Politics predates human society – all primates have a hierarchy of some kind. We, too, have been struggling to find a system of authority that would suit the majority or at least the few influential individuals who would have the power to suppress any possible uprisings of the crowd.
The eldest and probably most primitive form of government grew out of tribal organization in which there elders were the leaders and the power would be passed on to the siblings, usually male – a monarchy. This has existed in one form or another for at least the last 5000 years of human history.
It seems like the first ones to challenge this concept were the ancient Greeks who formed the first European civilization. It was them who came up with the idea of democracy, literally translating as ‘people’s power’. It was way more extreme than the form we see nowadays, it was literally the crowd who had the power to take decisions. The equivalent of today’s Parliament meetings where their ‘ecclesiae’ otherwise known as assemblies that took place regularly and every Athenian male citizen of age was expected to attend no matter what his social or financial situation was – in fact the modern day word ‘idiot’ comes from their ‘ideotus’ which was used when talking about someone who doesn’t take any interest in public affairs.…
