By the time we left the museum late in the afternoon, we were emotionally exhausted. There is a particular kind of fatigue that comes from spending hours in the company of human cruelty and political fanaticism. It is not merely intellectual. One carries it physically. We walked through the city center almost in silence.

Then, gradually, the atmosphere changed. We began to hear music and shouting. Streets were filled with people. Colors appeared everywhere. At first, we assumed that soccer fans were celebrating a victory. It took us several minutes to realize that we had walked into the Berlin Pride parade.

Neither of us had ever seen a Pride celebration before. We were therefore encountering it without preconceptions, and perhaps for that reason its effect on us was so powerful. Looking back, I find it difficult to describe exactly what happened. Nothing in particular caught my attention. I remember no speech, no slogan, no individual participant. What remains with me is a general impression, almost a sensation: the feeling that after spending an entire day contemplating the history of unfreedom, we had suddenly found ourselves in the presence of freedom itself.

When we returned to the hotel that evening, I remember saying that a parade had somehow succeeded in lifting from our shoulders the burden of sixty years of German totalitarianism. This was, of course, an exaggeration. History cannot be erased by an afternoon celebration. Yet there was something profoundly revealing in the contrast. A few hours earlier we had been examining political systems built upon obedience, conformity, and the suppression of difference. Now we were watching thousands of people publicly asserting their right to live as they wished and to stop apologizing for it. The connection between the two experiences seemed obvious.

It was only much later that I realized why so many people react negatively to Pride. Most critics imagine that what troubles them is sexuality. In reality, what troubles them is freedom.

The easiest way to see this is to listen carefully to the language they employ. They rarely speak about rights, constitutional principles, or equal citizenship. Instead, they complain about “provocation.” They insist that people should be more discreet. They object to visibility. They speak vaguely about moral decline, social disintegration, or the collapse of traditional values. What unites these complaints is not sexuality as such, but discomfort with individuals who refuse to organize their lives according to established expectations.

This discomfort is hardly new. Historically, demands for conformity have always been justified through the language of public morality, social order, religious truth, or collective necessity. The specific vocabulary changes. The underlying impulse remains remarkably constant. Free individuals are viewed as a problem whenever they exercise their freedom in ways that challenge prevailing norms.

What distinguishes a liberal society from an illiberal one is not the absence of such sentiments. Every society contains people who fear social change, dislike difference, or feel threatened by unfamiliar ways of living. The real distinction lies elsewhere. Liberal societies refuse to grant those sentiments political authority. They do not ask whether a particular way of life offends the majority. They ask whether free individuals respect the equal rights of others. If the answer is yes, the discussion is essentially over.

Critics often accuse liberals of inconsistency at this point. If we demand respect for everyone, are we not also obliged to respect those who disapprove of Pride? The answer is no. Liberalism requires respect for persons, not for every opinion they happen to hold. A bigot enjoys exactly the same rights as everyone else. What he does not enjoy is a right to have his prejudices accommodated. A person offended by Pride is entitled to his feelings, just as anyone is entitled to hold mistaken views. But he is not entitled to demand that others curtail their freedom in order to spare him offense. In a free society, offense is not an argument. It is simply a fact about someone’s emotional state.

This point is often misunderstood because liberty itself is misunderstood. Many people continue to believe that freedom is valuable only when exercised in ways they personally approve of. Yet a freedom that protects only approved behavior is not freedom at all. Nobody requires legal protection in order to conform. The entire purpose of liberty is to protect conduct that others dislike, disapprove of, ridicule, or condemn.

Seen from this perspective, Pride acquires a significance that extends far beyond questions of sexuality. What is being celebrated is not merely the right of gay men, lesbians, bisexuals, or transgender individuals to live openly. What is being celebrated is a more general principle: the right of human beings to define for themselves the shape of their own lives.

That principle lies at the heart of the liberal tradition. John Stuart Mill understood this better than anyone. The central argument of On Liberty is not simply that individuality is desirable. It is that societies prosper when individuals are free to experiment with different ways of living. Individuality is not merely a personal preference; it is a social good. It underlies freedom of conscience, freedom of expression, freedom of association, and every other liberty worth defending. It is also precisely what authoritarian movements, regardless of ideological persuasion, seek to suppress.

For this reason I have never regarded Pride primarily as a movement about identity. Its deeper significance lies elsewhere. It is one of the most visible contemporary expressions of a much older struggle between autonomy and conformity, between individual self-government and collective control. The participants may not describe it in these terms, and many would probably reject such a philosophical interpretation altogether. Nevertheless, that is what makes the event politically important.

What we witnessed in Berlin was not simply a celebration. It was a public demonstration of a society confident enough to allow its citizens to live openly as themselves. After a century marked by repeated attempts to subordinate individuals to grand ideological projects, that confidence seemed neither trivial nor inevitable.

Indeed, it struck me then, and it strikes me still, as one of the clearest signs of a genuinely free society.

When Crete is set free, I shall laugh.

Nikos Kazantzakis, Freedom or Death [Captain Michalis, 1953, ch. 3]

Crete did not enter the Greek state in 1830. That exclusion shaped the island’s nineteenth-century history.

Between the outbreak of the Greek War of Independence in 1821 and the establishment of the autonomous Cretan State in 1898, the island passed through repeated phases of rebellion, repression, reform, and renewed revolt. These episodes are usually treated as separate uprisings (in 1821-30, 1841, 1858, 1866-69, 1878, 1889, and 1895-98) but they are better understood as stages in a continuous political transformation. What began as a local extension of the Greek Revolution gradually became a persistent international problem, shaped by the interaction of Cretan Christian mobilization, Ottoman reform, Greek irredentism, and Great Power diplomacy. By 1898, formal union with Greece remained unrealized, but Ottoman authority on the island had been drastically curtailed and increasingly confined to the realm of formal sovereignty.

Crete mattered because its revolts repeatedly transformed local grievances into questions of European diplomacy. The island connected several problems that nineteenth-century diplomacy could not easily separate. It was an Ottoman province with a Christian majority, a large Muslim minority, a strategic position in the eastern Mediterranean, and a population increasingly drawn toward the Greek kingdom. For Istanbul, Crete was a test of imperial reform. For Athens, it was an unfinished national claim. For the Great Powers, it was a danger point in the Eastern Question.

Ottoman Crete and the Origins of the Conflict

To understand why Crete became so politically volatile, one must begin with the island’s unusually dense combination of religious division, local autonomy, armed social organization, and strategic geography. Unlike many other regions incorporated into the Greek kingdom after independence, Crete possessed a substantial Muslim population. The origins of this community lay not primarily in settlement from Anatolia but in conversion. During the centuries of Ottoman rule, significant numbers of local Christians had adopted Islam. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, Muslims constituted approximately two-fifths of the island’s inhabitants, although regional variations were considerable.

This Muslim population was not an alien colonial caste in any simple sense. Most Muslim Cretans were locally rooted, Greek-speaking, and tied to the same village economies and regional networks as their Christian neighbors. This made the conflict more intimate and, ultimately, more tragic. The struggle over Crete was not only a contest between an imperial state and a subject Christian population; it was also a struggle over the future hierarchy of an island society whose communities had long lived together but increasingly imagined incompatible political futures.

The conflict therefore cannot be reduced to a war between Greeks and Turks. It divided communities that shared language, locality, and, in many cases, ancestry. Religious affiliation rather than ethnicity served as the principal marker of communal identity. Like the broader Ottoman system, Cretan society was organized around confessional distinctions that structured legal status and access to power.

The island’s economy remained overwhelmingly agrarian. Large estates existed alongside smallholding agriculture, while mountainous terrain encouraged localism and fostered traditions of armed resistance. The rugged interior, particularly the White Mountains of western Crete, would repeatedly provide refuge for insurgents throughout the nineteenth century. Geography alone did not produce rebellion, but it made rebellion difficult to suppress.

The Revolution of 1821 and the Birth of the Cretan Question

The Greek Revolution reached Crete in 1821 under conditions that favored the Ottoman defenders. Crete lacked the naval resources of Hydra, Spetses, and Psara, and its mountainous insurgent zones were separated from the principal centers of revolutionary decision-making in the Peloponnese. Early revolutionary organization therefore depended heavily on local assemblies and committees, especially in western Crete, where Sfakia and the mountain districts provided both fighters and political leadership. The creation of revolutionary bodies such as the Cretan “Chancellery” and later assemblies reflected the effort to give the revolt institutional form despite the island’s isolation.

The response was swift and brutal. Executions, reprisals, and massacres occurred across the island as Ottoman authorities sought to prevent the emergence of another revolutionary stronghold. Although the revolt achieved some local successes, it never secured the sustained external support necessary to overcome Ottoman military superiority. Crete’s geographical isolation posed a formidable obstacle. Unlike the Peloponnese, which became the core territory of the emerging Greek state, Crete depended heavily upon maritime assistance from the mainland and the islands. Such assistance proved inconsistent and insufficient.

The defeat of the Cretan revolt had consequences beyond the battlefield. It created a political problem that would dominate the island’s history for the remainder of the century. When the independent Kingdom of Greece emerged through the London Protocol of 1830 and the subsequent diplomatic settlements, Crete remained outside its borders. The decision reflected strategic calculations by the Great Powers but also local realities. Britain, France, and Russia regarded Crete as too important to be transferred to the new kingdom. Its location at the crossroads of the eastern Mediterranean endowed it with significance far exceeding its size.

For Cretan Christians, the exclusion represented a profound disappointment. They had participated in the same revolutionary struggle as other Greeks yet remained under Ottoman rule. From this moment onward, the island occupied an ambiguous position: culturally and politically connected to the Greek national movement but diplomatically separated from the Greek state.

The Egyptian Interlude

The settlement of the 1830s introduced another unexpected chapter. In recognition of his assistance during the Greek War of Independence, the Sultan had granted Crete to Mehmed Ali, the ruler of Egypt. Between 1830 and 1840, the island experienced a period of Egyptian administration.

Modern historians differ in their assessment of Egyptian rule. Some have emphasized efforts at administrative modernization and economic development, while others note the heavy taxation and coercive practices that accompanied reform. Whatever its achievements, Egyptian authority failed to secure legitimacy among much of the Christian population.

When European intervention forced Mehmed Ali to relinquish his gains in the Levant, Crete returned to direct Ottoman administration. The transition generated renewed hopes that the island might finally be attached to Greece. Those hopes were quickly disappointed. For the powers, the issue was not whether Cretan Christians wished to join Greece, but whether such a transfer would disturb the fragile eastern Mediterranean balance.

The result was the revolt of 1841, the first major post-independence uprising. Although rapidly suppressed, it established a pattern that would recur throughout the century. Periods of relative calm alternated with moments of insurrection, each rebellion revealing the inability of Ottoman authority to secure lasting consent among large segments of the population.

Reform and Revolution in the Tanzimat Era

In the middle decades of the century, Ottoman officials tried to stabilize Crete through reform. The Tanzimat reforms sought to strengthen the state through legal modernization and greater equality among subjects. In theory, these measures offered an alternative to nationalist separatism. If Christians could enjoy security, representation, and equal rights within the empire, perhaps demands for independence might diminish. Crete became an important testing ground for this strategy.

The uprising of 1858 compelled the Ottoman government to grant significant concessions. Christians obtained greater access to local administration, taxation was modified, and restrictions on religious practice were eased. These measures appeared to address some longstanding grievances.

In Crete, however, reform changed the political habits of the Christian population. By expanding participation in public life, the Ottoman state helped create a politically mobilized Christian elite capable of articulating broader demands. Local leaders acquired experience in administration. Rather than integrating Crete more firmly into the empire, reform increasingly encouraged expectations that exceeded what the empire was willing or able to provide.

The result was a politics of escalating expectation. Concessions that might once have appeared sufficient came to be treated as inadequate once Cretan Christians had acquired experience in petitioning but also assembly politics and local administration.

The Great Revolt of 1866-1869

The revolt of 1866-69 carried the Cretan question into European public opinion more effectively than any earlier uprising. Its causes were local as much as national: frustration with the limited implementation of reform, conflict over taxation and administration, resentment of Muslim notables, and growing confidence that the international climate might favor the principle of nationality after Italian unification and the transfer of the Ionian Islands to Greece in 1864.

The rebellion spread rapidly across the island. Insurgent forces established provisional administrations, while volunteers and supplies arrived from Greece. The conflict soon assumed the character of a prolonged guerrilla war.

Arkadi Monastery became the symbolic center of the revolt. In November 1866, Ottoman forces besieged the monastery, where combatants and civilians had taken refuge. Facing defeat, the defenders detonated the powder magazine. The explosion killed hundreds and immediately transformed Arkadi from a military episode into a political symbol.

News of Arkadi circulated through European newspapers and philhellenic networks. Many compared the defenders to the heroes of Missolonghi. Philhellenic committees raised funds and organized support. Intellectuals across Europe denounced Ottoman actions.

Arkadi moved European publics more than it moved European governments. Sympathy for the Cretan cause expanded dramatically, but governments remained unwilling to support union with Greece. Strategic considerations continued to outweigh moral outrage.

After three years of fighting, the revolt ended without achieving its primary objective. Militarily, the Ottomans had prevailed. Politically, however, the rebellion demonstrated that Crete could not be governed indefinitely through coercion alone.

The Organic Law and the Pact of Halepa

The Ottoman response was the Organic Law of 1868. The Organic Law stopped short of autonomy. Still, it admitted that Crete required exceptional treatment. Its importance lay less in the specific balance of offices it created than in the precedent it established: Cretan disorder would now be answered not only by repression, but by constitution-making.

A decade later, the Eastern Crisis of 1875-78 created another opportunity for change. The revolt of 1878 formed part of the wider upheaval that accompanied the Russo-Turkish War and the restructuring of the Balkans at the Congress of Berlin. As Ottoman authority weakened throughout the Balkans, rebellion returned to Crete. The resulting settlement, known as the Pact of Halepa (1878), represented the most ambitious experiment in self-government the island had yet experienced.

Under the new arrangements, Christians obtained a greatly expanded role in local administration. The governor-general could be Christian, representative institutions gained enhanced authority, and civil liberties expanded. In practical terms, Crete became something approaching a semi-autonomous province.

Halepa looked, for a time, like a stable settlement. It proved instead to be an interval. The Pact succeeded in creating a more representative political system. It failed because the very success of that system accelerated the growth of nationalist politics. Elections and local assemblies as well as experience in administrative participation provided new arenas in which demands for Enosis (Union) could be articulated.

For roughly a decade, the Halepa regime appeared to vindicate the strategy of reform. Political life expanded, local newspapers multiplied, and a new generation of lawyers, journalists, and administrators entered public affairs. Yet the very success of the experiment exposed its limits. Christian leaders increasingly regarded autonomy as a stepping stone rather than a final settlement, while many Muslims viewed the new order with growing apprehension. Recurrent disputes between local representatives and Ottoman authorities, combined with periodic outbreaks of communal tension, gradually eroded confidence in the viability of the Halepa system.

