever-demanding insistence on offering and judging accounts of oneself and one’s beliefs arguably reflects his Athenian upbringing and political education. ¹³

While Athens’s commitment to holding elites and individual officeholders accountable is striking, scholars have challenged Euben’s influential “culture of accountability” thesis insofar as it overstates the “mutual” and “reciprocal” nature of the regime’s accountability practices. ¹⁴ For scholars like Matt Landauer, Kinch Hoekstra, and Daniela Cammack, understanding Athenian democratic rule requires disarticulating accountability practices directed at elite citizens, or those acting in an individual capacity as officeholders or orators, from those directed at citizens judging and acting in their collective capacity. ¹⁵ As voters in the assembly and popular courts, Athenian citizens faced no institutional scrutiny or risk of state-imposed punishment for alleged abuses of power. The dēmos’s formal unaccountability, these scholars remind us, was a defining feature of their popular rule.

Indeed, the dēmos’s power over others and control of the city’s “accountability machinery” helps to explain why it was often identified with the tyrant. ¹⁶ Isocrates, for example, writes that the dēmos is not only kurios but tyrannos. ¹⁷ In The Knights, Aristophanes personifies Dēmos as the tyrannical master, ¹⁸ and in Wasps, he portrays jurors specifically as tyrannical because they hold others to account while remaining unaccountable. When Pericles tells the Athenians they rule like a tyrant, it was not simply a criticism but also an exhortation to take seriously the extent of their power. ¹⁹ Even if informal social disciplining like shaming or gossip may have “tamed” the demotic tyrant, this was not a reliable constraint or functional equivalent to formal accountability: with respect to vulnerability to a higher political authority that might constrain or punish them for abuses of power, the dēmos and the tyrant appear identical. ²⁰

I want to hold the paradox of democratic accountability (i.e., that accountability is the hallmark of democracy, yet the dēmos must be unaccountable to rule supreme) at the center of my analysis by bringing together and building on these different interpretations of Athenian politics. In what follows, I show how Athens’s “culture of accountability” influenced deliberation within the People’s court (dikasteria), a central organ of democracy through which the dēmos ruled supreme. ²¹ I also show how the character of the people—a diverse multitude rather than a literal singular ruler—shaped each citizen’s internal resources for democratic deliberation and the horizon of rhetorical strategies available to speakers as they endeavored to secure citizens’ votes.

The dikasteria provides a useful starting point for reconstructing democratic practice with the paradox of democratic accountability in view because it provides an extreme institutional example of unaccountable popular rule. Whereas proposals or decrees passed in the assembly could be challenged by bringing legal action against the individual who had sponsored them, no appeal or institutional mechanism existed to constrain the courts. Secret ballots further reinforced the citizen-jurors’ institutional unaccountability: Unlike the open voting of the assembly, secret voting made jurors less vulnerable to peer pressure or threat of social sanction. And whereas it was possible to manipulate votes in the assembly, the dikasteria was designed to make interference with jury panel composition exceedingly difficult, if not impossible. ²² In short, the dikasteria was created to support the people’s unaccountable rule ²³ and, by the fourth century BCE, it was arguably the “supreme” democratic institution in Athens. ²⁴

Institutional Context

The dikasteria had no professional or supervising judges: trials were held before large juries of 201 to 1501 citizens selected by lottery. ²⁵ As jurors/judges (dikastai), citizens interpreted and applied the laws to cases ranging from petty theft to hubris or public treason and determined the penalty for those convicted. For the Athenian citizen, serving on a jury was a central part of exercising his authority and power to rule: It is estimated that, on average, a citizen spent as much as one out of every seven years of his civic life serving on a jury. ²⁶

The assembly and the popular courts were governed by strikingly different procedures, and these differences shaped the democratic practices taking place in each site. In the assembly, achieving consensus was the aim, and the dēmos sought unanimous or near-unanimous support for collective action, whether that be waging war or adherence to a new law. ²⁷ Voting procedure facilitated this goal: Because assembly votes were estimated by a show of hands and shouting rather than individually counted, the optics of voting in the assembly emphasized the group, endeavoring to decide together what was to be done and whether there was a critical mass to do it. ²⁸ Citizens in the assembly could discuss items on the agenda with their neighbors, and open voting enabled citizens to gauge how others were voting and potentially amend their own vote accordingly. These institutional features contributed to the collective character and experience of the decision-making process, one that would issue in a decision made by “the people” as a unified actor, rather than an aggregate of individual men.

