The Pnyx and the Agora: How Ancient Athens Built Democracy Into Its Public Spaces
The Pnyx and the Agora (2016)
Richard Sennett traces democracy's roots to two Athenian spaces: the Pnyx, an open-air theatre where citizens fixed their gaze on a single speaker and held one another accountable for their words, and the agora, a busy town square where commerce, worship, and law courts overlapped, teaching people to navigate difference. Sennett argues that today's democratic deliberation needs the theatre's sustained attention more than ever, rather than the distracted "surfing" of social reality.
The most urgent social requirement for democratic deliberation today is that people concentrate rather than "surf" social reality.