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Welcome to the new books network.
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Welcome to Madison's Notes, the official podcast of the James Madison Program in American ideals and Institutions at Princeton University. I'm your host, Ryan Schinkel. As we continue season five today, I have as our guest Professor Josiah Ober. Professor ober earned his PhD at the University of Michigan and is the Mitsutaki Chair at Stanford University, a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, and a Professor of Political Science, of Classics and by courtesy of Philosophy, also at Stanford. He is the author of many books, including the classic Mass and Elite in Democratic Athens 1989, the Rise and Fall of Classical Greece 2015, which we'll be talking about today, and Civic Bargain 2023, which longtime listeners might remember since Professor Ober was here to speak with then host Anneke Nordquist back in 2023. Recently, we have had a number of Roman focused historians on the podcast. These include Thomas Schmidt and Reese Edmonds earlier in the season to even it up. Thankfully, Professor Ober is here today to talk about Ancient Greece as well as his work with the Stanford Civics Initiative. Professor Oberlin, welcome back to Princeton and welcome back to Madison's Notes.
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Thank you very much, Ryan, and do feel free to call me Josh. My friends all do.
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Okay, Professor Josh, so please tell me a bit about yourself.
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I had the honor of being a professor here between 1990 and 2006, but having received my PhD at University of Michigan, my training originally at Michigan was as a historian of the ancient Greek world. I was trained in somewhat conventional way. My dissertation was on the problem of the defense of the Athenian homeland in the years after the Peloponnesian War, after Athens had lost this catastrophic war against its rival Sparta. That was very involved with archaeology. Part of the evidence base was the remains of fortification sites in the Greek countryside. So I had some years of happily tramping around looking for watchtowers, remains of fortresses, and so on. At a certain point, the Greek government changed and made it basically impossible for me to continue that kind of work. They restricted the kind of fieldwork that I was doing for long enough for me to be afraid early in my career that I would never get tenure because my work would be basically at the gift of changing Greek governments. And I at that point shifted to Plan B, a topic that I'd been interested in but had never really pursued in detail, and that is the relationship of elites and masses and how that relationship was played out in public. And that led to this book you mentioned, Mass and Elite in Democratic Athens, which had the really rather at that time Completely unexpected effect of making the second stage in my career and brought me to Princeton.
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How did you get into history? What cultivated your love for it?
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So I'd always had a taste for it. I didn't know really that I was passionate about Greek history until I entered the University of Minnesota. Entered unclear about what I wanted to do. Indeed, completely unclear that I even wanted to be in college. It was at that point, 1971. There were a lot of other things going on in the world that seemed to be relevant to a guy of 18, but had the luck of just dropping into a course, thought, oh, gosh, I liked Greek mythology when I was a kid. I like history. Here's a course in Greek history. And it was taught by Professor Thomas Kelly. He was a distinguished historian of the Greek world. Kelly was so different from all of the teachers I'd had in high school. Most of the other professors that I encountered at University of Minnesota at that point, because he was just so strict. He believed so deeply and so passionately in the value of Greek history. Gave absolutely no quarter to anyone who didn't take the work seriously, had no problem about failing students who he thought simply weren't doing the work. And I was just taken by it. This guy cared so much. And I started reading them much more carefully than I would have done otherwise. Doing the work I was assigned with a real attention. And I realized, God, this is just wonderful stuff. So I went to him at the end of the term and said, well, Professor Kelly, I've decided that I'd like to basically do what you do. I want to be a professor of Greek history. Tom Kelly looked at me and said, no, you have to understand that at that time, I wasn't particularly prepossessing. I had hair down to the middle of my chest. I dressed a quarter.
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It's 1971.
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It's 1971. You see, I set that up right. But I did then say, okay, no, but just in case I wanted to try, what would I need to do? And he said, of course you'd have to learn Greek. And so one thing led to another. I learned Greek. I took a number of other courses with Tom Kelly as well as people in the Classics department. And at the end of four years, Tom Kelly said, have you thought about graduate school? And I said, what's that? It didn't come from an academic family. Was pretty innocent question. So he filled me in on that and, long story short, suggested that I go to University of Michigan, where there was a professor that he had worked with who thought that was the right person for me to work with. And so I had a great education there. And one thing led to another. Got a Ph.D. wrote on initially, fortifications in the Greek countryside, but then, as I said, had to make this shift.
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Who is the professor at U of M?
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It was Chester Starr. He was a very distinguished professor. Starr was, in many ways, like Kelly, absolutely rigorous, very strict about your knowledge of the sources, of the care with which you approached the material. But Stahr was not, in any kind of overt way, but very clearly, as I got to know him better, a Hegelian. So he believed in a kind of historical progress. He thought that the Greek world was going someplace. If you look at the title of Starr's books, his really breakthrough book was Origins of Greek civilization, 1961. Yeah.
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Which pushed against a lot of the Nordic currents that had been popular.
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Absolutely. Starr was ferocious in rejecting the idea that there was some racial basis to Greek civilization. I got to know him very well, got to know his wife, Gretchen. Gretchen gave me and my wife, with whom she was also good friends, a book of the letters that she wrote back in the mid-1950s to her mother when she and Chester Starr were on a Fulbright in Greece for a year. The most interesting thing about these letters was when she would write to her mother about the troubles that chat, as she would call him, of course, had with various of the German professors. And she writes about him storming out of lectures because there was still this racial tinge in the 1950s. It was still respectable to talk about, as it were, the Nordic background, the Aryan basis of Greek civilization. He'd have absolutely none of that. But he did think that there was cultural development. He thought this was a civilization that was, in fact, developing over time. And that's what we ought to be paying attention to from the very earliest periods, from what's now known as the early Iron Age, or what was then
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called the Dark Age, the kind of post Homeric age.
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That's right.
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Through the Bronze Age collapse.
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Yes, exactly correct. That's right. And through the Archaic period, which he said that's the wrong way to call it. Don't call it the Archaic period, he said. Call it the Age of development, the age which the Greeks really started taking off and then, of course, the Classical period into the Hellenistic. He thought that we really ought to be looking at how this world changes and develops over time. That was really against the beat in the late 20th century, when the tendency was for Greek historians to say that Greek history really was pretty flatlined, that there was Never any really major economic development. That we had a civilization that was basically stuck. And stuck in part because. Because of its dependence on slavery. Stahr said, no, it's not stuck. It actually is going places. We ought to be paying attention to that. And that was something that I internalized pretty much early on.
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Did the progress that he envisioned in the first millennium BC happen in Greek civilization as a inevitable linear movement, or was it contingent that it could have gone this way or that?
