Zoltan Dienes Ober on robust democracy in classical Athens, Nov 2015

PDFs of the PowerPoint slides are available here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/axr4i6rhuby...

Josiah Ober is Constantine Mitsotakis Professor of Political Science and Classics at Stanford University, and this year Leventis Visiting Professor of Greek Studies at Edinburgh University, He works on historical institutionalism and political theory, focusing on the political thought and practice of the ancient Greek world. In addition to The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece (2015), he is the author of a number of books published by Princeton University Press, including Mass and Elite in Democratic Athens (1989), The Athenian Revolution (1996), Political Dissent in Democratic Athens (2008), and Democracy and Knowledge (2008).

Title of talk: Institutions, networks, and culture.Robust democracy in classical Athens.

Abstract: The question of what enables the emergence of democracy is related to a second question that is very much in the forefront of current policy discussions: What sustains democracy through periods of crisis in the face of exogenous shock? Ancient Athens provides a case study of an early democracy that performed exceptionally well within a highly competitive ecology of states, and survived severe shocks with severe demographic impacts, including plague and military defeat. Athens’ democratic institutions promoted robustness for the regime not only by giving citizens the right incentives, but also by encouraging the elaboration of social networks and promoting a political culture in which prosocial behavior was rewarded and praised while defection was blamed and punished. The close relationship between institutions, networks, and culture suggests a hypothesis for why some democracies have proved to be highly robust to crisis, and also why “thin” democracies, which fail to build networks or political culture, are prone to collapse.


Jorg Huber and I invited Josh to come to the University of Sussex so we could consider principles by which the management of a University cold be structured more democratically than has happened over the last 10 years. My view is the pure top down control we now have at UK Universities is damaging to science and scholarship more generally because it fails to implement the principles of an open society most effectively. The separate management class we now have are not incentivized to make contextually sensitive decisions that promote quality research and teaching. For example, one conjecture is that the current "credibility crisis" in parts of science are a result of currently typical management practices. I think a radical experiment in Athenian democracy for a University (i.e. using those principles that are transferable to the modern environment that explained why Athenian democracy worked) is worth trying - I would dearly love the experiment to happen at Sussex, but most of all I would love any University to try it, find out how to make it work, and become an intellectual beacon for others!

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Ober on robust democracy in classical Athens, Nov 2015
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