This arrangement could not hold. Every concession made Ottoman sovereignty less meaningful. Every effort to restore imperial authority provoked renewed resistance. The fragility of the arrangement became evident during the disturbances of 1889, when renewed unrest prompted the Ottoman government to suspend important elements of the Halepa regime.

Venizelos and the Final Crisis

The closing decades of the century witnessed the emergence of a new generation of political leaders. Among them, none would prove more important than Eleftherios Venizelos.

Born in 1864, Venizelos belonged to a generation shaped not by the memory of 1821 but by the experience of repeated constitutional struggles. His political formation occurred within the institutions created by the Pact of Halepa. He understood both the possibilities and limitations of autonomy. Venizelos was formed in this world of assemblies, petitions, armed pressure, and diplomatic calculation. The Cretan struggle taught him that national aims could not be achieved by insurrection alone; they required institutions, international timing, and most importantly a disciplined political leadership.

By the 1890s, the Ottoman government increasingly sought to curtail some of the concessions granted in 1878. Political polarization intensified. Communal violence between Christians and Muslims escalated. Confidence in the possibility of coexistence within an Ottoman framework diminished rapidly.

The crisis that began in 1895 and culminated in 1897-98 represented the final collapse of the Halepa order. Venizelos and other leaders established a revolutionary administration at Akrotiri. Greece, under intense pressure from public opinion, intervened on behalf of the insurgents.

The intervention contributed directly to the outbreak of the Greco-Turkish War of 1897, which ended in a humiliating Greek defeat. Yet the war also forced the powers to address the Cretan question separately from the broader conflict between Greece and the Ottoman Empire.

The Road to Autonomy

The Great Powers confronted an increasingly intractable situation. Continued Ottoman administration seemed incapable of restoring order. Annexation by Greece threatened regional instability. A compromise therefore emerged.

In 1898, Crete became an autonomous state under international protection and nominal Ottoman suzerainty. Ottoman troops withdrew. Prince George of Greece assumed office as High Commissioner.

The settlement was typical of nineteenth-century diplomacy. Rather than choosing between empire and nation-state, the powers created an intermediate solution. Yet despite its ambiguity, the political consequences were unmistakable. Ottoman rule had effectively ended. For the island’s Muslims, however, the same development appeared less as liberation than as the loss of the political framework that had guaranteed their security. Autonomy altered the communal balance irreversibly. As authority passed into predominantly Christian hands, many Muslims began to leave for other Ottoman territories. Crete thus followed a pattern that would become familiar in southeastern Europe: national self-government advanced as older multi-confessional societies contracted.

The autonomous state possessed its own institutions, administration, and political life. While sovereignty remained formally constrained, the foundations of self-government were firmly established. The remaining question was no longer whether Crete would separate from the Ottoman Empire, but when and under what circumstances it would unite with Greece.

Conclusion: The Success of a Long Revolution

The Cretan revolts look unsuccessful if each is judged separately. Viewed together, they changed the terms on which the island could be governed. Most Cretan uprisings failed in military terms. They were suppressed, compromised, or contained by diplomacy. Yet each crisis narrowed the range of possible futures. Ottoman officials could restore order temporarily, but only by granting reforms that enlarged Cretan political capacity. The Great Powers could prevent union with Greece, but only by accepting that direct Ottoman rule had become increasingly unworkable.

The autonomous state established in 1898 was therefore not an accidental compromise. It was the institutional outcome of decades of insurgency, reform, communal conflict, and international intervention. Formal union with Greece would come only in 1913, but the decisive transformation had already occurred. By the end of the nineteenth century, Crete had ceased to be governable as an Ottoman province and had entered the political orbit of the Greek nation-state.

Crete was therefore more than an episode in Greek irredentism. It formed part of the larger nineteenth-century passage from imperial rule to national politics in southeastern Europe and the eastern Mediterranean.

The text you have just read is an adapted and expanded version of two lectures I delivered in Crete in May 2026. I was invited by the Mayor of Apokoronas, Charalambos Koukianakis, to present a series of commemorative lectures marking three significant events in Cretan history (for the third lecture, see here).

The present essay draws on two of those talks. The first, delivered at Armenoi, examined the Cretan Revolution of 1821-1830 and the constitutional institutions created during the struggle. The second, delivered at Vamos, traced the longer history of the Cretan revolutions, culminating in the uprising of 1895-1896 and the political settlement that produced the Autonomous Cretan State in 1898.

I am grateful to Stavroula Psarrakou, a graduate student in Modern Greek History at the University of Athens, for her assistance with the research for these lectures.

The epigraph at the beginning of this article is drawn from Captain Michalis (Καπετάν Μιχάλης, 1953), Nikos Kazantzakis’ celebrated novel of revolutionary Crete. The quotation is taken from Jonathan Griffin’s English translation, published as Freedom or Death (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1955).

The song “When Crete Is Set Free” was composed in 1966 by Manos Hadjidakis for the stage adaptation of Kazantzakis’ novel, performed by the Greek Popular Theatre under the direction of Manos Katrakis. Its lyrics were assembled by Gerasimos Stavrou from passages and phrases drawn from the novel, which he selected and arranged into seven thematic units. In the video below, the song is performed by Nana Mouskouri and The Athenians on BBC Four (1973).

There are moments in history when an individual does not merely rise above his age but becomes the lens through which an entire age is understood. One such moment occurred in Athens in September 1910. Standing on a balcony overlooking Syntagma Square, Eleftherios Venizelos faced a crowd demanding a Constituent Assembly and, in the more radical expectations of the moment, the possible abolition of the monarchy and the drafting of an entirely new constitution. The atmosphere was charged with revolutionary energy. Greece, shaken by military humiliation, political stagnation, and the recent intervention of military officers in politics, appeared to be standing at the threshold of rupture.

Venizelos refused rupture. Striking the podium with his hand, he insisted that Greece did not need the destruction of the existing constitutional order but its revision. There would be no Constituent Assembly, only a Revisionary Assembly; no abolition of the Crown; no leap into constitutional uncertainty. Contemporary observers recalled that the thousands gathered in Syntagma Square suddenly fell silent. In that silence, as one historian memorably observed, Venizelos imposed himself upon the nation.

The significance of the episode lies less in its constitutional details than in what it reveals about Venizelos’ political temperament. Throughout his career he sought substantial reform while remaining wary of institutional rupture. He was neither a conservative defender of the status quo nor a revolutionary in the conventional sense. The tension between ambition and restraint would become one of the defining characteristics of his political career. In that intervention one can glimpse much of what made Venizelos the most consequential statesman in modern Greek history.

The question of why Nikolaos Papadakis spent decades studying, documenting, and interpreting Venizelos cannot be answered simply by invoking admiration for a great historical figure. Papadakis recognized in Venizelos a politician whose career raised many of the central questions of modern Greek history: the relationship between reform and nation-building, the limits of state power, and the opportunities and dangers created by international politics. He understood that through the life of Venizelos one could examine not only the biography of a leader but the making of modern Greece itself.

Papadakis was not simply a biographer, archivist, or admirer. As founder and long-serving director of the National Research Foundation “Eleftherios K. Venizelos,” he transformed the memory of Venizelos into a living institution. Through archival work, publications, exhibitions, conferences, educational initiatives, and a substantial two-volume biography exceeding 1,100 pages, he helped establish a scholarly infrastructure for the study of one of Europe’s most remarkable statesmen. His work belonged to the field of public history in the best sense of the term: not the simplification of the past for ceremonial use, but the disciplined preservation of historical memory through evidence, documentation, and interpretation.

Papadakis was drawn to Venizelos not because he regarded him as infallible but because he saw in him an unusually revealing historical figure. Few politicians have left such a deep imprint on both the territorial and institutional development of their country. For Papadakis, Venizelos was the principal architect of modern Greece: the statesman who presided over its dramatic territorial expansion, reshaped its governing institutions, and helped define its place within Europe and the eastern Mediterranean.

This claim may sound exaggerated to those unfamiliar with Greek history. Yet it is difficult to understand twentieth-century Greece without understanding Venizelos. His influence extends far beyond territorial expansion or the victories associated with the Balkan Wars. His deeper achievement was institutional. When Venizelos entered national politics in 1910, Greece remained a relatively weak Balkan kingdom, humiliated by defeat in the Greco-Turkish War of 1897 and burdened by administrative inefficiency, factional politics, and limited state capacity. Within a few years he had initiated a major constitutional revision, reorganized the military, modernized public administration, strengthened the judiciary, expanded public education, and attempted to create something that Greece had previously lacked: an effective modern state.

Since the rise of social history and historical sociology in the second half of the twentieth century, historians have generally become skeptical of explanations centered on individual statesmen. Economic development, class formation, demographic change, war, and international politics have increasingly displaced political biography from the center of historical explanation. The Greek case does not invalidate those approaches. It does, however, suggest that political leadership sometimes deserves more attention than recent historiography has been willing to grant it. Venizelos operated within constraints imposed by geography, finance, Great Power diplomacy, social conflict, and the long shadow of the Ottoman imperial collapse. Yet the Greek case suggests that political leadership can sometimes alter the pace, direction, and even the institutional consequences of broader historical processes. Venizelos did not create the forces transforming Greece and the eastern Mediterranean, but he proved unusually adept at mobilizing and directing them.

Venizelos understood something fundamental: national aspirations without institutions remain rhetoric. Territorial ambitions without administrative capacity remain fantasy. This was perhaps the first aspect of Venizelos that captivated Papadakis. Venizelos was not a nationalist of slogans. He understood that state-building precedes national greatness.

His second achievement was geopolitical. Under Venizelos, Greece ceased to be a passive observer of international developments and became an active participant in shaping them. Through alliances, diplomatic maneuvering, and strategic calculation, Greece emerged from the Balkan Wars with dramatically expanded territory and population. Thessaloniki, Macedonia, Epirus, Crete, and the islands of the eastern Aegean entered the Greek state through a combination of military success and diplomatic skill.

These outcomes were not accidental. They reflected a combination of diplomatic judgment and political calculation.

Venizelos possessed an unusually sophisticated understanding of international politics. Unlike many Balkan leaders of his generation, he recognized that national objectives could only be achieved through careful engagement with the broader European balance of power. He understood that military power alone was insufficient and that diplomacy was often decisive in translating military success into durable political gains. For this reason, Venizelos belongs in the same discussion as figures such as Cavour and Bismarck: statesmen who inherited countries that appeared too weak for their ambitions and left behind states fundamentally different from those they had found.

Yet comparison also has limits. Venizelos acted not in the context of a great power but within a small state whose fate depended heavily on international alignments. His genius lay partly in understanding that small states do not possess the luxury of autonomy in the same way as great powers. They must read the international system with unusual precision. Venizelos’ greatness was not only that he had a national vision, but that he knew how to attach that vision to favorable international circumstances.

Without Venizelos, twentieth-century Greece would almost certainly have been smaller, weaker, less consequential. But great statesmen are not judged solely by their victories. They are also judged by how they confront defeat and historical trauma.

Papadakis was particularly interested in the second half of Venizelos’ career: the aftermath of the Greek defeat in Asia Minor in 1922 (known in Greece as the Asia Minor Catastrophe), the Treaty of Lausanne, and the final phase of his political life. The Venizelos who emerged after 1922 was necessarily different from the politician of the Balkan Wars. The challenge was no longer expansion but reconstruction. The political task was to stabilize a state that had just experienced one of the greatest disasters in its modern history.

When Venizelos participated in the negotiations leading to the Treaty of Lausanne, he did so not as the representative of a victorious nation but as the representative of a traumatized one. The dream of a greater Greece in Asia Minor had collapsed. Hundreds of thousands of refugees had arrived in Greece. The economy was strained. Political divisions were profound. Yet Venizelos displayed a quality often overlooked in discussions of political leadership: the ability to recognize when an era has ended.

The Treaty of Lausanne represented a decisive acceptance of geopolitical reality. It abandoned the expansive ambitions associated with the nineteenth-century irredentist “Great Idea” and established the foundations of a more viable nation-state. This aspect of Venizelos’ career helps explain why Venizelos cannot be understood simply as a nationalist leader. He occupies an unusual position in Greek history. More than any other statesman he advanced the territorial ambitions associated with the Great Idea. Yet he also played a central role in managing the transition to a political order that could no longer be organized around those ambitions. In that sense, his career spans both the culmination of nineteenth-century Greek irredentism and the emergence of a more consolidated nation-state after 1922.

The same can be said of Venizelos’ final premiership between 1928 and 1932, often described as his “golden four-year period.” The label “golden four-year period” captures the scale of the government’s ambitions more successfully than it captures the difficulties it faced. The challenge facing Venizelos was formidable: integrating refugees, stabilizing public finances, rebuilding infrastructure, restoring Greece’s international standing, and redefining national objectives after one of the greatest disasters in modern Greek history.

What makes this period historically significant is not the absence of problems but the ambition of the response. Venizelos attempted something extraordinarily difficult: to transform defeat into a program of national reconstruction. The central shift was conceptual. The focus of Greek politics moved away from irredentist expansion and toward institutional consolidation. The goal was no longer to enlarge the state but to strengthen it.

Papadakis regarded this phase of Venizelos’ career as central to understanding his political legacy. It demonstrated a mature form of statesmanship. It also revealed the deeper meaning of Venizelian liberalism: not merely parliamentary rhetoric or party identity, but a governing project that linked national purpose to administrative capacity, economic modernization, educational reform, and international orientation.

Venizelos’ achievements make it tempting to overlook his limitations. Indeed, one of the most striking features of Venizelos’ political career was his confidence in his own judgment. This confidence was often the source of his success. Without it, many of his achievements would have been impossible. But it also carried risks.

The most difficult question concerns the decision to land Greek troops in Smyrna in 1919 and to pursue an increasingly ambitious military commitment in Asia Minor. Historians may disagree on the extent of Venizelos’ responsibility. The circumstances were extraordinarily complex, involving Allied diplomacy, Ottoman collapse, nationalist mobilization, domestic political conflict and the unstable aftermath of the First World War. Nevertheless, one may plausibly argue that Greece exceeded its material capacities. The country had already experienced successive wars. Its economy was strained. Its demographic and military resources were limited. The strategic objectives became increasingly detached from sustainable means.

Whether the Asia Minor campaign should be regarded as Venizelos’ greatest error remains a matter of debate. What is less debatable is that it exposed a recurring tension in his political career. Venizelos was often an acute judge of realities, yet at certain moments his confidence in his own judgment appears to have encouraged an underestimation of constraints. Large historical projects inevitably expose political leaders to forms of failure unavailable to more cautious figures. This does not excuse failure. It simply reminds us that historical significance cannot be measured solely by outcomes.

It was precisely these contradictions that attracted Papadakis. He saw in Venizelos a concentration of the central tensions of modern Greek history: modernization and division, triumph and catastrophe, realism and ambition, nation and state. Through Venizelos one can study not merely a politician but an entire historical experience.

