Daily Inspiration Quote by Robert A. Dahl

“Glorious” is the trapdoor word here: it flatters the past just enough to make the verdict sting. Robert A. Dahl, a political scientist who spent his career measuring democracy against its own ideals, isn’t nostalgic or contemptuous. He’s performing a controlled demolition. By granting the city-state its due - civic intensity, participatory myth, the romance of Athens - he clears the rhetorical space to deliver a harder claim: political forms don’t get to survive on prestige.

The intent is diagnostic, not elegiac. “Obsolete” sounds like a technical term because it is one. Dahl is importing the language of institutions-as-tools: once the environment changes, the tool no longer fits the hand. The subtext is that democracy, if it’s going to be more than a museum piece, has to scale and adapt. The city-state model depended on small populations, direct participation, tight boundaries of belonging, and exclusions that were not incidental but structurally necessary. You can’t simply enlarge that template without running into representation, bureaucracy, pluralism, and the modern state’s capacity to project power.

Context matters: Dahl wrote in the shadow of mass society, global conflict, and the administrative state, when “the people” became too numerous to gather in one place and politics became inseparable from complex economies and far-reaching military commitments. The line quietly punctures a recurring modern fantasy: that we can revive “real” democracy by reenacting its ancient stage set. Dahl’s point is colder and more useful. Admiration is not a governance strategy, and an institution’s beauty is irrelevant if its mechanics can’t meet contemporary demands.