By contrast, deliberation in the courts was significantly individuated: A simple majority determined judicial verdicts, jurors were forbidden from deliberating with other jurors, and their secret ballots were individually counted. Though members of the jury sat and listened side by side in a collective configuration, they were not expected or authorized to advise each other or to vocalize their opinion on the matter at hand (though this sometimes occurred informally, i.e., thorubos). ²⁹ Nor were jurors expected to discuss their decision with their immediate neighbors, eliciting other opinions and potentially revising their own through conversation. The primary deliberative relationship in that institutional context was between litigants and each juror sitting in attention: Litigants spoke to a crowd of jurors, but rather than addressing a collective who must arrive at a decision together in concert, they addressed jurors as individuals and sought each juror’s individual vote.

Despite the differences between deliberation in the assembly and popular courts, the Athenians conceived of the dēmos as a unified ruling body across both institutions. The author of the Constitution of the Athenians, for example, writes that the dēmos made itself “master of everything” (kurion hapanton) by ruling both through the popular courts and by decrees, ³⁰ while specifying also that the dēmos is kurios (i.e., “master,” also translated as “sovereign”) of the city because it holds judicial power. ³¹ Used symbolically, “dēmos” was used to denote the people as a collective unity that held supreme power vis-à-vis the assembly, council, and popular courts together. As Ober puts it, decisions of the dikastai (jurors), like decisions of the assembly, symbolized “the will of Dēmos.” ³²

When speakers in the courts address their audiences, however, they say “men of Athens” (andres athenaioi) or “men of the jury” (andres dikastai). In my view, this language is significant: It captures the individuated nature of dikastic deliberation that the singular figuration of the dēmos obscures. It also indicates the litigant’s relationship to jurors as individual decision-makers, which is appropriate to the democratic practice unfolding in this site: in the courts, each juror had equal influence over the final verdict, and each was expected to decide the case independently, based only on their own reception and response to each litigant’s speech. ³³ Finally, these forms of address articulate the audience’s plurality. The litigant does not speak to the collective as a unity but addresses a plurality of citizens gathered, each with his own relationships to those present and not present, each with his own sense of obligation to members of the community who might be impacted by the decision at hand. These two features of democratic deliberation—the individuated nature of each citizen’s deliberation and the citizens’ plurality—matter for our evaluation of the suitability of the singular figuration of the people to capture democratic rule and accountability in the dikasteria.

This is not merely a matter of historical interest. Moreso than assembly deliberation, the individuated character of deliberation and voting in the dikasteria—shaped by majoritarian vote-counting, the secret ballot, and the absence of group discussion and consensus-building typical of assembly meetings—bears a resemblance to the most common form of participation for ordinary citizens in democracies today: casting independent, secret votes in elections, typically in response to the speeches and arguments of political elites. At stake in this discussion of singular and plural figurations of the citizenry is whether the character of sovereignty or supreme rule changes “if it is the people who seize sovereignty,” because, unlike the tyrant, the people are “multiple and diverse.” ³⁴ Specifically, if we construe supreme rule or sovereignty in terms of formal unaccountability, as both ancients and moderns have done, we should ask whether the political significance of formal unaccountability changes when the “uncontrolled controller” is plural and individuated. ³⁵

I suggest that it does, in at least two ways. In the case of the popular courts, the individuated nature of deliberation may have heightened each juror’s sense of responsibility, insofar as his individual vote would count and directly affect the outcome of the trial. As Aeschines puts it: “In a democracy the ordinary citizen has a king’s power through the law and his own vote.” ³⁶ In Aeschines’s formulation, which refers specifically to voting in the courts, each individual citizen (rather than the dēmos as a unified actor) enjoys the power of a king (basileus). If arriving at a decision in the assembly was a group effort, with some citizens wielding more influence than others over political outcomes, in the dikasteria, individual “men of Athens” determined guilt and innocence, and each was as powerful as the next. This may have made it harder to deflect responsibility from oneself to the group during and after deliberation. Additionally, each citizen has their own personal relationships with individual members of the broader community. Litigants regularly call to mind these relationships and the juror’s responsibility to them; by doing so, they initiate a distinctly democratic deliberative practice. Whereas the tyrant is separated from those affected by his actions, each juror has deep, individual attachments to other citizens; he will leave his dikastic seat to return to the city when the trial ends, and he will soon become subject to other citizens’ rule in turn.

In what follows, I elaborate on three features of democratic practice in the courts that condition deliberation and the possibility of what I call reflexive accountability: plurality, answerability, and the need to maintain one’s relational self. While aspects of these elements may be found in nondemocratic regimes, their confluence, I argue, is distinctly democratic and essential to understanding the nature of popular, nontyrannical rule.

