I live in exceptional times. I can take for granted a global order defined by many independent states, some of them wealthy democratic federations governed ultimately by their citizens. Freedom, equality, and dignity are widely shared values. In states where citizens keep rulers in check, public authority protects individual rights and the rule of law pertains most of the time. These political conditions promote economic growth. The conjunction of democratic politics and a strong economy is, in practice, available only to affluent citizens of highly developed countries. But many people who do not yet enjoy those conditions aspire to them. Democracy and growth define the normal, although not yet the usual, conditions of modernity: Autocracy, while still prevalent, is regarded as aberrant, so that most autocrats pretend to be democrats. Economic stagnation is seen as a problem that demands a solution.
These conditions were not normal, or even imaginable, for most people through most of human history. But, for several centuries in the first millennium BCE, democracy and growth were normal for citizens in ancient Greece.
How that happened, and why it matters, is what this book is about.
New scholarship—much of it written by my colleagues at Stanford—has helped to show why the political and economic conditions of modernity are, historically, so exceptionally rare. For the past several thousand years of human history, and until the eighteenth century, most people lived under the rule of autocrats who claimed a special relationship to divinity. The most successful of these rulers were masters of extensive empires, but most of their subjects lived perilously close to bare subsistence. Rulers stayed in power by extracting surplus from their subjects and distributing the loot to a ruling coalition. Under these conditions, access to institutions is limited, rights remain vestigial, and economic growth is usually low.1
This premodern normal can be summed up as “domination”—so long as we remember that some subjects had input into government, through consultative assemblies or petition rights, that autocracy was sometimes limited by tradition or religious institutions, and that subjects often accept the legitimacy of royal authority. Domination pertained across most of the world until the eighteenth century. Then things began to change, first in a few Atlantic countries and later across much of the world. The result is our modern political normal, a condition that may be summed up as “democracy”—so long as we keep in mind that many people in democratic societies are in fact dominated in various ways.2
The modern world is exceptional for its economic development and for its political development: not only for being (overall) wealthy, but also for the prevalence of democratic politics and the values that democracy sustains. I assume that few readers of this book would choose to live in premodern normal conditions of domination, even if their economic circumstances could be guaranteed. I assume that equally few would choose to live at the median economic level of a normal premodern society, even were it democratic. The citizens of modern developed countries need not make the choice between wealth and democracy. As we now know, democratic states are quite capable of achieving high levels of economic growth.
My colleague, Ian Morris, has shown that relatively high levels of development have historically been achieved under various political systems.3 The question of what institutional conditions are necessary or sufficient to sustain growth remains hotly debated. But what is not in question is that many people—including those not lucky enough to be affluent citizens of developed countries—have a strong preference, not only for affluence over poverty but also for democracy over domination. This is a normative preference, predicated on deeply held assumptions about the value of democracy relative to that of domination. I believe that there are good reasons for that normative preference. I assume that many readers of this book share my preference for democracy, even though your reasons may be different from my own.4
If we prefer our modern political and economic conditions to the premodern normal, we have good reason to inquire how we got here and to ask how likely it is that democracy plus wealth will become usual as well as normal. How is it that historically exceptional economic and political conditions came to be regarded as normal? Ought we to expect these conditions to persist where they currently pertain and to spread to the rest of the world? The prehistory of political and economic exceptionalism offers one relatively unexplored avenue by which we may address those questions.
The exceptional political conditions that I have summed up under the rubric of democracy—a social ecology of many independent states, federalism, citizen self-governance with its associated values—were indeed rare before the eighteenth century. But they were not unknown. Societies with these features include the Dutch republics of the sixteenth century, the Italian city-states of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries—and classical Greece in the fifth and fourth centuries BCE. In each case, the era of economic exceptionalism was limited, and in no case did premodern political rights or economic growth reach levels comparable to those enjoyed by many citizens of the most highly developed states in the past 150 years. But these early societies each experienced an extended period of economic growth and cultural achievement in the context of a historically remarkable extension of citizenship.
