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Speaker: Josiah Ober, Professor of Classics and Political Science, Stanford University
Josiah Ober, Constantine Mitsotakis Professor of Classics and Political Science at Stanford University, spoke on the central themes of his forthcoming book, Democracy and Knowledge(Princeton, 2008). He provided an overview of the empirical evidence that Athens outperformed its rivals among the contemporary Greek city-states, and identified a correlation between its periods of outperformance and its reliance on democratic political forms. Given the widespread assumption that democratic political forms are highly costly, Professor Ober asked why in this case they seemed to produce enormous benefits. The answer, he argued, was that these forms promoted the organization of useful knowledge, and that this knowledge generated advantages that ultimately outweighed the costs of democratic governance.
The received wisdom, Professor Ober reminded his audience, holds that democracy is inefficient, and that participatory democracies are dominated by hierarchies. But in the real world, democracies often outcompete their authoritarian rivals in both economic and military terms. The reasons might include morale, mobilization, and leadership commitment; but Professor Ober indicated that his argument would center on knowledge management. Epistemic democracy faces the constant organizational challenges of aggregating dispersed knowledge and managing diversity. It can meet these challenges by designing institutions to collect dispersed knowledge and to manage diversity, specifically through processes of deliberation and through aggregative prediction markets.
Any empirical assessment of the value of social institutions requires long-term case studies featuring real-world consequences, and Professor Ober argued that Athens meets these criteria. Using quantitative measurements of cultural influence and material flourishing, he found that Athenian state capacity was closely correlated with its adoption of democratic political forms, with high points in each category running through the fifth and fourth centuries B.C. It is crucial to note, however, that majority rule was not the central differentiator: other Greek democracies experienced less success than Athens in this period. Rather, Athens benefitted from a unique system of organization that promoted social learning and made effective use of knowledge.
Professor Ober then focused closely on the institutional reforms introduced by Cleisthenes following the Athenian uprising of 508 B.C. The new participatory institutions he introduced included the Council of 500, which fostered deliberation and information-sharing among a quasi-representative sample of the population, and ostracism, which aggregated independent individual judgments to identify and eliminate future risks.
The Council of 500 offered a strong incentive for individuals to build relationships between local communities that had previously remained largely isolated, thereby increasing the flow of information across the society as a whole. The dense networks that developed facilitated communication and preserved valuable information, deepening the social and technical knowledge of successive generations of Councilmen. The performance of the polis improved commensurately. Ostracism, Professor Ober asserted, formed a pre-emptive prediction market, which operated through a series of stages: first, an assessment of whether an existing risk demanded extraordinary action; second, a non-deliberative and aggregative vote; and third, a forceful but transitory punishment.
In the questioning period, Professor Ober was first asked about the evidence supporting his central claims. He indicated that his work is intended to provide a framework that we can employ to develop a productive rereading of Athenian politics, but acknowledged that a fuller analysis and assessment of the theory can only be developed over time by a broad community of scholars. He was also asked whether the mechanisms he describes are necessarily democratic, and responded that tyrants could conceivably adopt these mechanisms for aggregating and sharing information but that in practice they almost always choose a different path.
A subsequent questioner asked whether greater access to information necessarily makes us better stewards of democracy, citing the example of internet access in contemporary societies. Professor Ober argued that an expansion of information and networks achieves little in the absence of institutional designs that are capable of capturing new realities and turning them into policies. Another questioner inquired whether one might attribute Athens's successes to its naval empire; but Professor Ober noted that Athens's extraordinary state capacity lasted a century beyond its empire, indicating a limited correlation between the two. Finally, a questioner asked whether, if increased state capacity seems to correspond with increased military activity, knowledge sharing and aggregation truly redound to the social good. Professor Ober indicated that his work focuses on the development rather than the use of state capacity. He further cited the example of the fourth century B.C., in which Athens's capacity was driven much more by public programs than by military conquest. Ending on a sanguine note, he indicated that the fact that the Athenians chose democracy over empire at the end of the fifth century, rather than the other way around, offers us some cause for optimism in assessing their mode of governance.
Angus Burgin