Plurality

The personal relationships between individual citizens judging in the courts and those who may be affected by judicial verdicts condition the distinctive possibilities of a democratic deliberative process. In “Against Timarchus,” for example, the prosecutor Aeschines asks his audience of jurors, “What will be the state of mind of each of you (echōn hekastos hymōn gnōmēn) when he goes home from court?” ³⁷ Carey’s translation of the Greek here captures the speaker’s suggestion that each juror will have to bear and carry home with him his own judgment (gnōmē, also translated as conscience, which would be a defensible translation here). Aeschines emphasizes the heavy and individual nature of this burden, while also suggesting that one’s “state of mind” is partly constituted through dialogue: One’s “state of mind” is figured out, in other words, and reflected back to one through the effort to render an account of one’s political action to others. Because, as Aeschines explains, “It is to be expected that boys and young men will ask the relatives how the case has been judged,” he asks his judges: “What will you say, you who now have the power to vote (hoi tēs psēphou nyni gegonotes kyrioi), when your sons ask you if you have convicted or acquitted?” ³⁸

By calling to his jurors’ minds his relationship with his own son, and the expectation that he will take personal responsibility for educating and protecting his son (and male relatives), Aeschines indicates the educative function of judicial decision; he reminds his jurors that through their verdict, they communicate the consequences of disobeying the laws. The litigant thus encourages his juror to view the stakes of the trial in terms of personal consequences alongside broader, collective expectations for civic activity. Importantly, in this passage, the son also has a claim on the father: He appears entitled to an account or defense of the father’s political action. This demand reflects his personal ties but also his political situation: While it is the father who rules today, it may be the son, or another male citizen selected by lot, who rules tomorrow. The juror’s authority is shared and circulated. This differentiates the democratic juror’s rule from the tyrant’s or king’s rule and conditions the deliberative process that Aeschines invites his jurors to enact when he asks them, “What will you say?” In other words, the intimate relationship between jurors and members of the community who will be affected by the judicial verdict, together with the circulating nature of citizen rule, enables the orators to perform a different kind of counsel (symboulos). ³⁹ The orator can encourage each juror to take seriously the broader consequences of his vote by imagining how he would defend it to someone to whom he has deep attachments. These relationships are plural and personal—the juror’s imaginative capacity to formulate an answer to the orator’s question, as well as the affective response he may have to anticipating another’s demand for an account, depends on the individual nature of the relationship.

While Athenian democracy is conventionally described as “direct” in contrast to modern representative systems, it is analytically useful to construe in representative terms the relationship between the voting Athenian citizen present and those not present to whom he feels responsible. I therefore use the language of representation in this article cautiously and as defined below. As Cammack has shown, Athenians routinely described citizens as judging and acting on behalf of (hyper, also translated as “in the interests of”) those not literally present. ⁴⁰ In this respect, they were regarded as “representatives” in Hannah Pitkin’s broad formulation—namely, as acting “in the interest of the represented, in a manner responsive to them” and “making present in some sense of something which is nevertheless not present literally or in fact.” ⁴¹ Crucially, this formulation need not involve formal accountability mechanisms or modern representative institutions or ideas. I adopt this language because it helps to illuminate how Athenians conceptualized political responsibility, responsiveness, and the expectations of those not present, and allows us to trace continuities in democratic ideas and expectations about “acting on behalf of others.”

One theory for why Athenian citizens voting en masse were formally unaccountable is that their interests were presumed to be the same as those they “represented” (i.e., synecdochical representation): Unlike elites or officeholders—whose interests might diverge from the many and thus require oversight—ordinary citizens serving as jurors or voting in the assembly were expected to vote in their own interest, which presumably coincided with that of their fellow citizens, making external checks unnecessary. ⁴² While this theory may capture part of the rationale for formal unaccountability, it is not entirely persuasive and obscures a significant feature of democratic deliberation—namely, that the very practice of inviting citizens to formulate a defense of their vote before others presupposes difference. When a litigant warns jurors not to render themselves incoherent or unable to defend their decision, he implicitly acknowledges that the present jurors are not interchangeable with other citizens, because the juror may vote against the interests of those whom he “represents” or to whom he is responsible. Defending one’s vote to other members of the community entails translating the reasons for one’s vote into terms that will persuade others who may occupy different positions within the polis (for example, one’s wife, who may have overlapping but not interchangeable concerns). ⁴³ When litigants encourage reflexive accountability, they register the existence of difference and plurality and the need for collective constraints.