Papadakis’ achievement was not that he persuaded everyone to admire Venizelos. Historians will continue to disagree about many aspects of his career, as they should. His achievement was different. He helped preserve the archival and institutional foundations that make serious disagreement possible. Research centers, archives, documentary collections, and scholarly networks rarely attract public attention, yet they are indispensable to the production of historical knowledge.

In that respect, Papadakis’ contribution extends beyond the study of Venizelos himself. It concerns the conditions under which historical knowledge is preserved and transmitted. Those conditions are often taken for granted until they disappear. Much of Papadakis’ life was devoted to ensuring that they did not.

In December 2023, the Greek Ministry of Education issued a call for proposals under the “Trust Your Stars” research program. The aim of the call was supposedly “to create the appropriate conditions for the utilization of existing scientific potential, the formation of new perspectives in their scientific and professional careers, and the implementation of research projects with a high impact on the economy and society by producing high-level research.” The call also contained other grandiose promises about hubs of “Excellence and Innovation.”

If you read the related articles in Kathimerini, you will already know how this initiative ended – in disaster. But this disaster had many victims. Not only excellence and science, but hundreds of young scientists who made the mistake of believing that the Greek state was reliable, giving up positions, missing opportunities, and taking risks to participate in this program. After 2.5 years, the Ministry of Education ended the program in an unacceptable manner, in a story unprecedented even for Greek standards.

In a nutshell: A total of 1,241 proposals were submitted and in July 2025 the results were announced. These were followed by reactions, as is the case in any competitive process. This time, the complaints were particularly intense for two reasons: because this was the largest funding program ever announced in Greece, but also because there were serious indications that AI was used in writing the evaluations of the proposals. More than 200 objections were eventually submitted, which, however, were never assessed, because the government chose silence until the issue went away. And what happened to those candidates who were informed that their proposal had been approved? Silence again. No official information, only rumors, leaks, and complete indifference.

I was one of those whose proposal was approved, even receiving a high ranking. So, allow me to describe to you the damage that this story caused, not so much to me, but to my younger colleagues. The reason I decided to describe my experience is simple: Those who decide on research policy usually have no idea what they are regulating, and how they affect the lives of young people, from whose work our society will move forward – because research policy is the crucial lever of economic development.

Countries with high investments in research show greater productivity, and create quality jobs with higher salaries, strengthening international competitiveness and innovation. Greece, however, is a typical case of research policy failure, because despite its high scientific potential, it has underinvested in research over time. You know the result: a massive outflow of scientists abroad, which is a national disaster.

I submitted the research proposal together with my colleague Katerina Galani (a professor at the University of Piraeus with a PhD from Oxford). We were fortunate to include in our team leading Greek scientists working in the country and abroad, as well as a strictly selected group of younger scientists. We worked on our proposal for months and then waited for over a year to learn the results, fighting tooth and nail to keep the team intact. The time came when we were informed that the proposal had been approved! We celebrated for a moment and then got to work. We recruited 30 scientists from six countries and committed them to our project.

Considering the Greek state trustworthy, we went on research trips at our own expense, gathering an invaluable treasure trove of evidence on Greek history, a treasure that will now remain untapped. But that is the least of it. The worst is the despair, the disappointment, and the anger of these young people who trusted us.

As I complete 25 years at a Greek public university, you will allow me to conclude with what I have learned over the years. This country not only does not support research – it undermines it. Not only does it not support excellence, it persecutes it. Not only does it not value investment in human capital, it systematically devalues it.

If you still have doubts, wait to see the official reaction to this cry of despair. It will be silence again.

In almost all opinion polls and in a recent Eurostat survey (fall 2025) we observe something very worrying: Greeks trust the justice system less than other Europeans. The reasons are many and in some cases unfair. The causes of distrust are often not due to system itself, but to the inability of many people to understand the way in which it operates.

However, especially for the Greek justice system, there are other causes that should concern us. The most important has to do with a domestic institutional shortfall: the Greek Constitution and constitutional practice do not fully ensure the independence of the justice system. The institutional framework does not minimize the incentives and opportunities to exercise undue political influence. This problem has many aspects, but it can be put simply: How easy is it for a judge – in any country, even in liberal democracies – to issue a decision that will displease the government? The judiciary is truly independent when we see that it does not hesitate, when necessary, to clash with the executive branch to defend the Constitution, the rule of law, rights and individual freedoms. The Greek judiciary should also be judged mainly by this criterion.

If there is a lack of trust today, the judiciary itself bears great responsibility. Because in a series of decisions which in many cases had political implications, it has caused reasonable concern. Let us look at the recent decision of the prosecutor of the Supreme Court not to reexamine the wiretapping scandal, arguing that no new evidence has emerged that would justify reopening the case. The Single-Member Misdemeanor Court of Athens where the wiretapping case was tried, had sent the case file back to the prosecutors for further investigation into possible responsibilities of other people, as well as for other possible offenses, such as espionage and illegal trafficking of surveillance software.

The problem is not that the case was archived, nor necessarily the refusal to investigate a case of such great political and institutional magnitude. The decision of the Supreme Court prosecutor, however, does not seem to meet the increased burden of justification required by the nature of this case. Given that respect for the institution of justice presupposes public scrutiny, the problem facing the domestic justice system is that the inability to persuade the public is beginning to take on institutional dimensions, as we observe in this case a rupture with the Prosecutor’s Office common practice: In cases of doubt, the usual practice tends to be to investigate further, not to close the case. When the opposite occurs, the burden of responsibility for full and convincing justification increases. Bypassing investigation requires stronger justification than a decision to investigate, while weaker justification will be judged with severity.

The basic question is simple: If the evidence that emerged after the Court of First Instance’s decision was unknown, why is it not considered sufficient to initiate a new investigation? If it was known, it is even worse, because it becomes difficult to understand the logic behind the prosecutor’s decision to file the case and confirm only now that the evidence was known.

We must be very careful in these matters. Prosecutorial judgments must be respected, but this respect must not be uncritical. The institutional stakes are very high. The wiretapping case does not simply concern individual criminal responsibilities. It simultaneously touches upon the confidentiality of communications and national security – that is, two of the most sensitive legal goods in a liberal democracy. Decisions with weak justification cannot convince a well-meaning observer, especially if he is also a lawyer with some experience. They undermine the trust of citizens which cannot be demanded, but must be earned.

This trust is not a given. In a state governed by the rule of law, it is tested precisely in legal cases where the most is at stake. In addition, judicial officers should not forget that the justice system, is not weakened by criticism. It is weakened when it cannot withstand this criticism.

Yet alongside this work I have maintained a habit that, at least superficially, appears to compete with it. Every day, regardless of pressure, deadlines, or fatigue, I read literature, systematically and with a certain stubbornness. Not just anything, but primarily literature of the nineteenth century.

This creates a real problem. Time is finite. If I read Gogol or Balzac for two hours, those are two hours not spent reading articles, working in the archives, or writing the second volume of my book. The question, therefore, is not rhetorical: is this time well spent?

The conventional answer – that literature gives us access to the “spirit of the age” – has never convinced me. It is too vague, and in practice too easy to ignore. It relegates literature to something like background music: enriching, perhaps, but ultimately optional. My own experience has led me to a different conclusion. The time spent reading literature is not merely justified; it is necessary – not because literature reflects historical reality, but because it helps us understand the conditions under which that reality becomes thinkable.

Let me put the point more sharply, and more personally.

Since 1993, during my graduate studies in Chicago, I made a commitment to devote at least two hours each day to reading literature. In late 2014, I set myself the goal of reading the major novels from the late eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century. By early 2018, I had completed this project. Around the same time, I became a full professor and decided to abandon my previous research agenda and focus exclusively on the Greek Revolution.

What followed was a period of unusually intense work. For three years (roughly until late 2021) I worked consistently at a pace that would now seem unsustainable, often approaching eighty hours per week in my university office. My sabbatical, as well as the pandemic, proved unexpectedly conducive to this effort.

It was also during this period that I became acutely aware of a gap in my background: Russian literature. Between 2014 and 2018 I had focused almost exclusively on English and French texts. I therefore decided to correct this imbalance while beginning my research on the Greek Revolution.

In retrospect, however, my approach was methodologically flawed. I began where I should have ended. I read War and Peace in its entirety – some 2,500 pages – and then plunged into Dostoevsky, not selectively but comprehensively. It was one of the most intellectually exhilarating experiences I have had. Yet for my purposes as a historian, it was also backward.

I had skipped the foundations.

What I needed was Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenev. What I had instead was the culmination of a tradition I did not yet fully understand. I had, in other words, entered the building from the roof.

When I eventually returned to Gogol – almost by accident, aided by travel, illness, and the sudden availability of uninterrupted time – the effect was immediate and disorienting. I read Dead Souls, the major short stories, and then The Government Inspector, a play I thought I already knew from the theater.

I did not.

Let me put the question in the form in which it first occurred to me:

Is it really possible to write seriously about the Greek Revolution, and especially about Russian policy in the 1820s, without having read The Government Inspector?

Of course it is possible. One can reconstruct Russian policy with considerable precision using the available sources. One can trace the transition from Alexander I to Nicholas I, the suppression of the Decembrists, the diplomatic maneuvering of Canning, the significance of Navarino, the Russo-Turkish War, and the subsequent realignments. One can produce excellent history without ever opening Gogol.

But one will miss something essential.

Because what Gogol offers is not information about policy, but access to a world: a bureaucratic culture structured by fear, performance, corruption, and a peculiar form of collective self-deception. The Government Inspector is not a document in the conventional sense, but it is evidence, evidence of how authority is perceived and misunderstood.

And the most revealing fact lies not in the play itself, but in its reception. A devastating satire of Russian bureaucracy is initially censored, then approved by Nicholas I, who attends the premiere, enjoys it, and compels his ministers to see it. This is not an anecdote one can safely ignore. It reveals something about the nature of power, about the limits of self-recognition within an autocratic system, and about the coexistence of repression and blindness.

It is difficult to extract that from the diplomatic correspondence I spent countless hours studying in the UK National Archives.

At this point one is tempted to say that literature “reflects” society. That formulation is misleading. Literature does not reflect; it distorts. It exaggerates, simplifies, moralizes, invents. Characters become types, plots become moral machines, and contingency is reorganized into narrative necessity.

And yet, when one reads extensively (not selectively, not only the masterpieces, but across the broader corpus) these distortions begin to align. The same patterns recur. The same moral judgments reappear. The same social stereotypes are reproduced across texts of varying quality.

What emerges is not a picture of what happened, but a map of what could be imagined.

This is the crucial point. Literature reveals the limits of intelligibility within a society: what counts as plausible motivation, what kinds of conflict are recognizable, what forms of behavior require no explanation, and which ones demand elaborate justification.

This is why reading only “great literature” is insufficient. Balzac is indispensable, but Balzac alone is misleading. One must also read the lesser writers, the popular ones, even the bad ones. They reproduce the assumptions that great writers often challenge. Without them, one risks mistaking the exceptional for the typical.

This becomes particularly clear when one turns to institutions. Consider, for example, something as dry as bankruptcy law. One can read the codes, the commentaries, the doctrinal analyses. Or one can read Balzac. In a few dozen pages he renders the entire system intelligible – not by explaining it abstractly, but by staging it as a social drama: creditors, debtors, lawyers, intermediaries, ambitions, humiliations, calculations, and self-deceptions.

What emerges is not the law as written (law in books), but the law as lived (law in action).

The same is true, in different ways, of Dickens and Hugo. Dickens does not merely depict Victorian society; he shapes its moral and political sensibilities. Hugo, at his most excessive, forces the reader into an almost unbearable engagement with suffering, justice, and social responsibility.

Or consider a different kind of comparison. It is difficult to think seriously about nineteenth-century constitutionalism in Greece without placing figures such as Alexandros Mavrokordatos alongside contemporaries like Victor Hugo. Their radically different reactions to the coup d’état of 1851 illuminate not only political positions, but deeper assumptions about legitimacy, authority, and the meaning of constitutional order over time.

These are not “sources” in the narrow sense, but they are indispensable if one wishes to understand how societies perceive themselves.

A senior historian recently remarked to me that younger historians no longer read literature. I hope this is an exaggeration. If it is not, it is a serious problem.

It is difficult, after all, to imagine historians such as Asdrachas, Iliou, or Svoronos operating without a deep familiarity with the literature of the periods they studied. More generally, the most interesting historians, the ones to whom one returns, are almost always readers beyond their discipline. They do not treat literature as ornament, but as part of their intellectual equipment.

The tension I described at the beginning (between archival work and literary reading) is real, but also misleading. The time spent reading literature is not time taken away from historical research; it is time invested in a different dimension of it.

Without Gogol, without Balzac, without Dickens, I could still write about the Greek Revolution. The narrative would be coherent, the arguments defensible, the sources properly handled.

But I would understand less than I think I do. And, more importantly, I would not necessarily know what I am missing.

That, for a historian, is the most dangerous form of ignorance.

Electoral clientelism is a transaction. The citizen promises to support the politician in the upcoming elections and the politician offers in return something that the citizen desires, but is not entitled to. What the citizen does is immoral, but what the politician does is also illegal, because he bypasses rules that do not “serve” the citizen he wants to favor at the expense of others. Thus, the distribution of public resources is not based on the principles of justice, equality, meritocracy, or with the aim of economic efficiency and the public interest, but is directed to where it will increase the political power of an individual or a party.

When clientelism is not an isolated phenomenon, but is so widespread that it creates its own informal rules which replace the formal and impersonal ones, then the rule of law becomes a vulgar, clientelist state. In the clientelist state, access to public resources, state positions and privileges is not regulated by legal rules, but by networks of personal relationships of dependence between politicians or state officials and citizens or pressure groups. The latter are, in other words, clients of the former.

In a state structured on a clientelist basis, dispensing favors – known as rousfeti in Greece – constitutes its basic operating mechanism. The relationship is organic, as the quid pro quo constitutes the daily practice through which the clientelist system is reproduced. It establishes ties of dependence that replace institutional procedures and violate legality.

In public debate in Greece, clientelism is often treated in moral terms or as a bad habit of our political system, a remnant of a pre-modern society that has not yet fully become familiar with the functioning of the institutions of a modern state governed by the rule of law. This interpretation is inadequate. First, the fight against clientelism cannot be limited to moral appeals; it requires institutional guarantees that reinforce the impersonal functioning of the state and limit personal discretion where clientelism arises.

Its historical root is indeed found in the formation of the Greek state in the 19th century, in a society where institutions were weak and the state administration had limited power. In this context, political mediation was the main mechanism for accessing resources, protection and opportunities. Clientelism was not simply a product of corruption – it was a way of organizing society and politics. A citizen did not resort to impersonal rules, but to persons (patrons) who could help him in two different cases: (a) when the institutional framework was corrupt and created barriers to entry or (b) when the institutional framework was open and competitive, but the citizen did not have the necessary qualifications or conditions in relation to others.

