For over 25 years, Josiah Ober’s remarkable scholarship has helped us to understand the complex relationship between “mass and elite,” and how and why Athens enabled ordinary citizens to participate in political decision-making. In The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece, Ober seeks to explain Greek “efflorescence”—economic growth and cultural achievement—by reference to two explanatory hypotheses, which he synthesizes into one: “Fair rules and competition within a marketlike ecology of states promoted capital investment, innovation, and rational cooperation in a context of low transaction costs” (p. 103). Upon encountering the two hypotheses, a casual reader might be forgiven for reading Ober as purely celebrating market freedom, while neglecting to note his attention to the political institutions that structured and provided the preconditions for the growth of capital investments, for instance. My aim here is to highlight the significant defense of political equality underlying these hypotheses.

Ober characterizes the first hypothesis as “rule egalitarianism.” On Ober’s account, “fair rules (formal institutions and cultural norms) promoted capital investment (human, social, material) and lowered transaction costs” (p. 103). So one might press on the term “rule egalitarianism” to distinguish the effects of “rule” (enhancing predictability) from egalitarianism, understood as “equal high standing in respect to major institutions: e.g., to property, law, and personal security” (p. 110). Of course, predictability need not track or yield equality; entrenched rules often secure unequal distributions of resources. The enforcement of property rights against threats of expropriation may promote capital investment and economic growth while enabling the advantaged to secure their holdings against redistribution. Ober writes: “When I believe that my person, property, and standing are secure (in that I have ready institutional recourse if I am assaulted, robbed, or affronted), I am less afraid that the fruits of my efforts will be expropriated arbitrarily by those more powerful than I” (p. 111). But those who lack property, of course, fear expropriation far less than those who possess it. So why would property rights yield egalitarian results?

Ober suggests that the institutionally egalitarian feature of rule-egalitarianism arises in the creation of “public insurance institutions,” which enabled the poor to take welfare-enhancing risks that might otherwise be limited to the well-off (p. 115). Among these risky investments included “literacy, numeracy, and mastery of banking and credit instruments,” and the “public insurance” institutions (especially in Athens) included grain price stabilization/subsidization, welfare provision for invalids, and state-supported upbringing of war orphans (p. 115). Ober’s argument relies on a broadly Coasean framework, in which socially efficient outcomes emerge from a decentralized system of property rights accompanied by rules minimizing transaction costs. Ober argues that rule-egalitarian norms lower transaction costs by securing relatively equal access to information, and in turn generate more economically productive societies. But because the burdens of unequal information are not equally distributed, one might argue that for rule-egalitarianism itself to emerge—and for ordinary citizens to insist that transaction costs associated with unequal information required redress—the prior distribution of bargaining power would have to be relatively equal (Knight 1992; Knight and Johnson 2011). That is, the emergence of “rule egalitarianism” itself may well have depended on prior norms of “equal high standing.”

Let me turn now to the second hypothesis, in which market-like competition spurred innovation, emulation, and rational cooperation. Here, Ober’s model is Hayekian (as he suggests in the introduction to his wonderful previous book, Democracy and Knowledge), arguing that the capacity to harness dispersed information and solve collective action problems produces competitive advantages. For Hayek, the information-aggregating function of the price system rested upon equally divided knowledge: “Through [the price system] not only a division of labor but also a coordinated utilization of resources based on an equally divided knowledge has become possible” (Hayek Reference Hayek1945, p. 528). One possibility, then, is that the ability to innovate and solve thorny problems itself rests on the equal distribution of knowledge and political resources more generally. The work of Elinor Ostrom might support Ober’s claim: the ability of groups to self-organize and self-govern “commons” is enhanced when the preexisting distribution of interests and resources is relatively symmetric (e.g., Ostrom 1997).

But how did the institutions of “fair rules” and “market-like competition” emerge in a way that was equality-enhancing rather than inequality-exacerbating? Here one must look carefully at Ober’s own historical account to identify features that might have enhanced the bargaining power of the poor. Ober emphasizes, for instance, that cheap iron enabled the wide distribution of instruments of violence in Athens, and that alphabetic writing enabled ordinary people to become literate. But a focus on the bargaining power of ordinary citizens, measured largely in terms of citizens’ capacity for violence, might seem to explain the success of both Athens and Sparta (one must note, as does Ober, that both Athens and Sparta also relied on forced labor). Whereas the Athenians were inclined to leverage their citizen power to ensure the equal distribution of political rights, the Spartans—while “functional equals in their violence potential” and as “equal power holders and rent-seekers” (p. 143)—did not. Why Spartans failed both to redistribute the wealth of their elite families, and enact political institutions that reflected this equality, would remain a question.

One possible explanation, implied by Ober, is that they were ideologically conservative, committed to upholding the oligarchic political structure (pp. 142–143). Alternatively, one might argue the flourishing promised by “fair rules” and “market-like competition,” and the capacity to innovate to meet new challenges, emerges and endures within a polis only in the presence of a prior commitment to political equality: not merely the equal “lifestyle” of the Spartan homoioi, but the isopsephos (equality of the vote) and isegoria (equality in freedom of speech) of the Athenians.

In this light, Ober’s superb achievement is not in demonstrating that Greek efflorescence derived in the first instance from their turn to the rigorous enforcement of property rights, the reduction of transaction costs, and market-style competition. Rather, it is to subject to rigorous empirical examination his brilliant insight from Democracy and Knowledge that democratic institutions, rooted in political equality, yield efflorescence, both in the ancient world and beyond.