Josiah Ober, Professor of Classics and Political Science, Stanford University
I have always been fascinated by politics - not parties or elections, but the play of power, legitimacy, and justice. Politics, in this extended sense, is at once a practical issue, an interpretative problem, and a moral concern: understanding any given political system or regime requires describing how it actually works, explaining why it works that way, and offering defensible reasons for why it ought to be otherwise (if in fact it ought). When I was young, I found I had a simple intuitive sense of how power worked in small groups, and discovered that it was possible to make some sense of social behavior by a rough-and-ready calculus of costs, benefits, and ideological legitimacy. Yet I lacked anything like a satisfactory vocabulary for parsing my intuitions about interpersonal politics. I could not begin to answer the descriptive, analytical, and normative questions that I might have asked had I been able to frame them in the first place.
When I arrived at university, more or less by accident, in 1971 I sought out courses that I imagined might help to me to make sense of my intuitions: sociology, anthropology, and so on. But only history held my dilettante’s attention. The ancient world - and especially the world of the classical Greek poleis - seemed to offer the raw materials for understanding politics. Not surprisingly, reading Thucydides was a
A Companion to Ancient History Edited by Andrew Erskine © 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. ISBN: 978-1-405-13150-6
Revelation. I realized, as have so many others, that Thucydides’ narrative of the events of the Peloponnesian war was the product of a profoundly powerful intelligence working at the descriptive and analytical sides of the power and legitimacy equation. Thucydides showed me that it was possible to conjoin the study of internal (intra-polis) and external (foreign policy) power relations; to ground political choice in a plausible conception of human nature; that relations between social classes were inherently political; and that thinking about power outside history made no sense. It was only later that I realized Thucydides also had much to say about morally defensible norms of interpersonal behavior and the possibility for justice in what appears to be an anarchic world of inter-state relations.
So I was hooked. Yet when doing my graduate training in the late 1970s I knew enough to see that I would not be able to work out my own Thucydidean explanation, or for that matter to do original work on Thucydides, until I knew a lot more about the concrete realities of Greek history. So I spent a long time studying Greek warfare. By the mid-1980s I felt ready to take on bigger political questions, including (over the next two decades) political sociology, ideology and discourse, revolution, expertise and dissent, social identity, moral authority, and collective action. Each of these emerged clearly in the context of democratic Athens, and so Athens became my case study: a model political system whose changes and continuities over two centuries allowed me to explore diverse aspects of the set of political issues that remained my abiding concern.
When I moved to Princeton in 1990, I saw more clearly than ever that the academic field of classical studies was a perfect environment for the work that interested me, because it demands no sharp distinction between various aspects of history (military, economic, social, cultural, intellectual), or between history, literature, and philosophy. Those undeterred by the disapproval of the few who feel that ancient history must only be pursued for its own sake are free to bring in contemporary work on sociology, anthropology, psychology, political theory, and so on. Although this was not always so, the field (publishers of scholarly books and journals, readers, many reviewers) is now remarkably liberal in its acceptance of methodological experimentation. This liberalism rightly carries a requirement that innovators manifest a respect for evidence, reasonable clarity in expression, and honesty in laying out premises and framing arguments. Ancient history is currently a very good field for someone who plans to devote a life to the study of politics and political change.
Ancient history matters to me because it seems to offer insight into questions that ought to matter to anyone living in a complex society, and especially to every citizen in a democracy. These questions have inseparable descriptive, analytical, and normative aspects: historians cannot avoid bringing together the question of what happened, with why it happened, and how what happened ought to be evaluated. That evaluation inevitably means moral judgment of some kind. Historians are necessarily concerned with description. But there is limited value in describing the past accurately without being able to explain it. And there is little value in explaining something without the capacity to judge its value. The difference between history and moral philosophy is, perhaps, that the historian is likely to see limited value in moral judgments that require historical outcomes no human community has ever, or ever could provide.
Capacities and trade-offs really matter. For a student of democracy, for example, it matters whether democracy is capable of generating its values through participatory practice: Can liberty as absence of domination be sustained by liberty as right of entry? Can equality of opportunity support fair distribution? Will dignity as recognition support the integrity of the individual or the minority community? It matters whether or not social justice is achievable at a cost low enough that democratic communities can compete with undemocratic rivals. It matters if democratic institutions and civic education can sustain democratic discourse and culture while promoting economic growth. Deciding if politics (like medicine) demands a highly specialized expertise, or if political craftsmanship can be attained by ordinary men and women, matters a lot. Those kinds of questions can only be answered by linking political description with analysis and moral reasoning, and by assessing historical processes of change and continuity over time.
It is, I think, easy to get politics badly wrong by approaching the question of politics too narrowly or ahistorically. Basic errors include severing the issue of power from that of legitimacy and legitimacy from justice; ignoring class distinction by imagining politics as an intra-elite game; focusing too narrowly on discourse, or critique, or beliefs; or institutions, or decision-process, or personalities; or chance, or environmental factors, or technological change; or social structure, or agency; or change, or stability. Ancient history offers special benefits to the student of politics seeking to avoid the errors encouraged by narrowness and ahistoricism because it is at once expansive and limited: Its sweep is huge in respect to time and space, but its scale, in terms of relevant facts that can be securely established, is small when compared with modernity. Achieving the level of expertise necessary to bring the manifold aspects of politics into play, even over a lifetime of scholarly activity, is impossible if there is too much to know - which is one reason the study of modernity is so fragmented by discipline. By contrast, antiquity allows me to dream of a sort of “unified political field theory,” in which power, legitimacy, and justice could be grasped as a whole.
Achieving that dream may prove impossible. Yet even approaching it represents progress in understanding how communities impede or sustain human lives that go well. So, at the end of the day, my reason for thinking ancient history is worth doing is ethical. Any historian who denies that the fundamental ethical question of “what it is for a human life to go well” lies within the realm of historia must answer to the Father of History. Herodotus may have got the facts wrong in his tale of Solon’s reply to Croesus’s query about who had lived the happiest life. Yet Herodotus’s clear conviction that ethics, politics, and history belong together is, I should say, dead right.
World History
