The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece

by Ober, Josiah

  Olson’s argument was backed by an impressively strong theory of human behavior (often called rational choice or rational actor theory) that posited the pursuit of self-interest, expressed as expected utility maximization, as the primary motivator of human social action. Yet rational choice theory, in its original strong form, notoriously fails to account for some evident facts about the world—including the success of large and democratic Greek poleis and the efflorescence of Greek polis ecology as a whole. The question of how certain human communities have managed to solve the problem of cooperation at scale, without the creation of centralized authority, is obviously important. There is now a large and growing scholarly literature that seeks to conjoin natural and social science to explain the motivation for human cooperation and the mechanisms that would allow well-motivated cooperation to be effective in producing valued goods. This literature is based on hypotheses about human sociability that weaken the strong assumptions of rational behavior on which Olson predicated his theory.4

  Plato’s star student, Aristotle, anticipated the “natural and social science” approach to the problem of human cooperation. Aristotle took up Plato’s light-hearted “Greeks and social insects” analogy and transformed it into a theory of politics as collective social action. Following Aristotle, we may seek the answer to the puzzle of decentralized cooperation in the ancient Greek polis ecology by asking why self-consciously rational and highly communicative humans would be motivated to cooperate, and how, once motivated, they could produce goods that would be comparable, on an expansive human scale of value, to those produced by colonies of ants.

  Despite flaws in certain of his premises—notoriously, the existence of “slaves by nature,” the inherent weakness of deliberative reasoning in women, and the inevitable corruption of virtue through other-directed labor—Aristotle’s theory of human collective activity offers much of what we need to explain the cooperative behavior that underpinned the classical Greek efflorescence.5 It also has the virtue, for our purposes, of being a theory that was devised by a Greek at the height of the classical efflorescence and that was tested with reference to a mass of (now mostly lost) empirical data on the observed behavior of city-states and their residents. Like the editors of the Inventory, Aristotle was convinced that gathering a great deal of information about a great many poleis would further the endeavor of making sense of the development of the Greek world. Of the 158 constitutional histories that were gathered in Aristotle’s school, we now have only one—known to classical scholars as “Pseudo-Aristotle’s Constitution of Athens” because it is generally thought to have been written by one of his students, rather than by Aristotle himself. But happily we do have the major work of political theory and institutional design that was, at least in part, based on the empirical data of many other constitutional histories: Aristotle’s Politics.

  ARISTOTLE’S POLITICAL ANIMALS

  Aristotle was at once a naturalist (the author of works on animals and their behavior), a moral philosopher, and a political theorist. Moreover, he was very interested in conjoining aprioristic theorizing about social order, of the sort perfected by Plato, with empirical observations of natural and social phenomena. For our purposes, the most notable example of his conjunction of natural science with the science of morals, and social theory with empirical observations of human behavior, is his political philosophy. In his Politics, Aristotle used his knowledge of the behavior of nonhuman social animals, and especially social insects, to help explain the distinctive forms of cooperation that he observed among his fellow Greeks. Moving beyond Plato-style simile (“like ants around a pond”) to behavioral taxonomy, Aristotle noted that the kingdom of animals, ranging from insects to mammals, could be organized according to social behavior, rather than mere physical appearance (figure 3.1). This allowed him to see why humans and ants belong, behaviorally, in the same category of animal, and how their behavior is affected by their natural capacities. Thinking with Aristotle about the social insects/classical Greeks comparison that was introduced in chapter 2 helps us to grasp some of the distinctive institutional and civic features that were characteristic of the marketlike ecology of city-states.6

  FIGURE 3.1 Aristotle’s behavioral taxonomy of solitary and social animals.

  NOTE: Up and to the right: more communication, more richly social (i.e., political) behavior, more public goods.

  In one primary category of animals, Aristotle placed those species whose members lived essentially solitary lives, without need for complex forms of intraspecies cooperation—we may think, for example, of orangutans, many species of wild feline, bumblebees, or spiders. In a second category were those species whose members always lived in groups—for example, flocks of birds, schools of fish, herds of herbivores, and bands of primates. Within the broad category of the social, group-dwelling animals, he observed that the individuals of some species gained an essentially passive benefit from their sociability. Many herbivores, for example (think of antelope, bison, or zebra), benefit from the multiplication of individual senses. If a single antelope in the herd sees, hears, or smells the approach of a predator and therefore takes flight, all the rest in the herd may take his or her flight as a signal and flee to safety. But antelope do not create or share goods in common.

