Democracy and Knowledge: Innovation and Learning in Classical Athens

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 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 show more 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