Development and Classics
In the first millennium BCE, Greece and Rome experienced unparalleled (for pre-modern standards) levels of economic growth. For a conspicuous chunk of this period, both were ruled by citizen-centered governments where the people had a voice in managing their own affairs (Ober, 2015; Connolly, 2013).
Modern social scientists struggle to unearth the roots of non-authoritarianism and prosperity from their most recent institutional instantiation — modern liberal democracies. Some go so far back as to weave the experience of early modern Europe within the comparative framework (e.g., North and Weingast, 1989; Greif, 2006). In these accounts, classical antiquity is largely ignored — and so are, perhaps, other experiments in relatively large-scale and reasonably prosperous citizen-centered government throughout history and around the world.
Theories of development should stand the test of time: if we identify development by definition with contemporary western institutions (such as high GDP growth, some form of democratic liberalism, or a strong centralized state), then we are willfully ignoring the possibility that development may take other forms and other paths. Classical antiquity can provide a testing ground for assessing the robustness of modern social scientific theories, and for uncovering the assumptions on which they are based.
But the relevance of classical antiquity for contemporary development is not just a theoretical matter: development efforts in the developing world have concentrated on building modern, western institutions in countries with profoundly different social, cultural, and institutional histories. The results have been mediocre at best. Because the institutional embodiments of development in the pre-modern world differ from their modern counterparts, the pre-modern world offers alternative paradigms that may help us rethink the processes and goals of institution building.
If we view classical antiquity as the cradle of modernity, then what I am proposing is really just shifting the gaze from one western-centered paradigm (that of contemporary liberal democracy and/or early modern Europe) to another (that of classical antiquity). In a sense, this move risks conjuring up a new program of cultural imperialism that not only wishes to impose western ideas and values on non-western people, but also, by looking at pre-modern paradigms, is further assuming that the developing world’s best chance is to look like some ‘primitive version’ of our developed one (Hobson, 2014).
I believe that studying the classical past is a way to challenge, rather than reinforce, the dominant paradigm of development. I do assume that a political system that gives voice to its citizens is better than a political system where a single man or a cadre of men make all decisions, but I do not contend that American or (god forbid) Italian democratic institutions are the only available options. I assume that prosperity is better than poverty, but I do not contend that, say, liberalism is the only economic doctrine that yields prosperity.
The classical past offers a window into how some form of citizen-centered government and relatively high levels of prosperity were achieved before the values and the institutions that underpin these achievements in the developed world (such as political and economic liberalism, inalienable individual rights, rule of law, and a slew of other oft ill-defined concepts) even came into existence. If we concentrate solely on the similarities between our modern world and classical antiquity, we miss the opportunity of understanding what made Greece and Rome distinctive.
Were ancient institutions really ‘primitive’? The ancient world developed some incredibly sophisticated institutional arrangements. Take Josh Ober’s account of the working of the Athenian Council (boule). The Athenians figured out how to get, over time, most citizens directly involved in politics. If Sierra Leone could create institutional arrangements to achieve a fraction of that level of participation, it would be a revolution. Or consider Emily Mackil’s account of Hellenistic koina. In Burma, the new NLD government will face, in the upcoming months, a challenging task: to establish a strong federal structure responsive to the needs of the ethnic nationalities. Those who will be designing a federal structure that works for Burma, rather than borrowing one from another country, could use some of the insights of those who designed the first federal systems.
In other words, my agenda certainly does not aim at belittling or justifying mediocre arrangements in the ancient world. To the contrary: because these sophisticated institutions did create social, economic, and political goods that we usually associate with modernity — such as citizen-centered governments, forms of open access, prosperity, forms of individual rights — pre-modern societies (including, but not limited to those from classical antiquity) can help us expand the range of options available to provide those goods.
The study of Athenian law, a topic that I am particularly familiar with, is illustrative of the tendency to look at the past through the lens of modern paradigms, and of what can be done if we move beyond this practice. Since at least the beginning of the 20th century, scholars of Athenian law have sought to describe the evolution of Athens’ legal system through the lens of modern paradigms.
In the 1980s, during the Cold War, the question dominating the discipline centered on the issue of sovereignty and whether it belonged to the Athenian Assembly, or the Athenian courts. In the 1990s, with liberal America emerging as the sole uncontested world power, the focus shifted from the issue of sovereignty to the pillar of American and Western European democracy: the rule of law. Accordingly, scholars from both shores of the Atlantic tabled the issue of sovereignty and began to debate whether Athens had the rule of law (Harris, 2006; Lanni, 2006).
As these debates gripped students of Athenian law, somewhere else in academia a motley crew of economists, legal scholars, and political scientists were discovering that, even in contemporary America, under the surface of federal and state layers of government, individuals sometimes don’t care about the law on the books — they know that the laws are there, but whether they live under the rule of law or not doesn’t matter much to their daily lives (e.g. Ostrom, 1990; Ellickson, 1991; Bernstein, 1992). The contribution of these scholars has been profound, and yet the political economy of development has largely continued to focus on state institutions. While the study of contemporary legal systems remains focused either on centralized or decentralized institutions, the Athenian legal system may contribute to bring the two approaches together.
