1st Anniversary of Social Science Files [11th Feb]
Josiah Ober's Review of The Athenian Assembly in the Age of Demosthenes, by Mogens Herman Hansen
Today is the 1st Anniversary of Social Science Files! To celebrate I will do something a little bit different. I will begin a mini-series by exhibiting part of a review of a book.
What is the reason for the upcoming series?
One of my current tasks is the preparation of a new ‘typology of societies’. I will be arguing that in the long history ‘from early humans to the present day’, society, rather like the supple cats of ancient Egypt, has experienced nine ‘lives’. The number was not intentionally calculated to be 9, it simply turned out to be 9 when I drew the list up.
But I have not yet quite decided where to fit the ‘exceptions’ of Greek city states (Athens in particular) and the Roman Republic. They could be classified as variants within one of the 9 general types, or they might be allowed a 10th (perhaps an 11th) unique life of their own in the history of society, a ‘libertas cat’ and ‘ελευθερία cat’.
We shall see. In any case, I have at least already determined that my consideration of Greek city states will rely greatly on the wonderfully readable book authored by Mogens Herman Hansen, The Athenian Democracy in the Age of Demosthenes: Structure, Principles and Ideology (Blackwell 1991).
I will tomorrow begin a purposeful ‘reading’ of this book, and short exhibits will be displayed here on Social Science Files.
In my reductionist mind, there are 3 questions to answer: in terms of ‘governance’ …
… what did the Athenians do? how did they do it? what were they thinking?
I thought it would be useful to start the mini series with the first two pages of Josiah Ober’s substantial review of an earlier book by Hansen, The Athenian Assembly (1987), which introduces the style of Hansen’s method.
Mogens Herman Hansen and Josiah Ober have both been subscribers of my Social Science Files since early July 2022. I notice that Professor Hansen opened many of the emails in my ‘End of Year Aristotle Series’, which obviously pleases me greatly.
I must apologise to listeners of the audio version. I do not currently have access to the journal directly (JSTOR subscription expired) and doubt that the two pages pictured below will be detectable as text by Substack’s otherwise very smart robot.
In his 1989 review of Hansen’s The Athenian Assembly, published in 1987, Josiah Ober wrote:
[That is the end of this Social Science Files exhibit]
The Source has been:
Review Article: The Athenian Assembly in the Age of Demosthenes by Mogens Herman Hansen. Review by Josiah Ober in Classical Philology, Vol. 84, No. 4 (Oct., 1989), pp. 322-334, Published by The University of Chicago Press. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4620752
Michael Heller’s Social Science Files collects and displays multidisciplinary writings on a great variety of topics relating to evolutions of social order from the earliest humans to the present day and future machine age.
‘The Heller Files’, quality tools for Social Science since February 2022.