The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece

by Ober, Josiah

  Unlike Aristotle in the Politics, my concern in this book is not to show that organizing human society into Greek-style city-states is the only, or even the most obvious, or even (in modernity) a feasible way to move forward toward collective human flourishing. We need not pursue Aristotle’s sometimes tortuous explanations for why it is that so many human societies deviated from the one path that he supposed could promote true flourishing. Nor need we concern ourselves with his diagnosis of the origins of social-psychological pathologies that led polis-dwellers to ignore the common good.9

  Our goal is to explain why and how, despite the various obstacles to largescale efficient cooperation that are seemingly intrinsic to life in the Greek city-states, the communities and individuals that constituted the ancient Greek world did in fact flourish, materially and culturally. Much in Aristotle’s teleological naturalism is clearly (in light of evolutionary science) mistaken and unhelpful in achieving our goal. But Aristotle’s basic insight about the potentially beneficial role of political institutions in sustaining high levels of social cooperation in a community of citizens—that is, that good institutions could and should align the motivations of citizens with the collective good of the community, and that it was within the abilities of real-world states to make institutional changes that would go some ways to achieving that alignment—does help to explain the classical efflorescence. My proposed solution to the puzzle of decentralized cooperation in the ancient Greek world is based on Aristotle’s basic insight and on several related Aristotelian ideas.

  I propose that Aristotle was right about the following things: Humans are like other political animals in our production and distribution of public goods. We are distinctive among social animals in our natural capacities to use reason and our ability to communicate complex ideas and information through language. Well-ordered human communities produce and distribute public goods through the development and prosocial use of human capacities of reason and communication. Societies that offer individuals especially rich opportunities to use those distinctive capacities are (all other things being equal) especially conducive to both individual and collective flourishing. Unlike bees (which Aristotle erroneously believed were subject to monarchical rulers) or ants (which he correctly believed were “each [her] own master”), Aristotle knew that human societies can be either autocratic or citizen-centered. But citizen-centered communities are (once again, all other things being held constant) more likely to enable individuals to use reason and communication in the pursuit of public goods than are highly hierarchical societies.10

  The efflorescence of the city-states of Hellas was, as I argue in chapter 5, promoted by high levels of specialization and innovation. Those were in turn made possible through the reliable production and fair distribution of bountiful and varied public goods. All of this was accomplished through self-governance, by citizens: individuals who, like ants, were their own masters and not under the command of a centralized, third-party governmental authority. The political structure of the Greek polis was well adapted—by the use of reason, history, and learning rather than by nature alone—to the production and application of new knowledge and the exchange of information among many of the community’s members. Institutions and culture promoting communication of useful knowledge among citizens (and sometimes noncitizens) sustained a complex set of activities and thereby potentially allowed for high levels of collective and individual flourishing.11

  DISPERSED VS. CENTRALIZED COOPERATION

  If the Aristotelian claims sketched in the previous section are right, and if, counterfactually, Greeks had been more like masterless ants, in terms of having an unproblematically hard-wired propensity to cooperate in the effective production of public goods for their local communities, the answer to why Hellas flourished in the classical era would be obvious. But the Greeks were certainly no more inherently cooperative than are the people of any other society. Indeed, competition—between individuals and communities—was a hallmark of ancient Greek culture. Hellas, with its agonistic values, its multiplicity of small states, its lack of centralized authority, its emphasis on the value of independence for states and of freedom of choice for the individual, seems on the face of it poorly positioned for an efflorescence based on cooperation. Why, given the salient differences between Greeks and most other great civilizations in terms of the centralization of authority, did the little corner of the Earth that was the Mediterranean/Black Sea Greek world do so well for so long?12

  For all the obvious disanalogies, what makes the ants around a pond analogy useful as a starting point for an investigation of Greek flourishing—more useful than Plato or Aristotle could have guessed, given their limited knowledge of the actual behavior of social insects—is precisely the absence of central authority. In this crucial respect, the Greeks of Hellas appear rather like ants, and rather unlike most of the other highly civilized peoples of the premodern world. It would not make much sense, for example, to analogize the Egyptians of the Old, Middle, or New kingdoms with “ants along the banks of the Nile.” Aristotle was right that the Greeks were, in this salient way, unlike their civilized neighbors.13

  Unlike social insects, and unlike Plato’s and Aristotle’s contemporary Greeks, ancient Egyptian society was oriented around a unitary and legitimate central authority: a king (pharaoh). The Egyptians expected the king to manifest in his person, and to maintain through his rule, the order of their world. Most Egyptians indeed lived in many villages scattered along the banks of the Nile. But the king of Egypt decided, for example, when the unified kingdom of Egypt went to war, and with whom: It was not left up to a process of distributed or collective decision-making in the villages. The king’s will (at least in principle) was law and determined many aspects of the activity of each individual Egyptian. Egyptian literature celebrated the authority of the king and registered the deepest dismay when the centralization of authority was temporarily disturbed. While there were practical limits to the extent of centralization, the political and social organization of ancient Egypt is inexplicable without reference to centralized royal authority.14