In “Against Timarchus,” the prospect of failing to uphold the written and unwritten laws constitutes not only a failure to act in the interest of other members of the community but also a narrative failure or crisis, whereby one loses the capacity to tell a convincing story to others about oneself and one’s actions. After asking his jurors to imagine how they will respond to their sons’ questions, Aeschines proceeds to offer an account of the disparity, should the jurors acquit Timarchus, between their political act (the verdict and its consequences) and their long-standing commitments (e.g., against brothels and squandering one’s inheritance). ⁴⁴ Aeschines warns the juror that he will be in contradiction with himself if he acquits the defendant, insofar as his self-understanding is grounded in shared, democratic commitments. Aeschines’s discussion of the stakes of each juror’s vote and the aftermath of the judicial proceeding seeks to elicit the juror’s desire to maintain a coherent self that is politically and intersubjectively constituted. He counsels his jurors with the threat of rendering themselves incoherent, insofar as they become unable to account for their decision.

We do not know whether Aeschines’s account of this future possibility was convincing to his jurors. The task of each juror is to choose between two alternative accounts of the defendant’s alleged crime and the implications of potential verdicts. In this case, each juror had to judge whether acquitting Timarchus would indeed conflict with the city’s written and unwritten laws, as Aeschines insists, and whether he could offer a persuasive justification of his vote to his sons and other citizens upon leaving the court that day. But already, in this speech alone, we see two elements of reflexive accountability that I want to develop further: first, jurors are not only expected to act on behalf of those not present, they are regarded as answerable to other members of the polis; second, litigants often frame the stakes of the judicial verdict in terms of maintaining one’s political identity, drawing attention to one’s need for a coherent story of oneself, which implies also an audience to whom the story makes sense.

Answerability

In Athenian forensic oratory, litigants invoke neighbors, bystanders, wives, daughters, sons, and fathers in their speeches, as members of the political community who have a claim to an account from jurors, despite the formal secrecy of judicial votes during the judicial proceeding itself. In Against Neaera, for example, Demosthenes asks his jurors, “What will each of you say when you return home to your wife or daughter or mother when they ask you, ‘Where were you?’ . . . and ‘Who was on trial?’ . . . and ‘Well, what did you do?’” ⁴⁵ When litigants invite their jurors to make other citizens and future interlocutors present in their minds and to consider how they will reply to their demanding questions, they are not only reminding their audience that they should act on behalf of others or with an eye to the common good. Their invitation is also a reminder that citizens are answerable to other citizens (including Athenian women ⁴⁶ ). I want to further develop the distinction between answerability and merely acting “on behalf of” or “in the interest of [hyper]” others, even though the two overlap, because answerability is doing important work in Athenian democratic practice and conditions reflexive accountability as I am developing the concept here.

In Against Ctesiphon, Aeschines advises his jurors to “cast your vote not just as men giving judgment (krinontes), but as men under observation (theōroumenoi), with an eye to your defence (apologismon) before those citizens who are not here but will ask you about your verdict.” ⁴⁷ In this passage, Aeschines calls attention to the jurors’ responsibility to vote in the interest of those “who are not here.” While the representative language of voting “on behalf of” or “in the interest of” those not present usefully captures this expectation, it does not capture the full significance of Aeschines’s formulation and challenge to his listeners. Aeschines could, for example, simply state which course of action is in the city’s interest and hope the jurors follow suit, or ask them, “Are you voting in the interest of the wider public, as is your duty?” Instead, Aeschines instructs each juror to cast his vote “with an eye to your defence before those citizens who are not here but will ask you about your verdict” (emphasis mine).

While a monarch (tyrranos) ⁴⁸ may act with an eye to his city’s advantage, he is not answerable to them. Democratic citizens, on the other hand, are, even though, as a collective, they remain formally unaccountable like the tyrranos. This is because the practice and principle of political equality undergirds their authority and power to rule: Athenian male citizens take turns being vulnerable to other citizens’ rule and understand their rule in terms of shared responsibility and lawfulness. To give an answer to another citizen’s question, “How did you vote?”—which implies, “How did your vote advance our interest or uphold our Athenian identity?”—is to acknowledge his equal right to representation by whoever happens to be ruling that day. To offer a defense of one’s vote is also to maintain one’s self-understanding as a reasonable and lawful political actor committed to advancing the common good, without any special claim to decision-making authority or power. The notion that Athenian citizens are answerable to other Athenians undergirded democratic deliberation and the rhetorical horizon of those addressing their democratic audiences.

