Fwd: BMCR 2009.04.24: Moore on Ober, Democracy and Knowledge: Innovation and Learning in Classical Athens

Josiah Ober, Democracy and Knowledge: Innovation and Learning in
Classical Athens.  Princeton:  Princeton University Press, 2008.  Pp.
xvi, 342.  ISBN 9780691133478.  $29.95.

Reviewed by Christopher Moore, The University of Texas at Austin
([email protected])
Word count:  2432 words
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I. Introduction

Ober argues that Athens' democratic institutions explain its six
generations of relative prosperity. His argument depends on seeing that
Athens competed with hundreds of other poleis for survival, that is,
for trade profits and military strength. His insight translates the
question of democratic functionality into one of relative efficiency.
For a city during turbulent times, what had to be made efficient was
the deployment of human knowledge. The capacious and highly articulated
deliberative structure of Athenian democratic government allowed Athens
to consolidate, use, and expand its citizens' knowledge in ways simpler
or more hierarchical cities could not. It could more often find good
solutions to hard policy and logistics problems. This becomes
especially clear when considering Athenian resilience and adaptability
in the dynamic century and a half before the Macedonian conquest. Ober,
drawing from findings in the social-scientific theory of the
organization, looks at those aspects of Athens that made it in some
ways more like a successful modern firm than like a modern
nation-state; but he also shows how certain democratic
institutions--the rule of law, face-to-face deliberative bodies,
guaranteed free exchange--are crucial for "democratic advantage" even
now.

This book, despite its occasional stretches of utilitarian argument
against various positions in classical or economics scholarship, richly
rewards any reader with interests in democratic theory or Athens. For
many it could renew an interest in the sociology of deliberative
action. And it does an excellent job rethinking tired political
hyperdivision of "public vs. private," "weak vs. strong publics," and
"civic vs. market orientations."

This review first summarizes the book, attending most to the
organizational-science quandaries Ober sets out to solve. Then it sums
up what Ober has in mind by "democracy" and by "knowledge." The end
suggests a few ways theorists and philosophers studying ancient
politics and democracy might benefit from Ober's results.

II. Outline of the Book

The comprehensive introduction sets out the social-scientific goals of
the work. The central goal is to show classical Athens to be a fruitful
case study for the understanding of joint action in a political
context--parallel to the way one would study Microsoft to see how the
firm organizes joint action in a market context--and the excellence of
Athenian democracy judged from the perspective of efficiency. Ober
works with organizational science more than with game or decision
theory. He sets out the economic problems of coordination effectively
and without pedantry. The author's major dialectical project quickly
becomes clear: he will be arguing explicitly against "the
cloistered-experts approach to policy-making" (2), a view supposing
that, given the costs of knowledge-acquisition, a mass citizenry will
always be too ignorant to run their city adequately; this view supposes
the necessity of managerial or technocratic elites. At the end of the
chapter Ober sets down his hypothesis--what he means his chapters to
support--in italics:

"Democratic Athens was able to take advantage of its size and
resources, and therefore competed successfully over time against
hierarchical rivals, because the cost of participatory political
practices were overbalanced by returns to social cooperation resulting
from useful knowledge as it was organized and deployed in the
simultaneously innovation-promoting and learning-based context of
democratic institutions and culture." (37-8)

The second chapter, "Performance," argues that Athens was the most
prosperous Greek polis and correlates that prosperity to its democratic
institutions. Ober measures prosperity in terms of "wealth, power,
security, stability, and cultural influence--as opposed to moralistic
criteria" and against "other real Greek poleis over the full course of
the late archaic and classical period" (40). He correlates Athenian
prosperity to its political structure because Athens "was quite similar
to its rivals in terms of climate, location, geology, ethnicity,
background history, and general culture," and because, despite its
great silver wealth, "resources endowments [alone] do not spur high
performance" (72). This chapter also divides Athenian history into
twelve periods (from 700 to 146), and gives handy one-page synopses of
each. (While this chapter charts much data from the Inventory of
Archaic and Classical Greek Poleis, more data is relegated to five
appendices (281-293).)

The third chapter, "Competition, Scale, and the Varieties of
Knowledge," sharpens Ober's take on the problems poleis faced. Such
cities--"purposeful organizations whose members jointly pursue
collective flourishing, as well as other shared and individual goals"
(90)--were always threatened by the real possibility of extinction; and
as their expanding populations could no longer maintain face-to-face
contact, coordinating solutions became increasingly hard. A city would
need, accordingly, to figure out how to bring together dispersed and
diverse social and technical knowledge (in part recognition of who was
comparatively expert in what); how to make sure what was decided upon
got done; and how to minimize the cost of potentially effortful but
useful interactions. Ober could have elaborated even more on a point he
makes, of certain interest to political theorists, that no so-called
"leadership" expertise exists (94-5), that there are instead only
constellations of expertise potentially relevant to the complex tasks
of running a city, and that institutional arrangements can help
increasingly large percentages of the citizenry acquire these.