A comparative analysis of these (and other) historical cases of political and economic exceptionalism would go a long way toward answering important questions about the origins and sustainability of our modern condition. Before that ambitious comparative project can be undertaken, however, we need to know more about each of the relevant cases. We need to explain how each historically exceptional society arose when and where it did and how and why its political and economic exceptionality was terminated. By offering a new political and economic history of ancient Greece, this book contributes to that project.
This is not a book about a putative “great divergence” between East and West, nor does it claim that democracy is either necessary or sufficient to sustain economic growth. It traces the rise of a society in which the normatively valued political conditions of democracy for an extensive body of citizens (although decidedly not for all residents) were conjoined with economic growth whose benefits were widely shared and with cultural achievements that had a lasting impact on the world. It measures growth, traces the causal relationship between Greek political and economic development, narrates the conquest of citizen-centered states by an autocratic empire, and explains why so much is still known about ancient Greek society.
It would be absurd to claim that ancient Greeks, who owned slaves, denied rights to women, and glorified war, offer an off-the-shelf model for us. The Greek transition from domination to democracy was incomplete, and it left a great many people behind. It would be equally absurd to claim that our modernity has all, or even most, of its roots in what happened in Greece some 2,500 years ago. But if we are interested in the conjunction of political and economic exceptionalism, we must start somewhere, and classical Greece was the society in which the wealth-and-democracy package first emerged in a form that can be studied in depth.
Classical Greece was not a state or a nation; it was an extensive social ecology of many independent city-states with citizen-centered governments. While the Greeks never fully formulated the concept of human rights, they did develop the basic democratic values of liberty, political equality, and civic dignity. The Greeks experimented successfully with federalism. Some Greek states practiced the rule of law, and some went a long way toward opening access to institutions. Political reforms were self-consciously enacted by Greek legislators, who sometimes left records of what they intended. Political development was critically analyzed in incisive and groundbreaking works of Greek political theory.
Because of the rich literary and documentary record surviving from classical antiquity, subsequent theorists and practitioners, eager to break with the norm of domination, were able to draw on Greek experience. For their own part, while they learned a great deal from other societies, the Greeks themselves had few precedents to build upon when devising democratic institutions and values. If we can explain the rise of classical Greece, we may gain a better sense of what it took to bootstrap the wealth and democracy package in the first place. If we can explain the fall of the Greek political order—that is, why major city-states did not maintain full independence for longer than they did—we may better understand democratic fragility.
My approach to explaining the rise and fall of classical Greece is that of a historian and political scientist. These are not the only ways to elucidate the Greek past. Scholars from the fields of anthropology, sociology, and literary studies have advanced our understanding of Greek culture in ways that are compatible with the results offered here. But there are ways to think about the ancient Greek world, associated with these three disciplines, that in their strongest forms, would render my project incoherent: First is an assumption that the Greek world was not actually exceptional. Next is a claim that Greece’s exceptionalism makes it analytically irrelevant. Third is an assertion that the exceptionalism of the Greek world has nothing to do with modern politics or economics.