Since the founding of the Greek state, the “modernizing” elites have played a leading role in the construction of the clientelist state and the legitimization of its methods through its widespread use for their own benefit. I put the word modernizers in quotation marks to include the real modernizers, but also those – many more – who declare themselves modernizers, but either are not or do not manage to become so. Almost all of them treat this system of favors as a useful tool. One will often hear from “modernizers” the argument that clientelistic practices are necessary for their election – which is a prerequisite for the implementation of their “modernizing” program. But this trite and weak argument ultimately reinforces the undermining of the institutions that the “modernizers” supposedly support. Any attempt at modernization undertaken within a clientelistic framework is doomed to failure, as the entire endeavor is flawed.

This system of favors survived because while the institutions in Greece were nominally modernized, they were not internalized by the political system and society. But the spoils system does not only erode the effectiveness of the state, it erodes the legitimacy of any system of governance – including, of course, of liberal democracy. When citizens believe that access to any rights depends on personal acquaintances, trust in institutions collapses. And without trust, even the best official institutions will fail.

In periods when the state proclaims its modernization, tolerance of such practices takes on particular importance, as any deviation cannot be attributed to ignorance or weakness; it constitutes a conscious choice or, at best, a lack of political will. And here the crucial question arises: Can a government claim the title of modernizer when it tolerates or downplays such practices? Modernization is not a matter of rhetoric or individual reforms. It is, first and foremost, a matter of consistency.

Introduction: From Obscurity to Symbol

In the early 1820s, Missolonghi was a marginal town on the western edge of the Greek world – geographically remote and largely unknown to the European public.

By 1826, however, it had become one of the most politically and emotionally charged sites in Europe: a focal point of political meaning and ideological projection.

Missolonghi did not simply become important; it became meaningful in a way that forced Europeans to take a position.

This transformation was neither sudden nor simply the result of the dramatic events of 1826. It was the outcome of a gradual process through which Missolonghi acquired political, ideological, and cultural significance.

In this lecture, I examine that transformation as a historical problem. I argue that Missolonghi became a symbolic focal point of European liberalism through the convergence of three developments. First, Alexandros Mavrokordatos established the town as his political and institutional base, embedding it in his broader project of constitutional government and diplomatic recognition. Second, members of the London Greek Committee turned Missolonghi into a site for the circulation of radical liberal ideas and institutional experimentation, especially through the press. Third, the presence and death of Lord Byron endowed the town with a form of cultural and emotional capital that resonated deeply within European public opinion.

These developments did not simply raise Missolonghi’s profile; they changed what the town meant. By the time of its fall in 1826, Missolonghi was no longer just a besieged town. It had become a place through which competing visions of liberalism and political legitimacy were expressed.

The reaction to its fall, marked by shock, mourning, and renewed mobilization, was shaped by this earlier process. It was shaped, above all, by the memory of the Sortie (Έξοδος), which was quickly recast as a model of collective sacrifice.

Recent scholarship has shifted attention to how such meanings are produced. Studies of philhellenism have emphasized the role of transnational networks, the circulation of texts and images, and the work of intermediaries in shaping European views of the Greek Revolution. At the same time, historians of liberalism have stressed its diversity, showing that early nineteenth-century liberalism was not a single doctrine but a field of competing interpretations and practices.

Seen in this light, Missolonghi is not only a “symbol.” It is a site where symbolic meaning was actively produced. Its rise as a focal point of European liberalism was not the inevitable result of its fall. It was the outcome of a series of political, ideological, and cultural interventions that preceded and framed the events of 1826.

This perspective allows us to move beyond viewing Missolonghi simply as a martyr-city and instead to examine how it became meaningful to contemporaries.

I. Mavrokordatos and the Political Construction of Missolonghi

The first step in the transformation of Missolonghi was political. Under the leadership of Alexandros Mavrokordatos, the town became a center of governmental authority and institutional experimentation. This was not simply a matter of convenience. It reflected a deliberate strategy to anchor the Greek revolutionary movement within a framework of constitutional legitimacy that could be recognized and supported by the Great Powers.

Mavrokordatos had already distinguished himself as a leading advocate of constitutional government. His role in drafting the Provisional Constitution of Epidaurus (1822/3), and his subsequent political activity, reveal a consistent effort to present the Greek cause as compatible with European norms of political order. In this context, Missolonghi offered clear advantages. Its proximity to the Ionian Islands, under British control, facilitated communication with Western Europe. Its relative distance from the main arenas of factional conflict allowed Mavrokordatos to maintain a degree of political autonomy and remain relatively neutral during the civil strife.

More importantly, Missolonghi became a space in which the tension between national survival and institutional development could be managed, if not fully resolved. Mavrokordatos understood that the success of the Greek Revolution depended not only on military outcomes but also on how the movement was perceived abroad. He therefore sought to cultivate a political image that European audiences would find legitimate and credible. This required moderation and the avoidance of actions that might associate the Greek cause with the radicalism of earlier revolutionary movements. The Revolution had already been burdened by suspicions of “carbonarism” and secret-society politics (after all, it had been organized by a semi-Masonic secret society). Mavrokordatos worked deliberately to dispel these associations by emphasizing constitutionalism and order.

Missolonghi was thus not merely a military stronghold; it was a political stage. It allowed Mavrokordatos to enact a particular version of the Revolution – one that prioritized external recognition and internal coherence over ideological experimentation. This was not only a matter of rhetoric. Missolonghi functioned as an administrative center where correspondence with European philhellenic networks was coordinated and where efforts were made to present the Greek cause in terms consistent with constitutional governance. Its proximity to the Ionian Islands also enabled regular contact with British officials and intermediaries, allowing Mavrokordatos to embed his political project within a broader diplomatic framework.

II. The London Greek Committee and Radical Liberal Internationalism

If Mavrokordatos represented a strategy of moderation and diplomatic calculation, the London Greek Committee embodied a different vision: that of transnational liberal activism. Founded in 1823 by a group of British radicals (many associated with the intellectual circle of Jeremy Bentham), the Committee aimed not only to support the Greek struggle but also to shape its political and institutional trajectory.

The Committee’s intervention in Greece was not limited to financial assistance, although its role in facilitating the first Greek loan was significant. It also sought to influence the ideological direction of the Revolution. Its most important representative on the ground was Colonel Leicester Stanhope, who effectively acted as the Committee’s principal agent, while Byron served as its most visible public figure. Stanhope treated Greece as a space in which liberal principles could be implemented, tested, and disseminated. The Greek Revolution was thus understood not only as a national uprising, but also as part of a broader struggle for political reform across Europe.

Missolonghi became the focal point of this intervention. It was there that Stanhope and his associates concentrated their efforts to introduce liberal institutions, most notably through the establishment of newspapers. The founding of Greek Chronicles (Ελληνικά Χρονικά) was central to this project. For Stanhope, the press was not merely a means of communication; it was a political instrument, a vehicle for the circulation of ideas, the formation of public opinion, and the education of citizens in the principles of liberty. His efforts went beyond founding a newspaper. He actively encouraged the publication of political material that introduced concepts such as representation, constitutional accountability, civil and individual rights (especially freedom of speech and of the press) into the Greek context. In this sense, Greek Chronicles was conceived not simply as a record of events, but as a tool for reshaping political discourse.

This emphasis on the press reflects a broader feature of early nineteenth-century liberalism. In a period marked by censorship and political repression across much of Europe, newspapers and pamphlets played a crucial role in the diffusion of liberal ideas. The Committee sought to reproduce this dynamic in Greece, effectively integrating the Greek Revolution into a transnational network of political communication.

This project, however, was not without tension. The Committee’s vision of liberalism was more radical than that of Mavrokordatos and Byron. Influenced by Benthamite utilitarianism, republican ideas of government, and the experience of other revolutionary movements, its members were willing to promote ideas that could unsettle existing political arrangements. They viewed Greece as a potential “laboratory” for liberal reform, a space in which advanced political principles could be put into practice.

This ambition brought them into conflict with those who prioritized national survival and diplomatic prudence. The very instruments designed to promote liberalism (especially the press) could also generate political instability. This tension is clearly illustrated by an episode of censorship in Missolonghi in February 1824, when Byron intervened to censor issue no. 20 of Greek Chronicles. The issue included an article by Meyer on the right of Hungarians to self-determination, which was considered politically dangerous. It risked further antagonizing Austria, whose hostility toward revolutionary movements was well known. The concern was not abstract: references to Hungarian self-determination could associate the Greek cause with broader destabilizing tendencies within the Habsburg Empire. Byron’s intervention must therefore be understood within a wider diplomatic context, in which the management of political language was closely tied to securing international support.

This transnational dimension is essential for understanding why Missolonghi, rather than another site of the Greek struggle, assumed such prominence. The London Greek Committee inserted the Greek Revolution into an already existing network of liberal activism that extended from Britain to continental Europe and beyond. The circulation of individuals, texts, and ideas created a framework within which events in Greece could be interpreted as part of a broader struggle for political reform.

Missolonghi thus functioned as a node within an emerging liberal public sphere. It was a place where local developments were quickly translated into terms that resonated with European debates about representation, constitutionalism, and political rights. The presence of figures such as Stanhope ensured that developments in Missolonghi were not only observed but actively framed in ideological terms.

At the same time, this process had ambivalent consequences. It increased the visibility of Missolonghi, but it also subjected it to interpretive pressures that did not always align with local priorities. Stanhope’s attempt to “Americanize” Greece (by promoting a republican model inspired by the United States) reflected the projection of external frameworks onto a very different political context. Missolonghi thus became a site not only of reception, but also of friction between competing political languages.

Nevertheless, Stanhope’s project was, in important respects, successful. In 1827, Greek revolutionaries, influenced by radical liberal ideas, established a republic and adopted a constitution that drew on, and in some respects developed further, the model of the United States.

III. Byron and the Cultural Sacralization of Missolonghi

The third element in the symbolic construction of Missolonghi was cultural. The arrival of Lord Byron transformed the town’s significance in ways that neither political strategy nor institutional experimentation alone could achieve.

Byron’s involvement in the Greek cause had already attracted widespread attention. As one of the most prominent literary figures in Europe, he embodied the Romantic ideal of the poet engaged in political struggle. His decision to travel to Greece and commit both his resources and his reputation to the Revolution had a powerful impact on European public opinion. When he settled in Missolonghi, the town became, in effect, a focal point of that attention.

Byron’s presence did more than amplify interest in the Greek cause; it reshaped the meaning of Missolonghi itself. The town was no longer simply a site of political activity; it became a space charged with cultural and emotional significance. Byron’s correspondence, the reports of his companions, and the coverage in European newspapers all contributed to the construction of a narrative in which Missolonghi appeared as a place of sacrifice and moral commitment.

His death in April 1824 intensified this process. It was immediately interpreted as a form of martyrdom – a sacrifice made in the name of liberty. The fact that Byron died not in battle but from illness did little to weaken this perception. On the contrary, his death was absorbed into a broader narrative of suffering and devotion that resonated deeply with European audiences.

The cultural impact of Byron’s death cannot be overstated. It transformed Missolonghi into a site of memory, a place associated not only with the Greek struggle but also with the broader ideals of European liberalism. This transformation would prove decisive in shaping reactions to the later siege and fall of the town.

IV. The Press and the European Public Sphere

The press was central to the elevation of Missolonghi within the European imagination. Newspapers across Europe played a key role in disseminating information about events in Greece, shaping public perceptions, and mobilizing support for the Greek cause.

Coverage of Missolonghi was particularly intense. Reports from the town circulated widely, often with delays and inaccuracies. Yet these reports were not merely informational; they were interpretive. They framed events in moral and political terms, emphasizing themes of heroism and suffering. In doing so, they helped construct Missolonghi as a symbol.

The Greek press, still in its infancy, was also part of this process. Newspapers such as Greek Chronicles served not only internal communication but also the transmission of information to European audiences. Their content was frequently reproduced or summarized in foreign newspapers, creating a feedback loop between local events and international perceptions. Reports from Missolonghi were translated, reframed, and amplified across Europe, often heightening their emotional and political significance. This process contributed to the rapid rise of the town in the European public imagination, even when the underlying information remained fragmentary or uncertain.

The importance of the press in this context lies not only in its role as a vehicle of information, but also in its function as an infrastructure of political meaning. Missolonghi became central not only because of what happened there, but because of how those events were reported, translated, and circulated across Europe.

This infrastructural role also helps explain why conflicts over the press assumed such importance. The issue was not simply whether particular articles should be published, but whether the emerging political order would be organized around open communication or controlled messaging. The tension between these alternatives reflects a broader dilemma within liberalism: the balance between freedom and stability, between openness and strategic restraint.

In Missolonghi, this dilemma was especially acute. The press had the potential to integrate the Greek struggle into a European public sphere, but it also risked exposing internal divisions and complicating diplomatic efforts. The resulting conflicts, including episodes of censorship, should therefore be understood as part of a broader struggle over the conditions of political communication in a revolutionary context.

V. The Siege, the Sortie, and the Shock of 1826

By the mid-1820s, Missolonghi had already acquired a dense political and moral meaning. The siege and the Sortie did not create that meaning; they brought it to its point of maximum intensity. The final stage in the transformation of Missolonghi occurred during the third siege (1825-1826) and its dramatic conclusion. By this point, the town had already achieved symbolic status, and the prolonged resistance of its defenders only reinforced that perception.

When the situation became untenable, the decision was made to attempt a mass breakout, the Sortie. Militarily, the operation was a failure. Many of those who attempted to escape were killed, and the town ultimately fell to Ottoman forces. Contemporary reports emphasized the confusion and fragmentation of the operation, as different groups became separated under pressure and faced overwhelming opposition. Yet it was precisely this combination of desperation and collective resolve that later accounts would transform into a narrative of collective sacrifice.

This reinterpretation was crucial. It allowed defeat to be recast as moral victory. The image of the inhabitants of Missolonghi choosing death over surrender resonated powerfully with European audiences. It aligned with existing narratives of martyrdom and sacrifice, and reinforced the identification of the Greek cause with the ideals of liberty.

The reaction in Europe was immediate and intense. News of the fall of Missolonghi provoked widespread outrage, grief, and renewed calls for intervention. Philhellenic committees were revitalized, fundraising intensified, and political pressure on governments increased. The political and emotional force of Missolonghi had reached its peak.

VI. Missolonghi and the Languages of Liberalism

The case of Missolonghi reveals key features of early nineteenth-century liberalism. It highlights the diversity of liberal thought, the tensions between competing conceptions of freedom, and the role of transnational networks in the circulation of ideas.

On the one hand, we see a moderate, pragmatic liberalism associated with figures such as Mavrokordatos and, to some extent, Byron. This version emphasizes order, legitimacy, and the need to secure external support. On the other hand, we encounter a more radical, internationalist liberalism, represented by Stanhope and the London Greek Committee, which prioritizes the circulation of ideas and the transformation of political institutions.

Missolonghi was a space in which these different visions intersected and clashed. The episode of censorship illustrates the limits of liberalism in a revolutionary context. It shows that commitments to freedom of expression could be subordinated to considerations of national interest and diplomatic strategy.

