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This article builds on comments by Pierre Lévêque and Pierre Vidal-Naquet, in 1964, about Cleisthenes the Athenian as political thinker, from an interdisciplinary perspective. It brings several significant elements as a complement to the way they reconstruct political thinking in Ancient Greece. First and in opposition to the Hegelian conception of reason as an actor in History that prevails in their work, the article presents the various thinkers as actors themselves within their own social and political context. Then the body of the sources referred to is extended to archaic poetry, going back to the beginnings of the literary tradition. Though often fragmentary, these works have recently been put forward as actual means of expression and exchange of political ideas in archaic times. Finally, the article reexamines the historiographic issue whether the Athenian reformer can be considered a political thinker or not. Against the background of recent studies on the circulation of knowledge in archaic times, Pierre Lévêque and Pierre Vidal-Naquet’s hypothesis that Cleisthenes might have drawn inspiration from other “intellectual” projects of reconstruction of the civic body (Thales, Demonax) seems convincing enough. Therefore it is still worth reading their work and discussing it in depth.