The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece, Josiah Ober, Princeton, 464 pages Did political decentralization foster classical civilization? That is one of the central claims of this fascinating new work of analytical history by the Stanford political scientist and classicist Josiah Ober.
Ober uses the tools of institutional political economy to explore the causes of economic and cultural “efflorescence” in ancient Greece. Rather than focusing on the impacts wrought by individual decision-makers animated by distinctive outlooks or on the aftereffects of great fortuities, Ober does social science, using the evidence of history to test hypotheses about the significance of political institutions and economic policy to human progress.
“Fair rules and competition within a marketlike ecology of states promoted capital investment, innovation, and rational cooperation in a context of low transaction costs.” This is the hypothesis Ober tests on the ancient Greek city- state (polis), which persisted from roughly 600 BC to the Roman conquest in the early second century BC. There are two parts to the hypothesis: one has to do with the political institutions Greek city-states adopted (fair versus unfair rules), and the other has to do with the change over time in economic integration and military rivalry among independent poleis (more or less competition). He takes advantage of the kaleidoscopic variety of institutional forms among the Greek states to investigate how their different political rules affected incentives for investment and exchange and therefore economic growth. He also explores how competition and rivalry over time affected the proportion of Greek city-states that adopted institutions that created good incentives.
The theory is explicitly inspired by Daron Acemo lu and James Robinson’s concepts of “inclusive” and “extractive” institutions, as discussed in their book Why Nations Fail, and the similar distinction between “natural states” and “open- access orders” in Douglass North, John Wallis, and Barry Weingast’s book Violence and Social Orders. The vast majority of political orders have been natural states, organized primarily for extracting wealth from laborers, farmers, and traders—who lack political rights—and transferring that wealth to a tiny elite that specializes in the production of organized violence. How do societies ever manage to move from the natural state to an open-access order, in which the creators of wealth are able to exercise some control over those who rule them and thereby limit predation?
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