The first assumption, that Greece is not exceptional because the Greek world shared various features with other premodern societies, seems to me insufficiently attentive to historically salient distinctions: It is certainly true that the Greek economy remained primarily based on arable agriculture; that Greeks practiced various sorts of morally repugnant status-based hierarchy, including slavery and other forms of coerced labor; and that polytheistic religion was an important part of the ordinary Greek’s worldview and daily practice. But the Greek economy was also, as we will see, fundamentally based on specialization and exchange; real wages (including the wages of at least some slaves) were much higher than the premodern norm. Religion was very important in Greece, as it was (and is) elsewhere. Yet classical Greece stands out among documented premodern societies, as the Oxford Greek historian Oswyn Murray has emphasized, in the prominence of formal rationality and explicitly political reasoning in the decisions and decision-making processes that set the course of its history.5
The second claim, that Greek exceptionalism renders the Greek case analytically meaningless, seems to me to place too much interpretive weight on historical prevalence. When studying some feature of a given society, a social scientist may (under some circumstances) discard “outliers” on the ground that the relevant sample is in the middle of the distribution. But in this case, the features that made the historical outlier exceptional are of great interest because the outlier appears quite similar, in salient ways, to our normal and because of its normative significance to us. Perhaps the city-state ecology was, as the Cambridge historical sociologist W. G. Runciman claimed, “doomed to extinction” because the Greek city-states were “without exception, far too democratic.”6 But the city-state ecology lasted for a very long time before it went extinct. All ancient empires, most of which proved more ephemeral than the city-state ecology, are likewise extinct. Insofar as we value democracy, and insofar as Greek democratic exceptionalism did anticipate exceptional conditions of modernity, we have strong reasons to want to know whether Greece’s “doom” must also be our own—and if not, why not.
The third assertion is based on the premise that, because each society is in some ways distinctive, societies are strictly incomparable. The strong version of the historicist argument rejects quantification and focuses on the contextual specificity of the societies in question and their cultural products.7 Historicists embrace the idea that comparative analysis highlights differences by showing how desperately foreign each society is when viewed from the perspective of the other. Comparison of similarities, on this argument, yields only false analogies. The historicist approach is, however, incomplete insofar as patterns of human behavior are fundamentally similar across societies widely separated in time and space. Social science (like natural science) is predicated on the possibility of determining regularities that underpin apparently diverse phenomena. The goal of much contemporary social science is to infer the causes of observed social, political, and economic phenomena, based on parsimonious “micro-foundations”—minimal and at least potentially testable assumptions about the motivations of individual and collective human action under specifiable conditions.
This book is both history and social science. As history, it may be characterized as middle-range in the sense of being neither global nor local, neither big nor micro-level. I do not attempt to match the breadth of global history or the level of generalization of recent “big histories,” which look at change and continuity over tens of thousands or millions of years.8 I am concerned to explain change and continuity in a society of several million people, in about a thousand states, over a period of several hundred years. I will sometimes focus on the doings of individual legislators or leaders, but more often I try to explain collective action at both the level of the state and at inter- and multistate levels. My approach is, therefore, at a much higher level of generalization than local or microhistory.9
As social science, my approach is also middle-range, straddling quantitative and qualitative methods. A good deal of the argument draws on quantified data. My discussion of Greek economic growth over time is necessarily quantitative, and I believe that it is possible to make substantial advances by using original data sets (compiled in conjunction with colleagues and students) based on recent monumental collections of evidence for the ancient Greek city-state ecology. I also make some use of simple game theoretic models, drawing on well-established social-scientific theories of political behavior and development. Although only one formal game is presented in full (appendix II), throughout the book readers are invited to think of Greek social relations in the form of games whose background rules induce individual players to make relatively cooperative choices. The aggregate of those prosocial choices was the “thumb on the scale” that tipped classical Greece toward sustained economic growth.
