The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece

Winner of the 2016 Douglass C. North Research Award, Society for Institutional and Organizational Economics (SIOE) Shortlisted for the 2016 Ralph Waldo Emerson Award, Phi Beta Kappa Society One of Flavorwire's 10 Must-Read Academic Books for 2015 One of HistoryBuff.com's 10 Can't-Miss History Books of 2015 Superb. --Armand Marie Leroi, New York Times In the late fourth century B.C., Aristotle and his students collected the constitutions of more than 150 [...] city-states. The scholar who would today follow in Aristotle's footsteps has to deal with a far more formidable mass of data. Few of today's scholars control more of this data, or write about it more insightfully, than Josiah Ober. [T]hose willing to put in the effort will learn much from the deep meditations of an expert historian and political philosopher. --James Romm, Wall Street Journal [T]his could turn out to be Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire for classical Greece. --Jonathan Sturgeon, Flavorwire Ober marshals a wealth of new data to make the case for a much different view of Greek history ... there was something distinct about the Greek world, he argues. What set the Greeks apart, he says, was their choice of a particular kind of order--and the cultural attitudes that went with it. Citizen self-government. Equality of standing among persons. Fair and open institutions. These ideas, unusual in history, were well developed in the Greek world, Ober notes. If we care about them, he says, we should pay attention. --Marc Parry, Chronicle of Higher Education [Ober's] central argument is that the achievements of Greek civilization were rooted in its prosperity, and that was the result of a rough economic and political equality... [He] ranges over a half millennium of Greek history, from the 8th to the 3rd centuries BCE, seeking the roots of Greek efflorescence --its material and cultural flourishing... [The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece] is rife with parallels to the present. --Brian Bethune, Macleans An attractive, informative, and timely picture of Greece from Homer to Aristotle... It's an absorbing story full of excitement, drama and hope. --Evaggelos Valiantos, Huffington Post A sharp and insightful economic history. --Daisy Dunn, History Today [The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece] is by far [Ober's] most ambitious work to date, a magisterial tour of the successes and failures of various city-states throughout the Greek world from the archaic through the Hellenistic periods... The thrust of the book is not just provocative but persuasive. --Adriaan Lanni, The New Rambler This book is a groundbreaking examination of what Ober (political science, Stanford) calls the 'efflorescence' of ancient Greece, which, divided into some 1,100 city-states as it was, developed a unified, dominant culture. --Choice His narrative history of Greek efflorescence is engaging and full of insights. --Richard Seaford, Literary Review A thought-provoking book with great depth. As the great political theorists of the modern era have always known, the ancient Greek experience provides immense empirical material to mine for insights into political science: how we design rules of politics to secure human freedom and well-being. We ignore the experience of classical civilization to our own disadvantage. --Jason Sorens, The American Conservative This challenging book is like no other history of the ancient world... [Ober] produces some engaging and striking analyses of familiar historical episodes. --American Historical Review Intriguing... [Y]ou can think of this book as how an economist might think about ancient Greece. --Tyler Cowen, Marginal Revolution