At the same time, the symbolic construction of Missolonghi demonstrates the power of liberal narratives. The transformation of the town into a symbol of European liberalism was not the result of a single actor or event, but of a cumulative process. It emerged from the interaction of political strategy, ideological agendas, and cultural representation.

Conclusion: From Event to Symbol

By 1826, Missolonghi had become far more than a geographical location. It was a symbolic focal point through which Europeans understood the Greek Revolution and, more broadly, the struggle for liberty in the post-Napoleonic world.

This transformation was not inevitable. It depended on the actions of individuals, the interventions of organizations, and the circulation of narratives across borders. It required the convergence of political, ideological, and cultural forces.

The fall of Missolonghi did not mark the end of its significance. On the contrary, it secured its place in the political and cultural memory of Europe. The town became a symbol of sacrifice, of resistance, and of the enduring appeal of liberal ideals.

What made Missolonghi central to European liberalism was not only the scale of suffering or the heroism of its defenders, but also the way these elements were framed, circulated, and interpreted within a transnational context. Symbolic power, in this sense, does not emerge from events alone, but from the interaction between events and the narratives through which they are understood.

This observation has broader implications for how we approach the history of the Greek Revolution. It suggests that the Revolution should be studied not only as a sequence of military and political developments, but also as a process of meaning-making unfolding across multiple spaces.

Missolonghi mattered not because it changed the course of the war, but because it changed how the war could be understood. In this sense, its significance extends beyond its immediate historical context. It offers a lens through which to examine the dynamics of nineteenth-century liberalism: its aspirations, its internal tensions, and its reliance on symbolic forms. As such, it remains a crucial case for understanding how political ideas acquire force, not only through institutions and actions, but through the meanings that attach to them.

Missolonghi reminds us that political ideas do not become powerful simply because they are true or just, but because they are made meaningful.

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The start of the trial for the Tempe train disaster in Larissa has shown how easily a criminal proceeding can become an institutional failure. First of all, the state itself did not appear adequately prepared. The authorities knew they would face scrutiny from the very first moment, even if every detail had been flawlessly organized. Yet they managed to amplify the criticism through missteps, gaps, and poor coordination.

The judicial authorities – those entrusted with upholding the principles of the rule of law – have so far fallen short of their responsibilities. It is still early to pass final judgment, but several have already offered unacceptable early indications, and, unfortunately, this is hardly surprising.

The relatives, aware that no trial can bring back their loved ones, are almost impossible to satisfy. They are convinced that those responsible will not be held accountable, and, regrettably, the Greek state has done little to allay these fears.

The danger with this trial is that it risks becoming political. In a political trial, rules carry less weight than in an ordinary criminal proceeding. What matters is that the outcome satisfies the “public sense of justice.” But this type of trial has little to do with the principles of the rule of law and never truly serves justice.

Yet this is precisely the moment when the Greek judiciary is called upon to demonstrate that it can assign responsibility for a national tragedy without political interference – and without transforming into a popular tribunal or a vehicle for political exploitation. The victims’ families have every right to demand truth and respect. What they do not need are professional purveyors of outrage who exploit their grief for minor political gain. Social pressure for justice is legitimate; turning a criminal trial into a permanent political rally is not. When that happens, the memory of the victims is dishonored, and the pursuit of truth is undermined.

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The rule of law is not tested in routine cases. It is tested when a case is emotionally charged, when public opinion is outraged, when there are multiple defendants, and when political power is under pressure. It is precisely in such moments that the principle of a fair trial must be upheld without compromise: an independent and impartial court, a public process, reasonable duration, and full respect for the rights of the accused. International experience with similar tragedies shows that public pressure often leads either to criminal populism or selective accountability – both of which undermine the rule of law.

That is why one point must be stated clearly, even if it is unpopular: The demand for punishment cannot precede proof. Anyone who believes in the rule of law must also uphold the presumption of innocence. If a verdict is pronounced on the street, on television talk shows, or on social media before it is delivered in the courtroom, then we do not have justice – we have revenge dressed up in institutional form.

This, however, does not absolve the government – far from it. The authorities had three years to recognize that the Tempe trial would be the largest, most demanding, and most politically symbolic criminal trial of the post-junta era. They had an obligation, from day one, to ensure adequate material conditions: a suitable courtroom, clear access protocols, dignified seating for relatives and survivors, functional arrangements for lawyers and journalists, and meticulous organizational management.

So what do the principles of the rule of law demand? From the judiciary: to maintain control of the process with composure and institutional rigor. From the government: to provide material and administrative support for the trial with the necessary empathy, without giving even the slightest hint of interference in its substance. From the opposition: to understand that it has no right to exploit a failure of the process for political gain. And from all of us: to remember that only a state governed by law can deliver justice. There is no alternative.

The mass death in the Mediterranean will not forever be met with today’s cynical indifference or buried under the language of “border management,” “deterrence,” and “migration flows.” The thousands who have drowned, disappeared, or been pushed back into danger will not remain statistics or unfortunate byproducts of policy. They will be remembered as victims of a deliberate system: one designed to make suffering visible enough to deter, but distant enough to be ignored. In time, this will be recognized as a crime against humanity: not necessarily because it was centrally planned with genocidal intent, but because it was knowingly tolerated and normalized.

History is unsparing in this regard. It rarely condemns societies for failing to be perfect. It condemns them for failing to recognize when they have crossed clear moral thresholds and for continuing anyway. What makes the present situation particularly damning is not ignorance. The images are there. The reports are there. The testimonies are there. What is lacking is not information, but the will to accept what that information implies. This is not an abstract moral problem; it is a political choice made every day.

At this point, the most common defense appears, usually framed as realism: how many can we take? We cannot invite everyone, accommodate everyone, save everyone. This argument presents itself as sober, even responsible. But it is largely a distraction. No serious critic claims that borders must be abolished or that states have infinite obligations. The real question is not how many, but how. How people are treated while claims are assessed. How deterrence is enforced. How death and suffering are used as instruments of policy. Invoking numerical limits does not justify letting people drown, pushing them back into danger, or stripping them of legal protection. Capacity constraints may explain difficult choices; they do not excuse systematic cruelty.

Those who cannot see where this leads are not merely lacking in empathy. They lack a sense of history. They fail to understand how moral verdicts are formed retrospectively, once fear no longer dictates judgment and once the beneficiaries of cruelty are no longer in power. They are morally and politically shortsighted. They imagine that legality absolves them, that delegation diffuses responsibility, that “everyone does it” will function as a defense. It never does.

Even more troubling than the existence of harsh policies is the social climate that surrounds them. What marks the formation of historical guilt is not only the actions of those who design and implement brutal measures, but the behavior of those who applaud them or who remain silent when silence is easiest. The loudest supporters are easy to identify. More revealing are the respectable voices who justify or normalize. Those who insist that “there is no alternative,” that “the system would collapse,” that “we must be realistic.” These phrases recur with remarkable consistency in every chapter of moral failure.

Silence, too, has its place in this ledger. Not the silence of fear, but the silence of convenience. The silence of those who know better but prefer not to know too much. The silence of professionals, academics, intellectuals, journalists and officials who would never defend cruelty explicitly, but who adjust their language just enough to avoid confronting it. History is attentive to such silences. It always has been.

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None of this requires hindsight to understand. It requires only the recognition that borders do not suspend moral responsibility, that deterrence through death is not an unfortunate side effect but a chosen strategy, and that the dehumanization of outsiders corrodes the moral fabric of societies that tolerate it. Liberal democracies do not lose their legitimacy all at once. They erode it gradually, by treating some lives as expendable in the name of order and security.

In the future, when this period is studied, the question will not be whether Europeans and Americans faced difficult challenges. They did. The question will be whether they responded to those challenges in ways that preserved their moral and political integrity. For many, the answer will be painfully clear. And the verdict will not distinguish sharply between those who acted and those who cheered and those who chose silence when they should have spoken.

P.S. For a genuinely liberal approach to the migration question, grounded in principles rather than fear and ignorance, see Brian Caplan’s Open Borders.

To defend one’s enemy is not a gesture of tolerance in the everyday sense. It is not an expression of sympathy, neutrality, or relativism. It is a commitment to a structure of principles that must remain intact even when the content passing through them offends us. Liberalism, at its core, is not a theory of correct outcomes but a theory of limits; limits on who may decide, by what authority, and under what conditions.

The temptation to abandon those limits is perennial. It usually appears in respectable form: appeals to responsibility, to institutional integrity, to social harm, to moral urgency. These appeals are often sincere. They are also often dangerous. For once we allow the permissibility of speech to depend on who speaks, where they speak, or how we evaluate the worthiness of their message, freedom of expression quietly ceases to be a right and becomes a conditional privilege.

This is why the defense of free expression must be content-neutral, identity-blind, and structurally consistent. A principle that holds only when the speaker is admirable, the cause just, or the audience sympathetic is not a principle at all. It is a discretionary judgment disguised as moral reasoning.

This is not a lesson I learned comfortably, or once. Because it is hard to be a consistent liberal: it requires fighting against one’s own natural instincts.

The hardest cases are not those necessarily involving vulnerable speakers or noble causes. Liberal principles are not tested there. They are tested when the speaker is powerful or detestable, when the message appears to align with oppression or falsehood, when the instinctive response is not to listen but to prevent. As the nineteenth-century Greek liberal writer Andreas Laskaratos emphasized: “Someone who fights for his own rights may or may not be a liberal. The true liberal is one who fights for the rights of others.”

It is precisely in such moments that liberalism demands self-restraint. This restraint is often misunderstood as passivity or complicity. But it is neither. To defend my enemy’s right to speak is not to endorse their views, legitimize their goals, or excuse their actions. It is to insist that the authority to silence cannot rest on agreement, virtue, or moral confidence. Once it does, the line separating law from raw power dissolves.

A liberal order depends on a critical asymmetry: the right to speak is not reciprocal with the right to be heard, praised, or accommodated. Others may protest, boycott, criticize, ridicule, or ignore. What they may not do – without undermining the very architecture that protects them in turn – is to prevent expression through coercive means or institutional pressure that functions as censorship in effect, even if not in name.

This distinction matters especially when public institutions are involved. Institutions inevitably exercise judgment. They allocate resources, schedule events, and define missions. But when institutional discretion is deployed selectively to suppress disfavored viewpoints, it ceases to be neutral governance and becomes a mechanism of exclusion. The danger lies not in any single decision but in the precedent it establishes: that access to public space, platforms, or recognition depends on ideological alignment or moral approval.

Once that threshold is crossed, every future decision becomes suspect. Power changes hands. Moral certainties shift. What was once justified as a defense against harmful ideas becomes, in another context, a tool for silencing dissent. The liberal response to this danger is not naïveté about power but skepticism toward its concentration, especially when exercised in the name of virtue.

Defending my enemy is therefore not an act of generosity. What looks like generosity is in fact something different and way more demanding. It is an act of institutional self-defense. It reflects an understanding that principles must be robust enough to survive adversarial use. If a justification for silencing cannot be applied symmetrically, if it collapses when the political valence is reversed, then it is not a justification but a rationalization.

There is, of course, a psychological cost to this position. It requires resisting one’s own instincts, suppressing the satisfaction of seeing an opponent thwarted, and accepting outcomes that feel unjust in the moment. Liberalism has never promised comfort. It promises responsibility. It asks us to bear the burden of freedom not only when it serves us, but when it constrains us.

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This burden is often mischaracterized as abstraction or moral fastidiousness. In reality, it is a deeply practical stance. Societies that normalize viewpoint-based exclusion, even under plausible justifications, do not remain pluralistic for long. They become polarized and thus brittle. They train citizens to think in terms of permission rather than rights, of alignment rather than argument.

The defense of one’s enemy is also a defense of one’s future self. It recognizes that today’s consensus is tomorrow’s heresy, that today’s guardians of propriety may become tomorrow’s censors. Liberalism does not assume moral symmetry among all positions. It assumes moral fallibility among all authorities.

To insist on this distinction is not to deny the existence of evil ideas or harmful doctrines. It is to deny that their suppression by coercive means is either a reliable or a legitimate response. History offers little evidence that enforced silence produces enlightenment. It offers abundant evidence that it produces resentment, radicalization, and intellectual decay.

In the end, defending my enemy is not about them. It is about refusing to convert moral disagreement into institutional power; a temptation I recognize all too well in myself. It is about preserving a space in which error can be confronted rather than managed, and falsehood exposed rather than administratively erased.

Liberal principles do not exist to reassure us when we are right. They exist to restrain us when we are convinced we are. And it is precisely at that moment – when suppression feels justified, even necessary – that defending my enemy becomes not merely an option, but an obligation.

Shelley’s political imagination was born in fire. The daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, she inherited a revolutionary legacy that had already burned hot and fast by the time she came of age. The Jacobin dreams of the 1790s had collapsed. The Napoleonic Empire had risen and fallen. In 1815, when Mary was just seventeen, the Battle of Waterloo closed a chapter. The age of republics was over. What came next?

She tried to answer this herself. In 1820, during her exile in Pisa, she wrote to a friend: “Thirty years ago was the era for Republics, and they all fell. This is the era of constitutions. I only hope that these latter may in the end remove the moths of the former.” She understood that the dreams of her parents’ generation had failed, not only from repression, but from excess. And yet she did not turn away. Over the next two decades, she would write her way into a new kind of liberalism: radical in sympathy, pragmatic in means, unshaken in its belief that liberty was still worth defending.

Her works were her arguments. History of a Six Weeks’ Tour (1817), her first publication, was already a political document: a defense of postwar Europe’s “partisans of liberty,” those scattered men and women who hoped still for a continent governed by rights, not dynasties. In Frankenstein (1818), she dramatized what happens when power (creative, scientific, or political) is exercised without accountability. Victor Frankenstein, a Promethean figure of isolated ambition, fails not because he creates, but because he abandons what he creates. Shelley’s message was simple: liberty without responsibility leads to ruin.

In Mathilda (1819), she turned to the family, exposing patriarchal authority as another site where duty can turn to domination. In Valperga (1823), she retold the story of a would-be unifier of Italy, Castruccio Castracani, whose dream of conquest destroys everything it touches. And in The Last Man (1826), she imagined the end of the world itself, a world where all political forms collapse, and only sympathy, memory, and ethical testimony remain.

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She wrote all this while living among the exiled liberals of Italy, men and women who had suffered defeat in Spain, in Naples, in the Papal States. One of the Greek revolutionaries, Alexandros Mavrokordatos, became her close friend. When the Greek Revolution began in 1821, it was he who told her the news. She was ecstatic: “Did you ever hope that Greece would ever free itself in your day?” she wrote in a letter. But she was not naïve. She supported constitutional reform, not charismatic rebellion. In Mavrokordatos she saw the kind of liberal she herself wanted to be: moderate, erudite, principled, and anti-imperial. Their correspondence reveals mutual respect, political affection, and something very rare: hope tempered by discipline.

