I haven’t yet read Josiah Ober’s new book The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece (it’s been out of stock in Canada for months) but the presentation I heard on it last fall and his Foreign Affairs essay drawing on it persuade me that it’s going to be of great interest to people with BHL sympathies. Building on work he did in Democracy and Knowledge, Ober demonstrates that the extraordinary jurisdictional competition of the world of hundreds of poleis was associated with tremendous improvements and advances in the rule of law, trade, and political institutions. These were in turn associated with a level of economic growth that was a far outlier in the preindustrial world, and of course with an efflorescence of the arts, culture, and philosophy.

Ober argues that this state of affairs was encouraged by relatively low political and economic inequality ex ante, and that in the most successful of the poleis, the good institutions such as the rule of law helped keep inequality low (by ancient standards) on an ongoing basis. (NB: he argues that inequality in Athens was very low by contemporaneous standards even when one accounts for slaves.) He identifies virtuous circles among good institutions, economic growth, and restraint on the power of elites to expropriate and dominate. (There are affinities here with the work of political scientist Deborah Boucoyannis on the emergence of parliaments in the Middle Ages.)

Libertarians might of course traditionally be well-disposed toward the view that jurisdictional competition and a world of poleis among which migration were very easy (because of proximity, shared language and culture, and simply small size) would tend to be good for institutional quality, trade, and economic growth. But the findings that restrained inequality helps to catalyze that virtuous cycle, and that the jurisdictional competition and economic growth are compatible with persistently low inequality– these, I think, will be more surprising to many. And they point the way toward a political science and political sociology that the BHL intellectual project has generally been missing but could sorely use. They suggest that the ways in which BHL differs from traditional libertarianism shouldn’t just be seen as concerned with outputs– a bit of state spending on the poor at the end of the political process– but also as concerned with the growth and stability of the rule of law-friendly, commerce-friendly institutions in the first place.

Anyway, I know enough about the new Ober book to recommend it very highly in general– but I do recommend it (and the FP essay) to readers of (and writers for) this blog in particular.