Athenian laws were articulated in, applied by, and modified through centralized institutions (most notably, in the 4th century, the Assembly and the nomothetai). Some of these laws were written and have come down to us. The extant evidence suggests that the Athenians used their laws quite a bit. But the evidence also suggests that Athens, like perhaps every other human community, had norms. Interestingly, the enforcement of laws, as well as norms, was largely decentralized. The Athenians thus elaborated and enforced community rules by coordinating the work of centralized and decentralized institutions. For two hundred years, the Athenian legal system supported a robust democracy and a prosperous commercial center.
Can this insight be leveraged to rethink contemporary approaches to building legal institutions in developing countries? To answer this question, we must back up a bit and ask another question first: to what extent was Athens’ legal structure dependent on the fact that Athens was a pre-modern state?
Compared to other Greek poleis and other pre-modern citizen-centered governments, Athens was relatively large and meaningfully pluralistic, if not in terms of language, culture, and religion, at least in terms of individual preferences about forms of governments, sources of prosperity, and the nature and quality of desirable social goods. But compared to most contemporary countries, Athens was awfully small, and massively homogeneous. Size and homogeneity constitute obvious advantages to coordination. Therefore, Athens’ success depended on features that cannot be replicated in the modern world. But before we throw the baby out with the bathwater, three points deserve attention.
First, I suggest that we ought to contextualize Athens’ advantages within their own historical, technological, and sociopolitical environment. Athens was smaller than most modern states, but the Athenians had only limited tools to communicate at a distance; the polis’ residents were more homogeneous than citizens of contemporary societies, yet it was primarily socioeconomic inequality, rather than e.g. ethnic diversity, that fostered internal instability and civil war.
Second, social scientists know all too well that cross-country variation is not just a problem with pre-modern case studies. Weaving pre-modernity more firmly into a comparative framework will indubitably add a number of variables to the equation. But if we are to take up Acemoglu and coauthors’ challenge seriously — that historically contingent factors explain much of the variation in development measures across countries — then pre-modern case studies may well be worth some attention.
Finally, we must define what it is, exactly, that we are demanding from pre-modern case studies. Based on modern approaches to development, one may think that the argument I am articulating here suggests that we should substitute a historically contingent set of ‘model’ institutions — those of contemporary North America and Western Europe — with another — those of, say, classical Athens. But that’s not the point I’m making. As I argued at the beginning of this piece, the ‘demand’ is twofold: first, to leverage an understanding of pre-modern development to subject modern theories to a critical out-of-sample test, and second, to allow for the possibility that there exist alternative paradigms to development that may better fit the needs and expectations of citizens in developing countries.
I suggested earlier that the Athenians formulated, changed, and enforced community rules by coordinating the work of centralized and decentralized institutions and that such a system supported both a robust democracy and high levels of prosperity. Can this insight be leveraged to rethink contemporary approaches to building legal institutions in developing countries?
The key ingredients of the Athenian approach to effective rule enforcement were clear rules, shared principles, accountability, mutual monitoring, and community trust. Some of these ingredients, such as clear rules and community trust, are part and parcel of the lives of many traditional communities. Others, such as shared principles, mutual monitoring, and accountability, ought to be more effectively implemented with a view to critical (often country-specific) issues, such as the sources of authority (customary, common/civil law, and constitutional law), and the availability of service providers (traditional authorities, police, central and local courts, and international and domestic NGOs).
The Athenian experience may be particularly valuable in those developing nations where a) the central state is, and will continue to be for years to come, appallingly weak and largely unaccountable; b) customary law continues to be a primary source of norms (and traditional leaders the primary source of authority); c) a number of decentralized providers of dispute-resolution services (particularly NGOs) have haphazardly emerged to fill the gap left by the erosion (or capture) of both state and traditional institutions.
For centuries, western humanists have turned their gaze to the classical past and seen themselves in it — a wondrous beginning, an ideal to restore. But what if the classical past could be more than a never-aging portrayal of ourselves?
As enrollment declines and income-based measures increasingly drive funding opportunities in Academia, the question of the relevance of our discipline has become more and more pressing. Surely, classics majors know that their degree will not make them rich. Will it make them more thoughtful and articulate? Or more able to read between the lines of rhetorical discourses, such as those that mystify contemporary politics? This is a compelling, if uncorroborated answer.
A few alternatives have recently emerged. Some suggest that in order to survive, we must make the discipline relevant at all costs: one way to do so is to weave classical antiquity into a longue durée historical paradigm of which the classics are a constitutive, albeit tiny, portion. More recently, a friend of mine has suggested that the relevance of classics lies in its status as an intermediated discourse — a discourse in which our own reflections about topics such as citizenship, race, and exclusion are refracted through those of similar communities of thinkers and readers, past and present.
These are all excellent responses, but my answer differs: Classics is relevant because the developing world needs new ideas.
Federica Carugati is the acting Associate Director of the Ostrom Workshop and a Visiting Scholar at the Political Science Department and Maurer School of Law, Indiana University-Bloomington.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not reflect the views of the Paideia Institute.