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I think he did think it was contingent. It didn't have to happen. He took the idea that progress can happen, but not that it's inevitable and not that it was part of somehow the emergence some ethnic spirit, but more's institutions, language, ideas. Yeah, indeed. He thought it was really, really essential that the Bronze Age civilizations had collapsed. The Greek world was during the Bronze Age, in some ways just at the periphery of these great civilizations. The Hittites, Egyptian civilization, the great civilizations of Mesopotamia. So you look at what Bronze Age civilization looks like, it's like a bad copy of these great civilizations. Not bad, and it was degenerate, but just small, with many of the same basic structures. A palace structure, a relationship between kings with claim to divinity, the palace hierarchy that is both a bureaucracy and a religious hierarchy. Very clear hierarchical relationships between the people running things and the people who are being run. So it was in many ways a very typical society of early civilization. And Staar thought it was just imperative if we're going to get to the Greece that we think about in what was commonly called the Archaic, the Classical, the Hellenistic period, that all of that was swept away and that Greece was basically brought back to a very basic level of existence. The Greek communities in the early Iron Age, post Bronze Age period were living at a very simple level. They lost a lot of population. They lost basically many of the things we think of as central to civilization.
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They lose writing, they lost the language of linear B.
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Linear B is linguistically Greek. We know that it is a form of writing that represented the Greek language. But they lost the technology of writing because that was really a scribal language, a mode of keeping records that was very highly specialized and there was no need for it. Once you lost the palaces and this
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kind of gets retold in the myths of Hesiod, the collapse. It's after the age of heroes.
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This is after the age of heroes because Hesiod has this vision of golden age in the past and then silver, but then you get this heroic age that's clearly meaning to be the age of the Iliad Odyssey, the Homeric Age. But he says now we live in an age of iron, an age that is hard and we have to work very hard to even live.
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As they're mourning for this lost civilization, they're also creating the poetry in the age of Homer that will then lead to a rebirth of civilization. Their nostalgia actually is innovating and building something new.
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Yeah, the Homeric poems are fascinating because they look back to this glorious age of hundreds of years past. Right. The Homeric poems get written down Sometime in the 8th century BCE, the Bronze Age civilization collapses in the 12th century BCE, and there's hundreds of years in between. And yet there is a memory of this glorious age of the past that's being preserved. And yet the world that Homer describes is not the world of the Bronze Age palaces. He's describing this whole made up world, a mythic world. Of course, there are gods floating around, horses talk. In many ways this is very much a mythic world, but it draws on elements of the early Iron Age civilization that was very simple, very much poorer than the Bronze Age world. And yet he's also aware that things are changing, that the world is beginning to pull out of this Iron Age poverty. The population of Greece is already growing by the 8th century. The early colonies are being planted in South Italy, in Sicily. So Homer's few a fascinating moment. And one of the interesting things about the emergence or the re emergence of writing in the Greek world is that it's alphabetic writing now, so it's really available for ordinary people to learn to read and write. Not one of these complicated syllabary forms of writing that really needs to be transmitted through a specialist bureaucracy. So it's now an accessible form of reproducing speech. And because it uses vowels as well as consonant forms, it actually can accurately reproduce speech. One of the theories about the origins of or the re emergence of writing in the Greek world is that it was developed not for commercial purposes, as we think about early writing typically being developed, but rather for poetic purposes, developed for poets to be able to transcribe what they're doing, which was up to that point, an oral form of transmission. At any rate, that, yes, that's a breakout. And going back to Chester Starr, he was very interested in what happened between the collapse of the Bronze Age civilization and the re emergence of writing then of other apparatus of what we think of high civilization, specialization, larger population and so on. And he said that's what we have to understand, that the Greek world changed fundamentally in a time in which they were not simply looking over their shoulders at a civilization that was available to them. That during this long period of the Dark Age or early Iron Age, the Greeks developed new forms of society, new forms of art, new forms of poetic expression that were distinctive, that were their own, that really were developed locally and indigenously. And those tended to be then the basis of something that could emerge or develop further as a really distinctive civilization. A civilization of city states rather than palaces.
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The politeia.
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Yes, this is a politeia polity. Yes, that's right. In the sense that Aristotle thought about it as a community of citizens rather than a community in which kings lorded it over aristocrats, who lorded it over peasants. And that instead of this kind of pyramidal society in which you have someone at the top and then a mass of people at the bottom, you have much closer to a horizontal society. Now, that doesn't mean everybody's equal, of course. They're not. Classical GRE civilization was a slave society. So there are people at the bottom doing work, but there's a large number of people who are, in a sense, adult native men of the local community, of the city state, of the polis, have standing as citizens and therefore expect to be part of the political apparatus to have a say in decisions.
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And they don't have education requirements or property requirements, do they?
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Yeah, ultimately, that's when we get to Athens. That's right, that they strip away.
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But the polity isn't just limited to Athens. There's different kinds of it. I mean, Thebes, Sparta. Would these count?
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Oh, yes. So once again we jump forward to aristotle. In the 4th century BCE, Aristotle becomes very interested in basically developing a taxonomy of different forms of polity, of regime. But he says there are democratic forms that are very horizontal, oligarchic forms in which the citizen body is limited to those who hold a certain amount of wealth. And then tyrann mechanical forms in which one individual or a family seizes control of the state. But Aristotle and the tradition that he represents at that point sees tyranny, the idea that one individual or one family should be running things, as in a sense, an anti polity. That's an aberration. Oligarchy that works. Democracy that works. Forms of aristocratic democracy, that's his ideal work. But tyranny is really out of the picture. So the form of government that was in the Bronze Age and which remained typical for much of the world ever since, that is there is a family that provides the leader that runs everything.
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The sacral kingship.
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That's right. Descended from the gods special relationship. Exactly. This gets just simply knocked out. I think Starr is ultimately right about this, that Greece would not be the Greece that we think of and know had there not been this catastrophic collapse that allows for the development of a different kind relationship between the residents of a local community.
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Let's dig into this a little bit. In Aristotle. Isn't democracy listed as the deformation of the polis as a kind of mixed regime?
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Yeah, Aristotle has this taxonomy in which there are three forms of correct regimes. Kingship, the rule of the one. That's right. Then Aristocracy, the rule of the few. That's right. And then what he calls politeia. Strangely he uses a term that is the generic term for the regime, for the correct form of the role of the many. He does however say that these forms of government are rare to non existent. So then there are three forms of degenerate regimes that are commonly existing. They are not the ideal type that are rare to non existent. The best of these is the uncorrect form of politeia and that's democracy. The best of the worst then oligarchy and then the worst of the worst isn't even properly a politeia at all. That is tyranny.
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There's three best regimes listed. The best regime, ideally then the best regime as it has existed in history. And then what is the best version of the regime that you happen to be living in? And so there would be also three kinds of worst regimes and democracy is the best of the available options.