  So it was, with relevant modifications for local cultural specificities, for many of the great civilizations of western Asia with whom the Greeks shared their extended world, for example, ancient Persia, Phrygia, and Lydia. Yet others of the Greeks’ neighbors, notably the Etruscans of northwestern Italy and the Phoenicians of the Levantine coast, lived in vibrant and commercially oriented city-states. The Etruscans, massive importers of sixth and early fifth century BCE Athenian painted vases, were ruled first by aristocrats and later by republican oligarchies. The political organization of a Phoenician city-state may in some ways have resembled that of a citizen-centered Greek polis, although most of the ca. 50 cities of the Phoenician Levant were under the control of just four powerful city-states. Although early Phoenician states were palace-centered and ruled by kings, the king’s authority was probably limited by a council, and by the eighth century, wealthy traders were politically powerful. From the mid-eighth century BCE, the Phoenician city-states were incorporated into one or another of the great empires of western Asia, but it is not implausible to think that the emergent poleis of eighth century BCE Greece were influenced by the institutions as well as the culture of the Phoenician states. The highly successful Phoenician North African colony of Carthage was ruled by a wealthy oligarchy, headed by a king. Carthage was similar enough in constitutional order to a Greek state to be included in the catalogue of poleis whose constitutional history was collected by Aristotle’s students. By the sixth century BCE, the government of Carthage served as a centralized authority for an extensive empire.15

  By contrast, with the partial and ephemeral exception of the unified Macedonian empire at the end of the fourth century, Hellas was never brought together as an empire with a unified center—although it was not for want of effort: Syracuse acted as an imperial sovereign in Sicily for parts of the fifth and fourth centuries, and Athens built a regional Aege
an empire, incorporating hundreds of Greek states for much of the fifth century BCE (ch. 8). There was never an emperor of Hellas—although near the end of our period, Philip II of Macedon and his son Alexander the Great came close (ch. 10). In their wake, several large kingdoms competed for power and wealth in the Hellenic world, but many poleis continued to function as independent states (ch. 11). Finally, few Greek city-states were ruled by a single family for more than two consecutive generations. Despite attempts by would-be imperial poleis and by tyrants to “normalize” the polis world through centralized authority, Hellas remained, in classical antiquity, distinctively and peculiarly “antlike” in the dispersed and decentralized nature of political authority. The pattern held at the level of the Greek world as a whole and at the level of the individual polis.

  The highly complex activities carried on by most middling or large Greek city-states, and especially by large democracies, were the products of communication and choice-making on the part of many individual citizens who did not know one another as individuals. Given that most Greeks lived in middling or large poleis (table 2.1 and ch. 4), we cannot resort to Mancur Olson’s smallgroup exception to explain decentralized Greek cooperation. Choices were strongly influenced by formal and informal rules, but the rules of the community were not given or enforced from above, by a supreme ruler or by divine dispensation. The rules governing each polis, laws and customs alike, were self-consciously devised and often revised, by the citizens themselves. The citizens of each polis acted as a collectivity—as a more or less coherent group agent.16

  Likewise, the higher level interpolis coordination between Greek states that was sometimes achieved in the recognition of common regional interests, or in the face of common threats (ch. 9) was a matter of interstate communication and cooperation. With a few exceptions (most notably the relatively short-lived Syracusan and Athenian empires: ch. 8), there was no central authority structuring when or how a number of city-states would choose to collaborate on common projects, or whether and how they would oppose common enemies.

  In sum, it is the combination of a coherent and extensive Greek cultural zone, around the shores of the two great seas, and the lack of cohesive central authority, either for the cultural zone or in the individual communities that comprised it, that makes Hellas appear in some ways so strikingly like Plato’s ants around the pond and that renders Hellas so unusual in premodern history. In light of Olson’s theory of collective action, which posits that largescale noncoercive cooperation is simply not possible, the distinctive Greek form of geopolitical organization poses a puzzle: How did the residents of city-states manage to act as an effective group agent in the absence of centralized authority? It is fine and well for Aristotle to claim that people ought to act cooperatively, but why would they be motivated to do so, and how did they manage to do so in ways that were highly productive?

