Brook Manville is a Yale and Oxford trained historian, writer and independent consultant who writes about politics, democracy, technology and business. Through a career that has combined university teaching, media, technology, and consulting, he has authored multiple books and publications on leadership, organizations and democracy, often emphasizing the lessons of ancient democracies for modern-world issues.
His latest book, emphasizing the lessons of ancient democracies for modern world self-governance is The Civic Bargain – How Democracy Survives(Princeton University Press, 2023), which he co-wrote with Josiah Ober, the Constantine Mitsotakis Chair in the School of Humanities and Sciences at the Stanford University. The two also collaborated on an earlier book, A Company of Citizens – What The World’s First Democracy Teaches Leaders About Creating Great Organizations. Manville now also writes a Substack newsletter, further exploring the ideas of his Civic Bargain book: https://civicbargain.substack.com/
Brook spoke to Greek News Agenda* about the role of Athens in the establishment of the democratic paradigm, the lessons that contemporary citizens can take from the study of ancient democracies, and the necessary conditions for democratic survival today.
While in college, what was it that made you switch your study area from pre-med to Classical Civilization?
I was schooled in the 1950s and 60s, when Cold War competition focused American public education on science and math skills. I brought that bias to college at Yale, which provided similar courses, and a path toward my initial goal of attending medical school. However, because of Yale’s historic liberal arts tradition, I also had the opportunity to be exposed to a broad range of humanistic subjects. When I was casting about for a class to fulfil my distribution requirements, my roommate—who was a Classical Language major—suggested a popular course on the basics of Greek philosophy. It was taught by a young, charismatic professor who opened my eyes for the first time to Plato and Aristotle. Their work resonated with me so much: it was clear but also penetrating—and so applicable to questions of the day. My intellectual interest grew, and I went on to take more courses in the ancient world. Upon graduation, I won a scholarship to pursue a degree in ancient history at Oxford—which only increased my enthusiasm. I later returned to Yale for my PhD in that subject, and then wrote my first book: the Origins of Citizenship in Ancient Athens.
Can you say more about how your passion for ancient Greek civilization developed?
I was intellectually curious when I entered college, and as I got into the introductory courses about ancient Greece, I realized there was this whole world that I knew nothing about, but was also the basis of so much of western civilization. I had earlier studied American history, and various courses in literature -mostly American, some English- and suddenly I realized many of the questions posed across all the humanities were first asked by the Greeks. Like the great scholars of the Renaissance –who had the vision of “going back to the sources”– I came to appreciate how special the Hellenic civilization had been. Because its peoples not only asked but also tried to answer those questions—for example, about existence, the good life, political concepts, and learning from history.
How did your collaboration with the historian Josiah Ober come about?
Before my first book, on Athenian citizenship, was to be published by Princeton University Press, it had to be approved by a panel of outside experts. Ober was a rising academic star who had recently joined the Princeton faculty and he was part of that panel. He liked the book, but thought it needed some revisions before publication—which he discussed with me, and I was happy to make. From those first conversations, we became friends, and over the years worked on several other projects together, each bringing a complementary perspective that made for an enduring collaboration. Our book, The Civic Bargain, was first hatched from a discussion he and I started when we were speakers at a National Geographic convention on the future of democracy, in 2016.
Your book, The Civic Bargain uses historical examples of democracy (ancient Athens and Republican Rome, the founding of modern Britain and America) to offer lessons for citizens today worried about democracy’s future. How easy is it to draw parallels among eras with such differing geopolitical characteristics, socioeconomic norms and technological advancement?
Well – it’s not easy. But because we thought those comparisons could make a distinctive contribution to current debates, we wanted to figure out how to make them work. After a lot of research and discussion, we hit upon two hypotheses that helped us tease out lessons from our four case examples—despite the many differences you note.
First, if we could look beneath the variations of time, institutions, technology, etc. of each of the four cases, and get to the deepest fundamentals about what democracy is for any organization, we could find enough essential commonality to compare them.
Second, the comparison could be more fruitful if we could also look beyond questions of why democracy has failed through history –or is now failing– which so much of the contemporary scholarship has emphasized. To use a medical analogy, instead of asking “when and why is the (democratic) patient going to die?” we thought we should ask, “when the patient grew up and became strong and healthy,” what can we learn from its ‘wellness’?” We pursued this idea because even though the ancient democracies did eventually collapse, each of them (Athens and Republican Rome), endured, or continue to endure, for hundreds of years.
On the first point about fundamentals, despite differences in institutions and historical settings, the four cases all exhibit some essential commonalities. For example, they all created some kind of system that allowed people to live and thrive free of the rule of an overarching “boss”—a king, tyrant, oligarchy, etc. Also, they all had to make their system work well enough to deliver what people expect of any kind of governed community, even as a democracy—basic security and welfare. Though their institutions varied in form, they all operated to make collective decisions, hold leaders accountable, and resolve conflicts when they arose. And they all designed their institutions to be led by citizens—which they had to define and defend as a concept.
