Josiah Ober

Fairness warning: my rating is unfair. I'm just trying to correct for all the equally unfair five star reviews. This is a solid three star book. My review is more negative than it should be, only because others have been too positive.

The three stars are due to the impressive attempt to study the actual material conditions of an ancient society. Two cheers! My two negative stars were caused by i) the book's neo-liberal triumphalism, and ii) its extremely shoddy historical thinking, which show more claims causation where there is maybe, kind of, sort of, perhaps, some correlation, but also just ignores historical events that can't be reduced to numbers.

i) Little more needs to be said. The point of this book is that Classical Greece was Great because it was more or less a modern, neoliberal state; all such states, we can assume, are, in turn, great. This is transparently false (e.g., they had slavery and we have capitalism; also, we are not great). I hesitate to say that Ober's book caused Trump's election victory, but one might think its success was a sign that certain portions of the American population were at least a little bit out of touch with reality.

ii) If you have the book in front of you, you might like to have a look at figure 4.3, on page 99. This is Ober's summary of his data. It is supposed to show that 'core Greece' reached an exceptionally high level of wealth because of democracy. A quick check will suggest that core Greece's ascent started around 1000 B.C., reached a plateau during around the end of the Athenian and Spartan empires, and then rapidly descended back to historical norms. I would have thought this suggested that imperialism, rather than democracy, was the driving force behind Greece's wealth (and, if I were a good Stanford classicist, I would then immediately hint that something similar might be true of the modern West). But I would only say that because I have no Panglossian wish to pretend I live in a post-imperialist, democratic utopia, or that anyone else ever does or has, for that matter. show less

This is that rare thing: a history of Classical Greece that brings a fresh perspective to a much-studied era. The influence of the Annales School is on every page and while the source material is not nearly as rich as was available to Braudel in his histories of the late medieval and early modern Mediterranean, the statistical estimates of demographics, trade, and the economy in this book are more rigorous and reap the benefits of fifty years of scholarship. Ober uses these statistics to show more test several hypotheses regarding the source of the dynamic culture that arose from the balance of cooperation and competition between the over 1000 poleis that formed the political units of Greek civilization. While Herodotus, Thucydides, and Aristotle all make appearances, Ober places them in the context of a long-term evolution from the ruins of the Mycenae-era kingdoms to the "Greek efflorescence" of Classical Greece, an efflorescence that Ober shows survived the deprivations of the Peloponnesian War, the Macedonian invasion, and even the Roman conquest. show less

There’s a fair amount of political theory, quantitative history, statistics, and even some specialized biology in this book. Josiah Ober (Stanford University) approaches the history of Ancient Greece from propositions relevant to our time: can we learn lessons from the success, and subsequent decline, of the Greek democratic poleis? I'm a rather classically trained historian, and so that approach strikes me as rather tricky, and so I'm not entirely convinced of the book's methodology. show more After all, the available sources for antiquity, even for ancient Greece, are far from abundant, and there are numerous essential domains where our knowledge is completely uncertain. Ober is therefore taking a risk here, especially in the first five theoretical chapters. What follows, about two-thirds of the book, is a more classical historical account, in which he tests theory against reality. I remain skeptical, but that doesn't detract from the fact that what Ober does is at least stimulating, challenging, and, to a certain extent, thorough and engaging. More in my History account on Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2373426167 show less

The author presents a competent review of Athenian political institutions. Athens managed to create a unique system of democratic government, but that is of course a familiar story. The author's claim to novelty rests on the extension of Athenian political and economic history to matters of knowledge. He argues that the superior power of democratic Athens (over other Greek city states) is explained by the way its governmental processes utilized the ordinary knowledge of Athenian citizens.

I show more think the argument misses its mark because the mark is so elusive and inaccessible to historical study. Athens built an empire and its citizens participated in government, that much is clear. But what Athenian citizens may or may not have known about any given issue, how their opinions may have interacted and changed in debate, to what extent their decisions were determined by distributed ordinary knowledge rather than specialist knowledge - these seem to be completely speculative questions that historical research simply cannot answer.

Since direct evidence about states of knowledge among Athenian citizens does not exist, the author uses a variety of roundabout approaches to build his case. The results are uneven. The city-state comparisons and the timeline of the historical development of Athenian government in chapter 2 provide an interesting starting point. When the author discusses decision-making in councils, magistrates and assemblies in chapter 4, the argument is to some extent persuasive. These are, after all, manifestations of direct democracy and thereby also of ordinary knowledge. But when he moves on to legal decrees, coinage, monuments, architecture etc. in chapters 5-6, the connection to ordinary knowledge is often lost and the argument is unclear. When he uses modern business literature to draw comparisons between Athens and "knowledge organizations" like Google (p. 105) he is being outright silly.

I think the argument would have been much better if the presentation of political institutions in chapter 4 would have been linked to the chronological account in chapter 2. The biggest flaw with this book is that it supposedly explains Athens' rise but is silent about its decline. If democracy led to success, then what led to failure? Why did Athenian democracy not survive? The author detaches his theory from Athenian history when he begins to stack up increasingly speculative evidence for his circumscribed one-way thesis.

Despite my criticism, I still enjoyed the author's broad understanding and enthusiasm for the subject. I don't think historians are likely to ever know much about how knowledge influenced the development of ancient societies, but this book can still be recommended to readers in democratic theory who don't mind a bit of free speculation. Readers that take Greek history seriously probably won't learn anything significant from this book, except perhaps new tricks for overinterpreting historical evidence. show less