  HOBBES VS. ARISTOTLE

  Group agency and collective action are easier to explain in political systems featuring strong individual leadership and centralized authority—which is why the relative success of ancient Egypt, Lydia, or Persia is less of a puzzle: A unitary royal will determined (at least in principle) the choices of the community. A centralized-authority community, although in fact made up of many individuals possessing unique sets of preferences and diverse interests, is in principle an extension of a single intelligence and will.17

  If the king’s preferences are coherently ordered; if his choices, expressed as commands, reflect his preferences; and if the individuals making up the community act on the basis of his choices via a hierarchical system by which orders are passed down in a chain of command to the base of the social pyramid, then the community may be regarded as functioning like a rational individual.18 If we further suppose that the king has a good sense of what needs to be done (e.g., in the way of public works necessary for basic state security), then we can readily grasp why the state that he rules does adequately well. The same may be said to be true of a society ruled by a cohesive junta of like-minded rulers. The result (ch. 1) is the centralized and autocratic “natural state.” As we have seen, a natural state is not optimally productive, but it does solve the problem of the motivation and mechanism of cooperation. The necessity of a ruler (or unified ruling junta) to provide coherent direction for an extended community of individuals with diverse preferences and interests is the core assumption of many influential accounts of political authority. Among these, in the Anglophone European tradition, Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan (1996) holds pride of place.

  Hobbes, who was fluent in ancient Greek, was well versed in Aristotle’s political philosophy, and he engaged directly with Aristotle’s vision of humans as political animals, taking the comparison to social insects head on: “It is true that certain living creatures, as bees and ants, live sociably one with another (which are therefore by Aristotle numbered amongst political creatures), and yet have no other direction than their particular judgments and appetites; nor speech, whereby one of them can signify to another what he thinks expedient for the common benefit.” Hobbes acknowledged that “therefore some man may perhaps desire to know why mankind cannot do the same” (Leviathan 17.7).

  Hobbes’ answer was, he supposed, decisive:

  1 Humans, unlike social insects, were “continually in competition for honour and dignity,”

  2 For social insects, common and private goods were identical, “But man, whose joy consisteth in comparing himself with other men, can relish nothing but what is eminent.”

  3 Social insects, lacking reason, do not find fault with one another, whereas men habitually do.

  4 Lacking language, social insects cannot misrepresent reality to one another, as men do.

  5 Social insects make no distinction between injury and damage, as men do.

  6 “Lastly, the agreement of these creatures is natural,” whereas humans can have agreement only by “artificial” covenants between them, and thus they require a third-party coercive enforcer of agreements: an absolute ruler, standing above and outside the law (Leviathan 17.8–12).

  In short, the production and fair distribution of public goods was simply impossible absent a central authority. Moreover, without central authority, human life was utterly miserable.

  Hobbes famously argued that the only alternative to highly centralized political authority was a grim state of nature—one in which human existence would necessarily be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Hobbes countenanced a direct form of majoritarian democracy (in which whatever was decided by direct vote of the majority, no matter how prejudicial to any minority, was law) and an equally tyrannical form of aristocracy among the possibilities for central authority. But he clearly favored monarchy as the most efficient solution. Hobbes’ core argument, that only a strong, legally unconstrained, central government can bring the order necessary to civilized life in a complex society, has seemed intuitively convincing to many of his readers ever since. His line of thought has a very long history; the basic notion that order is both essential for decent human life and impossible without central authority was prominent in political thinking long before Hobbes (cf. Egyptian wisdom literature, cited above) and has remained influential despite many attempts to show that Hobbes was wrong.19

  Strong centralized authority not only helps to explain how a group may function as a collective agent through the guidance of a single will but also explains why the individual members of an extensive group rationally choose to cooperate with one another. As we have seen, modern social scientists have identified cooperation as a fundamental problem confronting any relatively large human society. If we assume that individuals are at least to a degree rationally self-interested (i.e., each will under some circumstances seek to maximize his or her expected utility), cooperation at scale becomes problematic. Why, as Mancur Olson asked, does each individual not choose to free ride on the cooperative behavior of others by contributing as little as possible to the public good while taking from it as much as pos
sible? And if some are free riding, then why ought anyone else cooperate? This problem is not just a fiction of modern social science; it was well understood by the ancient Greeks themselves. The Hobbesian tradition has a very good answer.20

  In a centralized-authority state, a king or ruling junta has both the incentive (rent-seeking) and the means (the rational cooperation of violence specialists who share the rents) to establish a system of monitoring and sanctioning such that free riders were likely to be caught, and, when caught, punished. Moreover, many centralized-authority societies have the means to develop and promote ideologies that discourage free riding. If there is a general belief that the king is divine or has a unique access to divine will, if the divine order is believed to punish disobedience (perhaps in the afterlife), and if free riding is regarded as disobedience, each member of society has good reason to obey the king by obeying his commands. Moreover, and just as important, each individual has good reason to believe that everyone else has good reason to obey. And thus, ideally, no one will free ride: All cooperate through obedience to the dictates of the king.

  Of course in the real world, no system of monitoring is perfect and no ideology is seamless. But even though the command-and-control/ideological system is imperfect, it may be good enough to prevent a cooperation-destroying race to the bottom. This is, presumably, why centralized-authority political systems are historically common. It is also, with a few tweaks (more monitoring, less belief in a divine order, with the Party standing in place of the King), why highly centralized forms of political authoritarianism remain so common in the contemporary world—long after the apparent victory in much of the world of Enlightenment ideals of democracy, individual freedom, and equality.