The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece Quotes

“We now have a theory of effective collective action with decentralized authority. The theory is based on a conception of human nature as at once social, interdependent, justice-seeking, self-interested, and strategic. That conception is consistent with contemporary social science and with ancient Greek thought. The theory explains (through a mix of ideology, federalism, “altruistic” punishment, and existential threats) individual motivation to cooperate in the absence of a unitary sovereign as third-party enforcer. It provides (through information exchange) a mechanism that enables many individuals to accomplish common goals and to produce public goods without requiring orders from a master.”
― Josiah Ober, The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece

“[I]n Greece, the distinctive political situation that arose beginning around 800 BCE and persisted for at least the next half-millennium was the differentiator that enabled the world of the city-states to perform economically and culturally at a level much higher than the premodern normal, defined by conditions in the Late Bronze, Early Iron, and early modern periods of Greek history - and indeed, at a level that in some respects matched the exceptionally high-performing early modern societies of Holland and Britain.

Those conclusions are important to us in modernity, not because Greece was the unique origin of the Western tradition or the spark that ignited a putative 'great divergence' between East and West but because classical Greece is the earliest documented case of 'democratic exceptionalism plus efflorescence' - a historically rare combination of economic, cultural, and political conditions pertaining among developed countries in the contemporary world.

Insofar as we value democracy and prefer wealth to poverty, then we have good reason to care about explaining the rise of the society in which the wealth and democracy package is first documented. We have equally good reasons for wanting to explain why the major states within that society failed to maintain their full independence in the face of entrepreneurial authoritarians willing and able to appropriate institutions and technology. In the long run, the loss of city-state independence was coincident with a long economic decline. By the seventh century CE, core Greece had reverted to the relatively impoverished condition of the 'premodern normal.' The world of Greek antiquity was obviously very different from our own, and some of the factors that led to both the rise and fall of classical Greece are unlikely to be repeated. Yet for those who do recognize certain features of our modernity in the history of classical Greece, that history may serve as a cautionary tale.”
― Josiah Ober, The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece

“Fair rules and competition within a marketlike ecology of states promoted capital investment, innovation, and rational cooperation in a context of low transaction costs.”
― Josiah Ober, The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece

“[The “Platonic pond ant” thought experiment] suggests there is nothing preternatural about the efflorescence of the decentralized world of the Greek city-states. I would suggest, as a working hypothesis to be tested in the chapters to come, that the ancient Greeks reproduced the ants’ process of successful decentralized organization through constantly reiterated information exchange.... It this information-centered hypothesis is right, the key to effective decentralized human cooperation in the context of a state is enabling a wide variety of valuable (at a minimum: accurate and pertinent) information to be exchanged with great frequency by the residents of the state. The hypothesis would be falsified, of course, if, relative to central-authority systems, citizen-centered Greek poleis tended to discourage information exchange.”
― Josiah Ober, The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece