Joshiah Ober’s new book is the fullest expression yet of the terrific idea that has propelled his ground breaking work for years—the record of Greek antiquity can serve as a robust case study against which we can test big social science theories. He does not treat Greece as a straightforward model for us. And he does not limit Greece to a resource for tweaking our conceptual toolbox (e.g., participation, deliberation, judgment, free speech, democracy, federalism), though it is that for sure and he does some of that work. His work consistently brings the fruits of the latest methodological innovations that keep enlarging and refining our knowledge of Greek antiquity to bear on the empirical puzzles that animate political science. The trilogy of Mass and Elite in Democratic Athens: Rhetoric, Ideology and the Power of the People (1989), Political Dissent in Democratic Athens: Intellectual Critics of Popular Rule (1998) and Democracy and Knowledge: Innovation and Learning in Classical Athens (2008) effectively refutes Robert Michels’s famous “iron law of oligarchy,” as Danielle Allen observed some time ago. Political Dissent also seems to engage Michael Walzer’s conceptualization of “connected criticism,” though it does not do so explicitly. In The Athenian Revolution: Essays on Greek Democracy and Political Theory (1996) Ober compellingly casts a pivotal period in Greek history usually (and blandly) referred to as “Cleisthenic reforms” as a spectacular historical example of radical political action and the constitution of a people, or demos, that appears to me to be informed by a notion of “the political” associated with Sheldon Wolin.
In The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece Ober seeks to show that appreciation of the record of Greek antiquity can set a new research agenda in motion in political science. We live in “exceptional times,” Ober states clearly at the very start of the book, because substantial measures of sustained economic growth and widespread cultural accomplishment are joined with the normalization of the idea of democracy. This is rare in history. How might it be possible to effect change that brings this condition to the lives of more people, more widely and more thoroughly, locally and globally? What gives rise to it? What sustains it? What impedes its extension? How fragile is that condition? The book presents readers with the possibility that we can address these timely questions theoretically by way of a comparative analysis of the few historical cases of political and economic exceptionalism known to us. Classical Greece, he argues in this book, is not only one such case but is a richly documented one capable of sustaining intense examination. He chooses to examine that record through the lens of problems of collective action and theories regarding the issue of cooperation at scale without the creation of a centralized authority, thereby testing the insights of institutional economics. This means he investigates the incentive structures and broad conditions under which it was possible for the city-states of Greece to sustain in practice a conjunction of an extended period of economic growth and enduring decentralized politics. What he finds is that the complexities that mark the Greek experimentation with “citizen-centered” politics explain its ability to sustain economic growth and widespread cultural achievement (a condition he refers to as “efflorescence”).
There is a lot to more to say about this remarkable book. Classical historians might engage in a lively debate regarding his argument about “wealthy Hellas,” that is, his view that new evidence and new analyses give us good reason to challenge the longstanding assumption that the general standard of living in the Greek city-states was poor. Others will no doubt point out that he does not at length discuss slavery, though he satisfactorily accounts for this in my view. I wish there was even more discussion of the way constant warfare structured the political economy of the city-states (but that is because I want to know more). It may be that his argument renews political science’s interest in the relationship between democracy and empire in Greece given that he discusses at length the political economy of the extended networks of Greek city-states across the Mediterranean in the post-Peloponnesian War period and indeed after the rise of Alexander of Macedon. (Readers new to the fact that cutting edge research on Greece focuses on the evidence for hundreds of cities beyond Athens are directed to Edith Hall’s new Introducing the Ancient Greeks: From Bronze Age Seafarers to Navigators of the Western Mind, W. W. Norton & Company 2014).
His interest in exploring game theoretic modeling in this book will likely puzzle some readers who admire his earlier work. It will provoke controversy in some corners. But we should not lose sight of the fact that what distinguishes this book is its extraordinary embrace of methodological pluralism. The book includes marvelous close readings of extremely influential parts of philosophical texts (most notably a brilliant discussion of Aristotle’s famous language of “political animals”), appreciation of insights from scholarship seemingly far afield (e.g., evolutionary biology) as well as more obviously linked (demography), assessments of the implications of the newest forms of documentary evidence coming out of classics (e.g., M. H. Hansen and T. H. Nielson, An Inventory of Archaic and Classical Poleis, Oxford 2004), the compilation of original data sets drawing on documentary evidence, statistical analyses and game theory. Its analysis assumes quantitative and qualitative methods “can be conjoined in ways that are rigorous enough to pass muster as causal explanation” (p. xviii). It also delivers a stunning appreciation of Aristotle’s theoretical sensibilities. The book deserves a very broad readership in political science across subfields. It brings Greek antiquity into the 21st century.
