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On the Use of Greek History for Life: Josiah Ober's Athens and Paul Rahe's Sparta

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JosiahOber: The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015. Pp. 416.)
JosiahOber: Demopolis: Democracy before Liberalism in Theory and Practice. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Pp. 204.)
Paul A.Rahe: The Grand Strategy of Classical Sparta: The Persian Challenge. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015, Pp. 408.)

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Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 April 2019

Susan D. Collins
Susan D. Collins*
Affiliation:
University of Notre Dame
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Extract

Among contemporary scholars who write about classical Greece, Josiah Ober and Paul Rahe are especially adept at navigating the territory shared by history and political theory and illuminating the relevance of Greek history for our time. The historical approach each takes in the works under review does not easily fall into the categories—monumental, antiquarian, and critical history— delineated by Nietzsche in the essay to which my subtitle alludes. Yet, in treating these works together, I am guided by a question that Nietzsche raises at the conclusion of his “untimely meditation” in recalling the Delphic injunction Gnōthi seauton, “Know thyself.” The Greeks’ cultural inheritance, he argues, was a chaos of foreign ideas—Semitic, Babylonian, Lydian, and Egyptian—and gods, and it was only when the Greeks began to organize this chaos in accordance with the Delphic injunction that they were prevented from being swamped by their own history and became the model for all civilized peoples. The works under review are extraordinarily rich, and I will not do justice to their many arguments. Rather, I organize my consideration of them by focusing on this question: What is the relation between the study of Greek history and the search for self-knowledge at the core of Greek political philosophy?

Type
Review Essay
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 81 , Issue 2 , Spring 2019 , pp. 305 - 321
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 2019 

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References

1 Nietzsche, Friedrich, “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life,” in Untimely Meditations, ed. Breazeale, Daniel, trans. Hollingdale, R. J. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 On Sparta and Athens as the peaks of classical Greece, see esp. Thucydides 1.1.1–4; 1.6.3–6; 1.10.1–2; 1.15.2–3; 1.18–19. In referring to the works under review, I will employ abbreviations of their titles and page numbers in parentheses.

3 At the same time, neither Ober nor Rahe denies the obvious contributions of non-Greeks to classical Greece or the cross fertilization of “West” and “East.” See, e.g., RFCG, 41–42, 65–66, 132; GSCS, 54–55.

4 The Inventory of Archaic and Classical Greek Poleis is central to Ober's study, and he makes use of a variety of measures from the “new institutional economics” (4–5). See also http://polis.stanford.edu.

5 Goldstone, Jack A., “Efflorescences and Economic Growth in World History: Rethinking the Rise of the West and the Industrial Revolution,” Journal of World History 13, no. 2 (Fall 2002): 333CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Ober, RFCG, 1–2, 330n3.

6 This difficulty, among others, led Kostas Vlassopoulos to pen a hard-hitting review of the book, to which Ober offered a spirited rebuttal. Cf. Vlassopoulos's review in the Bryn Mawr Classical Review, March 4, 2016, with Ober's response at https://www.academia.edu/22898166/Reply_to_Vlassopoulos. For examples of other social scientific terms that come into play in Ober's analysis, see pp. 68 “social networks,” 194 “path dependence” and “escalation dominance,” and 196 “nonexcludable public good.” Joseph Schumpeter's notion of “creative destruction” is also central to Ober's narrative (12), and Weber's definition of the state as the legitimate “monopoly of violence” is at work in Ober's account of political power understood as domination (see, e.g., 127, 135).

7 To describe the world of the Greek poleis, Ober uses the expression “ants around a pond,” a reference to Socrates's analogy in Plato's Phaedo of the Greeks living around the sea, “like ants or frogs around a pond” (109b2–3). Ober takes this analogy quite far, using also the “information-sharing” of ants to explicate partially the role of information sharing among human beings.

8 One of the important features of Ober's narrative is his rejection of the orthodox view of classical Greece as largely poor and divided between the few wealthy and the many poor. Economic specialization, as well as trade and new forms of commercial exchange, he argues, raised the Greeks’ standard of living and made possible a fairly robust middle class during the classical era (RFCG, see chap. 4, esp. 76–98). In this regard, Ober belongs firmly within the school of the new institutional economics. See especially RFCG, 77–78.

9 If, even in the best case, social scientific claims about causation are hard to establish, they are all the more difficult when the case studies are from the ancient past. Ober frequently notes this difficulty. As he observes, “It is not possible, given the state of our evidence, to trace in detail the actual emergence of a market-like ecology of a great many citizen-centered states in various parts of the Greek world over the half-millennium ca. 1000 to ca. 500 BCE.” In this case, Ober must resort to a model and to “hypotheticals” that conform to the evidence we do have (RFCG, 130). See also his early recognition of the difficulty at xviii.