Shelley’s later novels (Perkin Warbeck, Lodore, Falkner) brought her politics down to earth. In them, she argued that the foundations of liberty were legal, domestic, and moral. Fathers must raise daughters as equals. Inheritance laws must be just. Institutions must be fair. If earlier she had warned of charismatic power, now she mapped a liberal order grounded in education, care, fairness, just institutions and piecemeal reform.

In her final work, Rambles in Germany and Italy (1844), she wrote in her own voice. It was no longer the voice of the prodigy or the widow, but of a liberal internationalist. She met Italian patriots. She condemned the Austrians. She supported national independence — not out of nationalism, but from principle. “I write from a political point of view,” she declared. And so she did.

Mary Shelley’s political thought does not offer a program. It offers something better: a sensibility. Liberty, she believed, could no longer be achieved by revolution alone. It had to be preserved, painfully, cautiously, through obligation, through conscience, through care. She understood that law matters, that memory matters, that even when institutions fail, human sympathy might still endure.

That is the Mary Shelley I’ve come to know: a radical liberal reformer, shaped by the failures of revolution, but never reconciled to injustice. She was, in Mavrokordatos’s own words, someone whose letters alone were “sufficient to awaken in the soul a love of Liberty.”

Today, 175 years after her death, I remember her not just as the author of Frankenstein, but as one of the most courageous political writers of her age.

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PS1. This post is based on a paper I presented on January 19, titled “Mary Shelley and the Making of Post-Revolutionary Liberalism (1817-1826).” The paper and slides are available to paid subscribers upon request; just send me a personal message.

PS2. I am especially pleased that, for the first time this semester, I will be able to include Mary Shelley’s works in my teaching, in a seminar devoted to women political writers of the revolutionary era.

PS3. The previously unpublished letters from Alexandros Mavrokordatos to Mary Shelley, written in French during the spring and summer of 1821, provide her with firsthand information about the early stages of the Greek Revolution and were preserved in her personal archive. These letters will be published later this year by Crete University Press, with scholarly commentary by Roderick Beaton, Maria Schoina, and myself.

The Acharnians were the inhabitants of a deme about seven miles north of Athens. The place still exists today and is called Acharnes (Αχαρνές or Μενίδι). During the early years of the Peloponnesian War, Acharnes was repeatedly devastated by the Spartan army (Thuc. 2.19-2.20). Its fields were burned, its houses destroyed, and its people forced to abandon their land and take refuge behind the walls of the city.

Aristophanes wrote Acharnians in the sixth year of that war; a war that would last twenty-seven years and would end with the collapse of Athenian power. Every spring, Spartan armies invaded Attica. The Athenians, trapped behind their walls, watched their private property being systematically destroyed year after year.

This is the historical and political background of the play: prolonged war, mass displacement, the destruction of livelihoods, and a democracy increasingly dominated by demagogues, war profiteers, and patriotic hysteria.

At first sight, Acharnians looks like a comedy about the desire for peace. But that description is far too weak. The play is about something deeper and far more radical: the moral standing of the individual against the collective, dissent against majority rule, private choice against public coercion, and, remarkably, the civilizing power of markets and voluntary exchange.

The Individual Against the City

The protagonist of the play is Dikaiopolis, a middle-aged Athenian citizen, a small farmer, and a family man. He used to live in Acharnes. His land has been destroyed, his house burned, his way of life ruined by a war he has neither chosen nor supported.

Dikaiopolis goes to the Assembly (the sovereign institution of Athenian democracy) to argue for peace. He fails completely. The majority wants to continue the war: some out of hatred for Sparta, others because they profit from it politically or economically.

Disillusioned and isolated, Dikaiopolis reaches a shocking conclusion. If the city refuses peace, he will make peace on his own.

This idea is deliberately outrageous. A private peace treaty with the enemy is tantamount to treason. Aristophanes knew exactly what he was doing. He himself had already been publicly targeted by Cleon, the leading war-mongering demagogue of Athens, for criticizing imperialism in an earlier play.

Yet Dikaiopolis proceeds. He decides to act as an autonomous individual (in a striking proto-liberal sense) against his city-state, many centuries before the emergence of modern liberal individualism.

The Tyranny of the Majority

The reaction is immediate and violent. The Chorus of the play, made up of Dikaiopolis’ fellow villagers, the Acharnians, turns into a furious mob. They threaten to stone him to death. They shout:

You insolent scoundrel!

Traitor to your country!

You alone among us have made a truce,

And you dare to look us in the face!

Dikaiopolis begs them to listen. He asks only for a hearing, for reasons to matter. They refuse. The majority has already decided. No argument is needed.

This is one of the earliest, and sharpest, literary depictions of what later liberal thinkers would call the tyranny of the majority. Democratic power, unrestrained by respect for individual choice, turns into collective violence.

Only with great difficulty does Dikaiopolis manage to partially persuade them by exposing Athenian aggression, injustice, and democratic hypocrisy. At last, they ask him a crucial question:

Very well.

Suppose you have made a private peace.

What exactly are you going to do with it?

Markets Instead of War

His answer is unforgettable:

First, I will establish my own private market.

And I will invite our former enemies to trade with me.

My market will be open to them.

And they come. Megarians, Boeotians (former enemies) enter his market. They trade with him. They trust him. They recount the injustices they have suffered at the hands of Athens. Dikaiopolis treats them not merely as trading partners, but as fellow human beings.

This is not accidental comic decoration. Aristophanes draws a clear contrast between politics, which produces hatred, coercion, and violence, and exchange, which produces trust, cooperation, and mutual benefit.

Long before Adam Smith, long before Montesquieu, long before Kant, Aristophanes stages the liberal intuition that commerce humanizes, while war brutalizes.

Two Ways of Life

The final scene makes the argument visually unmistakable. The stage is divided in two.

On one side, Dikaiopolis prepares a lavish dinner party: food, wine, music, pleasure, friendship. On the other side, his neighbor Lamachus, the embodiment of militarism, a real Athenian general and war hero, arms himself for battle.

Lamachus curses Dikaiopolis as selfish, cowardly, and unpatriotic. But when the scene ends, Lamachus returns wounded, helpless, and in agony, supported by soldiers. Dikaiopolis, drunk and content, is supported by two female dancers.

The Chorus now turns fully in Dikaiopolis’ favor. His individual defiance has been vindicated. The play ends with praise for his eudaimonia, a rich form of flourishing, not mere pleasure. The final image is decisive:

See how happy he is.

Truly blessed,

Sitting in his marketplace.

Was Aristophanes a Liberal?

At this point, an obvious objection arises.

Aristophanes was not a liberal in the modern sense. He was not a theorist of rights. He was not a defender of democracy, and he often attacked it. He was culturally conservative, nostalgic for an older Athens, suspicious of intellectual innovation.

All of this is true, and largely irrelevant.

Liberalism, historically understood, does not begin as a theory of democracy. It begins as a defense of individual choice, private life, voluntary association, and limits on collective power. On these issues, Acharnians is astonishingly clear.

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The play does not argue for reforming democratic decision-making. It argues for escaping it. Dikaiopolis does not try to persuade the Assembly again. He exits Athenian democratic decision-making and creates a parallel political space. He chooses peace, trade, and private happiness over patriotic sacrifice. The play’s target is not democracy itself, but the assumption that democratic decision-making can legitimately extend without limit into the private choices and moral lives of individuals.

That choice, radical, scandalous, morally justified, is the core of the liberal tradition.

Why This Still Matters

A major problem with much contemporary theatrical reception of Acharnians is its persistent superficiality. Poorly read or theoretically untrained stage directors often fail to grasp the play’s political depth and institutional audacity, reducing it to a rustic, coarse farce with a “don’t-care” peasant as its protagonist; a simple-minded figure who merely longs for peace. In doing so, Dikaiopolis is stripped of his radical significance as an agent of individual choice and political defiance and is instead recast as a folkloric embodiment of common sense. Worse still, many directors go beyond this flattening and actively impose their own ideological frameworks onto the play — often in direct contradiction to Aristophanes himself — thereby transforming a work deeply critical of unlimited collective power into a vehicle for contemporary, simplistic, or moralizing messages. The result is not merely misinterpretation, but a form of cultural violence against the text itself.

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Acharnians was written by a young genius, performed in democratic Athens, and awarded first prize. It did not stop the war. Athens ignored its warning, and paid the price.

But the play remains. It reminds us that the conflict between the individual and the collective, between conscience and patriotism, between commerce and coercion, is as old as political life itself. By mobilizing the power of “exit,” along with the market and the contractual setting, Aristophanes gestures toward an institutionalized form of individual choice rather than mere personal defiance. He does not articulate a theory of markets in abstract terms; instead, through implicit dramaturgy, he allows the audience to see how voluntary exchange generates cooperation and trust in ways that politics, organized around coercion, cannot.

In that sense, Acharnians is not merely an anti-war comedy.

It is, I submit, the first liberal work of literature in human history.

For more on the Athenian Democracy, read this short paper of mine: The Illiberal Democracy of Ancient Athens.

Because in this series Gilligan touches the essence of liberalism – not as ideology, slogan, or political branding, but as a moral condition of human existence. He does so by highlighting the moral weight that accompanies liberalism, its internal tensions and contradictions, its deeply counter-intuitive character, and above all its tragic dimension: the fact that individual freedom carries costs that are often unbearable. Liberalism here is not comfort; it is burden. It is not harmony; it is conflict. It is not salvation; it is responsibility. Gilligan shows, with rare honesty, how difficult it is to remain a consistent liberal when consistency demands sacrifice, loneliness, and moral courage. And he does all this with artistic mastery, without grandstanding, without clichés, without easy answers, using his fundamental tool: storytelling itself, which allows moral complexity to unfold without sermonizing.

Even if the average viewer does not consciously grasp the political position of the series, not only will they enjoy it because it is gripping and suspenseful, but they will also join the millions of viewers around the world who elevated it to number one in viewership on Apple TV, even surpassing the multi-awarded, ingenious, and also philosophically interesting Severance. Yet beyond the narrative plot, anyone who watches attentively should not miss its political message. The screenwriters do not wave it in the viewer’s face, as demagogic television series and simplistic films often do. Pluribus is not simplistic propagnda, but it is profoundly political – and as inherently liberal as any series in the history of television.

Unfortunately, I do not know what Gilligan has read, what has influenced him, or what his explicit intellectual references might be. In any case, he does not appear to have formal philosophical training. I admit that I was both impressed and surprised by the way the series handles the most critical questions in the history of political thought across centuries – questions concerning liberty, authority, responsibility, knowledge, and moral agency – and does so in a manner that is likely to leave the average viewer unaware, remaining at the first, characteristically post-apocalyptic level of the story. But whoever has studied the history of political thought seriously will recognize within the script unmistakable philosophical resonances.

One encounters John Stuart Mill, in the insistence that individual choice is morally superior to imposed correctness; that paternalism is suspect even when mild, benevolent, and well-intentioned; and that the right to individual error is preferable to the enforced rationality of any system claiming superior knowledge. One encounters Isaiah Berlin, in the deep commitment to moral pluralism, in the recognition of tragic moral conflict, and in the rejection of moral monism (i.e. the belief that all values can be harmonized without loss). One encounters Hannah Arendt, in the treatment of responsibility as something that cannot be dissolved into systems, roles, or obedience, and in the insistence that obedience is never morally innocent. One encounters Friedrich Hayek, in the epistemic skepticism toward any collective’s ability to gather and process the dispersed knowledge required to decide for each individual separately, and in the demonstration of why extreme vertical integration of social and economic organization must fail. And, of course, one encounters Robert Nozick: the idea that individuals are not resources to be used for collective ends, that there are moral side-constraints on what may be done to persons, and that outcomes cannot justify violations of agency. Indeed, the entire narrative architecture of Pluribus echoes one of Nozick’s most famous thought experiments, translated into dramatic form.

It is most likely that Gilligan has not read most, or any, of these works. But that only reinforces the point. He may simply be a genius, like Aristophanes – the ancient Athenian comic playwright who wrote what might be considered the first genuinely liberal play, The Acharnians, long before concepts such as individualism, individual rights, open markets, or liberalism itself existed as articulated doctrines. Aristophanes could intuit these ideas because he was able to imagine the individual standing apart from the collective, asserting personal judgment against the claims of the many, and seeing the market as a liberating social convention. Unfortunately, today we have not found comparably serious directors capable of perceiving and articulating these ideas with similar depth. At best, interpreters of Aristophanes content themselves with celebrating peace; at worst, they reduce his work to demagogic spectacle, stripping it of its radical individualism; a distortion obvious to anyone with basic knowledge of political thought; who can connect Aristophanes not only to Pericles’ “Funeral Oration” in Thucydides, but also to the broader emergence of individuality in funerary ritual, sculpture, and tragedy.

Gilligan is likewise a major writer whose artistic works constitute genuine contributions to moral philosophy, comparable to those of the (undoubtedly well-read) Woody Allen, Éric Rohmer, Ingmar Bergman, Andrei Tarkovsky and others who used cinema to explore ethical responsibility rather than to illustrate ideology. Gilligan dares, already from Breaking Bad, to wrestle with the deepest philosophical questions without the usual pretension of so-called “serious” directors. For him, narrative is not an illustration of theory; it is theory. Storytelling is self-sufficient and adequate. He does not explain to the viewer what they are seeing, because explanation would diminish moral autonomy.

I wonder how accessible these ideas are to a broad audience, at least on a second interpretive level. One thing is certain: from now on, with Gilligan’s help, I will be able to explain far more easily to my students what it meant to live without the concept and the lived experience of individuality – without resorting to Aesop’s fables or to the more demanding cryptic passages of Aristotle and Xenophon.

Gilligan, as a genuine liberal, falls into the trap that every liberal will inevitably fall into – the liberal illusion (a trap into which I fall every day, systematically): the belief that one person can, and perhaps must, save the world. I quote here from one of my unpublished essays (“Liberal Illusions”, 2025).

What I call the liberal illusion is the belief that a single individual can, by force of conscience and will alone, successfully resist the collective and bend history toward liberty; that at the decisive moment, agency will prevail over structure and freedom over necessity. This belief is deeply embedded in the liberal imagination, from early modern accounts of conscience and dissent to modern narratives of heroic resistance.

Yet liberalism itself has always been ambivalent about this idea. Classical liberal thought recognizes individual agency as morally foundational, but it has never guaranteed its efficacy. From Constant to Mill, from Tocqueville to Berlin, liberalism insists on the moral primacy of the individual while remaining painfully aware of the asymmetry between individual conscience and organized power. History offers few examples where solitary resistance triumphs; more often, it records defeat, marginalization, or martyrdom.

And yet the illusion persists (and I am one of its victims), not as a prediction about outcomes, but as a moral obligation. Liberalism does not claim that the individual will succeed; it claims that the individual must try. The duty to fight for liberty does not arise from the likelihood of victory, but from the intrinsic wrongness of submission to coercion and moral abdication. To refuse to act because success is uncertain is already to accept the logic of domination. In this sense, the liberal illusion is constitutive rather than naïve: it sustains moral agency in a world where outcomes cannot be promised, where liberty is fragile, and where the responsibility to make a difference rests on individuals precisely because no historical force, collective subject, or benevolent system can be trusted to do so on their behalf.