When addressing complex questions of long-term social development in a society that flourished in the distant past, it is impossible to employ a perfectly clean identification strategy—that is, to strictly distinguish independent (explanatory) variables from dependent variables and to rigorously test hypotheses through natural, lab, or survey experiments. The data I use are inevitably noisy, although, as I argue, not so noisy as to preclude valid conclusions. More generally, the social systems I address are sufficiently complex and the time spans long enough to introduce what social scientists call the problem of endogeneity—that is, feedback between causes and effects. Many of my results are based in part on qualitative analysis of literary and documentary sources. The conclusions of this book assume that quantitative and qualitative methods can be conjoined in ways that are rigorous enough to pass muster as causal explanation.10
My goal is to use the tools of the historian and the social scientist to explain two phenomena that seem to me especially relevant to the larger project of understanding political and economic exceptionalism: First is the sustained economic and cultural growth of the Greek world from 1000 to 300 BCE: “the rise of classical Greece.” The second phenomenon is “the fall of classical Greece”: the defeat of a coalition of Greek city-states by imperial Macedon in the late fourth century BCE, an event that ended the era in which fully independent city-states determined the course of Mediterranean history. I explain the economic rise by tracing the development of civic institutions and political culture in an environment of interstate and interpersonal competition and rational cooperation. I demonstrate how and why political development drove exceptionally high individual and collective investments in human capital, high levels of economic specialization and exchange, continuous technical and institutional innovation, high mobility of people and ideas, low transaction costs, and ready transfer of both goods and ideas. I distinguish the role played by these same political and economic developments in the political fall.
The rise and fall of classical Greece can be explained without special pleading involving a mystical Hellenic spirit and without spurious assumptions about inherent differences between the peoples of the East and West.11 The answers to the questions of why and how Greece rose, fell, and persisted in the cultural memory of the world are of intrinsic interest. They bear on central issues in social science, including the problem of collective action without central authority and the role of political institutions in economic development. Those answers also bear on some of the biggest challenges and most promising opportunities that democratic citizens are now confronting in our own decentralized world.
In the chapters that follow, after posing the question of why Greece rose and fell, I present new data for answering that question. This new evidence shows just how far Greece had come from the age of Homer to the age of Aristotle, both politically and economically. I formulate new hypotheses concerning specialization and innovation to explain both rise and fall through a causal relationship between political and economic developments. I then offer a new narrative of Greek history, from the Early Iron Age to the Hellenistic period. The narrative expands and tests the explanatory hypotheses. Tracing the histories of great and small Greek city-states alike, the unfolding story reveals how the ecology of city-states grew so dramatically, over such a long period of time, how it was finally conquered, and how Greek culture became a world culture.
Chapter 1 introduces the puzzle of classical Greek exceptionalism. Chapters 2–4 explore the contours of a decentralized ecology of hundreds of small states; develop a theory of how high-level cooperation, and therefore stable political order, is achieved in the absence of central authority; and document ancient Greek economic growth. Chapter 5 suggests two primary drivers of Greek growth: First is the establishment of fair rules that encouraged investment in human capital and lowered transaction costs. Next is competition among individuals and states, driving continuous institutional and technological innovation, and motivating rational cooperation.
Chapters 6–9 tell the story of the rise of classical Greece: the historical development of citizen-centered politics and economic growth from the age of Homer to Aristotle. We focus on a few particularly successful and influential states but also attend to the historical development of less prominent and less powerful communities. The rise of Hellas is illuminated by similarities and differences among Athens, Sparta, and Syracuse and by the differential historical trajectories of many Greek states of different sizes and levels of prominence. Comparing the internal development of great and small city-states reveals how innovative political institutions and culture stimulated specialization and fomented creative destruction. The failure of Athens to sustain its fifth century BCE empire demonstrates the robustness of the decentralized Greek social ecology, while dense populations and high per capita incomes in the postimperial era demonstrate that empire was not a precondition for continued economic growth.
Chapter 10 narrates the political fall, showing how the products of Greek specialization, especially military and financial expertise, were taken up by leaders of states on the frontiers of the Greek world, and how Philip and Alexander of Macedon, the most talented of these entrepreneurial opportunists, terminated the era in which independent city-states determined the course of Greek history.
Chapter 11 concludes by explaining the surprising robustness of the polis ecology and continued high economic performance in the postclassical era. Because Hellas did not collapse after the political fall of the major independent city-states, the memory of Greek political exceptionalism has been preserved as part of the world’s cultural heritage. As a result, classical Greece remains a resource for theorists of decentralized social order, and both an inspiration and a cautionary tale for those who aspire to practice citizen-centered politics.