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The ideology of the Athenian metic

Democracy and Knowledge: Innovation and Learning in Classical Athens

List of Images and Tables xi Preface xiii Acknowledgments xxi Abbreviations xxv 1 The Efflorescence of Classical Greece 1 2 Ants around a Pond: An Ecology of City-States 21 3 Political Animals: A Theory of Decentralized Cooperation 45 4 Wealthy Hellas: Measuring Efflorescence 71 5 Explaining Hellas' Wealth: Fair Rules and Competition 101 6 Citizens and Specialization before 550 BCE 123 7 From Tyranny to Democracy, 550-465 BCE 157 8 Golden Age of Empire, 478-404 BCE 191 9 Disorder and Growth, 403-340 BCE 223 10 Political Fall, 359-334 BCE 261 11 Creative Destruction and Immortality 293 Appendix I: Regions of the Greek World: Population, Size, Fame 317 Appendix II: King, City, and Elite Game, Josiah Ober and Barry Weingast 321 Notes 329 Bibliography 367 Index 401

The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece

How and why did the Western tradition of political theorizing arise in Athens during the late 5th and 4th centuries BC? By interweaving intellectual history with political philosophy and literary analysis, Josiah Ober argues that the tradition orginated in a high-stakes debate about democracy. Since elite Greek intellectuals tended to assume that ordinary men were incapable of ruling themselves, the longevity and resilience of Athenian popular rule presented a problem: how to explain the apparent success of a regime "irrationally" based on the inherent wisdom and practical efficacy of decisions made by non-elite citizens? The problem became acute after two oligarchic coups d'etat in the late 5th century BC. The generosity and statesmanship that democrats showed after regaining political power contrasted starkly with the oligarchs' violence and corruption. Since it was no longer self-evident that "better men" meant "better government", critics of democracy sought new arguments to explain the relationship among politics, ethics and morality. The author of this text offers readings of the political works of Thucydides, Plato and Aristotle among others, placing them in the context of a competitive community of dissident writers. These thinkers struggled against both democratic ideology and intellectual rivals to articulate the best and most influential criticism of popular rule.

Political Dissent in Democratic Athens: Intellectual Critics of Popular Rule

Most groups have social distance norms that differentiate "us" from "them." Contrary to a widespread assumption in the sociological literature, however, these normative distinctions, even when they are collectively recognized, do not always overlap with the affective orientations of group members in a uniform manner. Relations between normatively close members of a group are not always warm and friendly, and normatively distant groups can sometimes be an object of reverence and love. In this study, a typology of five different ways in which normatively distant groups can be perceived is presented: as competitors, allies, symbols of otherness, saviors, and ambivalent figures. Each type tends to emerge under certain circumstances and triggers different affective orientations. This typology is not a substitute for a general theory, but it aims to provide preliminary insights for investigating why affective orientations toward normatively distant groups take different forms and, more generally, to motivate further inquiry into the relationships between different dimensions of social distance.

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Social Distance and Affective Orientations

Since the mid-1980s, debates between competing schools of archaeological interpretation have become more theoretical and abstruse, moving away from confrontations over specific methods of analyzing our data. This article reopens arguments over one of the more controversial propositions of the New Archaeology - Saxe's claim that the emergence of formal cemeteries corresponds to the appearance of agnatic lineages monopolizing vital resources through inheritance. The hypothesis is examined in three ways: through a generalized ethnological model; through specific ethnographic data from Taiwan and Kenya; and through a historical comparison of Athens from 500 to 100 BC and Rome from 200 BC to AD 200. It is argued that all three methods lead to a similar conclusion, that many societies do indeed talk about the dead in the way the Saxe/Goldstein hypothesis maintains, but that in any specific instance the cemetery/property message may well be subverted by other arguments which the buriers are making.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S0959774300000330

The ideology of the Athenian metic

Citations

Democracy and Knowledge: Innovation and Learning in Classical Athens

The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece

Political Dissent in Democratic Athens: Intellectual Critics of Popular Rule

Social Distance and Affective Orientations

The Archaeology of Ancestors: The Saxe/Goldstein Hypothesis Revisited

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