To put the concept of answerability into relief, consider the comparative case of a king who—despite ruling according to the laws and with an eye to the city’s advantage—is not answerable to his fellow citizens. As Landauer reminds us, because the king is formally unaccountable, there will be resemblances between his and the unaccountable dēmos’s deliberation and received counsel. ⁴⁹ Comparison with the king is instructive: It clarifies the significance of answerability (or its absence) for deliberation, and how answerability sets democratic citizens apart from other formally unaccountable political rulers.

Theseus, Athens’s mythical founder, is an archetypal beneficent king and became a democratic cult figure in the fifth century. Classical portrayals celebrate Theseus as a virtuous monarch, and Athenian poets and politicians tailored this image to democratic audiences as a model to emulate. As Atack has argued, for example, Isocrates crafted in his political speeches a vision of Theseus that offered “patterns for [Athenian citizens’] own educational practice and desire to benefit the city.” ⁵⁰ Euripides likewise depicts Theseus as a monarch who upholds and defends the people’s laws and judges according to the city’s advantage. ⁵¹ Yet, however “democratic” Theseus’s virtues, Euripides underscores that his deliberation remains that of a king: It is shaped by his formal unaccountability and by his lack of answerability to other citizens.

In Suppliants (423 BC), ⁵² Euripides presents Theseus anachronistically and awkwardly as a “democratic king”: anachronistic because Theseus belongs to the mythical past while the democratic regime Euripides places him in is relatively new, and awkward because although the play’s Athens is ostensibly democratic (405–8) and Theseus gestures admiringly toward its political arrangements (442–50), his own political power and authority remain squarely monarchical: He does not share his executive power with other citizens. ⁵³ What makes him a “democratic” monarch is that he holds himself accountable to the city’s laws (apparently authored by Athens’s male citizens), and he holds himself responsible for acting in the city’s interest. As we shall see, however, the rhetorical strategies that encourage the king’s “self-control” differ significantly from those that may guide a dēmos.

The play begins with the mothers of dead and defeated Argive soldiers begging Theseus to help return their sons’ bodies from Thebes for burial. The bodies remain at the city gates after Thebes’s tyrannical king Creon—in violation of civic and religious law—forbids their retrieval. Euripides stages a contest between Creon and Theseus, and Theseus emerges as the play’s hero: He determines to uphold the sacred laws and pursue his city’s advantage by helping the mothers retrieve their sons’ bodies, for which he is promised blessings for Athens’s protection. Over the course of the play, those who counsel Theseus appeal to the laws, the king’s reputation, and his self-understanding as a good king. When the king’s mother, Aethra, for example, urges him to respond to the supplicants’ pleas, she counsels him to “first, look to the gods, for if you slight them you will fall,” and second, to consider the honor he will earn when he defends the laws of the land (300–2, 311). Aethra advises her son to think of Athens’s collective good and pursue courageously what will “win a crown of glory for the city” (317). In response to his mother’s speech, Theseus concedes that it would be cowardly to ignore the Argive mothers’ pleas and “not in keeping with my ways” (338). After initially deciding not to help the mothers, and on the precipice of changing his mind, Theseus considers what others will think of him and then resolves to “go and free the dead” (343–45).

Theseus’s deliberation shares common features with democratic deliberation because he is, like the dēmos, a formally unaccountable ruler receiving and responding to advisors’ counsel. Due to advisors’ vulnerability relative to their audience, they may be tempted to flatter the ruler (whether monarch or dēmos) and sacrifice sound counsel to preserve their favor. ⁵⁴ At the same time, advisors may also guide the unaccountable ruler toward prudent judgments that serve the public good by appealing to certain attachments. Concern for reputation, for example, animates both kings and democrats alike: Euripides shows how Theseus’s mother appeals to her son’s desire to maintain his reputation among Athenians as she tries to persuade him to change course. We see this also in Athenian forensic oratory, when litigants appeal to reputation as a chief motivation among the people for acting one way as opposed to another. Likewise, Theseus displays his desire to act consistently—that is, in keeping with his own self-understanding as a courageous, just, and beneficent leader. ⁵⁵ In classical Athenian forensic oratory also, as we have seen, Athenian litigants appeal to the desire for constancy in their audiences and warn of the shame they will feel if they fail to live up to their ideals.