  Aristotle’s second subcategory of group-dwelling animals was made up of species whose members live more actively social lives, in that they cooperate in the production of some tangible good that is publicly shared by all members of the community. The behavior of these public-good-producing creatures was designated by Aristotle as “political.” Social insects provided Aristotle with his prime examples of nonhuman political behavior. In the Politics, he singled out honey bees, although he might just as well have referred to ants. In his major work on zoology, the History of Animals (1.1.20), he includes ants among political animals, along with bees, wasps, and cranes. He notes that, of these species “some submit to a ruler, others are subject to no governance; so, for instance, the crane and the several sorts of bee submit to a ruler, whereas ants and numerous other creatures are every one his own master.” Aristotle erroneously thought that each beehive had a “king” who directed the other bees’ activity. But, as we will see, he was right to believe that the ants of a given nest cooperate to produce public goods without a master. Like honey bees, harvester ants process and store food that is shared by all individuals in the nest. All creatures that live in clearly defined communities, producing and sharing public goods, are, in Aristotle’s behavioral taxonomy, “political animals,” whether they “submit to a ruler” or live “every one his own master.”7

  Humans, according to Aristotle, fell into the public-good-producing subcategory of social creatures, which is the basis of his famous claim that “the human being is a political animal” (Politics 1253a). Indeed, for Aristotle, humans were the most political of animals—that is, we are, in behavioral terms like social insects, only more so. Although, as we will see, Aristotle was well aware of the human propensity to engage in strategic behavior, the hypertrophy of human political nature was not, according to his behavioral theory, due to humans’ capacity to act strategically in pursuit of their own selfish interests. Rather, humans are, for Aristotle, the most political of animals because of our uniquely human capacity to employ reason in pursuit of common ends and to communicate complex prosocial plans through the use of language.

  The unique conjunction of reason and complex language enables humans to produce public goods that are greater, in abundance, variety, and (as Aristotle confidently believed) moral worth, than those produced by any other species. Our hyperpolitical nature is, for Aristotle, the relative advantage that humans enjoy in comparison to other animals—some of which are obviously stronger, faster, and have more acute senses of sight, smell, and so on than any human. Our political nature is the reason, we might then add, that the human race is so prevalent on the face of the Earth—why humans as a single species have recently (in evolutionary time) become, as ant
s as a taxonomic family have long been, a very large part of the total biomass of land animals.

  Aristotle’s discussion of humans as political animals was intended not only descriptively, as a naturalistic explanation of why humans behave as we do, but also normatively, as a moral argument for how we ought to behave. Unlike the philosopher David Hume, who famously claimed that it was a fundamental error to seek to derive an ought from an is, Aristotle supposed that certain moral duties arise directly from the specifics of human nature. In the Politics, Aristotle sought to explain to his readers, first, that the wellsprings of human behavior do lie in our ontological status as a certain sort of social creature. And next, he sought to show that, as a consequence of having an inherently social—indeed political—nature, humans ought (that is, have a moral duty) to behave in specific prosocial (public goods creating and preserving) ways. In a properly ordered Aristotelian society, then, cooperation would rightly (as a matter of justice, not merely of expediency) be praised and rewarded, while defection from cooperation would rightly be blamed and punished. He supposed that this felicitous condition could be achieved only in a polis, and moreover, only in a polis that was provided with the right resources.

  Aristotle’s moral “ought” served, and was clearly meant to serve, to distinguish polis-dwelling Greeks from their non-Greek neighbors—and very much to the favor of the former. Aristotle’s attempt to show that the Greek polis was the most natural, and thus the best, system of social organization for humans was put to blatantly ethnocentric purposes. It led him into what we must now regard as a reprehensible attempt to justify slavery as both natural and moral. But despite these failings, it is worth our while to pursue Aristotle’s naturalistic argument because it can help us to see what actually is historically distinctive about the citizen-centered social order developed in the classical Greek world, and how that social order contributed to the efflorescence of the classical era.

  Aristotle’s thought was strongly teleological. Human beings, Aristotle supposed, are like all other beings in that we have a proper end (in Greek, a telos). Achieving its end, in fullness, is what, in Aristotle’s teleological naturalism, is best for each sort of being. Ends differ according to species: Each distinctive kind of being’s end is specific to the kind of thing it is. Thus antelopes, ants, and humans all have their proper ends, but not the same ends. Our proper end as humans—and therefore what is best for us as humans—is, in Aristotle’s account, hard-wired into the hyperpolitical sort of social beings that we are by nature. Aristotle supposed that it is only by attaining the highest and fullest form of its own proper end that a being (or a collectivity of social beings) could truly flourish. Human flourishing—construed as true well-being, genuine happiness, in Greek: eudaimonia—required the production of and access to a wide range of public goods. Human flourishing thus required behavior on the part of each individual human that was appropriately hyperpolitical in the sense of orientation to provision of the requisite public goods through cooperative social activity.

