Ober’s Rise and Fall of Classical Greece represents a major restatement of our understanding of Classical Greece based on integrating the new social science studies in classics that has flourished over the past quarter of a century. The book tackles many of the major questions in modern social science: Why did an oligarchy decide to share power with the masses? Or was it forced to do so by the masses? Was Athens rich; and if so, what were the sources of its wealth? And can ancient Athens be considered an egalitarian society; and if so how is that connected to its prosperity?

In turning to these questions, many scholars of classical Greece began to realize that the traditional humanities tools of the discipline could not capture the full meaning of these questions. Hence the turn to social sciences, especially those tools developed to study these questions in the modern world. The results promise a new understanding of the Classical world, Ancient Greece in particular.

In The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece, Ober gives us the first integrated view of this new understanding, using all the tools and concepts of social science. But the road Ober travels is not a one-way street of modern social science being introduced to studies of the classical world. Ober has also brought Classical Greece into the modern world of social science as a case for study in the fields of comparative politics and economic development.

There are two main reasons for modern students of development to be interested in the Classical Greek world. First, it provides a type of natural experiment where geography and culture are held constant. The Greeks shared a common language, religion and were unified by a history, for example encapsulated in the Homeric epics. They also shared a similar geography and were for the most part spread around coasts with a mountainous interior (like “ants around a pond,” as Ober puts it, quoting Plato). Yet a great institutional divergence (think Athens versus Sparta) occurred between the end of the Greek Dark Ages (around 800 BCE) and the collapse of Classic Greece with the rise of the Macedonian Empire. Second, the Greeks in this period were remarkably modern in many ways lacking dense webs of kinship or such institutions as polygamy. This means there is a great deal of external validity and hence much we can learn from this case for a broader range of cases.

How much? Consider a few examples. Modern social science is obsessed with Charles Tilly’s dictum that “states made war and war made states;” yet the Greek evidence should give us reason to pause. It is not clear that warfare led to the rise of the poleis. Despite centuries of warfare and grave external threats, for example from Persia, the poleis never united into a large state. Instead they formed various “leagues” a bit like the European Union but with more emphasis on warfare.

Second, while the Greeks pioneered democracy, they realized it could be very dysfunctional and populistic, as many of us do today. Ober notes (p. 234) “with no brake on the process, the dynamic of public speakers seeking influence and honors, and mass audiences eager to be entertained and willing to be flattered sometimes led to catastrophic policy mistakes.” But the Greeks learned their lessons and changed institutions accordingly. For example Athens introduced a law that people who implemented policies that were “inexpedient” (i.e., retrospectively seen as rashly imprudent) could be brought to trial. All these issues resonate, for example, with the recent publication of the Chilcott Report on the British participation in the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Finally, the natural experiment allows us to focus on the key factors that allowed the emergence of such democratic and economically successful societies. Ober emphasizes egalitarian changes in technology, such as the transition from bronze to iron; that ideology and religion were not controlled by elites; and that military technology gave society a pro-democratic impulse with the spread of hoplite warfare. The context also helps us to dramatically narrow the potential explanatory factors that lie behind institutional divergence.

Just as political economy has been enriched through study of the Glorious and French Revolutions and American Independence, Classical Greece holds the potential to be a strikingly revealing out of sample case that can illuminate many existing questions and pose new ones (a point also made by Carugati 2005). Ober’s book is a major statement of how much this case can tell us.