Despite these resemblances, the different relationship each decision-maker has with their broader community shapes the form and stakes of their deliberation and the advisors’ horizon of rhetorical strategies. Whereas mutual authority and shared political action undergird the democratic relationship, Theseus’s relationship to the Athenian dēmos is one of responsibility and regard. Euripides dramatizes the kind of deliberation that follows from this fact: When the king conveys his desire for the Athenians’ approval, he aptly describes his desire’s object in ocular terms: He wants to be seen by them in a favorable light, as an admirable and impressive image of virtuous leadership (247); he explains that “the city, when it saw (ēistheto) I willed this effort, was ready to accept it, even glad” (383–94). ⁵⁶ The emphasis here is on the city’s affirmative response to perceiving Theseus’s plan and resolve: Euripides presents Theseus as an actor on stage, performing for his subjects.

While a “democratic king” like Theseus may be invested in his city’s approval, he nevertheless relates to other citizens as a leader and benefactor rather than a co-deliberator and mutually responsible political actor. He is eager to avoid the shame (and potential loss of support) of being seen in a negative light, or what Christina Tarnopolsky calls “occurrent shame,” construed as “a moment of recognition” during which one recognizes in the gaze of another the perception of one’s failings. ⁵⁷ His mother effectively exploits this inculcated sense of shame to persuade him to judge well.

By contrast, Athenians regarded themselves as exercising responsible power: shared, circulating, and answerable to others, even where institutions left them formally unaccountable. This civic self-understanding, cultivated by institutions, political rhetoric, and social habits, underwrote democratic deliberation and made reflexive accountability possible. Litigants in the dikasteria implored their jurors not only to avoid appearing badly in the eyes of others, but also—and crucially—to retain their capacity to be in conversation with others, which includes justifying their decision to other members of the polis to whom they are answerable. The shame to be avoided here includes the shame of being unable to formulate an intelligible account of one’s actions, or to offer a coherent narrative about what one has done, given who one is and to whom one is responsible.

Identity

Here, it is helpful to recall Athens’ broader “culture of accountability,” which helped to inculcate an attachment to being the kind of person who can offer a coherent defense of one’s actions. Building on Euben et al., and bringing them into conversation with Tarnopolsky’s work on shame, ⁵⁸ we may identify a distinctive kind of shame to which democratic “advisors” ⁵⁹ may appeal: The shame that arises when one experiences oneself—in conversation or in relationship with others—as incoherent, or as unable to sustain a relationship of mutual understanding (i.e., unintelligible). ⁶⁰ This resembles what Tarnopolsky calls “Socratic shame,” experienced when one is “exposed or unmasked by having the contradictions in one’s views revealed both to oneself and to others.” ⁶¹ The kind of shame that concerns me here, however, does not arise from contradiction in one’s views per se but from contradiction between one’s action or vote and one’s commitments, ideals, and responsibilities to others. Moreover, it emerges in the felt gap, generated through real or imagined interrogation by another, between one’s incoherence and one’s admired civic identity, namely a citizen able to defend oneself persuasively before those to whom one is responsible.

Identity attachments and attendant forms of shame are not, of course, functional substitutes for formal accountability. Like Theseus, it is ultimately the voting citizen who must hold himself accountable. Unlike Theseus, however, the democratic citizen’s deliberation is ideally undergirded by his own understanding—gained through practice and habituation—of his authority as shared and circulating, and by his familiarity with answering others to defend his political actions. Athenian litigants bring into play and reiterate the democratic nature of each citizen’s authority when they counsel, relying on the city’s broader culture of accountability to stimulate an internalized echo of formal and informal accountability practices. These include the dokimasia and euthunai, which every juror would have likely undergone and which established a model of responsible, answerable power that could be enacted informally elsewhere when fellow citizens or family members asked voting citizens to justify their political decisions. When jurors anticipate and imagine giving reasons for their choice—as litigants regularly exhort them to do—they acknowledge and enact the democratic nature of their authority, which may encourage (though it cannot ensure) more responsible and public-oriented judgment.

Finally, Athenian litigants regularly appealed to the juror’s need to sustain not only his individual relationships with other members of the community, but also a collective identity that is intersubjectively constituted across past, present, and future. ⁶² Often, the question “Who are we?” is presented as “Who have we been?” whereby litigants praise judgments consistent with Athenian memory and condemn those that risk rupture. ⁶³ They make representative claims ⁶⁴ about which verdict will support or betray this identity, asking some version of: “How [if you vote in that way] will you live with yourself?”—where the “self” is explicitly cast as relational and embedded. These questions serve as tests of the soundness of a vote or action, casting the judicial verdict as a political act that the individual juror and the broader community may or may not successfully integrate into an ongoing self-understanding. In this analysis, I am focusing specifically on instances when jurors are asked to enact dialogues with imagined interlocutors. The effort to maintain dialogical relationships, however, belongs to the broader effort to maintain one’s relational self, oriented within a civic past and future.