On the second point, about wellness, we saw that in al the examples, the way the democracy arose, and the way it kept strong, was citizens accepting and acting upon certain shared beliefs and norms necessary for self-governance: willingness to compromise when needed for the common good; and maintaining an attitude of “civic friendship”—tolerance of disagreement, and refusal to demonize or use violence against political opponents. And finally, they all had a commitment to keep educating one another, and the next generation too, about the institutions and norms that make democracy work.
It was from these two themes that we developed the overall concept of the book—that democracy is really a “civic bargain”—a deep agreement (in some parts tangible, in some parts implicit) among citizens, that they will do what’s needed to rule themselves, delivering security and welfare, and remaining free of control by a boss. We saw in the examples that the formation of these democracies all emerged out of a willingness of citizens to accept such terms of freedom; and that these democracies flourished as long as citizens remained committed to their “bargain” with one another—even if it meant periodically renegotiating and revising certain terms of the bargain.
These two themes, about fundamentals and conditions of “wellness,” taken together, provide the core lessons of the book: that any democracy can remain strong and resilient if the citizens are willing to build, defend, and renew as needed, the basic bargain by which self-governance first arises.
You’ve said Athenians were not historically the first to gather, debate ideas and vote, but rather the first to “conceive, and put into operation, an explicit bargain that bound people to one another with a civic identity”. What factors led to this development in that moment of history?
Great question. First a general observation: any kind of innovation, from the Internet to pharmaceutical or bioengineering breakthroughs often happen in very unexpected places. Human ingenuity and the conditions that allow it to flower are hard to predict and hard to replicate; and it’s hard to explain why some renaissance or explosion of genius happened here and not somewhere else. In the case of Greece, and its great innovation of democracy, civic self-governance, and broader democratic culture, arguments are made about many perhaps critical factors: distinctive leaders; its geographic centrality in a world of rising trade and exchange, the influence of supporting innovations like the spread of writing and improved metallurgy, or the striving and reflection among competitive poleis about the best way to build and manage a community—or some combination of “all of the above.” But these are questions bigger than what our book attempted to answer: about the lessons of its historical democracy for modern states.
In fact, many scholars argue other pre-Greek civilizations deserve the credit of the self-governance innovation. Anthropological and archaeological studies suggest that certain prehistoric communities in other parts of the world (and also pre-archaic Greece) operated with a king who was not absolute or even with no clear leader—perhaps a kind of basic democracy. But celebrating the innovation really turns on how you define democracy—is it simply evidence that some earlier people once made some decisions without a boss? We say that’s a necessary but not sufficient condition—that, what makes a democracy is when a relatively large population (when Athens launched its democracy it was at least 30,000 citizens), relatively diverse in terms of people’s backgrounds, are governing themselves as free and equal citizens, under arrangements of some kind of bargain for institutionalized self-rule. There’s a discipline and system that defines democracy, beyond simple or occasional participative decision-making. This kind of more systematic approach, and the development of a bargain for citizens to govern themselves are difficult to prove before 6th C. BC Greece. There were many “democratic” Greek states in the ancient era, but Athens is the most fully documented.
Whatever reasons might explain the breakthrough and timing of classical Greek democracy, what Athenians accomplished has been an inspiration through the history of Western civilization. It has always motivated me to think about what we can take away from the very special centuries of ancient Athenian greatness.
You’ve also written that ancient Athens was history’s “first high-performing knowledge organization.” Would you like to expand on that?
Well, this is a bit of jargon from the 1990s but the concept implied remains relevant. Over the last decades, the world has seen that to succeed in the modern economy the knowledge and the collective wisdom of the people is a competitive differentiator. In the age of the networks and human talent, the countries with the best network of specialists and expertise are the ones that will flourish and be most successful. And the same competition is now pointing to future battles about who will create the best artificial intelligence.
So, we realized that when the Athenians invented what became their version of democracy, it was organized around this very innovative combination of people being mixed together from different parts of Athens and brought together regularly in the center of city, in the agora and then later the Pnyx; it was all about getting the collective minds of the community discussing and debating in open form, to face various challenges. One of the famous examples was in the year 480, with the great threat from the Persian Empire. The people get together and they debate different strategies (fleeing on ships and starting a new polis, fighting them on land), but the idea that gained traction was to man the newly built ships and meet the Persians out at sea, which of course led to the famous Battle of Salamis, which was kind of a counterintuitive strategy that came about as a result of the debate in the assembly.