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Yes, that's right. I think that he in fact says pretty explicitly that now in his own time that city states, that polis are much larger. Aristotle knew that things were growing. Starr was right about this. He said now that city states are larger, it is very difficult for any regime other than democracy to emerge. It is becoming larger. And that once democracy is available as a regime type, it's very difficult for oligarchs to maintain their authority. Because there you are as a middling farmer in an oligarchic regime and you're told no, you're not a citizen, really, you're one of us, but you will never make any of the decisions. You're not going to be in the assembly, you're not going to be in the law courts. You will be told what to do by the people who meet the property qualification. You look right across the border, five miles down, there's this democratic regime and a guy who has exactly your same lifestyle goes to the assembly, is treated with respect. He gets to call those rich guys to account in the law courts. I'm equal. Why aren't I equal to the people who are running my oligarchy? And that makes it harder for oligarchies to continue. Yeah.
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So when would the polity as a political form start?
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So this really was Chester Starr's question. How does this distinctive political form, with its distinctive cultural apparatus? And so when did that really happen? He said we have to look back before the origins of writing to understand it as an emergent phenomenon that by the time we get to Hesiod writing, probably in the late 8th century, maybe the early 7th century, it's there. Hesiod knows the form of the polis. And so the question then is, how is it that this kind of social organization could emerge such that Hesiod, although he lives in a community that's run by, he says, the princes or the basileis, he can complain about it. He says, they're bad, they are bribe swallowers, they judge badly. And Hesiod can say, and this anger angers Zeus. This is against the divine order, that the people running things should be acting in this corrupt way, taking bribes rather than judging according to basically equity. Although you don't have Hesiod living in a happy, certainly not a democratic polis. He wants to be in a world in which the people who are running things are not corrupt. He wants to be in a place that is just. And so he does say, yes, stay away from the center of the community. Stay away from the agora. Live your own life, get along with your neighbors. But clearly this is a second best for. Because the best would be that the community is a just community. That's really, in a sense, the drive that gets you to citizen communities in which the people who are, in the sense, at the receiving end of the orders ultimately say, we're going to be at the delivering end of the orders. It's a society that at least has the potential to develop into what we would call democracy.
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B
The Metamorphosis of the City, a book about the development of the Western political Pyrmennon, has this little analysis of the Iliad and the Greek camp and specifically the disparate elements of the polity about to all be enjoined. The way Achilles calls out Agamemnon, you have the roles that different characters assume. It's the kind of thing you would see later in Athenian Greek tragedy. There's something growing there that they are not fully able to articulate, but they know something's happening. Like the end of the Oresteia trilogy, where it invents the Jury trial.
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Right, yes, absolutely. In the very first book of the Iliad, our earliest literary production of this Greek civilization. Rage, rage. It's all about the anger of Achilles.
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Anger against injustice.
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Exactly right. Because anger against Agamemnon, who has unfairly taken what is not him.
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He takes from one Greek subordinate king, like Achilles, and he can do that to anyone else in the camp.
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Exactly. And why can he do it? He's absolutely explicit about it. Because I have more men than you do under my command. So it's just the rule by the strong majority.
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Tyranny.
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In this case, his command is a majority of soldiers under my orders. And we can see that Agamemnon is not doing things the way he ought to be doing. It's not just Achilles who complains about it, but initially, the whole problem starts because a priest from another town within, broadly speaking, the Trojan world, comes to the Greek camp and says, please, give me my daughter back. She was stolen in a raid by you Achaians you have in the Greek camp. And I have ransom. I'm gonna give you this rich ransom. You're gonna give me my daughter back. And then we're square. There's no kind of sense that you've done this horrible thing. You shouldn't have come and burned the town and stolen my daughter. The norms of war, this is a very rough society, but it also has the norm that when somebody comes and offers a fair ransom, you ought to give them back. Family member. The point here is that, and Homer tells us this, the army says, yes, give her back. The ransom is fair. And Agamemnon says, no, I'm not going to. She's mine. And we can see already there's this idea that if the army, the ordinary foot soldiers, were actually determining the outcome, it would have been a much better outcome. Achilles would never have been mad. Agamemnon would have no reason to steal his prize captive. Because of course, the priest comes, says, give me back my daughter. Agamemnon says, no. The priest leaves the camp. He's a priest of a Apollo, and he says, Apollo, I've just been insulted. You've been insulted. What are you going to do about it? Apollo says, oh, how about a nice plague upon the Greek camp? So the Greeks start dropping dead. And eventually Agamemnon went, what am I going to do? The whole thing is collapsing. And he has to, therefore give back the girl. No ransom this time, has to, in fact, give back the girl with a bunch of other prizes. And then, because he's lost, what does he do he goes and takes Achilles prize captive. And that's the reason for the rage of Achilles. Everything breaks up. It's because you've got bad leadership, but you have bad leadership in which you have no way to deal with. Because we're still in a world of kings and authority. But yes, exactly the idea that if the voice of the army had real weight, we wouldn't get into this problem. And that's, I think what Vernon is suggesting, that they haven't been put together yet, but the pieces are there for the developed poles.
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B
So we have the rule, the one in Agamemnon, you could say, of the few in Achilles and fellow heroes like Ajax and Odysseus, and then the many in the soldiers. Now, which century would we see these disparate parts in much fuller form? Would it be in the age that Herodotus is depicting? Because it seems like it's full up and running.
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A
The time that he's really talking about in detail is the back end of the 6th century BC and the first half of the 5th century BC, so the lead up to the Persian wars, which were fought between 490 and 478 BC and then the immediate aftermath of the Persian wars. So by that period, which once again would be called in classical terminology, the Late Archaic and the early Classical period, we have very clearly established forms of government that are consciously the rule of oligarchs. That is not only the few, but the few who are defined by their wealth.
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This is the age of Themistocles, who rules in Sparta at this time.
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You have now in Sparta a rather strange developed form of politeia, known as strange already by the time of Herodotus, because they do have a mixed government.
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Most of what we know about is written by non Spartans.
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The Spartans weren't big on writing.
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Two pieces of writing we actually have from actual Spartans.
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Yeah, we have some poetry from Sparta. Tyrtaeus is one of the great Spartan poets. We have fragments of their poetic tradition. But the Spartans were in some ways actually hostile to writing. The semi mythical lawgiver of Sparta, Lycurgus forbade them ever to write down their laws. He said it would be bad to have written law because then people could use it.
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I, Rousseau, loved it because it was practiced, not formally instructed. Once it's written down, you lose the art of it.
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A
There you have it. Exactly. And Sparta had this complicated form of government. Two kings. They're not kings like Agamemnon, but they are war leaders. And then we might call it a senate of elders. They have a Priestly function, but also an advisory function. So the king and the elders, by the way, who were elected by the armed warriors of Sparta, together formed a ruling council. They didn't have final authority, but they had the authority to bring proposals to the assembly of Spartan warriors. And the proposals that they brought, once the elders and the kings were in agreement, were virtually always adopted by the Spartans. So ultimately the agreement of the army was necessary for anything to happen. But the kings plus the elders would be deciding what is brought before them. It was a complicated form of government that worked pretty well for Sparta.
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B
Sparta was particularly small, which perhaps helped preserve its regime in the way that it did for a while. But by the time Philip of Macedon is invading, I think Sparta is like the one city. Yeah, we're not going to give tribute to you. And he's okay, I'm just going to ignore you.
