Having defined the concept of democracy against itself in theoretical terms, the following chapters will each explore how a different democracy acted, or is in the process of acting, against itself in practice. Why it is important to ground our analysis with empirical examples is clear enough. Conceptually, as the previous chapter demonstrated, it is not too difficult to make the case – several different varieties of cases, in fact – that democracies are apt to self-destruct. The logic of democracy against itself seems to make a lot of sense when viewed purely from a theoretical vantage point. But politics in reality is a great deal more messy and illogical. Often, there is very little sense to be made from what happens in the political arena. Things that are ostensibly the same on paper may actually turn out to be quite different. More importantly, only on the rarest occasions is there just one overarching reason or factor behind why something occurred the way it did. Explanations and motives are complicated and multifarious. What this means for the concept of democracy against itself is that we can never assume it materialises in the same way, for the same reasons, for all democracies. Moreover, we cannot in our attempt to study democracy against itself examine endogenous factors without also referring to the numerous exogenous influences at play. Contextual factors are always important, even if it is the citizens and the institutions of democracy that are the most immediate impetuses behind democide. To this end, the chapters that follow will analyse, compare and then contrast how a number of archetypal democracies, and the societies in which they emerged, could be said to have acted against themselves in distinctly different yet detrimental ways.

The first democracy to receive this scrutiny is ancient Athens. Arguably the first of the great democracies of Western civilisation, Athens was home not so much to one as to a sequence of democracies which existed from 508/7 BC to 322 BC. Anyone who has ever studied the history of democracy will know something of the rise of democracy in the ancient city-state of Athens toward the end of the sixth century BC.