10 Along with Athens and Syracuse, Sparta is one of the three “superpoleis” of the Greek cities (RFCG, 33–44, 140). Its democratic promise largely unfulfilled, Syracuse plays a foil to Athenian democracy. A curious lacuna in Ober's narrative, however, is the absence of any extended discussion of “wealthy Corinth,” one of the earliest innovators on the sea and active in commercial trade and markets, but not democratic in form (but see RFCG, 41, 210).

11 Ober accepts the arguably apocryphal story that Aristotle was appointed by Phillip II as tutor to Alexander, seeing Aristotle's influence especially in Phillip's and Alexander's strategy of “aligning the interests of the state with those of rational men concerned with their own welfare” (RFCG, 290; see in general 288–91). Regarding the questionable status of this story, see Chroust, Anton-Hermann, Aristotle: New Light on His Life and on Some of His Lost Works, vol. 1 (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1973)Google Scholar, chap. 10.

12 But Ober is concerned to challenge also “agonists” and those who take their bearings from the thought of Carl Schmitt (D, 22, 69, and in general chap. 8).

13 As he sometimes acknowledges, Ober's etymological argument is not definitive (see, e.g., 21, 27n4). Among other difficulties, much depends on the political commitments of the one making the claim that the dēmos is the “whole” of the people, as Ober's citation of a speech by Athenagoras, a Syracusan character in Thucydides who is profoundly suspicious of oligarchy, illustrates (D, 28; Thuc. 6.39.1; cf. 6.35.1–2, 38.1–4, 39.2–40.1).

14 Given Ober's emphasis on “strategic rationality” and “cost-benefit analysis,” one has to think that, just as for Hobbes, so for Ober, the question whether one is to sacrifice one's own life in defense of country is a particularly vexed question. Cf. Leviathan, Review and Conclusion, 5–7 with 21.16; see D, 48–58, 99, 106–9.

15 See Ober, Josiah, The Athenian Revolution: Essays on Ancient Greek Democracy and Political Theory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 4n3Google Scholar. See also D, 7.

16 Now a common, if contested, term of the scholarly literature, “grand strategy” refers to the way in which states order their military, economic, and political resources with a view to their national security. Rahe notes that “grand strategy” is a notion introduced by Julian Stafford Corbett in the 1920s in relation to British maritime strategy and then developed after WWI by J. F. C. Fuller in The Reformation of War (SR, 109n4). For a good summary of the debate over the term in contemporary IR literature, see Silove, Nina, “Beyond the Buzzword: The Three Meanings of ‘Grand Strategy,’” Security Studies 27, no. 1 (2018): 27–57CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

17 Rahe notes the debate concerning Sparta's exceptionalism (see SR, 148n1), but to quote Xenophon on the practices of the Spartans: “Everyone praises such practices, but not a single city is willing to imitate them” (Regime of the Lacedaemonians, 10.8).

18 Literally, “sons of virgins”—a story that in its various versions is connected with the first Messenian war of the eighth century.

19 Rahe quotes Lord Macaulay here; see esp. SR, chap. 1, for Rahe's analysis of the Spartan paideia.

20 According to Plutarch, Sparta's laws remained unchanged for five hundred years; Machiavelli claims eight hundred years, including the centuries before Sparta's absorption by Rome (Plutarch, Lycurgus 29.6; Machiavelli, Discourses, 1.2.1). See also Montesquieu, De l'esprit des lois, 1.4.6.

21 On this question, not only is there an odd link made between history and nature, but there is also a curious tension between Ober's view that democracy is the “natural default of humans as a species” (D, 34–35) in the absence of conditions that would thwart it and that of North, Wallis, and Weingast, whom he cites and who argue that the “natural state” is “centralized state-level social order” (RFCG, 10).

22 The importance of this revolutionary period simply and to Ober's overall historical perspective cannot be understated, especially his “de-centering Cleisthenes” in favor of a history of collective action. See especially Ober's “The Athenian Revolution of 508/7 B.C.: Violence, Authority, and the Origin of Democracy,” in The Athenian Revolution, chap. 4. Cf. Rahe, GSCS, 96–100.

23 The way in which the technical language of contemporary social science can obscure the real phenomenon is perhaps nowhere clearer than in Ober's treatment of slavery in Greece. He goes so far as to describe the helots of Sparta as “in effect, specialists in subsistence agriculture” (RFCG, 139), even as he notes the use of terror (the krupteia) to keep them subjugated (RFCG, 113).

24 See Ober's own accounting of this dimension of historiography in The Athenian Revolution, chaps. 1–2.