The fourth chapter, "Aggregation: Networks, Teams, and Experts,"
confronts the three-fold democratic problem: any particular citizen is
likely to be untutored in high-stakes public decision-making,
unfamiliar with who could be expert in what, and unconcerned with
people or events outside his rather small circle. Ober shows how
membership in multiple deliberative bodies solves all three problems at
once. To put it simply, people learn to debate and decide by doing it a
lot; they gather useful contacts and advisors when, serving as
representatives to larger assemblies, they meet representatives from
other locales (e.g., the sea-side); and the desires to win social
capital, etc., (e.g., to find potential sons- and daughters-in-law)
encourages an important extroversion and catholicity of awareness to
goings-on. Ober looks particularly into what makes a "real team"--a
group that works increasingly well together--and looks to competition,
accountability, feedback, and other incentives. He also admires the
paradoxical Athenian tradition of yearly turnover of office (155): it
was only an apparent block to the development of efficient routines and
the preservation of useful knowledge, since whatever disadvantage that
discontinuity caused was overwhelmed by the upside of innovation
(120-1), the prevention of "a self-serving identity or corporate
culture" (150), and the benefits of an ever-larger percentage of the
population gaining official experience. The bulk of this chapter looks
at Athenian institutional complexity from two angles. Ober first reads
a dispatching decree of 325/4 establishing a naval station. He is very
impressed by the fourteen bodies or agents involved and named
therein--e.g., "curators of the shipyards," "trierarchs," "the herald
of the Council of 500," "apodektai," "treasurers of Athena,"
"euthonos," "paredroi," "prutaneis," and "dispatchers"--and the
incentives offered for quick and effective service. The second angle is
on the Cleisthenic solution to the problem of cliques: Ober sets out
how Athens organized its populace into tribes, trittyes, and demes, and
how those bodies' respective deliberative assemblies allowed just the
right intensity of intermixing of the citizenry to unify useful
knowledge (140).

Chapter five, "Alignment: Common Knowledge, Commitment, and
Coordination," explains how it was that "behind every Athenian statute
lay the implicit assumption that coordination could be achieved in the
absence of a unitary executive, through dispersed choice making and
self-regulation" (169). As in the previous chapter, after outlining the
basic dilemmas, Ober takes up both a narrow and broad topic in Athenian
democracy. The narrower one is Lycurgus' prosecution against Leocrates
on charges of treason in 330 (183-190). The broader one is Athenian
civic events and architecture, which, following Michael Chwe's Rational
Ritual (Princeton, 2001) and his ideas about intervisibility, Ober
shows succeeded at bringing people together in ways that allow them to
see what one another knows (and that one another knows that one another
knows that...). Such self-consciously shared awareness makes joint
action more reliable. (Ober doesn't belabor the way these findings
speak to theses about shame or the single-mindedness of communities.)

The sixth chapter, "Codification: Access, Impartiality, and Transaction
Costs," focuses on Nikophon's law on silver coinage of 375/4. The
hypothesis which Ober's discussion of the law means to support is that
the law was enacted to minimize the effort and money wasted in
uncertainty about the value of tender on offer (i.e., transaction
costs). Further discussion in this chapter concerns legal openness
designed to encourage the visit to Athens' markets by foreign traders.
It is here where the moral superiorities of democracy--in equality,
fairness, and transparency--are seen to be in part driven by market
considerations. Yet it's important to see that it is the very
advantages of democratic learning and innovation that allow the laws to
be driven by those market considerations. Of course opening markets is
not itself cost-free--the psychic and (ensuing) deliberative costs
could be high. But Ober implicitly but reasonably assumes that banking
experts were able to persuade the assembly that the benefits to their
city of trade liberalization outweighed whatever excitation of its
xenophobia or distaste for thinking about matters economic such
resolutions caused.

Democracy and Knowledge's  conclusion summarizes its findings and shows
how what we know about Athens could be at all relevant to nation-states
three to four orders of magnitude larger. Ober is not pessimistic about
scaling up Athens' discoveries, should modern deliberative arrangements
figure out a way to promote the development of "participatory
expertise," create the "potential for long-term social interactions,"
and operate within "high stakes" environments full of "deliberative
experience at multiple levels" (274).

