Matt Simonton on Democracy

Matt Simonton is Associate Professor of Classics at Princeton University.  He is a historian of the ancient Greek world with interests in political institutions, social conflict, the history of political thought, and applied social science methodologies. With an eye toward pursuing big-picture questions about democratization, authoritarianism, and populism across historical contexts and cultures, Simonton's graduate training included a Master’s degree in Political Science with a concentration in Comparative Politics.  He earned degrees from Washington University in 2006 and Stanford in 2012.

Simonton's first book, Classical Greek Oligarchy: A Political History (Princeton University Press, 2017), explored the phenomenon of oligarchy, or the “rule of the few,” and specifically how wealthy ruling elites designed institutions to keep themselves united and their subject populations divided.

Currently at work on multiple projects, most centrally a political and cultural history of the practice of demagoguery in ancient Greece, Simonton's book, Ancient Greek Democracies, is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press’s “Key Themes in Ancient History” series; it offers a new synthetic overview of the characteristic institutions and ideology (but also the striking diversity) of democratic constitutions across the Greek world over the half-millennium from ca. 500 BCE to ca. 100 CE.