How did ancient Athenian democracy work? How was it similar or different from democracy today? Joining us to discuss these questions and more is historian Josiah Ober of Stanford University. Ober's recent book "The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece" is the most up-to-date and comprehensive study of the economic factors that led to Ancient Greek prosperity and democracy. In it he writes:
"Democracy and growth define the normal conditions of modernity: Autocracy, while still prevalent, is regarded as aberrant, so that most autocrats pretend to be democrats... These conditions were not normal, or even imaginable, for most people through most of human history. But, for several centuries in the first millenium BCE, democracy and growth were normal for citizens in ancient Greece. How that happened, and why it matters is what this book is about" (p. xiii).
Ober's book brings together archaelogical data, economic theory, and historical and demographic models in order to explain the political developments of classical Greece. In it, he suggests that the ancient Greek world was historically exceptional in many of the same ways that our modern world is. If that's true, what lessons, if any, can we take away from the Athenian experience?
