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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.
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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.
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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.