Josiah Ober

Democracy's Wisdom: An Aristotelian Middle Way for Collective Judgment

A satisfactory model of decision-making in an epistemic democracy must respect democratic values, while advancing citizens’ interests, by taking account of relevant knowledge about the world. Analysis of passages in Aristotle and legislative process in classical Athens points to a “middle way” between independent-guess aggregation and deliberation: an epistemic approach to decision-making that offers a satisfactory model of collective judgment that is both time-sensitive and capable of setting agendas endogenously. By aggregating expertise across multiple domains, Relevant Expertise Aggregation (REA) enables a body of minimally competent voters to make superior choices among multiple options, on matters of common interest. REA differs from a standard Condorcet jury in combining deliberation with voting based on judgments about the reputations and arguments of domain-experts.

Democracy's Dignity

Dignity, as equal high standing characterized by nonhumiliation and noninfantilization, is democracys third core value. Along with liberty and equality, it is a necessary condition for collective self-governance. Dignity enables robust exercise of liberty and equality while resisting both neglectful libertarianism and paternalistic egalitarianism. The civic dignity required for democracy is specified through a taxonomy of incompletely and fully moralized forms of dignity. Distinctive features of different regimes of dignity are modeled by simple games and illustrated by historical case studies. Unlike traditional meritocracy and universal human dignity, a civic dignity regime is theoretically stable in a population of self-interested social agents. It is real-world stable because citizens are predictably well motivated to defend those threatened with indignity and because they have resources for effective collective action against threats to dignity. Meritocracy and civic dignity are not inherently liberal, but may persist within a liberal democracy committed to universal human dignity.

Public Speech and the Power of the People in Democratic Athens

I will defend three premises. (1) If we take democracy to mean what ancient Greeks took it to mean—“political power wielded actively and collectively by the demos ” (i.e., all residents of the state who are culturally defined as potential citizens, regardless of their class or status)—then Athens was a democracy. (2) Even granted that Athens excluded from regular political participation persons Greeks did not regard as potential citizens (slaves, women, most foreigners, children), the historical example of the Athenian experience with democracy should be taken seriously by democratic theorists interested in expanding “the bounds of the possible” (as well as “of the thinkable”). (3) The Athenian demos exercised its collective power in order to prevent elite political domination, and thus the “power of the people” was not a cover for elite rule. These premises do not mean that the peoples power was in some ontological sense “pure,” or “undistorted”—indeed it was arguably through the tightly coiled and convoluted “distortions” of social and political power that the Athenian democratic order counterbalanced elite social power. Nor can Athens, with its acceptance of slavery, exclusion of women and foreigners from political participation, and jingoistic “blood and soil” doctrine, be considered a readymade model for a just, modern political society. It can be argued (incorrectly I believe: Ober 1989a, 20-35), that democracy in Athens was fundamentally dependent upon slavery, or empire, or the exclusion of women and foreigners.

Socrates and Democratic Athens

In 399 bce , the Athenian citizen Socrates, son of Sophroniscus of the deme (township) Alopece, was tried by an Athenian court on the charge of impiety ( asebeia ). He was found guilty by a narrow majority of the empanelled judges and executed in the public prison a few days later. The trial and execution constitute the best-documented events in Socrates’ life and a defining moment in the relationship between Greek philosophy and Athenian democracy. Ever since, philosophers and historians have sought to explain troubling aspects of the case: Why was Socrates, the philosophical model of a good man, charged with public wrongdoing? Why was he convicted and why on such a close vote? Was he guilty of impiety or other crimes? Why did he undergo trial and execution, rather than leaving Athens to pursue his philosophical investigations elsewhere? Were his loyalties owed to Athens, to himself, or to the world? And, perhaps most pressing: how did a democratic community, committed to the value of free speech and public debate, come to convict and execute its most famous philosopher-citizen? Because there are no simple answers to these questions the ancient tradition and modern scholarship on the trial and its aftermath are rich and of enduring interest.

Political Knowledge and Right-Sizing Government

ABSTRACT Ilya Somins Democracy and Political Ignorance proposes an original, epistemic argument for decentralizing and downsizing democratic government. Somins argument does not produce a plausible real-world program for government reform, nor does he exhaust the universe of what voting is for, or possible democratic solutions to the epistemic problem of rational ignorance and cognitive limitation. But his proposal is of considerable interest as an advance in political theory. The historical example of the classical Greek world of decentralized authority and small city-states suggests that democracy does benefit, in epistemic ways, from decentralization, reduced scale, and simplification of procedural rules. The tradeoff is, however, increased responsibility on the part of individual citizens to undertake civic services of various kinds.

Inequality in Late-Classical Democratic Athens: Evidence and Models

This paper contributes to the question of the relationship between democracy and economic inequality in ancient Greece by developing a realistic population and income model for late classical Athens. The model is evidence-based, although hypothetical in many particulars. It aligns with other evidence suggesting that economic inequality in late classical Athens was low by historical standards. While no causal argument is made here, the model is consistent with the hypothesis that democracy tended to lower economic inequality over time, in part through progressive taxation. The model also helps to explain Athenian social stability: poorer Athenians, including many slaves, were beneficiaries of a system that enabled most Athenians to live well above the level of bare subsistence. Some slaves had some chance of earning their way out of slavery by, in effect, purchasing themselves. While taxation could be disruptively heavy for some estates, the overall tax burden on wealthy Athenians, as a class, was not high enough to trigger elite-level revolutionary cooperation against the democratic regime.

Development and Political Theory in Classical Athens

Analyzing the birth of political thought in Greece uniquely as a response to democracy in Athens overlooks the economic, social and legal aspects of the profound transformation that Athens underwent in the classical period. That transformation did not merely affect political structures. Without understanding this larger transformation, we cannot adequately explain the development of Greek political thought. Between the late 6th and 4th centuries BC, Athens transitioned from an undeveloped limited access, “natural state” toward a developed open access society – a society characterized by impersonal, perpetual and inclusive political, economic, legal and social institutions that protected individual rights and sustained the polis’ exceptional growth. Some of those who witnessed this transformation first-hand attempted to grapple, often critically, with its implications for politics, social relations, and moral psychology. We show that Thucydides, Plato, and other Greek political thinkers devoted a considerable part of their work to analyzing the polis’ tendency toward political but also economic, social, and legal inclusion. Such a tendency, as many of them recognized, made Athens stand out among other Greek poleis, despite the fact that Athens was a democracy, not because of it. Democracy, therefore, is not the only explanatory variable in these accounts.

Social Science History, Cultural History, and the Amnesty of 403

Response to a set of papers on the Athenian Amnesty of 403 b.c.

Joseph Schumpeter's Caesarist Democracy

ABSTRACT Schumpeter’s highly influential theory of democracy, developed in Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, is less a market-based theory of party competition than it is a theory of strong leadership, modeled after generalship. As such, it is a weak foundation for rebuilding a democratic theory of party politics. Moreover, Schumpeter’s demolition of the “Classical Doctrine of Democracy” knocks down a straw-man theory: a hybrid of Bentham’s utilitarianism and Rousseau’s communitarianism that few contemporary theorists of democracy would be willing to defend.