AT times the ancient Athenians seem to have conceived of their democracy almost as a religious rite.
It was as if it disclosed some elusive truths about human nature and sociability which are otherwise obscure to us, and become visible only in the mystic spinning of the political top.
It was they who brought into the world the beautiful idea that the individual human mind can work, as it were, in concert, and that a people - for better and for worse, depending upon how the demon takes them - can in effect think together, in some kind of celestial thought-space that spans itself above our heads.
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