  Aristotle knew, of course, that many individual beings and communities exist, and have long existed, in a state that could not appropriately be described as flourishing. There are, for example, individual ants and ant nests that are alive but in a self-evidently poor physical state, and likewise individual humans and human communities. Aristotle posited that certain species-appropriate material conditions are necessary for any creature or community of social animals to flourish. As a contingent matter of luck, these material conditions might, or might not, be adequately abundant in a given local environment. Obviously enough, every animal needs, at a minimum, enough oxygen, water, and food of the proper sort. For many species, appropriate shelter will also be necessary. For all political animals, the necessary conditions include access to raw materials from which the right sort of public goods (pollen to make honey for the bees, grain for harvesting and storage for the harvester ants) can be produced. If by bad luck resources are inadequate, the political community fails to flourish.

  Assuming that the right resources are available, the flourishing of individual political animals requires that the right public goods be produced from raw materials and that each member of the community has access to public goods once they are produced. That, in turn, meant that individual flourishing required living in the right sort of community—not only one with the right resources but also with the right systems of production and distribution. For honey bees or ants, then, the conditions necessary for flourishing included living in a well-located and well-functioning hive or nest.

  For humans, the conditions necessary for flourishing, according to Aristotle, prominently included living in a well-located and well-functioning city-state. The city-state was, he argued, a natural communal environment for humans, just as the hive was for bees or the nest for ants. This is a startling claim, and on the face of it an implausible one, when we consider how relatively rare extensive and long-lived city-state ecologies are in human history. But Aristotle’s argument was about ultimate flourishing, not about historical prevalence. His argument hinged on the unique advantages that were offered to humans, as hyperpolitical animals, by life in a community large enough to be self-supporting but small enough to enable effective communication of important information among its members.

  According to Aristotle, in every community of political animals, the individuals (bees, ants, or humans) constituting the group should be thought of as parts of a community whole (hive, nest, or polis). In each case, the right activity for each individual part (that is, what the bee, ant, or person ought to do) was to act for the common good of the community as a whole. Choosing to act cooperatively in ways that promoted the common good through the production of public goods was thus, for Aristotle, one way to define the ethical value of justice. Aristotle’s second definition of justice was fairness in respect to the distribution of the public goods produced through social cooperation. These two aspects of justice link his moralized conception of human flourishing to collective material flourishing—and potentially, at least, to the high level of sustained collective flourishing that we are calling efflorescence. A well-ordered Aristotelian community produced enough public goods so that all of its members, through sharing fairly (each receiving goods according to his or her desert: a combination of need and virtue), could achieve their highest ends. The requirement that all members of the community have the chance to flourish up to their highest potential thus meant that the community as a whole must be highly productive and must divide the fruits of that productivity fairly.8

  Ants, like humans, make mistakes, but ants are incapable of injustice in the Aristotelian senses of ignoring the common good or engaging in unfair distribution of public goods. In the case of social insects, there is no meaningful gap between the natural is and the moral ought: The nest is the only environment in which individuals of the relevant species of ants can survive. Cooperation in the production of essential public goods, and fair distribution of those goods among the members of the nest, is hard-wired. Individual ants have little, if any, capacity (much less desire) to behave strategically in order to pursue private advantage at the expense of their productive roles in the community, and so ants act justly by nature. But the vistas opened by reason and language give humans many more options—both in terms of the kinds of communities (city-states, empires, nomadic societies, nation-states) in which they may potentially live, and in terms of how individuals contribute to and benefit from those communities.

  Aristotle knew that many peoples in the world lived in societies that were not organized as independent city-states. And, assuming that he consulted the 158 constitutional histories of mostly Greek city-states that were collected for him by his students, he certainly had at hand a great deal of evidence that showed that some residents of city-states failed to produce their fair share of public goods for the community. Much of Aristotle’s Politics is devoted to squaring his naturalistic moral theory with readily observable facts about human history
and sociology. He needed to explain to his readers how and why the actual behavior of humans, unlike that of social insects, deviated so often from what was naturally and normatively the right course for them as political animals—that is, the course that would lead to the collective achievement of the highest human ends by the members of a polis community, and thus to the flourishing of individuals and community alike.

  His answer, in brief, was that human sociability was not enough to produce consistently cooperative behavior, in light of the human capacity and tendency to use our capacities for reason and communication to identify and exploit gaps between the good of the whole community and the interests of the individual or subgroup. If human political nature produced naturally just individuals, there would be no need for laws and education—which feature prominently in the description of the best possible city-state, “the polis we should pray for” that is the subject of books 7 and 8 of Aristotle’s Politics. The purpose of political institutions in a well-ordered state was, in Aristotle’s view, to close that gap—to align individual and factional interests with the collective good of the state as a whole. Much of the Politics is devoted to showing how specific mechanism designs could help achieve that salutary purpose—not only in the best possible state but also in the imperfect poleis of the real Greek world.