Josiah Ober’s excellent recent book Democracy and Knowledge: Innovation and Learning in Classical Athens challenges one of the oldest bits of conventional wisdom in political theory: the idea that the direct democracy of ancient Athens was dominated by ignorant voters whose misguided decisions often led the city to disaster. Modern representative democracy, the conventional wisdom claims, is a great improvement in limiting the impact of ignorance. This critique of Athenian democracy certainly isn’t new; it dates back to ancient Athenian writers such as Plato and Thucydides. And it influenced scholars and political theorists for thousands of years, including the American Founding Fathers. Even today, most undegraduates get their picture of Athenian democracy from such works as Thucydides’ Peloponnesian War, which blames Athens’ catastrophic defeat on poor decisions adopted because of voter ignorance.
Ober doesn’t completely demolish the conventional wisdom of 2500 years. But he certainly calls it into serious question. I was asked to review the book for the philosophy journal Ethics because of my own work on political ignorance (e.g. here and here). Here is the abstract for my review:
In his excellent book Democracy and Knowledge: Innovation and Learning in Classical Athens, Josiah Ober argues that ancient Athenian democracy surmounted the dangers of political ignorance and made effective use of dispersed citizen knowledge to forge good public policy. He effectively demonstrates that Athenian democracy was more successful than the oligarchic and tyrannical governments of rival Greek city-states. He also shows how Athenian institutions worked to reduce the dangers of political ignorance.
On the other hand, Ober is less successful in showing that the relatively impressive performance of Athenian democracy should lead us to be optimistic about today