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A
Yeah, yeah. Philip didn't feel the need to go down to the Peloponnesus and worry about dominating the Spartans. But Sparta was, by the time of Philip of Macedon, really just a shadow of its classical self. Sparta had become really small, at least in terms of people who had full citizen rights that could call themselves Spartans Spartiates. In the time of the Persian wars, around 480, there were somewhere around 9,000 full Spartan citizens. Small compared to the number of Athenian citizens. The Athenians probably had 30,000 by that time, but large compared to some of the the other very small Greek city states. By the time Aristotle was writing near the middle of the 4th century BC, Sparta was down to about 1000 full citizens. Aristotle is very aware of this, and he says that it was because of the problems with the way that the Spartan inheritance system worked and the Spartan system in which citizens could be expelled from the citizen body and yet not brought into the citizen body, that the Spartans basically collapsed as really a major power in the Greek world.
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Well, currently, I think the remnants of Sparta are often a bunch of parking lots, while Athens is the capital of the state of Greece. So I guess we can say we know who really won the Peloponnesian War.
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A
Certainly in terms of the series of four towns that were the core of ancient Sparta. They never had a city with a wall around it, but they had these four towns. We know where that is. In the 19th century, the king of Greece was presented to the Greek people by the European powers. In the 19th century, King Ol Otto never bothered to learn Greek, by the way. Anyway, Otto decided he wanted to have a true, proper, laid out European kind of town. And he chose Sparta. Because Sparta had this cachet, you say Rousseau with the German tradition. And so he lays out on top of what was once upon a time, the remains of the four towns of Sparta, a proper European city. And that's why you think of it as a city of parking lots. It doesn't even look like a proper Greek city anymore. It looks like something that you would see if you have a 19th century planned European town. And that's exactly what Otto planned.
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B
We saw how that monarchy turned out. No comment. So we have Sparta, we have Athens. What are some of the other more major players of Greek city states? Thebes.
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A
Yes. Yeah. Among them, yes, certainly Thebes, the city of Pindar. Right. To the north of Athens, the city of Oedipus. Yeah, exactly. A city that in Greek tragedy is the tragic city. It's where whenever you have a Greek tragedy that houses its locus out in Thebe going to be a real tragedy, things will go horribly badly. Now you set a tragedy in Athens and it's not properly tragic at all. You mentioned the Oresteia trilogy, which concludes with the Eumenides. And that one ends up happily. Everybody's doing fine at the end.
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If Oedipus wants a happy ending, he becomes a citizen in Oedipus at Colonis of Athens.
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Yes, that's right. Although of course he has to be dead by then.
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He is Theban.
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Yes. Thebes is always tragic anyway. Yes, Thebes is a major city.
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Corinth.
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Corinth. A great commercial center on the isthmus,
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destroyed and rebuilt a dozen times.
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A
Yes, indeed. The modern city wasn't plopped down right on the ancient city, happily for archaeologists. So you can go and see what a Roman city looks like, because the Romans rebuilt Corinth as a proper Roman city.
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B
The thing that surprised me when I was reading Herodotus and Thucydides was the amount of Greek city states that were also throughout Asia, throughout modern day Turkey, throughout Ionia.
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A
Yes, absolutely. So if you go to today, the west coast of what is now Turkey, you'll see the remains of spectacular Greek cities. Ephesus, Priene and so on.
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Places that feature in The Bible that St. Paul was going to.
- [32:20]
A
Exactly right. And these are cities that certainly were important in the classical period, but they were for the most part dominated by Persia at that point. The great Persian empire that the Greeks of the mainland fight to keep themselves free of. But in the period after the classical period, from Alexander the Great forward, the cities of Asia Minor become really the great center of Greek civilization. These places become wealthy and Moreover, they become democratic. There's a lot of work that's being done right now on the politics of post classical, that is Hellenistic Greek world. We have lots and lots of evidence for this because, because the Greek cities of, as you say, the territory the Greeks called Ionia on the west coast of modern day Turkey, left a remarkable epigraphic, I.e. inscription record as they developed into democratic cities in the age after Alexander, they developed the habit that had been typical of Athens when it became democratic considerably earlier, of writing down public decisions on stone tablets. Happily, these stone tablets which you carved, the decision to literally carve their laws and their decisions in stone survive. And so we know quite a lot about the history of these places. It's being intensively studied now. And the old story that even 30 years ago, 20 years ago, you would have read in your textbooks that democracy had a glorious time in Athens. It rose in the end of the 6th century and then fell at the end of the 4th century, is no longer the story. We now know that democracy as a Greek regime type has a much longer history, well into the 3rd and 2nd centuries BC.
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B
Now your book is called the Rise and Fall of Classical Greece. So it's not just about the rise of this epoch of civilization, but then also its decline, which was starting to be ushered in by the conquest of Philip of Macedon and the necessary son, Alexander the Great.
- [34:30]
A
I wrote this book, the Rise and Fall of Classical Greece. When I was talking to my editor, I just wanted to say, I want to write a book about the rise of Classical Greece. And he said, oh, we can never sell a book cult. It's just the rise of. You've got to do the full gibbon.
- [34:44]
B
You need a decline in fall.
- [34:46]
A
Exactly. So you need to have the fall. In the book, I do basically mostly talk about how it is that classical civilization emerged from this Dark age period to ultimately develop to a remarkable level of economy and of relative wealth. We tend to think about the Greeks as being virtuous but poor. And I say actually they were virtuous, but by pre modern standards, relatively wealthy.
- [35:10]
B
If I'm reading, say, a Tom Holland book on ancient Greece, it's very glamorous purple prose setting the scene, describing these vivid characters. You'll have a lot of quantitative research to show. This is very much a numbers book.
- [35:21]
A
I wrote it as a professor in the political science department as well as in the classics department at Stanford. As some of my colleagues in political science used to say, in God we trust, everyone else brings data. So if I was going to get Taken seriously by my political science colleagues. I needed to develop some data which happily this great scholar, Mogens Hansen from Copenhagen some years before I wrote this book, had created a great inventory of Greek city states. He basically gathered all the evidence that we have of every single Greek city state that we know about. With Bogan's permission, I just digitized this and basically did it by hand, turned it into a spreadsheet so you could do it probably more efficiently these days with AI. But this was the pre AI era actually because we were able to take this big body of evidence and turn it into numbers. We were able to then to talk about what had really happened over time in the Greek world. And instead of just saying that it looks different in the classical period than in the early Iron Age and it looks different again in the Hellenistic period, we were able actually to do some quantification. The fall really was what you allude to, that Athens and most of the Greek city states of the mainland lose their foreign policy independence with the rise of Alexander and then the Macedonian kingdoms that follow Alexander.
