For most of human history, demokratia — rule by the demos, the common people — was a slur. Aristocrats used it to describe what would happen if their slaves and farmers ever got their hands on the levers of the city: mob rule, the confiscation of property, the collapse of every decent thing. In Athens, between roughly 508 and 322 BCE, this nightmare was deliberately and self-consciously constructed. The reforms of Cleisthenes dissolved the old kinship tribes and reorganized the citizenry into artificial districts so that no clan could dominate. About forty thousand adult male citizens met in the Ekklesia, the assembly on the Pnyx hill, raised hands, and decided foreign policy, capital cases, and the price of grain. Most officials were chosen not by election but by lottery, on the radical theory that any citizen of decent character should be able to do the job for a year — and that election, by contrast, favored the rich and famous.
It was a radically narrow democracy by modern standards. Women, resident foreigners, and slaves were all excluded, and the enslaved were a large fraction of the population — by some estimates a third or more, the labor that freed citizens to spend their days in politics. It was also rowdy, expensive, easily swayed by demagogues like Cleon, and capable of monstrous decisions: in 406 BCE it executed its own victorious generals after Arginusae, and in 399 it condemned Socrates. Twice — in 411 and 404 — it voted away its own existence under oligarchic coups, and twice it clawed democracy back. Yet for two centuries this restless system produced more philosophy, theatre, mathematics, and political innovation per capita than any community before or since. The puzzle the Athenians left for posterity — can ordinary people, given good information and time to deliberate, govern themselves better than experts can? — has never been settled. Madison thought no, and built machinery to filter the popular will. Jefferson thought yes. The argument continues in every debate over referendums, juries, and citizens' assemblies.
Every modern democracy is a Madison-style compromise: representation, not direct rule; elected experts, not lotteries; rights protected against transient majorities. Those filters were deliberate distrust of the Athenian original. Whether they have hollowed out the demos itself — whether citizens now experience politics as something done to them by distant professionals rather than something they do — is the open wound of contemporary politics. The recent revival of randomly selected citizens' assemblies, from Ireland's abortion convention to French climate panels, is in effect an attempt to smuggle the Athenian lottery back into the machine.