One relevant moment in Demosthenes’s “Against Aristogieton” is worth quoting at length:

You will soon be leaving this courthouse, and you will be watched by the bystanders, both aliens and citizens; they will scan each one of you as he appears, and detect by their looks those who have voted for acquittal. What will you have to say for yourselves, Athenians, if you emerge after betraying the laws? With what expression, with what look will you return their gaze? [99] How will you make your way to the Sanctuary of the Mother-goddess, if you wish to do so? For surely you will never go individually to consult the laws as if they were still valid, unless you have now collectively confirmed them before you depart. . . . Or what will you say, Athenians, what will you say, if someone detects and questions those of you who have voted for acquittal? What will you answer? That you were satisfied with him? But who will dare to say that? ⁶⁵

Demosthenes asks each juror to imagine if, following the trial, he can maintain his self-understanding as an Athenian citizen charged with upholding the laws and continue with his civic duties in his city, amid fellow Athenians and traversing sacred sites, without contradiction. Demosthenes urges his jurors to treat the judicial verdict not merely as a judgment on one man’s potential crime, but as a political act that will either sustain or interrupt and violate the juror’s own civic identity. Significantly, continuing with one’s daily life and civic duties includes remaining in conversation with other citizens and narrating to them one’s vote as a reasonable expression of oneself and one’s political commitments.

I want to emphasize here that Demosthenes’s initial threat of “detection” does not, on its own, generate reflexive accountability. Indeed, Athenian litigants often warned that bystanders would observe and judge how jurors voted, ⁶⁶ though there is no evidence that the secret ballot was compromised. In the aforementioned speech, however, Demosthenes is not merely threatening his jurors with social stigma or the shaming gaze of others: He is counseling them to avoid the shame of being unable to offer a reasonable justification of one’s actions, where “reasonable” entails what is intelligible and persuasive to one’s peers. ⁶⁷ Ideally, this counsel initiates a democratic mode of internal deliberation, irrespective of whether a post-trial interrogation will come to pass thereafter.

Whether bystanders, post-trial interrogations, or gossip functioned as direct, external “checks” on otherwise unaccountable jurors is a matter of significant debate. The prevalence of post-trial interrogation warnings in extant forensic oratory suggests that such questioning did occur; otherwise, the rhetorical appeal would fall flat. Likewise, references to bystanders “watching” and “judging” the jurors ⁶⁸ often implies subsequent questioning. While Lanni interprets these references as evidence of “a sort of informal social control, a compensation for the legal unaccountability of the jurors,” helping to “rectify a perceived weakness in Athenian democracy,” ⁶⁹ Landauer counters that ballot secrecy safeguarded democratic unaccountability by mitigating external social pressures. ⁷⁰ Lanni and Landauer’s disagreement is about mechanisms of control external to democratic deliberation and voting. My concern in this article is the internalization of Athens’ “culture of accountability” and the civic identity it cultivated—an identity to which litigants could appeal during the trial itself, irrespective of whether any post-trial interrogation happened to take place on a given day.

Unlike the ruling elite of nondemocratic regimes, who stand apart from their subjects, democratic citizens rule and are ruled in turn; they have social ties to friends, neighbors, and fellow citizen-rulers who will be affected by their political actions. The desire to sustain one’s intersubjectively and dialogically constituted identity, and to avoid the shame of failing to do so, is central to reflexive accountability. While such a desire may be common, its strength and power are cultivated: It depends on the broader political community’s formal and informal accountability practices that place value on giving an account of one’s actions and habituate citizens to regard that capacity as integral to their identity. In a democracy, the internalization of this identity and its attendant forms of shame condition elite rhetorical strategies for addressing a formally unaccountable audience. The Athenian case indicates the important consequences of this kind of relational identity for political rhetoric, deliberation, and accountability.

Conclusion

Reflexive accountability is a democratic ideal that emerges from a reconstruction of Athenian judicial deliberation and its political intimations. As a deliberative practice, reflexive accountability will exist in varying degrees and is difficult to measure; as a democratic ideal, reflexive accountability deepens our understanding of the conditions for a more responsible democratic politics grounded in the recognition that citizens must enjoy the privilege of unaccountability and that most citizens will participate in democracy as members of an audience, listening and responding to elite speech.

