History of Democracy

The main focus in this course, broadly, was the concept that ideas drive events. It seems sufficient to begin by reflecting back to one of the first few classes. Somewhere in that hour and a half class, I remember learning about educational perennialism. This is the notion, derived from Robert Hutchins, that there are a group of ideas that keep coming back and remain relevant in our present and in our future; in other words, it is the concept that history is repeated. The idea behind this concept is to not only process the facts of history, but to think critically of ideas in light of a brighter future, much like the Socratic method. Thus, this course does not serve the purpose of merely memorizing names and dates, but rather studying ideas derived from original source documents, to see how those ideas have impacted human history. Your professor continually expressed the importance of history; in quote, it is the “living, breathing story of who we are and how we got exactly where we are today.” Within this concept is the fact that our families experienced many of these historical events, and that if any of our ancestors did anything differently, we may not exist.
After setting this foundation of common ground, we learned about Democracy’s history and development. One of the first documents we looked at was the Thebian Dialogue. First, let me explain the guts of the piece. To put it simply it is a document where two men argue over two forms of government, democracy and despotism. Theseus was arguing in favor of democracy whereas the Herald, also known as a messenger, was arguing in favor of despotism. After a dialogue of opposing views, it set a foundation of ideas that we can fall back on and refer to in the further developing of government. With this, too, brought to light the fact that although democracy allows every individual to contribute their opinions, it does not guarantee us any substantive rights. This is due to the absence of liberty, which was