In Hollywood, traditionally, that figure, the heroic individual, the liberal hero, has been a man: James Stewart in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), Henry Fonda in 12 Angry Men (1957), Gregory Peck in To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), Tom Cruise in A Few Good Men (1992), David Strathairn in Good Night, and Good Luck (2005). This time, however, the individual is a middle-aged woman and a lesbian, though white, blonde, and blue-eyed (the extraordinary Rhea Seehorn, who stole the performance in Better Call Saul). Yet even she is not sufficient. She comes close to breaking under the weight of responsibility, isolation, and moral exhaustion, until she encounters a caricature of the liberal hero: a Paraguayan named Manousos, who does not negotiate freedom or individuality, who refuses communal ownership and the abolition of money, and who insists on a simple, brutal truth: “Everything has a cost, and someone must pay it.”

But the ideas underlying this series are not simple, because Gilligan’s thinking is not simplistic. The subject of Pluribus is the tragedy of individuality itself: the burden of freedom; the extent to which liberalism feels “unnatural” because it runs against deep social instincts for conformity, security, rule-following and belonging; and yet how inseparable it has become from modern self-understanding. Liberalism here is not merely a political doctrine; it is a way of inhabiting the world as a free, rational agent making choices under conditions of uncertainty. It is the individual claiming the right to become the author of their own life, without guarantees of happiness or success.

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Manousos, the fearless and single-minded Paraguayan hero, embodies a pathological form of individuality, reminiscent of a modern Thoreau stripped of romanticism. Refusing the collective is painful unless one becomes something almost inhuman, something feral. The female protagonist, by contrast, is recognizably human: she longs for connection, safety, care and shared rules; she briefly succumbs to the temptations of conformism and moral outsourcing. And because she overcomes that weakness, rather than denying it, she emerges as the true heroine. As a pure liberal archetype, Manousos is morally impressive but existentially unlivable, much like the Rev. Josiah Crawley in Anthony Trollope’s The Last Chronicle of Barset (1876). The female protagonist’s hesitation, fear, and struggle, on the other hand, make her choice ethically superior, because it is chosen against inclination rather than in harmony with temperament.

To understand how consistently liberal this series truly is, one must know the classical and contemporary traditions of liberal political thought in depth. By contrast, those who approach liberalism superficially will miss the essence entirely. They will fixate on surface-level references to Stalin’s crimes, to Poland in the late 1980s, or to the abolition of property and money by “peace-loving zombies” and draw crude conclusions. But the series has no interest in refuting communism. Why engage with a corpse?

Pluribus is far more ambitious. It explicitly rejects an entire family of political theories grounded in metaphysical or teleological assumptions: the belief that history has a predetermined direction, that there exists a final stage of reconciliation, that some collective subject knows the end toward which humanity must move. There is no historical necessity here, no promise of salvation, no utopia waiting at the end of time. There are only contingent choices, irreversible consequences, and individual moral responsibility without metaphysical alibis.

At this point, several objections will inevitably arise, and they are worth addressing directly.

The first is that Pluribus exaggerates the dangers of collectivism and underestimates the benefits of coordination, solidarity, and shared norms. But this criticism misses the point entirely. Gilligan is not denying the necessity of cooperation or the reality of social interdependence. He is interrogating something far more fundamental: the moment when coordination ceases to be voluntary and becomes compulsory, when solidarity is no longer chosen but imposed, when peace, love, and harmony are no longer moral achievements but administrative outcomes. Liberalism, as the series presents it, does not deny social life; it insists that social life must remain compatible with moral agency. A society that functions perfectly at the cost of choice is not a society, it is a oppressive system.

A second objection will come from those who mistake liberalism for comfort. They will argue that the series romanticizes suffering, loneliness, and resistance, and that it offers no workable alternative to the security provided by the collective. But this objection rests on a category mistake. Liberalism has never promised comfort; it promises responsibility. It does not guarantee happiness, only authorship. The pain depicted in Pluribus is not an argument against freedom; it is the price of taking freedom seriously. To criticize liberalism for failing to eliminate tragedy is to demand from it what only metaphysics or religion have ever pretended to supply.

A third criticism, perhaps the most revealing, will accuse the series of elitism. Who, after all, can afford to choose individuality? Who can bear the costs of dissent, isolation, and refusal? This is a serious question, but it cuts against the critics themselves. What Pluribus shows is not that individuality is easy for the privileged, but that systems which abolish choice do so in the name of protecting the weak, while in reality depriving everyone, especially the most vulnerable, of moral standing. The series does not celebrate heroic autonomy; it mourns how rare and fragile it is. It does not assume that everyone will choose freedom. It insists only that they must be allowed to.

Others will object that the series is “anti-political,” that it reduces politics to individual morality and ignores structural injustice. This too is mistaken. What Gilligan rejects is not politics, but political theories that dissolve responsibility into structure, history, or necessity. Pluribus is political precisely because it refuses to let systems think on our behalf. It restores politics to its most uncomfortable register: responsibility without metaphysical escape hatches.

Finally, there will be those who say that all this is over-interpretation, that Pluribus is simply a well-made dystopian series, nothing more. But this objection collapses under its own weight. The refusal to take ideas seriously is itself an ideological posture, one perfectly aligned with the kind of world the series warns against: a world in which meaning is flattened, choice is procedural, and moral reflection is dismissed as pretentious. Gilligan does not force interpretation on the viewer. He offers it. Ignoring it is itself a choice – and not a neutral one.

The true subject of this extraordinary series is free will, individuality, personal autonomy, responsibility, and the tragic inevitability of conflict with the collective. For Gilligan, liberalism is not a policy preference or a procedural arrangement. It is a moral regime of responsibility. Nothing less.

I will conclude with a passage that crystallizes the ideology of the series in the simple words of its female protagonist, Carol Sturka:

Some of you think the world might be better off this way, with all the newfound peace, love and understanding. Enjoy that opinion. Relish it. Because it may be the last one you ever possess. And when the day comes that you have peace and love forced upon you, who knows, maybe in the last fleeting moment you might just realize you treasured your individuality.

P.S. Here you can find an earlier, shorter version in Greek.

What has recently occurred there is, in the most straightforward sense, a violation of international law. No amount of moral indignation against Nicolás Maduro – fully justified as that indignation may be – can change this basic fact. Tyranny does not suspend legal principles; it is precisely in the face of tyranny that those principles are tested. To abandon them selectively is not realism. It is opportunism.

Emotional satisfaction does not retroactively create legitimacy. This tension, between moral instinct and legal consistency, is where many falter. And it is precisely here that selective sensitivity to international law reveals itself. Some voices suddenly discover an acute respect for sovereignty and legality when it suits their political preferences, while remaining conspicuously indifferent when those same principles are violated elsewhere (i.e., in Ukraine), on a far greater scale and with far deadlier consequences. Law, however, cannot be invoked selectively without losing all meaning.

What is more troubling is the way certain self-proclaimed defenders of the Venezuelan people speak in their name while effectively lamenting the weakening of the regime that oppresses them. This is not solidarity with the Venezuelan people; it is an ideological projection onto them. The Venezuelan state has for years survived through intimidation, corruption, and the systematic destruction of civil society. Many of those who today present themselves as “defenders of legality” paid little attention to this reality at the time – or worse, actively defended, excused, or helped normalize the corrupt authoritarian regimes of Chávez and Maduro, often treating them as privileged interlocutors. To present concern for that regime as concern for the Venezuelan people is not merely hypocritical; it is a distortion of reality and a moral insult to a population that has paid an extraordinary price for the failures and abuses of its rulers.

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Yet those who cheer foreign intervention find themselves in curious company. The logic that justifies arbitrary action abroad often mirrors the logic of executive overreach at home. When military force is deployed unilaterally, without meaningful democratic authorization, legal categories collapse into expediency. War powers, foreign policy, and criminal enforcement merge into a single decision taken by one person. That is not strength; it is institutional erosion. In the United States today, this logic has become disturbingly familiar.

The fact that such actions may survive judicial scrutiny after the fact does not resolve the deeper problem. Legal tolerance is not the same as constitutional legitimacy. The decision to expose a country to international escalation, retaliation, or prolonged instability was never meant to rest in the hands of a single executive actor. When it does, safeguards disappear, and with them, accountability.

Nor should we indulge the illusion that such interventions help democracy. History suggests the opposite. External coercion tends to delegitimize internal opposition, reinforce nationalist narratives, and provide authoritarian regimes with exactly the pretext they seek. A tyrant imposed from within can be challenged by society. A tyrant confronted by foreign force often gains new rhetorical life.

As for smaller states, like Greece, observing these developments from the sidelines, a degree of caution is understandable. Not every government can afford open confrontation with powerful allies, particularly when unpredictability enters the equation. Diplomatic prudence, in such cases, reflects the constraints of international politics rather than a lack of principle; though it should not be mistaken for a definitive judgment on the underlying issues. Still, there is room – especially within a European framework – for aligning more openly with those states that have chosen to voice principled criticism without abandoning realism.

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The essential point remains: democracy cannot be delivered by force, and liberty cannot be subcontracted. Tyrants are overthrown when societies assume the risk, the burden, and the responsibility themselves. Anything else may feel momentarily satisfying, but it is politically deformed and historically short-sighted.

Venezuela, tragically, is about to discover that even when tyranny is real (and it is!) shortcuts come at a devastating price.

This reaction is not incidental. It goes to the heart of a much broader problem: the systematic substitution of history with hagiography in contemporary public culture.

Historical cinema is never easy. Even the greatest directors have repeatedly failed to satisfy professional historians. Films such as Gandhi, Braveheart, or Lincoln moved audiences and shaped public memory, yet were also criticized, often harshly, for distortions, omissions, and anachronisms. This tension is structural. Cinema demands condensation, emotional identification, narrative clarity. History resists all three.

Is it really possible to present, within the span of two hours, a past that for the viewer remains a foreign country, but for the historian is a world in which one moves almost imperceptibly, like the protagonist in The House on the Strand (1969) by Daphne du Maurier? This is precisely the difficulty that historical representation must confront. The past is not immediately legible; it is not a transparent backdrop onto which stories can simply be projected. It is a dense and internally structured world, grasped only through long familiarity, through attention to context, constraints, and unspoken assumptions. When this complexity is ignored, what is lost is not pedantic detail but the very conditions that make historical understanding possible.

But there is a crucial difference between unavoidable simplification and conscious falsification. What is at stake here is not whether every detail is correct, or whether a historical film can ever meet academic standards. The problem lies elsewhere: in the complete abandonment of historical seriousness.

The result is dispiriting. There is not a single scene in Kapodistrias that can be said to rest on serious historical research. No one, of course, expects a historical documentary, but it is astonishing how the screenplay manages to pack in every exaggeration, every distortion, every myth that has ever circulated about Kapodistrias. Where does one even begin? No, Kapodistrias was not the “founder” of Switzerland; he did not draft its celebrated constitution, which, in any case, was written seventeen years after his assassination. He did not “save” France from dismemberment during the Restoration, nor did he act as some providential savior of Europe. He was not a democratic revolutionary, and he certainly did not swear in the members of the Filiki Etaireia; on the contrary, as is well known, he sought to restrain and discourage them. He did not “mentor” or “educate” Giorgakis Mavromichalis. The British were not involved in his assassination, nor is there any mythical “secret file” on his murder buried in the archives of the Foreign Office. His relationship with Roxandra Sturdza was not a cheap, melodramatic romance, but a complex, restrained, and historically documented bond that has nothing to do with cinematic sentimentality. I do not know which historians Yannis Smaragdis (the film director) consulted, but they did not even protect him from egregious errors – above all, from turning, at the level of the screenplay, the protagonists of the Greek Revolution into cartoonish caricatures.

The film in question does not merely err. It constructs a closed moral universe in which complexity disappears. Kapodistrias is elevated into a solitary, almost messianic figure, severed from the political conflicts that defined his career. His opponents are flattened into cartoons, his dilemmas dissolved into melodrama, and the Greek Revolution itself is reduced to a sequence of emotionally charged tableaux rather than a deeply contingent, internally divided, and internationally entangled process.

The intellectual genealogy of this kind of narrative draws, directly or indirectly, on a genre that historians know all too well: devotional biography. This genre does not simply select facts; it reorganizes the past around edification. Its purpose is not understanding but veneration. Recent scholarship has shown how such biographies of Kapodistrias systematically reproduce myths, suppress contradictions, and recycle claims that collapse under even minimal scrutiny. Yet these myths return, repackaged for mass consumption, endowed with the authority of moving images.

The result is not history with errors. It is anti-history.

This matters, and not just to historians, because hagiography is never politically innocent. Long before modern historiography emerged, rulers and nations relied on exemplary lives, saints, and heroes to stabilize authority and discipline collective memory. Modern historical scholarship arose precisely as a reaction against this logic. From the nineteenth century onward, historians insisted, sometimes imperfectly, sometimes inconsistently, on a radical premise: the past is not there to reassure us. It is there to be understood.

Hagiography violates this premise at its core. It transforms disagreement into heresy. Once a historical figure is canonized, criticism becomes moral offense. Evidence is replaced by faith, argument by indignation. The past is no longer a field of inquiry but a repository of symbols.

None of this is unique, of course, but that hardly makes it less dangerous. Across Europe and beyond, public history is increasingly shaped by what scholars have called “usable pasts”, i.e. narratives tailored to contemporary needs rather than historical truth. Memory replaces history not because societies forget, but because they remember selectively. As Pierre Nora observed (Les Lieux de Mémoire, 1984), memory seeks immediacy and identity, while history introduces distance and complexity. The former comforts; the latter unsettles.

What makes the present case particularly troubling is the implicit hostility toward historical expertise. The question is no longer whether the narrative is accurate, but whether accuracy even matters. Historians who object are dismissed as pedantic, elitist, or detached from “the people.” Emotional impact is invoked as a substitute for truth, popularity as a substitute for argument.

Yet this caricature of historical scholarship is profoundly misleading. Historians are not gatekeepers of national pride, nor enemies of collective memory. Their task is different and far more demanding. They reconstruct the past as a foreign country (L.P. Hartley, The Go-Between, 1953); governed by norms, assumptions, and constraints different from our own. That distance is not a failure. It is the very condition of understanding.

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What historians actually do is neither glamorous nor comforting. They situate actors within structures, reconstruct conflicts rather than resolve them, trace unintended consequences, and accept that political action is rarely pure and never omnipotent. They insist on contingency, on limits, on the stubborn resistance of reality to moral narratives.

Seen in this light, Kapodistrias becomes far more interesting, not less. A conservative reformer shaped by Russian imperial service; a political thinker navigating Enlightenment rationalism, Orthodox moral frameworks, and post-Napoleonic diplomacy; a statesman whose vision collided with local elites, revolutionary expectations, and geopolitical constraints: this Kapodistrias cannot be worshiped. But he can be understood.

