In the United States today, the top 20% of families receive approximately 50% of the nation's aggregate income; the bottom 40% of families receive less than 14%. Nearly 36 million Americans—12.5% of the population—live in poverty. These facts are well known. But what do they mean for politics? Do inequalities of wealth distort the political process? Do they contribute to—or constitute—injustice? Is the pursuit of wealth itself corrupting? Does greed distort the soul and damage the polity? Eric Nelson explores affirmative answers to these questions in this impressive first book.

The “Greek tradition,” first articulated by Plato and revived in the early-modern era by Thomas More, asserts that “men achieve their greatest happiness and fulfillment when they are part of a rationally ordered state in which the best men rule” (p. 183). Inequalities of wealth pose formidable obstacles to the creation and preservation of a just polity. Hence, Greek theorists pay special attention to schemes for the elimination or redistribution of private property.

The book is framed as a contribution to the historiography of republicanism. In the 1960s, historians and political theorists uncovered a republican language of virtue and corruption that appeared to be distinct from and in tension with the liberal logic of rights and interests. In J. G. A. Pocock's influential formulation, republicans embraced the Aristotelian claim that man is by nature a political animal whose self-realization occurs through active participation in public life. During the next two decades, the concept of “classical republicanism” spread like wildfire. Many—including, on occasion, Pocock himself—assumed a basic congruence of ideas among the writers of classical antiquity. But in the 1980s, Quentin Skinner constructed a counternarrative in which early-modern republicanism was cast in distinctly Roman garb. Skinner's “neo-romans” did not embrace the vita activa; they conceived of liberty as nondomination, and virtue as the qualities of character needed to sustain a free state.

Nelson follows Skinner's lead and makes the next move. If Machiavelli and his followers were neo-roman, and if Greek and Roman traditions diverge, then it ought to be possible to identify a separate Greek tradition. And so it is. For neo-romans, freedom is nondomination; for Greeks it is living according to nature. For neo-romans, the highest end of life is glory; for Greeks it is happiness. For neo-romans, virtue requires civic participation; for Greeks it culminates in contemplation. For neo-romans, justice entails the protection of private property; for Greeks, property is a communal resource that ought to be distributed “in such a way as to advance some normative vision of human nature” (p. 17).

The Greek Tradition in Republican Thought unfolds in six chapters devoted to key figures and pivotal moments. More's Utopians, following Plato, “take it as axiomatic that justice requires the rule of the better over the baser” (p. 42). Because private property indelibly corrupts the souls of men, and because its effects cannot be regulated, it must be eliminated. Few embraced More's communism, but all who came after him in the Greek tradition held that “the central challenge confronting political theory” was the task of mitigating the effects of wealth (p. 48). James Harrington “makes clear from the very outset that Oceana is a book about greed” (p. 88). Montesquieu urges that “the chief agent responsible for promoting the passions at the expense of justice turns out to be wealth” (p. 155). By the American Revolution, Greek ideas had transmuted into a “vibrant” set of claims regarding the efficacy of agrarian laws and the importance of regulating inheritance (p. 199). The denouement of the Greek tradition did not come until the nineteenth century, in the writings of de Tocqueville.

Nelson writes with verve and erudition. Each chapter is based on a comprehensive study of primary and secondary sources. The book is intentionally provocative; almost every page presents familiar texts in a new and challenging light. Specialists will find plenty to argue with. Is it true that Harrington embraced the Platonic view that virtue was “the result of a justly balanced soul aligned with the cosmos through contemplation” (p. 125)? Or that Montesquieu took Plato as “an authoritative political guide” (p. 170)? The sheer quality of Nelson's arguments and evidence will make these and similar engagements fruitful and rewarding.

Three worries. First, are the ideas Nelson isolates sufficiently distinct and coherent to constitute a tradition, and if so, do they capture all that was significant about the early-modern reception of Greek political ideas? Hobbes famously complained that it was by reading “Aristotle, Cicero, and other men, Greeks and Romans,” that men had “gotten a habit (under a false shew of Liberty,) of favouring tumults, and of licentious controlling the actions of their Sovereigns.” What should we make of this claim?

Second, in what sense are these ideas republican? Pocock's republicans articulated a positive conception of liberty. Skinner's neo-romans argued that individual liberty was possible only in a free state. Nelson's Greeks seem unconcerned with questions of participation or representation. They “advocated the redistribution of wealth so that they could institute and preserve a particular structure of rulership: a structure in which a few elect, virtuous men rule, and all the rest are ruled” (p. 233). Can the concept of republicanism be stretched to include the Greek tradition, yet retain sufficient precision to do explanatory or analytic work?

Finally, how should we assess these ideas? Were theorists in the Greek tradition astute observers of their world? Were they ever confused or opaque? Did contemporaries find their arguments compelling, meretricious, or beside the point? How did they weigh and balance the claims of Greek theorists against alternative accounts of greed or economic inequality? How did the emergence of commercial economies in the late seventeenth century affect the plausibility of Greek ideas? The Greek Tradition does not attempt to answer these questions. It does, however, bring them to the fore, and in so doing helps focus our attention on the complex dynamics of wealth and virtue in early-modern political thought.