The time of efflorescence

How can we understand what the young Ernest Renan, recalling his first trip to Greece (Memories of childhood and youthParis, 1883, p. 59-60), will call “the Greek miracle”, “a thing that existed only once, that had never been seen, that will never be seen again, but whose effect will last forever”? How can we understand the extraordinary political, economic and cultural flourishing of Greece in the V^e And IV^e centuries before our era, but also its fall, in the face of Macedonian domination?

This is the question that Josiah Ober, professor of political science and classical history at Stanford University, attempts to answer in a work published in 2015 by Princeton University Press and of which La Découverte editions published the translation a few months ago.

Greek Cities, Institutions and Ideology

If the history of classical Greece—and in particular that of the city for which we have the most sources, Athens—is often studied from the perspective of institutions (we think first of the remarkable work of Mogens H. Hansen, within the Copenhagen Polis Center), Josiah Ober is one of the historians who, in the tradition of Moses Finley, refuses to consider politics outside of the sociological problematic. In his work, he, like Nicole Loraux, approached the question of Athenian democracy in terms of civic ideology. But while it is polemical in Nicole Loraux’s thinking, in Josiah Ober this notion of civic ideology is profoundly irenic. In his major work Mass and Elite in Democratic Athenspublished in 1989, the historian showed how, according to him, civic ideology confirms the primacy freely consented by the masses to the elite, in a balance where the masses and the elite find their account, since the demos remains sovereign.

The Greek Enigma is in line with these reflections; we also find a certain irenicism when the author explains that, certainly, conflicts between cities were endemic, but that many were knowingly avoided, because the Greeks were well aware of the interest in cooperating and exchanging. Josiah Ober nevertheless intends to propose here “a new narrative of Greek history” (p. 21). Indeed, it is with the help of the tools of the social sciences, of the New Institutional Economics, for example, or even of the theory of social choice, but also by relying on work in evolutionary biology as well as on recent data in Greek history, that he attempts to understand the formidable flourishing of classical Greece.

The blossoming of the Greek world

This term efflorescence, which is at the heart of the work, Josiah Ober borrows from the sociologist Jack Goldstone; he defines it as “a period of sustained economic growth accompanied by a spectacular increase in cultural achievements” (p. 32). According to the historian, the period between 800 and 300 BCE is quite exceptional in the Greek world, and it is necessary to wait until the beginning of the XX^e century for the number of inhabitants living in the heart of Greece and their standard of living to return to levels comparable to those which existed 2300 years earlier.

Indeed, from 800 BCE onwards, the Greek world experienced a sharp demographic increase, which resulted in a high population density (around 44 inhabitants/km²) and significant urbanization of the territory. Josiah Ober estimates that 35% of Greeks lived in cities of more than 5,000 inhabitants. This population would have been in good health; thus life expectancy would have increased by 10 years during the period, to now reach 36 years for women, 40 years for men. Finally, a third of the population would have fed on imported agricultural products, which not only contradicts “the modernist assumption that the economy of ancient Greece is defined above all by subsistence agriculture” (p. 144), but also shows the place of trade within a diversified economy.

Because far from leading to an impoverishment of the population, this demographic growth was on the contrary accompanied by exceptional economic growth, as demonstrated by the significant increase in the quantity of money in circulation or the increase in the size of dwellings and the predominance of medium-sized houses – a sign, according to the historian, that wealth was relatively well distributed within the population.

Concerning the “spectacular rise in cultural achievements”, the author explicitly leaves aside the cultural, scientific and intellectual life of the Greek cities, which, it is true, have already been the subject of recent and fascinating works (such as those of Sarah Forsdyke or Robin Osborne, for example), to insist more on the institutions that are being established and the civic order. He thus highlights, for example, the way in which the great city of Athens created, within itself, several degrees of sub-communities thus encouraging citizens to act together in a rational and efficient way, spurred on by the spirit of competition.

At the heart of the enigma: decentralized cooperation

How can we explain this extraordinary efflorescence? While Josiah Ober briefly discusses the way in which Greek cities exploited the systems of domination in place in peripheral territories, thus building up a high income at low cost (an example is taken of cereals exported to Athens below market prices by Thracian sovereigns), he further develops the hypothesis that the particular geography of Greece — a maritime landscape, very jagged, microclimates, different soils and thus a heterogeneous distribution of natural resources — would have encouraged and facilitated specialization and exchanges; a shared language and culture further favor their development and reduce transaction costs.

But this is not enough to explain the blossoming of Greece. In fact, for the historian, the answer lies above all in the fact that

Classical Greece was neither a state nor a nation: it was a living, sprawling ecology, made up of many independent city-states, self-governed by their citizens. (p. 21)

There are about 1,100 cities of very different sizes that interact with each other on an equal footing, without any of them ever managing to dominate the others by taking the lead of a centralized empire, because they all share a culture of “dispersed authority”. Similarly, within the cities, there is no centralization of power or wealth. Drawing on the work of the economist Mancur Olson, on the Policy of Aristotle and the research conducted on ants by Deborah Gordon, an evolutionary biologist at Stanford, Josiah Ober shows that the Greeks were motivated to cooperate and act together, despite the absence of any central power, not only because they were united by a strong civic ideology, but also, and above all, because the cities established fair and egalitarian rules that encouraged investment in capital, whether human, social or material. Indeed, according to the historian, when the security, status and property of each person are guaranteed, when the individual does not fear that the fruit of his work will be unfairly grabbed by others, but when on the contrary he knows that he will be rewarded for it, in a society where honor has its place, he is more inclined to (self) invest, to specialize and, therefore, to participate in the creation of public goods, from which the entire community benefits; social productivity increases. Furthermore, fair and egalitarian rules induce a reduction in transaction costs, because they allow a good circulation of information and goods. Finally, Josiah Ober underlines the importance of competition, endemic, between Greek cities: this spirit of emulation favored, within the cities and between them, rational cooperation and innovation. Innovations — federal leagues, coinage, “epigraphic habit” or even theater, for example — spread all the more quickly in the Greek world because transaction costs were low.

Thus the Greek world was able to achieve exceptional greatness. But Josiah Ober also questions its fall (explicitly mentioned in the title of the original edition): during the second half of the IV^e century, the Greek cities fell under the domination of Macedonia. Indeed, Philip II (382-336 BCE) was able to identify the innovations of the most powerful Greek cities, and to import and adapt their military and financial expertise – only to then turn it against these same cities. And yet, despite this political fall, the efflorescence of Greece continued in the Hellenistic period, so much so that Greek culture could become, in the words of Ernest Renan, “a thing (…) whose effect will last forever.”

Josiah Ober does not believe in miracles, as the French subtitle of the book might suggest, and he strives to offer a very rational — and convincing — explanation for this Greek enigma. One can certainly regret that the historian relies very little on the sources or that he offers, after a brilliant first theoretical part, a second part intended to support it where the broad outlines of the history of classical Greece are set out without much fanfare. And, like Jean-Yves Grenier, one can be bothered that Josiah Ober puts forward competition or freedom of enterprise, “without really seeking to situate these notions in the historical context that he studies, by attributing to them a questionable universality”. However, in fineit turns out that this is what makes this work so interesting: it shakes us up, disrupts the reassuring categories that we had constructed for ourselves, to propose, as he himself says, “a new account of Greek history”. Sometimes closer to an essay than to a work of erudition, The Greek Enigma is a book that gives food for thought on the world of Greek cities, but also on our own democracies.