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1136 REVIEWS DEMOCRACY AND KNOWLEDGE: INNOVATION AND LEARNING IN CLASSICAL ATHENS Josiah Ober Princeton University Press, 2010, 342 + xvi pp., £15.95, $22.95 (pb), ISBN: 9780691133478 Ever since the appearance of Rousseau’s writings in the 18th century, Western political thought has been ‘haunted’ by an image of the ancient Greek city-state of Athens. Athens, of course, was that rare thing: a democracy in which citizens directly decided on issues of policy. Such a form of government, it is frequently asserted, is no longer possible in the nation states of our time. That is why we have representative democracy. To an 18th-century mind, a representative democracy is a contradiction in terms. Since representation is an aristocratic principle (we still aim to elect ‘the best’), it is at loggerheads with a form of government that traditionally admits the rabble to the political arena. Admittedly, not everyone living in Athens was a citizen. There was no such thing as equal rights for all human beings in a certain territory. The large majority of the 250,000 inhabitants were women, children, resident aliens (‘metics’) and, most disconcertingly, slaves. But that does not alter the fact that the body of decision makers was still relatively large, counting about 30–50,000 adult men. Although only a portion (up to 8,000) attended the Assembly (the ekklesia) and the People’s Court (the dikastêrion), we may still wonder how it came about that Athens outperformed many of its competitors, some of which were democracies, other tyrannies, or oligarchies. One of the possible answers is that the Athenians were superior because of their very number. But this answer is altogether too easy. In Democracy and Knowledge, the classical scholar and historian Josiah Ober sets out to tackle this question. Democracy and Knowledge completes a trilogy on Athenian politics, a subject which, as Ober himself remarks, it is well worthwhile spending a life’s effort on. The first part, ‘Mass and Elite in Democratic Athens’ tries to refute the thesis that Athenian democratic politics was in fact dominated by something like a ruling elite. By means of painstaking analysis of the sources, mainly forensic rhetorical speeches that have come down to us, Ober shows that there was no identifiably and homogeneous ruling elite. He brilliantly points out that those who addressed the congregation of Athenian citizens in the Assembly and the Court were not demagogues capable of swaying their audience; it was as much the other way round. Orators had to pay tribute to the mentality of the masses in order to get their way. In the second part, ‘Political Dissent in Democratic Athens’, the author undertakes to show that Athens also knew ideological pluralism. He takes on those adversaries of the democratic form of government whose texts form the subject that is usually the substance of ancient political philosophy. As is well known, the historian Thucydides, and the philosophers Plato and Aristotle, were far from unconditional supporters of democracy. Whereas the first two parts of the trilogy exhibit the methods of history and textual analysis, the book under review here is an attempt to apply contemporary methods from the social sciences to the political institutions of ancient Athens and their workings. The problem Ober addresses is that of ‘dispersed knowledge’ (which he takes from Friedrick Hayek) and its relation to public action. This relation is the social scientist’s object and at the same time his major problem. Public Administration Vol. 88, No. 4, 2010 (1131–1145) © 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. REVIEWS 1137 The hypothesis Ober proposes to test is the following: Democratic Athens was able to take advantage of its size and resources, and therefore competed successfully over time against hierarchical rivals, because the costs of participatory political practices were overbalanced by superior returns to social cooperation resulting from useful knowledge as it was organized and deployed in the simultaneously innovation-promoting and learning-based context of democratic institutions and culture. (pp. 37–8) Ober deploys a wide variety of insights from organization theory and current social science of the analytical persuasion to point out how knowledge in Athenian institutions was ‘aggregated, aligned, and codified’. Concerning ‘Aggregation’ in terms of the aggregation of knowledge (Ch. 4), Ober carefully analyses the way Athenian citizens were networked in subunits such as demes and tribes, which were the organizational building blocks of such major institutions as the Council (the agenda-setting body preparing decisions of the Assembly). He meticulously uses the theoretical analyses of modern business firms to make clear how such institutions dealt with the problem of balancing routinization and innovation. Mark Granovetter’s theory of weak and strong ties is used to chart how social networks emerged that brought together social and technical knowledge needed for concerted action. Ober skillfully intersperses (sometimes rather sterile) accounts of current organization theory with descriptions of concrete policy measures, based on solid archaeological or epigraphical evidence such as inscriptions setting out decrees of the Assembly. The problem of ‘Alignment’ (Ch. 5) is broken down in terms of common knowledge, familiar from analytical philosophy in the 1960s and made available to social science more recently by Philip Pettit and others. Ober shows how Athenian political life involved many occasions for meeting and generating such common knowledge by means of public rituals, architecture, and practices of publicizing and erecting monuments. ‘Codification’ (Ch. 6) concerns the issue of minimizing transaction costs of bargains and contracts so as to maximize the profit of private and public interactions both for individual citizens and the community. Athens dealt with this problem by a remarkably high level of standardization and reliability of commercial practices that were publicly known and endorsed. It provided a relatively safe environment for commercial exchange. Ober makes use of a thorough analysis of Athenian coinage (providing important archaeological evidence) to bring home the point that Athens was a highly reliable market place, not only for commodities, but also for ideas. Democracy and Knowledge is no mean feat. Anyone who is prone to the illusion that government was simple in ancient Athens because it was small-scale is recommended to read this book. It rightly draws attention to the complicated efforts of public administration that had to be invested in running Athenian democracy in a way that enabled it to outstrip its competitors and to survive major crises. Much of these efforts were marshalled by amateurs who occupied the even more specialized offices for what is by modern standards only a short term (one year). By finding ingenious ways of calibrating routine and innovation, the Athenians prospered until the Macedonians violently ended their autonomy in 322 BC. Ober’s book brings together a dazzling array of insights from unexpectedly different directions: classical scholarship, ancient history, organization theory, economics, political philosophy and, more broadly, social theory. Such mastery of different disciplines is remarkable for a subject that has long been the exclusive province of specialists. There Public Administration Vol. 88, No. 4, 2010 (1131–1145) © 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 1138 REVIEWS is, however, one downside to this: the application of this welter of disciplines sometimes causes the object of the book, democratic politics in Athens, to recede into a barely visible background. This will no doubt put off some classical scholars. It is, however, a price we should be willing to pay for a story that passionately but meticulously shows that participatory and deliberative ways of doing things can work, and work well – both in large organizations and ancient city-states. Paul Nieuwenburg Leiden University Public Administration Vol. 88, No. 4, 2010 (1131–1145) © 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.