- [36:52]
B
A recent book by John Ma called A New History makes a very interesting argument that the polis flourished under other empires, under Macedonian expansion, the age of Hellenization, and then under the Roman Empire, local self government actually did better than it did in the classical period. What do you make of John Ma's thesis?
- [37:12]
A
Really the culmination of his work. John Ma has this great book on Poland. I've known John since he was a graduate student at a immense respect for him. John is part of a group of scholars who have been developing this theory for a while. What he was really able to show is that we ought to take this polis form and recognize that it exists. Even though there's an umbrella authority of these Macedonian kingdoms. The Macedonian kingdoms don't have a lot to do with what's actually going on internally in the Greek city states. They interfere sometimes. If there's a city state that is in a particular important strategic location at Corinth, for example, they would try to control it directly. And they of course were worried about revolts against, as it were, the empire. But for the most part it simply was too cost ineffective for these kingdoms to try to really dominate these Greek city states, which all had their own armies, their big walls around their cities. They were tough nuts to crack. So it was much more to the advantage of, of the Hellenistic kings down, at least in the early period of the Roman Empire to basically make deals with the city states which retain local independence. That's rather than Having to say, I'll huff and I'll puff and I'll blow your house down, which ultimately you can do. If you're a king, you have the firepower, you could take over a polis, but you don't really have the firepower to take over 100 polis, certainly not all at the same time. And so it makes much better sense to set a reasonable tax. The city state says, fine, we can pay that tax. So you can go on and become a king using the tax revenues. And the deal is that you don't bother us internally. We run our own affairs as we choose. And as we choose turns out to be especially these well documented cities of western Turkey, we choose to run ourselves democratically.
- [39:15]
B
Did that continue under the Macedonian generals who became the successors to Alexander the Great's empire? And did that also continue in the world Roman Empire?
- [39:23]
A
That now is really a point of controversy. I think that John Ma has persuaded even a lot of people who thought that the fall was the end of Greek freedom. That's it. The polis really doesn't exist as a meaningful thing anymore. As soon as the Macedonians come in, we've entered a new era.
- [39:40]
B
It's become a thing that's taught, not a thing that's practiced.
- [39:43]
A
Yeah. So I think even people who thought that with Alexander, the whole polis thing is gone now have had to say, okay, John, you know, certainly the polis exists as a vibrant form in the third century B.C. so during the period of the Macedonian kingdoms and maybe in the first half of the second century B.C. so the period in which the Romans are getting interested in the Greek world but haven't taken it over yet. The real question and the debate now in the literature is does the polis form and does something like democracy and local government anyway within these city states really continue in a vibrant way under the Roman Empire? So John Ma says yes, and some of his opponents in this debate say no.
- [40:31]
B
Where do you stand?
- [40:31]
A
I think John's got a really good argument. The trick is how we define democracy. Right. So does a Greek city in the, say, 1st century AD to be understood as meaningless, governed by its extended citizen body, or is it being governed by a few elites who are basically very much working just hand in glove with the Romans? And I think it depends, certainly by the time we're in the full Roman Empire, it doesn't look like Athens anymore. So if you say that it has to look like Athens to be democratic, then I think the argument against has a real weight. But if you say that the People who are running these cities, relatively wealthy, sometimes from old families by that time, are constantly having to justify their position to a much larger citizen body locally in their own city. And they're using the language that is familiar from democracy. Their behavior is in some ways constrained by norms that really are democratic norms. The way you use your wealth is supposed to be for public good rather than just for private good. Then there's something like democratic culture continuing onward. I think it's going to come down to a kind of a definitional question. To what extent do you think this is about certain kind of norms? To what extent do you require certain kinds of formal institutions?
- [42:03]
B
James Madison in the Federalist Papers makes a big distinction between a pure democracy versus a republican. A pure democracy can only work on a small scale. A representative republic mediates and channels the interests and passions of different factions together. That's the kind of thing that we need to create. That is unprecedented. I'm wondering, is it a federal republic that he is crafting something that is close to the Greek model or that's very far apart from the Greek model?
- [42:26]
A
Yeah. Madison certainly was very keen on making a sharp distinction between republic what he wanted and democracy what he thought the Greeks had and he didn't want. And he was really worried about. About democracy as he understood it in the Greek form, which he thought was ultimately mob rule or majoritarian tyranny. I think that if Madison knew as much about how democracy actually worked in Athens, especially Athens after the Peloponnesian War, in the Hellenistic city states and the federal republics that emerged in the Greek world already by the time of Aristotle and really flourishing in the third century century, I think he would have had a different idea about ancient democracy. Now, he'd still probably like to call what he's doing a republic, but I think he might have recognized that, oh, these ancient democracies are, in a sense, republics.
- [43:20]
B
This is the new data. We have more inscriptions, more documents. The discovery in the 19th century of the Constitution of Athens by Aristotle.
- [43:27]
A
Yeah, exactly. He had to take his vision of the Greek world from the data that was were then available. Basically, these were literary texts which were very critical of democracy. One of my earlier books was about Athenian critics of popular rule. And basically the argument there is that if we think about the great Greek tradition of thinking about politics, and especially the tradition that is a text written in Athens, sometimes by Athenians or other people living in Athens like Aristotle, what we see is it's a critical tradition. It's not necessarily a hostile tradition, but it's A tradition aimed at demonstrating that democracy is not the best possible form of government, pointing out its weaknesses.
- [44:13]
B
You have a great essay in Aeon magazine about Socrates. Plato's version of Socrates would be an example of this.
- [44:19]
A
Yeah, exactly right. Yes. Socrates clearly critical of democracy, and at least so we believe because of Plato, we don't have anything written by Socrates. But then you can ask the question, gee, Socrates, if you're so critical of, of this, how come you live your whole life in Athens? How come you say that I never even go outside the city walls?
- [44:39]
B
Rousseau, you love Geneva so much, why do you live in Paris?
- [44:42]
A
There you have it.
- [44:43]
B
Probably because he got exiled.
- [44:45]
A
Yes, in that case. But see, Socrates could have left at any time, as he says very explicitly in Plato's dialogue, the Crito, when Crito is coming and trying to bust him out of prison after Socrates had been convicted and is awaiting the death penalty. And Socrates then basically makes a big point. Now, I never left Athens and has this internal dialogue with the laws of Athens saying, Socrates, just in case you're thinking about running away now that you're convicted, you need to recognize that you had a kind of contract with us and that we gave you your birth and your upbringing and your education. You chose to live here your entire life. You could have left at any time if you thought that we were not good laws, but you didn't.
- [45:31]
B
You've enjoyed the fruit of the laws of this regime. And now when the fruit is bitter, oh, now you don't want it anymore. Now you want to leave.
- [45:39]
A
Of course, real Socrates was just giving the argument to a counterfactual Socrates that was thinking about leaving. But real Socrates has actually determined that he's not going to. So I think, yeah, we have to think about this critical tradition. Now back to Madison, thinking about people he really respected a lot, like Plato and his Aristotle. Why do these guys all choose to live in Athens? Not only Socrates, but Plato lives almost his whole life. Goes and visits Syracuse for a little bit, doesn't do very well there.
