Stanford Scholar Awarded Balzan Prize for Illuminating the Resilience of Ancient Athenian Democracy
A leading historian’s decades-long study of ancient Greece offers crucial insights into the challenges facing modern democracies, from populism to political dissent.
The 2025 Balzan Prize has been awarded to Josiah Ober, a classicist and political scientist at Stanford University, for his groundbreaking research on the origins and functioning of Athenian democracy during the classical period. Ober’s work consistently draws parallels between ancient political structures and contemporary sociopolitical debates, offering a unique lens through which to examine the strengths and vulnerabilities of democratic governance. He shares the prestigious prize with Carl H. June for gene therapy, Rosalind E. Krauss for art history, and Christophe Salomon for atomic physics.
Ober’s fascination with the ancient world began in the 1970s, while an undergraduate history student at the Universities of Minnesota and Michigan. He was particularly drawn to Athens in the aftermath of the Peloponnesian War – the era of Plato and Aristotle – for two key reasons. First, the Vietnam War deeply impacted his generation of Americans, leading him to believe that studying a historical democratic and imperial state grappling with a prolonged and ultimately unsuccessful war could offer valuable perspective. Second, the wealth of surviving Athenian speeches – over a hundred delivered by elite citizens to large public assemblies – presented a unique opportunity for analysis. He believed these speeches held clues to a fundamental question posed by his doctoral advisor: “The real question,” as Ober recalls, “is not why the city-state democracy finally failed, but why it lasted more than twenty minutes.”
This question – how a small, citizen-governed state could thrive amidst powerful autocratic rivals – became the central focus of Ober’s doctoral research. His initial fieldwork in Greece, combined with a deep dive into Athenian rhetoric, led to his influential book, Mass and Elite in Democratic Athens. Through careful analysis of surviving speeches, Ober demonstrated that Athenian public discourse involved a nuanced, two-way communication. Orators were acutely attuned to public reaction, shaping their arguments accordingly. Citizens, in turn, developed sophisticated rhetorical judgment, using established norms to guard against the dangers of populism and elite capture.
The success of Mass and Elite propelled Ober to a professorship at Princeton University, where he was surprised to be recognized not just as a historian, but as a political theorist. This realization prompted him to engage with the critiques of democracy offered by ancient thinkers like Thucydides, Plato, and Aristotle. He found these criticisms weren’t merely complaints, but sophisticated theoretical arguments challenging the legitimacy and effectiveness of collective self-governance, culminating in his book Political Dissent in Democratic Athens: Intellectual Critics of Popular Rule.
Ober’s scholarship then expanded beyond a narrow focus on classical Athens. He tackled the “Greek miracle” – the extraordinary cultural flourishing of the Greek world – framing it as a problem of institutional economics in The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece. He also turned his attention to democratic political theory, particularly the relationship between democracy and liberalism. The Arab Spring of 2010 presented a new challenge: could a functioning democracy be established in a community with a strong religious heritage, without necessarily adhering to Western liberal values? This inquiry resulted in Demopolis: Democracy Before Liberalism, which explored the concept of “basic democracy” – a form of self-governance distinct from both liberal and illiberal models. Ober argued that even without a commitment to liberal values, collective self-rule requires conditions like free political speech, political equality, limits on economic inequality, and access to education and healthcare.
His most recent work, The Greeks and the Rational: The Discovery of Practical Reason, returns to Greek political philosophy, arguing that ancient Greek intellectuals anticipated key insights of modern Rational Choice Theory. Ober demonstrates that the modern understanding of strategic reasoning isn’t solely a product of contemporary concerns like neoliberal market fundamentalism or nuclear threat, but has roots in ancient philosophical inquiry. He emphasizes the ongoing relevance of grappling with how to integrate strategic reasoning into political practice while acknowledging the inherent irrationality of human interaction and the need for ethical judgment.
Looking ahead, Ober plans to launch a “young scholars program” focused on the “revitalization of democracy,” specifically examining how democratic systems have been restored after periods of tyranny or oligarchy. He anticipates further research on the ethics and politics of artificial intelligence, as well as a book on “Civil War and Civic Duty.” Despite the increasingly urgent relevance of this latter topic, Ober remains convinced that “revisiting Athenian democracy” – through a cross-disciplinary approach combining history, philosophy, and contemporary analysis – offers invaluable lessons for the practice of democracy today.