III. "Democracy" and "Knowledge"

Ober looks at democracy as "the capacity to act in order to effect
change," when that capacity "lay[s] with a public composed of many
choice-making individuals" (12). His concern is not with voting as an
accurate or inaccurate way of aggregating preferences but with the way
a group of people can decide together to act in concert. Participatory
and deliberative ideas of democracy are central to this vision, but
this is not itself a justificatory project as those ideas are. Nor does
Ober claim that a democracy must transform its citizenry from seekers
of self-interest into altruistic councilors; instead, a successful city
must bring its people to see what objectives they do share and what
knowledge they could share that would help them with those objectives.
Incentives and sanctions remain powerful devices for encouraging public
work; fortunately, both may be internal to the democratic institutions
themselves (e.g., pride in one's committee's excellence; fines for
extortive behavior levied by the overseeing legislative body).

What precisely is this "democratic knowledge"? It is only incidentally
the knowledge of concern to the Millian liberal, knowledge of what the
individual wants (that the individual is best positioned to know),
knowledge expressed through free speech, association, and petitioning.
Nor is it, exactly, the knowledge each person has about policy
decisions (that would be increased if everyone read white papers).
Democratic knowledge combines what Ober calls "social" and "technical"
knowledge. Social knowledge is knowledge of who is expert in what and
thus from whom to take advice; tacit and explicit knowledge of basic
routines for fact-finding and making decisions; and awareness of what
others' preferences and intentions are such that their actions will be
relatively predictable. Technical knowledge is the expertise dispersed
throughout any society (including expertise in the deployment of social
knowledge, for example, in the invention of new problem-solving
mechanisms); every craftsperson, enthusiast, or socialite will have his
respective expertise probably useful someday to a city decision.

IV. Relevance to Normative Theory of Ancient Democracy

It is worth noting that rational choice ("positivistic") models such as
Ober's make some theorists nervous. Such models seem to rely for
explanation on (unjustified? hazardously-oversimplified?) assumptions
about self-interest, and they seem to treat the moral success of a
regime as a happy accident rather than a constraint on its
justifiability.

Ober's first prophylactic against this anxiety is to observe that the
survival of democratic societies matters, because democracy "is
uniquely well suited to human flourishing" (xiii). He also appeals to
the ways Athens' need to survive required it to strengthen its
commitments to procedural justice, openness, and accountability (though
sometimes to a woefully incomplete extent). Ober could even have
identified the many ways in which the proliferation of deliberative
venues would have had effects on individual wellbeing besides improving
political engagement and putting the decision-maker under better-made
laws (which are themselves important-enough outcomes). The points he
makes, and those he intentionally leaves aside, go some way toward
sketching out a theory of democracy as excelling in both the economic
and moral domains, and to identifying core features responsible for
this simultaneous excellence.

On this point, one may wonder what this work shares with more
conceptual or justificatory works. I take one example, Paul Woodruff's
First Democracy (Oxford, 2005). Woodruff's discussion of Athenian
democracy, and its lessons for today, talks about seven explicitly
moral democratic ideals: freedom from domination, harmony, the rule of
law, "natural equality," "citizen wisdom," "reasoning without
knowledge," and paideia. A work like Ober's can explain why a city can
rely on "citizen wisdom," that is, non-expert leaders (because
expertise is diffused throughout society) and on imprecise reasoning
(because layers of committees improve it); how a city can achieve
harmony (because of its physical ordering) and the rule of law (because
of the economic advantages of it); and so forth. Woodruff and other
philosophers and normative theorists can explain why a successful
Athens was, in a fair number of respects, also an admirable Athens.

V. Some Concluding Remarks

The book, while not always vividly written or given to illustration
after interesting illustration (and it could use more mundane examples
of decision-making itself), is, besides having the virtues discussed
above, very useful. It has a lavish bibliography and an effective
index. Ober's repetitiousness proves helpful when flipping back through
the book. There are lots of apparatus, well-ordered presentations of
data, serviceable diagrams, and some fascinating tables and figures
(e.g., pp. 57, 74). It is easy to accept the argumentative structure of
the book and Ober's claim that it is part of a trilogy (with his Mass
and Elite in Democratic Athens [Princeton, 1989] and Political Dissent
in Democratic Athens [Princeton, 1998]), and thus not be annoyed at
what it leaves out. One is of course curious about the educational and
social institutions in which deliberation, discovery, and judgment
might be practiced, and whether Athens had any special ones. Also
unanswered are some matters perhaps of especial interest for
contemporary development theorists: "How did Cleisthenes' novel tribal
divisions take?" "What allowed oversight between organizational
structures to maintain its impartiality?" But these absences are no
argument against the deeply interesting hypotheses, findings, and ideas
of this book.