- [46:08]
B
Aristotle only leaves because they're about to get him as well. He doesn't want to give him another scalp.
- [46:11]
A
Aristotle famously says, I don't want the Athenians to sin twice against philosophy. We don't know that actually they would have prosecuted him. That's in the time when Athens is now at war with Macedon. Once again. Once again, Aristotle was a Macedonian or really born there, and certainly had very close relations with the Macedonian regime. So it's worth thinking about this great critical tradition. All of these writers Thucydides or Aristophanes, Isocrates, the great rhetorician, as well as Plato, Aristotle, write very profoundly, deeply, thoughtfully and critically about democracy. They all live in Athens, where you can write critically about the regime under whose laws you are living, whose laws actually protect your right to criticize the laws under which you are living. So I think that there's reasons to think about the Athens that Madison thought of as a mob democracy killed Socrates, at least in the classical period, the place that if you were going to do serious, serious philosophical work that was relevant to thinking about politics, Athens was the only place that you'd really want to be. It's where all the smart kids were there and where, in fact, the likelihood of actually getting in trouble, as Socrates ultimately did, turns out to be much less than, say, if you had tried to do this in Sparta or even in an oligarchic city like Corinth.
- [47:38]
B
In your essay, you state that Socrates say, like a communist dissident suffering some Soviet show trial, was not remaining silent, he was actively participating in it. His actions could have been bringing on his death if he had given a more conventional defense, bringing in his family to sob for him and say, oh, please, I'm so sorry. But instead, his actions are showing him as an active contributing citizen who is trying better the Athenian people through this trial, knowing that it may bring about his death. He's not denying by his actions legitimacy of what taking place. He's in fact authorizing them by what he is doing in a way deleterious to himself, but ultimately for the good of what he believes is the life, philosophy and the noble life for Athens.
- [48:18]
A
In some ways it's possible to see Socrates. This seems a little perverse, but I think it's right. As a very conventional Athenian citizen, conventional in the sense that if you are a patriotic Athenian citizen, a good citizen of the democratic, you believe, and your community also believes that you ought to give to the community some part of what is best of you. If you're rich, you should be giving voluntarily some part of your wealth to help maintain the Athenian navy, for example, or to put on the tragedies. If you are a middle class guy able to afford infantrymen, armor, you ought to voluntarily march in the phalanx and risk your life that way. If you're a poorer guy and you can't afford spears, the rest of the shields, breastplate, all of that, you ought to be taking up an oar and rowing in the navy and risking your life to maintain the freedom of the seas. Socrates says, I Have something good to offer the country community. And that is philosophy. That is a way of understanding how people ought to live their lives to be the best selves they are. Now that's a radical way of thinking, give the best of yourself. But I think that's exactly what Socrates thought he was doing.
- [49:42]
B
That's also taking Socrates at his word. And both Thrasymachus as well as Aristotle would say Socrates is always ironic. It's always hard to pin down. There's a little anecdote that Alan Bloom was in Paris trying to talk some sense into the graduate student. He said Socrates didn't love Athens. Basically the life of philosophy was incompatible with a love of your political home. These things were fundamentally distinct and the only interest in the city was insofar as to make the life of philosophy possible. Now on the other hand, Socrates fought three times in battle. He was known to have heroically made some stands in the Peloponnesian War. In physical face to face combat, he serves the city. Over the years his actions seem to portray a deep devotion to the city. But his philosophy, say his fables in the Republic, doesn't ever really give a reason why a philosopher who has seen the good would actually have a motive to serve the city. He practices it, but his theory never fully justifies it.
- [50:41]
A
Basically you have to ask yourself, do you think that across the whole of Plato's set of dialogues that that the real living Socrates had those opinions, that was his philosophy? Seems to me that's unlikely, that Plato was, I believe, a very original thinker and he's not simply transcribing Socrates. Socrates of the Crito generally thought to be one of the earliest of the dialogues that Socrates is completely consistent in the arguments he's giving. Although critical of Athens, he's not being uncritical. But I think that Socrates is completely compatible with the life of Socrates as a warrior, as someone who spent a full year on the Athenian council and had to have volunteered to get that he don't get drafted onto the council. So he spends a year hanging out and doing the business of the city with 499 of his fellow citizens chose to enter the lottery to become a councilman. So I think the Socrates of the Apology of the Crito, some of the other earlier dialogues is fully consistent with that. The Republic, I take anyway has Plato ultimately developing a refutation of some of the arguments that Socrates had made. So Socrates in the apology in Crito basically says if you are going to be a Socratic, if you are going to live your life According to the arguments I have developed so far, you will live thus. And thus is going into the agora and challenging your fellow citizens to live the best lives that they can. Plato doesn't do that. Plato goes and sets up his own little school in the academy outside the walls of Athens. He, as far as we know, never took part in the work of the city. I don't say that Plato hated Athens, but he lives a very different life. If you're a Socrates, you must live a life that is according to the philosophical arguments that you believe in and that have not been refuted. Plato lived a different life than Socrates. Plato, I think, therefore, if he was a true Socratic, which I believe him to be, developed different arguments than Socrates had about the life of a philosopher in the city.
- [53:02]
B
Was Socrates guilty?
- [53:03]
A
Socrates was guilty. Guilty in the sense of the Athenian jury, which had the authority not only to decide on matters of fact. Right. But actually had the authority to decide what constitutes impiety. The Athenian jury decided that Socrates behavior constituted impiety and that therefore. And he had in fact done things that then, given the definition that they chose to use, they basically chose to use Meletus definition, not Socrates. And by their lights, then by the procedural regularity of this trial, which was a completely procedurally regular trial, he was in fact constituted a guilty man, which
- [53:48]
B
he accepted, so technically guilty. But what constitutes impiety is decided by the very act of the judgment of the jury.
- [53:55]
A
That's right. So was Socrates actually impious by my standards or by Socrates standards? No. Socrates makes an argument that he thinks is a compelling argument for why it is absurd to say that he doesn't believe in gods. So you can either think that was an ironic argument or an honest argument, but he thinks it's a logically compelling argument.
- [54:17]
B
He believes in his Delphic oracle saying he believes in his daemon.
- [54:20]
A
Yeah.
- [54:21]
B
So you would vote to exonerate him?
- [54:23]
A
Had I been on that jury, and were I myself on that juror of the. We know that the vote count, because Socrates alludes to it, was quite close. We know that 30 votes had gone differently, Socrates would have been out of 500. Socrates would have been 280 to 280 or 281, if you think there was an odd number on the trial. So I'd like to think I would have been one of the 220. And I'd like to think I would have been one of the pretty strong 220s. But it is always important to keep in mind that, yes, Socrates was convicted, but close to half of the jury thought that. That he was innocent.
- [54:57]
B
Pro Alcibiades or anti Alcibiades?