I think that little story is one example of a model of what is now called the wisdom of the crowd; when you get large numbers of people with different backgrounds together with enough of a culture of harmony and willingness not to always agree together but to debate in a civil way, so that the best answer comes forward, when you create that climate of what we call civic friendship, then great wisdom can come forward. And of course, the best ideas also are what helped create this incredible renaissance of Classical Greece, marvelous architecture, new ways of depicting the human body, theater and arts–it’s this this climate of many people working together, debating, trying, testing and coming up with new ideas, new innovations, that individuals on their own would never have thought of.
So, what are the lessons we should draw from ancient Athenian democracy—about democratic collapse, and fortifying against future collapse for 21st century systems?
If we return to the premise that began our book –and this discussion– collapse is really the result of failure to preserve and renew what launched democracy in the first place. Metaphorically, once more on analogy of the human body, failure to preserve and strengthen “wellness” explains much of what ultimately becomes death. Death for humans is inevitable but not necessarily for democracy—or at a minimum, we say it can be sustained for a much longer time than people realize, if citizens are willing to keep committed, and renew/adapt as necessary the “health” of their civic bargain with one another.
That’s what we have to remember when we get into the debate about “is democracy dying”– and the answer is yeah it might be but it’s in the hands of you, the citizens, to understand what you need to do so that doesn’t happen. Υes, there are people who are threatening our democracy today, absolutely right, but it’s in the hands of the citizens understanding, with some grasp of history, about what keeps it strong: that is the best defense.
In practice, that means citizens staying committed to the essentials of their bargain—doing what’s needed, and making changes as necessary, so they can keep governing themselves without a boss. For example, it requires them to be very clear about who’s a citizen and who’s not, having norms of what we call civic friendship, and willingness to compromise with one another.
Look at most Western nations today, who are struggling because of massive immigration; many people are unhappy about that and the systems are being over overwhelmed, and then political debate gets very ideological and partisan: people say if you’re against immigrants then you’re racist or if you are for immigrants you’re throwing away our heritage. And we’re too quick to destroy political trust by abandoning basic civic friendship—so we can find common ground on those important questions. If we don’t find our way back in today’s democracies, we’ll all end up in destructive civil war.
Here again, we can learn from history.
We saw that in Greece and Athens, for example, at the end of the Peloponnesian War, there was an oligarchic revolution, the so-called Thirty Tyrants took over with help from the Spartans and there was a democratic uprising which forced them out. Now at that point the Athenians could have said “we’re going to kill every one of those people and we’re going to kill everybody who supported them–we’re just going to cleanse our nation of these people who dared to do that.” But instead, they decided “no we’re not going to do that, we’re essentially going to have an amnesty, because it’s better for the culture and viability of our democracy if we can say, look, we forgive you, let’s just follow the democratic rules together, we won’t chase you and pursue you like vigilantes, but we expect you to be part of this system again”. And that’s what they did and Athenian democracy flourished for another 50-60 years.
Another thing we talk about is civic education; there needs to be education so that every new generation understands that the traditions and pieces of the civic bargain are essential to keeping democracy alive. So, the content of the civic bargain is just the tip of the iceberg: citizens and future citizens must understand the norms and underpinning conditions that support it.
In contrast to the common trend of pondering the death of democracy, you express an optimistic view in your book. Are you optimistic about democracy today, and if so why?
When our book was published, critics described it as a more optimistic view of democracy’s future. Which perhaps it was, in contrast to all the “doom and gloom” being published, and still today. But in many ways, what was being described as our “optimism” was misunderstood.
We weren’t implying democracy will always live forever—don’t worry. What we were really saying was that doom is not inevitably pending—there’s still life to preserve and extend, if we face the challenge. Through history, great democracies have always struggled—but today, if we pay attention to what kept them going when they successfully rebounded in the past, it’s potentially in our power to do the same now.
The ancient Athenians made renewing changes to their democracy after their loss of the devasting 5th. C. BC Peloponnesian War—they completely rehabbed all the commercial activities to compensate for the loss of their empire. They put in new laws, and changed how laws themselves would be made, to protect themselves against the sort of volatility of the crowd which had produced some disastrous decisions. So, adaptation and changes to the bargain are fundamental; if you can do that, there’s a case for optimism but it’s optimism, without a guarantee. If collapse is not inevitable, neither is eternal success. Citizens who cherish democracy holds the bargain on which it depends in their own hands.
*Interview by Nefeli Mosaidi and Christina Fiorentzi, with the help of the Public Diplomacy Office of the Embassy of Greece in Washington, DC.
Read also via Greek News Agenda: Rethinking Greece | Kostis Kornetis on the Democratic Transitions of Greece, Spain, and Portugal: Memory and Legacy; Bruce Clark: “The Acropolis never ceased to be a place of spiritual importance”
TAGS: DEMOCRACY | LITERATURE & BOOKS
