To help us see how democracy came to be, we have only shards of ancient Athens, only pieces of the past. Many pieces are missing of that vanished ancient world. The ancient Athenians must be examined on their own terms based on what little we can know about them. Through our modern eyes, we see their failings, including their exclusion of women, immigrants, and those they enslaved from their first democracy. Yet for those who were included in it, their democracy was considerably more democratic than the democracies of today, especially in its direct form of participatory governance through the use of the random selection of sortition. Following the fall of the Mycenaean civilization in the twelfth century bc, Greece entered several centuries of an Archaic Age before beginning slowly to emerge from darkness. Athens had survived the fall, but the consolidation of the city-state and its emergence into regional influence took hundreds of years. Dominated by an agricultural aristocracy, the Athenians were riven by social and economic strife. In succession, Draco and then Solon were enlisted by the Athenians to help resolve the divisions among them, with mixed success. Cultural unity of the Athenian people developed under the tyrannical rule of Peisistratus. Following the death of Piesistratus, and the exile of his oppressive son, the Athenians were ready to seek self-rule. They found a leader in the visionary Athenian aristocrat Cleisthenes.

“Mutual Coercion, Mutually Agreed Upon” (the phrase comes from Garrett Hardin's classic essay "Tragedy of the Commons") sees the democratic reforms and social reorganization of Attica by the Athenian statesman Cleisthenes in 508 BCE as a case study in systems leveraging. Cleisthenes’s reforms are situated in a nexus of Presocratic (Pythagorean) thinking about limit (peras) and in the context of ideas that circulated at the time under the banners of isonomy (isonomia) and harmony (harmonia). The ancient Athenians, newly freed from political tyranny and the social upheaval of 508, recognized the intrinsic value of limits and restraint and built them into the structures of democratic life. Their example, I argue further, stands as a challenge to environmental and social problems faced by democratic regimes today.