Josiah Ober

Professor Josiah Ober, author of The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece, discusses the unique political ecology of Greek city-states, demographic growth, and the role of institutions in making Classical Greece distinct from the rest of the ancient world. They explore factors contributing to demographic success, risk management, and the decentralized structure of Greek society.

Explore democracy and demagogues in ancient Athens with historian Josiah Ober. Learn about the unique political developments, economic prosperity, and citizen participation in the Athenian system. Discover the challenges in controlling demagogues like Cleon and the fragility of democracy. Reflect on the lessons from ancient Greece for modern democratic societies.

Josiah Ober, Stanford professor of political science and classics known for work on Athenian democracy, civic theory, and institutional design. He explores why democracies can aggregate dispersed knowledge, the scaling challenge of democratic systems, the role of civic trust and communication technologies, and the teachable skills of civics like listening, bargaining, and compromise.

How do you solve the question of collective self-government by citizens? Josiah Ober discusses a fundamental problem of democratic societies: how we come to agree on courses of action when we commit to living within a democracy. His argument is that we need to become civic friends, a concept he explains in the conversation.

Melissa Lane, Princeton politics professor bridging classics and philosophy. Josiah Ober, Stanford scholar of Greek institutions and democracy. Dan Edelstein, Stanford historian of Enlightenment thought. They trace how revolution shifted from civic nightmare to liberating promise. Conversations hit mixed constitutions, civic education, revolutionary violence, and how historical scripts shaped modern uprisings.