- [54:59]
A
Anti Alcibiades. Alcibiades really was a brilliant general, but he used his brilliance in ways that were actually very destructive to his own polis. If we're to believe Thucydides about the speech that Alcibiades gives when he goes to Sparta in which he says, well, this democracy business, of course, we all know, is just simply a fantasy. It's a mere wave of the ocean that comes and goes. But I have to go along with it because my ancestors were Athenians and so on. It's a sophistic speech in the most obvious sorts of ways. And, yeah, I think Alcibiades was not a good thing.
- [55:38]
B
Also, his fanning the flames of war for Sicily, for the expedition, was a bad idea.
- [55:43]
A
No, clearly it was. Now, had he been the sole general in charge and had he had control of that operation from the beginning, would he have been the brilliant general who actually succeeded in taking Syracuse and winning the key battle? We don't know that he had to
- [55:59]
B
mess with the Hermes statues.
- [56:00]
A
We don't know that he messed with the Hermes statue. Somebody did. And certainly some people thought Alcibiades did. But what was pretty clear that he did is he performed a mock Eleusinian Mysteries in a private household. There was pretty good evidence that he did that, and that was considered just as bad.
- [56:17]
B
According to Plutarch, Alcibiades once chopped off the tail of a dog just to get everyone in Athens to talk about something other than what he was also doing.
- [56:24]
A
So, yeah, he had a certain reputation.
- [56:26]
B
So in Peloponnesian War, could have Athens done something differently to have won?
- [56:30]
A
I think at least they could have done something differently not to have lost.
- [56:33]
B
No, Sicily.
- [56:34]
A
Exactly. So you imagine that. No, Milos. So you don't go and knock off this more or less neutral island in the middle of the Aegean after you have this uneasy peace with Sparta. But clearly, you go and knock off Milos and you develop. God, that was a. We've been hungry, and the appetizer really got us ready for the main thing. And then we get Sicily, and then, of course, it all goes south. Had you not decided that we need to, as it were, expand our imperial power, if you could just have said, sparta has its sphere of influence, we have our sphere of influence. We're willing to keep it a steady state, then Athens would have at least not lost the Peloponnesian War.
- [57:12]
B
If there's an ancient document that you could get back just One, what would it be?
- [57:16]
A
That's a very good question. What I would like is from the school of Aristotle, one other of the politei, these accounts of the political history and the current form of institutions of another city state. We've got most of his Politeia, his account of the Athenian constitutional history and current form of the constitution. That's the only one we have. Give me another one. Give me Argos, give me Thebes, give me Syracuse.
- [57:45]
B
Something for some comparative politics.
- [57:47]
A
That's right, because it's great having Athens, but boy, it would be nice to know in that kind of detail what another polis really was. Like.
- [57:54]
B
Favorite Greek God.
- [57:55]
A
Favorite Greek God, Hermes.
- [57:57]
B
Hermes. Why?
- [57:58]
A
Because he's always moving around. He's the God of merchants. And in my rise and fall book, part of the story is how is it that exchange between the Greek city states drove a kind of potential for increasing welfare across the Greek world? Without Hermes, without the movement of goods and services and people across the Mediterranean, you never would have had the rise of classical Greece and we never would have had the greatness of Greek civilization.
- [58:28]
B
Thucydides or Herodotus?
- [58:29]
A
Thucydides.
- [58:30]
B
Why?
- [58:31]
A
Because I fell in love with Thucydides early on. Not the first time I hated Thucydides. The first time I read it, he was too hard and I had to read him too fast. The second time I thought, I'll never get to the end of this. This is such a deep and profound investigation into so many aspects of politics, social relations, relations, conflict, violence. I love Herodotus. I would hate to have to make the choice. Only one of these comes on the desert island with me. I'd take them both. But if I had to make the choice. Thucydides.
- [59:04]
B
You have been spearheading the Stanford Civics Initiative. Please tell me a bit about it.
- [59:09]
A
So I'm doing two things now at Stanford as a senior fellow at Hoover. One is called the Stanford Civics Initiative that's basically trying to develop a curriculum for Stanford undergraduates that will be focused on the knowledge, the skills, the dispositions and the kinds of engagement characteristic of the effective citizen. So what we want to say is that Stanford, Princeton, Ball State University, every American university ought to be not only offering a great technical education and whatever it is that you are going to major in, whatever it is that you're going to spend your life pursuing, but also ought to be offering an education in effective citizenship. Basically, the first thing that we did was develop a course for first year students that currently is taken by 2/3 of entering Stanford students and I hope will become mandatory for all of them after this year called citizenship in the 21st century. And then we're developing a series of more advanced courses, courses for those citizen students who want to go deeper to develop their knowledge to a higher level. So we're about to launch a minor in civic thought and Practice. So it's not going to be a major, but it's something that you can pursue alongside your major. That's been quite successful in doing that. We've raised money to do it. We've convinced the administration that this actually should be a core part of what Stanford is doing. And we hope that it's going to happen. And it has been happening at other universities as well. The other part of what's going on is the alliance for Civics in the Academy that's run through the Hoover Institution. The alliance is a membership organization. Membership is free. We encourage people to look us up and to apply for membership. The alliance is meant to promote civic education nationally. It's a membership organization that is open to anyone who. Whose work is aimed at civic education in colleges and universities. We are very interested in what happens at K12, but there's a lot of other people working on that where we thought the need was in higher education. So the alliance sponsors webinar. We sponsor these convenings. The idea is that those who are engaged in this enterprise of education for citizens in higher education ought to be in communication with. With each other. The programs are emerging at very different kinds of institutions. Some of these are at red states with state legislatures that have mandated that there will be a civics education program and that sometimes are mandating what the curriculum will be. Others, like at Stanford, are driven by faculty who became concerned for this and started trying to build it up for grassroots. In other cases, you have administrators, the president or a provost who say it's time for us here to launch something and are doing it that way. And the actual curricula that will be offered in these different programs are going to be quite different. A red state, blue state, public university, private university, big university, small liberal arts college. They're going to look different. They should look different. American higher education is a very diverse environment or ecology even. But those of us who are engaged in it should be talking about to each other. I might be offering a different course than one of my colleagues at, say, University of Florida with the Hamilton center, but I ought to be talking with them. We can learn from each other. We can learn from what works and doesn't work, what kind of syllabus are you developing for a course in constitutionalism, for example? I may end up teaching a somewhat different course, but they ought to be coherently about what it is that a citizen ought to know about the Constitution or about the history of constitutionalism. So that's what the alliance is about. It's saying that what we're doing at Stanford, we think works well for Stanford, but we want to have people across the country who care about this, not fighting culture wars about, oh, red state civics versus blue state civics. That would be a disaster. I think we need to do is have the sense that civic education is and ought to be a priority across the country. It ought to be a national priority, but it'll never be run by or driven by a central government because of the nature of American higher education. And that means it's up to us, the practitioners of civic education, to make a community and to talk with each other and to learn from each other so that we're delivering the absolute best kind of education we can at each of our very diverse forms of institution.
