Josiah Ober's 'Institutions, Growth, and Inequality in Ancient Greece' summarizes evidence and arguments from his recent The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece: by pre-modern standards, the classical Greek world sustained exceptionally high economic growth and, in Athens, historically low levels of income inequality, both driven primarily by "fair rules and fierce competition" (24). Much of the volume will be of interest only to specialists in ancient Greek philosophy or politics, but a few of the chapters would reward a wider readership among philosophers and students thinking about justice, equality, and democracy more broadly.įollowing the editorial introduction, the volume opens with two historical chapters setting out the economic, social, and political background against which Plato and Aristotle did their thinking. The quality of the contributions varies, but several chapters provide novel insight or especially helpful overviews of their topics. The emphasis therefore falls decidedly on the philosophical rather than the historical, though most of the papers give some attention to matters of context. Ten of its thirteen chapters focus on Plato, Aristotle, or both.
Nonetheless, historical and cultural perspective plays an indispensable role in self-understanding, and this volume seeks to offer just such perspective. Yet the vast cultural differences between antiquity and modernity inevitably put some distance between ancient concerns and our own. The ideas of democracy, justice, and equality were central to political thought in ancient Greece and remain so for us today.
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