As we have seen, reflexive accountability exists at the intersection of (and facilitates) two forms of political representation, construed as follows. First, jurors were expected and encouraged to vote in the city’s interest and on behalf of (hyper) others not present. Hannah Pitkin’s formulation of representation as “acting in the interest of the represented, in a manner responsive to them,” ⁷¹ illuminates this aspect of the juror’s role. An additional representative aspect of the juror’s role becomes legible when we assume a constructivist view of representation. A constructivist approach, as Matt Simonton has recently put it in his discussion of Athenian democracy, treats representation as an “open-ended process” whereby speakers make representative claims about their audience’s political identity, and audience members critically respond to those claims by affirming or rejecting them. ⁷² Because questions of political identity undergird questions of criminality and political interest, and because Athenian litigants consistently frame the stakes of each trial in terms of maintaining Athenian identity, jurors are tasked with affirming or rejecting competing representations of “who we [the dēmos] are” when they cast their ballots.

An important feature of the constructivist model of representation is that the “process of identity-formation . . . features agency on the part of both political actor and potential constituency.” ⁷³ This process is “dynamic, performative, and—crucially—partially constitutive of the very groups that populate the political landscape.” ⁷⁴ In other words, both the speaker and his audience participate in this relational process of identity-formation, and those with decision-making power (i.e., the receptive and responsive audience present) “authorize” a particular and competing representation when they vote in favor of a speaker’s account. This relational dynamic is integral to reflexive accountability because elite speech occasions the voting audience member’s activity of imagining how he would defend his vote when pressed.

I want to make clear, however, that reflexive accountability also exceeds the bilateral constructivist model. When the litigant or elite speaker asks his empowered audience, “What will you say to your sons, wives, neighbours?” he relinquishes some control over the representation of the dēmos and its laws or ideals that he has endeavored to craft during his speech and encouraged them to affirm through their vote. By directing the audience’s attention to the questioning of others, the speaker creates an opening in the edges of his own narrative through which the (imagined) voices and expectations of others may enter. The individual citizen listening to the speech is invited to imagine his brother’s conception of civic identity, or his wife’s expectations of the law, or another citizen’s idea of hubris, and consider whether he could defend affirming or rejecting the speaker’s position to them, given the commitments they hold and expect him to uphold when he votes. While the locus of reflexive accountability is the ordinary citizen holding himself accountable to other members of the community, it is initiated by elite rhetoric and enabled by a web of social and political relations. In a democratic regime, the speaker and his audience enjoy power and authority that circulate, and they seek to maintain a political identity that is intersubjectively constituted; reflexive accountability manifests this situation.

Reflexive accountability is distinctly democratic: It is possible only in regimes of political equals who are expected to use their power to advance public interest and who hold themselves to be answerable to other members of the community. This accountability mechanism is not, of course, functionally equivalent to formal political accountability mechanisms that might issue in state-sanctioned punishment, which in Athens were directed at magistrates and politically active individuals. By introducing this concept, I do not seek to challenge the important observation that there was an essential asymmetry between elites and ordinary citizens at the heart of Athenian accountability politics. I do suggest, however, that this concept helps us to identify a distinctive feature of democratic practice and a potentially useful indicator of a democratic regime’s health. Reflexive accountability makes legible elements of Athenian democratic practice that figuring the people as a unitary, unaccountable actor obscures—namely, the self-understanding of the citizen-judge, his deliberative process as facilitated by elite orators, and his relationship and responsibility to those affected by his decisions. If, and when, the Athenian dēmos judged and acted like a tyrant, it did not fulfill its democratic role as supreme political power. Instead, it acted like a tyrant and could be (and was) criticized accordingly.

The paradigmatic scene of Athenian democratic politics was elite orators addressing large, empowered audiences. Reflexive accountability manifests a democratic politics that remains relevant today, one that requires neither transcending political rhetoric and personal interest—such as we find in Rousseau’s vision of popular sovereignty—nor the deliberative democrat’s small, face-to-face assemblies. As Simonton observes, Aristotle thought “the most pressing danger for an ancient democracy . . . is not that a demagogue will become a tyrant as elites stand by helpless, but that the demagogues will make the dēmos itself a kind of collective tyrant.” ⁷⁵ How does a demagogue “make” the dēmos into a tyrant? This analysis suggests that one of the ways demagogues fuel citizens’ tyrannical impulses is by feigning to liberate some from their responsibility to others, including their answerability to others and their need to offer a defense. Elites play an essential role in generating reflexive accountability by encouraging ordinary citizens to hold themselves accountable and to fulfill their representative role.