- [64:05]
B
In one of your Aeon essays, you mention Fukuyama's end of history. Now, his book, as I understand, always seemed to me a lament for there not being political rivalries anymore with liberal democracy as the only ideological game left in town. He has this from his original National Interest essay from from 1989. Perhaps this very prospect of centuries of boredom at the end of history will serve to get history started yet again. Now, that's one perspective. But another perspective comes from actually a critic, not of liberal democracy in a classical liberal sense, but in its more progressive form. Rizard Legutko, he had a book called the Demon in Democracy, in which he was saying that liberal democracy as it's exported around the world contains elements within itself that move towards a more authoritarian control from a very small clique bureaucracy that's embedded in the very kind of ideas. What do you make of that critique?
- [64:57]
A
It certainly is possible for democracy to turn into a technocratic meritocratic apparatchik run
- [65:05]
B
operation or in the name of meritocracy, but without actually rewarding merit.
- [65:09]
A
You can play it in different ways. You can imagine that in a dream world the most meritorious are actually running the show. That's what the Chinese Communist Party claims. I don't believe their claims, but that is their claim. They claim to be the true meritocratic society because the very best demonstrated by their success in a very vigorous examination system are actually running the show. It's true that within democracy, a Lot of people who go to universities like Princeton and Stanford and Harvard imagine themselves as those people. And they do in fact get in positions in which they do run things. And I think they, like the Leninist vanguard, imagined that it would be much better if the ordinary masses of people just stayed out of it for the time being. They will lead us to utopia and then the rest of us could be welcomed into it. So I think that's a real danger and partly because I think that is a real danger. I've been interested in some of my work to try to separate the idea of democracy as collective self government from liberal democracy democracy. Personally, I want to live in a liberal democracy because liberalism just means it's predicated on freedom. And I rather want to live in a free society. I don't want to live in a non liberal, that is non free society.
- [66:29]
B
You always prefer Paris to Geneva and Athens to Sparta.
- [66:32]
A
That's exactly right. And I think there are good reasons to have that preference. If you like culture, you might have that preference, various kinds of high culture as well as if you want to have the right to simply speak your mind, you might think that would be a good thing. If you think that a diversity of experiences are actually going to be better for making policy, for solving problems than people who have had a very similar kind of upbringing. Right. The apparatchiks have all had the same education, they all know the same people, they all read the same books, and therefore they all have the same solutions to the problems. That gets you into trouble in the end. We need to recognize that liberalism as a conviction that freedom is fundamentally important, is something that we can add to a form of government that is predicated on collective self government, that is broad citizenship, that is committed to a kind of vision of the common good and committed to a conception of political equality among a broad and diverse citizenship. You can build a liberal society on that foundation, but it's going to mean that you're going to compromise some of the ideas of people who call themselves liberals because they're not going to get to do all of the things that they consider to be best for us. The conception of justice of the rest of us may be somewhat different from the conception of justice that somebody like John Rawls, a classic liberal, would believe sincerely was the form of justice, the nature of redistribution that everyone would choose if only their arguments would be reasonable in the right kind of way. That's one way to imagine it. But I think that when we take democracy as being collective self government, we have to say that people Some of whose ideas are not going to be, by a Rawlsian standard, reasonable are going to have their say too. And that means we're going to have, have to have a kind of compromise with everybody's idea of what is the most just, the best form of government, the most utopian ideal. Because we do indeed disagree on some fundamentals and collective self government means we have to find a way to deal with that disagreement through fair bargains that we make that are good enough, in which each of us is doing better than we, we would do outside of the bargain, but yet less well by our own standards than if my lot were running everything.
- [69:01]
B
What do you make of that challenge that while certain models were used during the Enlightenment era, drawing from the Greek experience, nonetheless a lot of our assumptions that have so built today's world are really going back more towards the Middle Ages and late classical antiquity. The kind of stuff that our local Peter Brown was be covering, rather than specifically from Socrates and Plato and Aristotle.
- [69:25]
A
Yeah, history is what it is. Certainly the medieval Christian experience, the text, the thought is deeply part of that and is certainly reflected in a lot of the ways that we think about the world now, or at least the way that the people who designed the constitutions under which we live think about now. But if we jump back to the Greek world and we understand it at least with inadequate depth in some ways, exactly that same concern for the respect for the person, for the individual, based on a kind of core equality in the democratic communities. Theophrastus, a student of Aristotle, writes this lovely series of character sketches called the Characters. One of the characters that he calls out is the oligarchic man. And among the things about the oligarchic, oligarchic man as he goes into the assembly and he's just all out of sorts because he has to sit next to some scrawny guy who is obviously wearing inferior clothes and so on. He's not buffed up like the oligarch, who I guess spends a lot of time in the gym. And yet he does. That's the point. There he is in the citizen assembly when he raises his hand. His hand basically has the same strength as the scrawny little guy next to him. And he has to accord that guy a kind of public relations respect. He's not allowed to say, I'm not going to sit next to you, I'm going to sit in the top seats, the best seats. Now he actually has to sit amongst his fellow citizens, even if your attitude is that of a snotty aristocrat in the ancient democratic society, you had to accord your fellow citizens this kind of public respect based on the fact that your votes were equal, that you had the same political standing. And so I think, think that there is a tradition there that we can go back to, whether it is the basis of the way that people talked and so on in the Enlightenment and post Enlightenment, at least it's a source for saying it's possible to have that kind of relationship. So I think that one of the reasons to study antiquity, I've always thought, is it gives you an argument against people who say that could never work. Oh, direct democracy, or that is assembly democracy at a scale beyond face to face with tens of thousands of citizens rather than a few dozen. That could never work. It would not. It did for a long time, over generations. And yes, of course there were failures, Peloponnesian War, but there were also great successes. And it gives you a way to think about, yes, that is a way of being human together, having political life, a social life, building a kind of community, predicating. One form of equality is a political equality, right. Doesn't mean we all have the same wealth, doesn't mean that everybody's just the same as intelligent or it's good advice to give on a given policy question. But it does mean that there is a core equality and each of us has the right to speak insofar as that speech is regarded by our fellow citizens as likely to add something to the common good.
- [72:35]
B
At the very end of your book, the Rise and Fall of Ancient Greece, would you be willing to read this section?
- [72:40]
A
Surely. The Greek cities, like most of the cities of the Roman Empire, were eventually stripped of their fortifications. The Federal Leaves were disbanded. But by that time they had done their work. Greek political culture, in the form of democratic exceptionalism, had survived the fall and had been deeply embedded into a developing literary canon. Greece, once great fallen, was on its way to immortality.
- [73:05]
B
With that, we shall end. Josh, thank you for joining us on the Madison's Notes podcast.
- [73:10]
A
Thank you so much, Ryan. Been great talking with you.
- [73:12]
B
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