And understanding, not reverence, is what history owes us.

The gap between professional historiography and public myth is not a technical problem. It is a democratic one. Democratic citizenship presupposes the ability to think in terms of conflict, constraints, responsibility, and failure. Hagiographic history trains citizens to expect purity, betrayal, and redemption; categories borrowed from theology, not politics. When real politics inevitably disappoints, a public shaped by such narratives oscillate between cynicism and authoritarian longing.

This is why the issue extends far beyond a single film or a single historical figure. From debates over monuments and imperial legacies to struggles over revolutionary memory and national identity, the same pattern recurs: when history is replaced by sanctification, democratic judgment erodes; not in the abstract, but in how citizens learn to speak about power, blame, and responsibility.

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Kapodistrias does not need to be defended, nor torn down. He needs to be placed, firmly and honestly, within history. That is where he belongs. That is where we belong, too, if we are serious about knowing our past rather than comforting ourselves with it.

Only history can do that work. And only by accepting history, rather than hagiography, can we hope to recognize ourselves in the past without lying about it.

A shorter Greek version of this essay appeared as an op-ed in Kathimerini (January 3, 2026); the present text is revised and expanded substantially.

In the early 1970s, our family in Thessaloniki was among the first to buy a TV set, and my father tormented us by watching, for hours on end, football matches and programs featuring traditional Macedonian dances on Skopje television. At family gatherings, they would sing – among other things – two or three Macedonian songs, one of which ended its refrain with a word that sounded to me like “sortsen.” I have no idea what it meant, or even whether I heard it correctly; it was clearly a ramoni (a mondegreen) as linguist Nikos Sarantakos calls such misheard words. My brother and I – and especially my Thessalonikian mother – couldn’t stand those songs or that music. Whenever they began, I would quietly leave the living room so as not to reveal my irritation. They did not bother me because they were Macedonian; I simply disliked all forms of traditional songs and dances, whether from Greece or anywhere else in the Balkans.

Yet now, years later, I remember those Macedonian songs with nostalgia—almost with affection. I associate them with two of the people I loved most, who are no longer alive: my father and his sister, Despina. Those songs are part of my inheritance, part of my memories, and part of my identity.

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That is why I have yet another reason to be outraged by the disgraceful events in Florina, where the mayor stopped a live concert simply because a song was sung in a Slavic language.

The primary reason for my outrage is more serious: in a liberal society, no one should be persecuted, restricted, or stigmatized for their language, their songs, their memories, or the identity they live and claim as their own. This is a basic principle of freedom and human dignity. What happened is a disgrace to Florina.

P.S. If you’d like to read a very unusual Jewish–Macedonian memory of mine, you’ll find it here – though it’s in Greek. You can easily translate it into your own language using AI, Google Translate, or similar tools.

Over the past year, we have continued our work on the history of political ideas and institutions, expanding our research projects, strengthening international collaborations, supporting early-career scholars, and investing in shared research infrastructure open to the broader scholarly community.

I am deeply grateful to our colleagues, associates, and friends for their trust, generosity, and engagement, and I look forward to building on this common effort in the year ahead.

A brief overview of our work and activities is available at historyofideas.gr.

I’m having a hard time understanding why such a fuss is being made about how the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier is protected. Is there anyone who believes that we don’t need to respect the monument or that it doesn’t warrant some kind of protection? No one, I’d say, except perhaps certain political extremists. On the other hand, no one questions the freedom of assembly and expression.

Nevertheless, an issue that could have been resolved easily with a modicum of understanding has ended up at the epicenter of a political clash. This is due equally to the government’s erratic handling of the issue and the opposition’s opportunistic reactions to anything related to the 2023 Tempe rail crash. This terrible accident, one of the worst in the country’s history, fully exposed the ills of our political system, which has failed monumentally in dealing with the tragedy.

But the question is simple: The government’s aim, it says, is to protect the monument in front of Parliament honoring the fallen of war. Fine. The issue is how such protection can be accomplished without infringing on the freedom of assembly, that is on the right to stage political protests. I would go even further: The right to protest is not just inviolable, it is a cornerstone of liberal democracy, as it is intrinsically tied to the right of free expression. This, after all, is what distinguishes liberal democracy from all other political systems, which – despite their differences – share one common feature: the prohibition of protest and the restriction of expression.

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Can these sacred rights (in liberal democracies only) be restricted? Some reasonable restrictions – that do not take a serious toll on civic freedoms – are common in every liberal democracy. For example, the Monument to the Unknown Soldier holds special significance, as it symbolizes sacrifice for the homeland and serves as a space of national unity and collective memory. It is therefore understandable that a state would seek to protect and preserve such a monument from actions that might desecrate it or turn it into a stage for confrontation.

Is it, therefore, so terrible to have restrictions solely concerning the immediate vicinity of the monument, that is the area right in front of it? In principle, no. Are there similar measures protecting monuments in other capitals? Yes, almost every European capital, even in the most established liberal democracies, has them. But the difference is this: In those countries, special legislation is usually not required for their protection because demonstrators would never think of desecrating them.

Visit the Kathimerini website to read the rest of the editorial.

These seven women were some of my best students. They were working with me on their B.A. theses in the History and Philosophy of Science department at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. I selected them from among many other students because they had high GPAs, performed exceptionally well in my classes, shared my research interests, and are brilliant and ambitious. Most of them lean left (there were only two liberal-leaning in the mix) and are openly political.

This group of women – together with three others from the same cohort – produced outstanding senior theses on a strikingly diverse set of topics: Branko Milanović’s approach to inequality and capitalism; erotic dance as a form of expression protected under free speech clauses; the formal and informal rules governing the Star Wars universe; open markets and trade as a source of economic prosperity and freedom; uninhibited sexual relations as an expression of self-ownership; cisgenderism and gender-affirming care; the right to euthanasia; Hegel’s philosophy of history; John Dewey’s pragmatism and democratic politics; mass media and the sociopolitical mechanisms of subjection in The Hunger Games; and the silent contributions of women to early modern astronomy.

I understand that their group is not representative in any way, and I asked them to interpret the reluctance of their classmates, who were quite different from them on average. However, I wasn’t looking for a representative sample, but rather a brainstorming session.

I provided them with some leads. I tried to suggest some answers. The question I posed to them was this:

In a survey I conducted within our department, 40% of girls did not respond to the question about their political affiliation. By contrast, nearly all men and non-binary individuals placed themselves on the political spectrum. However, female students responded to all other questions, even the most sensitive, such as those about religiousness, and the most specific, such as those about same-sex marriage and parenthood.

Why is this the case? Please read the explanations I provide and add any you think I may have overlooked.

(a) Women are reluctant to express political opinions

(b) Female students do not trust the integrity (anonymity) of the process.

(c) Female students do not trust me. [Note to the Reader: I am openly liberal, and all of my classes are political. I teach political philosophy; history of ideas; theory and history of institutions; political history.]

(d) Political ideologies do not represent women because they are male constructs.

(e) Politics is considered a male domain, so women do not feel comfortable there.

(f) Young women have other interests and are not particularly concerned with politics.

(g) The options did not cover them because something was missing.

(h) They are not interested in politics because they do not feel they can influence anything.

I know my questions might have had a framing or anchoring effect. However, as I emphasized, these young women already had their own views on the subject. I, also, realize – it’s not lost on me – that there’s something ironic about a man taking up this question. All I can say is that I’m mostly channeling what my female students have told me, and I’m trying to tread carefully when it comes to interpretation or prescription. Their insightful answers, together with some recent research findings, paint a clearer picture.

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First, the young women themselves pointed to social and cultural reasons. A recurring theme was that mainstream politics still feels like a men’s club. One student bluntly stated, “Even political ideologies that are supposed to be liberating still have a male prototype at their core,” adding that women and minorities are represented by men, which overshadows their own voices. Another student compared high-level political debate to a boys’ game, saying that for some women, politics can “feel like football or baseball” – entertaining from afar but only tolerable up close if you’re willing to endure all the rough play that comes with it. In her words, a woman entering that arena must “be prepared to endure all the behavior that comes with football or baseball.”

These insights echo classic feminist critiques: traditional political categories and debates have long been coded as masculine. As feminist political theorists have noted, conventional political thought has presumed that political actors are male and that politics is a masculine enterprise. This approach treats women’s concerns as peripheral. In the Victorian era, for instance, public “politics” was explicitly men’s territory, while women’s issues belonged in the “private” home. This history casts a long shadow. Many women today still hear the message that politics is “for others.” Social scientists often report a gendered pattern in survey responses. Relatively disadvantaged people (often including women) may choose not to answer political questions because they feel those debates are “dominated by and intended for better-off” people. In other words, if you subconsciously sense that the game wasn’t meant for you, you might opt out of playing. This helps explain why some women in our data set preferred the neutral responses “prefer not to answer” or “none of the above.” It’s not that they lack opinions; it’s that the usual ideological categories didn’t align with their views or level of comfort.

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Indeed, several students pointed out that the options offered (left, liberal, right, etc.) simply “didn’t cover” their complex views. One remarked that terms like “liberal” or “left” have wildly different meanings by country and can serve as useful umbrellas – but those umbrellas can leave gaps. She suggested that our standard categories are “too narrow” for people with mixed views on issues like feminism, ecology, identity, and other non-traditional concerns. Another student wrote that she sometimes feels politically “unmarried” to any label. For example, she might be more or less of an anarchist in theory, yet still support a left party in practice, so no single label feels quite right. Modern surveys sometimes find that young people, especially women, prefer options like “left without specific details” or “undecided between social democracy and socialism.” In my informal poll, one of my students asked me if we could add choices such as “I lean left but am not sure where” or specific labels such as “feminist,” “ecologist,” or “none of these (I have my own mix).”

Beyond labels, communication style and confidence also emerged as reasons. One student confessed that when asked a blunt ideological question in public, her automatic reaction is to say, “It depends.: She argues that politics is often more nuanced than a one-word label can capture. She noted that women in the classes she attends often expect pushback when they state an opinion. “Men often want to explain to me why I’m wrong,” – so withholding a firm answer can feel safer. Another student recalled how she and her female friends often hear arguments like “You don’t really know” and are talked over by louder classmates when they share their thoughts. Rather than risking a futile debate or feeling “mansplained,” they sometimes keep quiet or claim neutrality. In this way, answering “prefer not to answer” on a survey might reflect a desire to avoid pointless conflict rather than ignorance or apathy.

All seven young women agreed that political culture is male-dominated and that mainstream ideologies were created by men. These are the most plausible explanations. For example, one student pointed out that even ostensibly progressive parties can exhibit sexist or exclusionary tendencies. She joked that the Greek Communist Party’s pamphlets included homophobic and sexist language. Another student noted that left-wing or liberal circles can still be uncomfortable for women who don’t conform to traditional male norms. In short, if a woman sees that even the loudest spokespeople of her own ideology are mostly men who frequently silence women, why would she embrace that label? This mismatch helps explain the “it doesn’t cover me” responses.

By contrast, trust issues were almost never mentioned by the students. None of them believed that dishonesty by the researcher (that’s me) or insecurity about anonymity was causing the discrepancy. On the contrary, they were quite open with their candid answers. One even remarked that she appreciated my use of feminine forms in class [I should mention that this led to a significant increase in female participation in a class that was already 70% female]. Nor did these women believe that they simply don’t care about politics. Several pointed out that our generation of women is very aware of social issues – the difference lies in how we engage. If public politics seem male-dominated or rigid, women will observe from afar or establish new spaces, such as online groups or community projects, rather than engaging in the traditional left-right framework.

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Interestingly, empirical studies back up many of these impressions. Survey research consistently finds a gender gap in responses to political questions. One classic study of political knowledge quizzes found that men often answer even when they are unsure, while women more frequently respond, “I don’t know.” The authors found that this difference in style artificially inflates men’s knowledge scores – and, by extension, their willingness to claim an ideological label. Recent work confirms that men answer “don’t know” to political questions significantly less often than women do, even in comparable groups. This is precisely what we observed in our survey: Men answered the ideology question without hesitation, whereas many women did not. Thus, part of the story is the difference in confidence and risk attitude: women in surveys tend to take fewer risks when the options don’t feel perfect. Another study reaffirms the status component, drawing on decades of data. If someone (a woman or an outsider) feels that the political arena is an exclusive club, they may simply opt out. The scholars noted that offering a neutral “I don’t know” option reveals hidden apathy; when this option is added, it is chosen by 20-25% more people, disproportionately women and minorities. Although my questionnaire provided a “prefer not to answer” option, the high usage by women (and zero usage by men) suggests that underlying attitudes, rather than the “offer,” drove the gap.

We should also consider the possibility that the source and phrasing of the question mattered. One student wondered aloud whether being asked by a man introduced a touch of awkwardness. Would she have answered differently if a woman had handed her the form? It’s difficult to measure, but social psychology research shows that people often react to the interviewer’s identity, especially when discussing personal topics. In any case, the women’s responses suggest that, even among friends, many Greek women are accustomed to hearing “boys” do the political talking while girls clear the table. This early socialization may make politics feel unwelcoming.

Finally, some women simply couldn’t find an ideological box that fit them. My students offered additional suggestions: one asked if we could include “feminist,” “ecology,” or even “agnostic” as boxes. Another student pointed out that many women no longer strictly identify with the classic left/right divisions – they might agree with parts of both or simply “belong to the left side of the spectrum without a clear spot.” In short, the limited menu left them scrambling. (By contrast, the men just picked the closest label without complaint.)

For me it’s obvious, that the silence of these women was not a sign of ignorance or disinterest, but rather, a sign of disconnection. They have strong opinions, but the traditional ideology question didn’t resonate with them. Twenty-first-century issues and intersectional thinking don’t always fit neatly into “left vs. right.” When the conventional political landscape appears masculine and elitist, a thoughtful woman may simply choose not to participate. Political psychologists warn that ideological labels can be “male-centric” and discourage women from self-identifying. My female supervisee’s frank commentary that politics often feels like a “men’s club” and that common labels don’t capture their views embodies these critiques in real life.

What, then, should be done? First, researchers should give respondents, especially women, more nuanced choices. Perhaps surveys should include identity- or issue-focused categories alongside “left/right,” or explicitly allow for a middle ground. [As you may recall, I did this in my survey, and every young woman expressed her opinion on hotly contested social issues.] More broadly, our political culture must recognize that educated young women who withdraw may be indicating that our political discourse is alienating. If we want more genuine answers and more women to fully participate, we must change the game itself. We must make politics feel inclusive and offer ways for people to express complex positions without stigma. One thing is clear: we shouldn’t blame young women for not answering; we should blame our questionnaire and political vocabulary. Evidence from my students and social research suggests that these young women care deeply about politics. They’re simply more cautious, excluded, or unmoved by old labels. They refuse to reduce themselves to a single checkbox. As one student aptly summarized, perhaps these women “perceive political reality as more complicated” than a quick label can convey. Let’s listen to them. I hope my next survey will provide a better way for them to express themselves.