The anti-Leviathan looms large in Josiah Ober’s study of the rise of and long-lasting “efflorescence” of the Greek world from the seventh century b.c.e. through the second century c.e., well past the conquest of Greece by Philip of Macedon. For Ober, Hobbes’s Leviathan represents a centralized authority dominating the activities of the members of the community, looking to its own welfare rather than the community’s. In contrast are the decentralized city-states of Greece, which eschewed any such centralized authority, that flourished economically and culturally. Efflorescence, a term borrowed from historical sociology, entails for Ober an “increased economic growth accompanied by a sharp uptick in cultural achievement” (p. 2). With a wide range of statistical measures and graphs, Ober argues that during the period he studies the experience of the Greeks living comfortably above subsistence level would not be matched until the late 1800s. Such material well-being also fostered, he suggests, those cultural wonders that made Greece, in the words of Lord Byron that serve as epigraphs for the first and final chapters, “Immortal, though no more” (pp. 1 and 293).

The economic exceptionalism of the ancient Greek world, according to Ober, derives from a political exceptionalism entailed in the congruence of a whole host of distinctive social and political practices, such as fair play, low transaction costs, and “limited” specialization, yet a willingness to rely on specialists, sharing of ideas, federalism, knowledge-based innovation, and more. Although information concerning the Greece about which Ober writes is often sketchy and conclusions conjectural, he takes advantage of a wealth of new resources that have been collected in the last several decades, epigraphical and archaeological, as well the Inventory of 1,035 poleis compiled by a research team under the leadership of Mogens Hansen (2004). These resources now enable scholars to analyze the experiences of a multitude of Greek cities. Thus, Ober can offer an extensive history of Greek cities well beyond the usual suspects (Athens and Sparta) that have dominated our understanding of ancient Greece.

To complement these new resources, Ober presents a multimedia display of scholarly methods to support his claims about the sources of Greece’s efflorescence. Just to mention a few: comparative history, counterfactual imaginings, quasi-experimental history, game theory, evolutionary biology, the ecology of ants, a Kahneman “prospect theory” analysis of such famous set pieces as the Melian Dialogue (pp. 217–19); all these and more appear at different moments in the text and the Appendices. The ecology of ant communities may take pride of place with a whole chapter, “Ants Around a Pond,” devoted to analogizing the Greek cities clustered around the Mediterranean to ant colonies studied by Deborah Gordon in Ants at Work (1999). Greece’s flourishing resulted from decentralized cooperation within and between Greek cities, Ober suggests, just like the colonies of Gordon’s ants. This gathering of the latest research in Greek history, along with the array of methodological tools to argue that Greece’s efflorescence could result without the Leviathan’s touch, is certainly a tour de force.

Earlier in his career, Ober published an article in which he had demolished the Cleisthenes-centric reading of the founding of democracy at Athens (“The Athenian Revolution of 508/7 b.c.,” in Leslie Kurke’s Cultural Poetics in Archaic Greece, 1993). Previously, scholars accepted Aristotle’s and Herodotus’ word that Cleisthenes had “instituted” Athenian democracy in 508/7 b.c.e.; what that meant and how he did so remained unclear. Ober attacked this conventional understanding of democracy’s founding, arguing that the demos, not the leader Cleisthenes, expelled the Spartans from Athens and laid down the foundations Athenian democracy. Ober the democrat insisted that the demos could act, that the demos need not rely on leaders to accomplish great things, that history needed to acknowledge the potential agency of the demos, and that therefore the story of the founding of democracy needed serious revision.

In his new book, Ober the democrat continues this argument with a centuries-long reading of Greece history. Elsewhere, rulers claimed a direct line to divinity or minted coins with their images. Among the Greeks, where the priests failed to translate religious authority into positions of social privilege and Greek elites failed to acquire military technology that would allow a few to secure domination, power was diffused. No Leviathan managed a city’s affairs. No individual has pride of place in the story of the Greek efflorescence. Throughout, Ober writes as a committed democrat, and it is his distaste for Leviathan that energizes the argument about the material and cultural benefits of authority resting with a leaderless people.

Ober’s goal goes beyond resuscitating the world of Greece as a model of decentralized democratic practices that might be—certainly are—impossible to implement today. Rather, he wants to suggest that the principles that marked the life of ancient Greece—the rule of law, egalitarianism, low transaction costs, reliance on specialists—need not be alien to our current aspirations. So committed is he to these principles that he even suggests that Philip’s conquest of Greece may have come in part from his adherence to practices that marked the Greek world. Commenting on Philip’s hiring of Aristotle to educate Alexander, Ober asks: “Why on Earth … would Leviathan hire Aristotle to tutor his prospective heir?” (p. 290).

Ober acknowledges that there are varied justifications for preferring democracy to Leviathan, but his focus in The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece is primarily on the language of efflorescence. We should not, however, let ourselves get lost in the impressive display of economic comforts enjoyed by the ancient Greeks and ignore the insights of the philosophers who benefited from that efflorescence. Ober calls on Aristotle’s biological works to support his own analogy with ants, glossing Aristotle’s statement about man as a political animal to say that “we are in behavioral terms like social insects, only more so” (p. 49). As Ober knows and acknowledges, Aristotle cared about human flourishing, the exercise of reason/speech (logos) whereby humans consciously pursue the good and become moral creatures distinguishing the just and unjust within the context of political life. Such human flourishing may require the material benefits of a flourishing economy, but without the concern with “the good life,” one marked by the exercise of logos and the engagement in the mutual pursuit of a common good, the material efflorescence that Ober chronicles would leave us, in the philosopher’s view, no better than ants clustered around the pond.

I am certain that Ober understands Aristotle’s deeper commitments and cares for them in his diatribe against Leviathan. My minor worry is that the Aristotelian concern with human flourishing may disappear behind the attention to economic flourishing that can easily be captured by the raw numbers controlling the book’s central thesis. The Greek efflorescence gave us Aristotle. We should not ignore the insights Aristotle offered about the true nature of human flourishing. The worry about Leviathan may lie deeper than the conditions for economic well-being; it may come from what we learn courtesy of just those philosophers who flourished during the efflorescence of ancient Greece.