Athenian Legacies: Essays on the Politics of Going On Together

Abstract

Athenian Legacies: Essays on the Politics of Going On Together. By Josiah Ober. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005. 296p. $29.95.In the Philosophy of History, Hegel says that the only thing anyone ever learns from history is that no one ever learns anything from history. Josiah Ober dissents. He believes that the study of ancient Greek history provides valuable lessons for maintaining democratic polities in today's world. Athenian Legacies is comprised of 10 essays—eight published previously, lightly revised. Ober is primarily a cultural historian. He describes this field as “concerned with functional explanation: how members of a society, or subgroups within a community, negotiated a set of meanings that allowed them to continue to live in an existing community” (p. 177). This volume can be read as a follow-up (one of several) to his important 1989 work, Mass and Elite in Democratic Athens. That study explores the role of discourse and ideology in alleviating conflict between richer and poorer citizens in ancient Athens and so contributing to democratic stability. In this new book as well, Ober's central concern is how products of public culture contributed to the reconciling of differences in Athenian identity, thus helping the Athenians “go on together.” The essays were written for different audiences: political theorists, classicists, moral philosophers. But the collection is more unified than many such works, as most essays bear to some degree on the central idea of “going on together.”