Can we learn something about political and economic development from ants and the ancient Greeks? In The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece, Josiah Ober makes the case that we can. Drawing on new data, and applying frameworks and methodologies borrowed from the biological and social sciences, Ober formulates four interrelated arguments.
First, in the period between 500 b.c. and a.d. 200, Greece experienced levels of population growth and consumption not matched until the twentieth century. This era of “efflorescence” placed the ancient Greek economy on a par with that of several early modern states, including high-performing Holland.
Second, Greece’s striking economic development was the product of a unique set of political institutions that fostered investments and innovation, leading to specialization in a decentralized political environment where people, information, goods, and services traveled smoothly from one polis to another.
Third, porous barriers to exchange benefited not only the Greeks, but also their authoritarian neighbors. Within a cheap and easy-to-scale governmental hierarchy, “opportunistic” rulers borrowed Greek financial and military expertise, transforming loosely connected territories into powerful centralized states. The most successful of them, Philip of Macedon and his son Alexander, effectively put an end to Greece’s experiment in large-scale decentralized governance.
Or did they? According to Ober, if we move beyond the macroimplications of Macedon’s conquest of Greece—that is, the poleis’ loss of independence—neither Philip nor Alexander and his successors brought about the fall of those political institutions that Ober regards as responsible for the rise of classical Greece. As a result, and this is Ober’s fourth argument, Greece’s efflorescence continued and its culture spread in the vast Hellenistic world, where it began the process of codification that would render it immortal.
Like ants, the Greeks established and sustained a wholly decentralized ecology. Like ants, the Greeks succeeded because of their ability to share information at low costs. Like ants, the Greeks shared information as a strategy of survival in a highly competitive world. Because mouths spread information more efficiently than antennae, the Greeks’ information-sharing system produced not mere survival, but remarkable levels of prosperity and a sophisticated culture.
This book is grounded on two radical claims: First, ancient history can, and indeed ought to rely on hard data and scientific methods to build rigorous and falsifiable hypotheses about the past; and second, such hypotheses may help us rethink long-held assumptions about political-economic development in the present. Blurring disciplinary boundaries, these claims challenge both ancient historians and social scientists to take up new research questions.
Ober collects the now overwhelming evidence of Hellas’s wealth, shifting the burden of proof on those recalcitrant followers of Moses Finley for whom the economy of classical Greece was embedded in growth-constraining social structures. The digitization of the Copenhagen Polis Centre’s Inventory of Archaic and Classical Poleis, which Ober elegantly deploys to rule out alternative explanations of Hellas’s wealth, is the second punch in the one-two combination. While some ancient historians will feel uncomfortable about Ober’s use of the Inventory as a data set, only the rigorous application of statistical methods to the data can prove him wrong. As new scholarship turns to this task, it will raise two questions: How much do we know, exactly, about ancient Greece? And what are we missing? The answer to these questions will shape how we study Greek history.
Social scientists will find Ober’s claims equally challenging. Greece’s decentralized yet prosperous and remarkably egalitarian ecology constitutes an existential counter to the Hobbesian/Olsonian notion that cooperation at scale requires a strong central authority. Most importantly, Ober suggests that conditions usually associated with modernity—democracy and growth—are in fact quite old. Whether social scientists will weave premodern, citizen-centered efflorescences more firmly into a comparative political-economic framework remains to be seen. To the skeptics, the author’s story should at least suggest that well-documented historical cases might greatly contribute to the agenda, set by Douglass North in 1990, that seeks to understand the process of institutional change.
For historical cases to be of use for comparative investigations, however, we must pay attention to the terms of our inquiry. In this respect, Ober’s analysis of the microfoundations of power relations raises a set of problems.
For Ober, Macedon was not “a Leviathan of the sort that would have satisfied Thomas Hobbes” (p. 301). But what exactly is the standard for a “satisfying Leviathan”? The fact that Macedon did not constantly employ violence against its subjects, which no ruler can ever afford to do, does not make Macedon less of a coercive power. The fact that the Greeks managed to carve out pockets of autonomy also does not make Macedon less of a coercive power. Ober tells us that the Greeks were better off than they would have been if Macedon had annihilated, enslaved, or plundered them. Those threats are the reason why the Greeks gave up their sovereignty. How is that not Leviathan?
A related problem emerges in the analysis of power relations between the poleis in the classical period. The Inventory considers the poleis as independent and autonomous units. And so does Ober. But how many of those thousand-plus poleis were under partial or total control of superpoleis, like Athens, Sparta, Syracuse, or even Persia? Relaxing the autonomy-and-independence hypothesis, in turn, creates an omitted-variable problem. What role did power relations grounded on unequal violence potential play in making Hellas wealthy? The rise of Macedon indubitably presented the poleis with new challenges. How new, however, Ober’s story does not say.
Finally, what can students of democracy and development learn from the rise and fall of Classical Greece? Ober rejects the historicist argument that because each society is “distinctive,” comparison cannot but yield “false analogies.” This rejection shifts the emphasis on the similarities between our modern world and the Greeks’ (pp. xvii, 15). But if we focus uniquely on similarities, then Classical Greece cannot but remain “a cautionary tale” (p. 295)—the tale of the striking achievements of a civilization that, for a while, looked a lot like us but was gobbled up when opportunistic, authoritarian rulers absorbed those achievements into a cheaper governmental structure. There is more to ancient Greece than that.
To think productively about the differences between our world and the Greeks,’ we need to focus as much on familiar institutions—such as markets—as on unfamiliar ones—for example, decentralized enforcement of laws and norms. The payoff of doing so will be a fuller understanding of the institutional arrangements that allow for the provision of democracy, prosperity, and justice in places where centralized state institutions typical of the developed West have proved unsustainable.
As a student of Ober’s, I am admittedly partial to the arguments in this book. Readers shall therefore evaluate for themselves the strength of the claim that the classical past can help us understand, predict, and potentially even change the present. In the process, they might discern a new approach to a perennial problem—the problem of development.
