Social Science History, Cultural History, and theAmnestyof403

Transactions of the American Philological Association 132 (2002) 127-137

Social Science History, Cultural History, and
the Amnesty of 403

JOSIAH OBER
Princeton University

SUMMARY: Response to a set of papers on the Athenian Amnesty of 403 B.C.

IF WE ARE TO BELIEVE THUCYDIDES, Xenophon, Plato, Aeneas the Tactician,
and Aristotle (among other Greek historical and philosophical sources), sta-
sis-violent conflict among citizens within the civic space of the polis-had
emerged as one of the biggest stories of Greek history and political philoso-
phy by the latter part of the fifth century B.C.1 And stasis continued to domi-
nate Greek thinking about «what threatens the polis most" throughout much
of the fourth century as well. Why communities fall into a state of stasis, and
how that problematic tendency might be controlled, are clearly motivating
questions (perhaps the motivating questions) for Greek historians beginning
with Thucydides, and for the first generation of systematic Greek political
philosophers. Stasis was little short of an obsession among Greek writers (in-
cluding dramatists) in the late classical period.2

As every reader of Thucydides' harrowing narrative of the civil conflict on
Corcyra (3.70-85) learns, stasis could be devastating in its material and moral
effects. Thucydides suggests that stasis, once begun, developed a terrible
momentum of its own: killing and atrocity led to retribution-killing and
counter-atrocity in a widening downward gyre. Physical violence was com-
pounded by referential instability within evaluative language: bodies, prop-
erty, and the meaning of the everyday terminology of politics and morality-

1 All dates are B.C. unless otherwise noted.
2 On stasis in Greek political philosophy and drama see Ober 2000. Loraux discusses
the ways in which stasis was internalized as a negative concept, to cover a wide range of
conflicts, including those arising from gender. Ofcourse, stasis was a deep concern of many
archaic poetic texts as well, notably of Solon and the Theognid corpus.

128 Josiah Ober Social Science History, Cultural History, and the Amnesty of403 129

all were at risk. At the bottom of the downward spiral of stasis lay the mate- or some other "extraneous" factor) then at least two, rather different, ap-
rial destruction of the polis as a public and privately held physical space, the proaches to explaining the democrats' distinctive choice are possible. In the
disintegration of the citizenship as a community of persons, and the semiotic first, «type A;' approach, the historian begins by supposing that the historical
collapse of a common discourse that had once united citizens with diverse situation faced by the Athenians was distinctive, and that the Athenians re-
interests and backgrounds. For the Greeks of the late classical period, the acted pretty much the way other Greeks (or even other non-Greek commu-
experience of devolutionary stasis was as bad as it got: the mutilation of a nities) would have reacted if faced with the same distinctive circumstances.
community by civil conflict was arguably more devastating (at least in his- In a second, «type B," approach, the historian supposes that the stasis situa-
torical retrospect and philosophical prospect) than that inflicted by plague, tion faced by the Athenians was fairly typical, but that democratic Athenian
natural disaster, or enemy invasion. Stasis eliminated the possibility of public political culture was quite unlike the political culture of most other Greek
grandeur, individual nobility, ordinary dignity, even base-line human decency. communities. In this second case, the historian's answer depends on show-
The social and psychological trauma inflicted by stasis seemed peculiarly re- ing that the Athenians reacted to a «standard" stasis situation in a distinct way
sistant to therapeutic redress. because of their distinctive political culture.

It is not at all peculiar, therefore, that historians of late classical Greece have Of course, explanations of types A and B are not mutually exclusive and
been consistently interested in studying the best documented stasis of the era: in the real world of historical explanation we would probably not expect any-
the short reign of the Thirty at Athens and its aftermath. The Athenian story one to propose a purely type A or type B explanation. But it is, I think, rea-
is all the more compelling for its apparent atypicality, for its "arrested devel- sonable to suppose that we could arrange historians' attempts at an explana-
opment." Instead of vindictively turning upon their foes and thus complet- tion of the events of 403 (at least the attempts of those historians who accept
ing a Corcyra-like downward spiral into chaos, the victorious Athenian demo- Ath. Pol.'s claim for the distinctiveness of events in Athens after the fall of the
crats abruptly halted the cycle of retribution by declaring and enforcing an Thirty) along a spectrum defined by the «ideal types" of distinctive circum-
amnesty. This decision (although no doubt influenced by prudential concerns stances/standard response or standard circumstances/distinctive response.
about the Spartan response to an anti-oligarchic purge) earns the frank praise The different assumptions made by type A versus type B approaches to un-
of the author of the Aristotelian Ath. Pol. (40-3): derstanding the events of 404/3 may clarify the debate carried out in the pa-
pers of Quillin and Wolpert over the relative worth of «Social Science His-
[On this occasion-the implementation of the Amnesty of 403, after the fall tory," which favors type A, and «Cultural History;' which leans on type B ex-
of the Thirty], they [the Athenian democrats] seem to have reacted to their pre- planations.
vious misfortunes, both privately and communally.(Kat i()i~ Kat Kotvn) in a
manner more noble and public-spirited than all other people (KaAAt<J1a ()~ In the oral version of the paper presented here James Quillin usefully de-
Kat 1tOAt1tKro1a1a a1taV1ffiv). Not only did they wipe out all prosecutions for fined Social Science History as the «use of reductionist analyses and case stud-
past acts (ai1ia<; E~~AEt\vav), but they paid back out of common funds the ies in order to create generalizable models of human behavior;' and Cultural
money that the Thirty had borrowed from Sparta ... History as the attempt to «analyze in all their specificity the cultural expres-
sions and discourse of a particular locality and moment." Social Science His-
If the Ath. Pol. is to be believed (and, whoever its author, we may suppose that tory asserts that, if we can filter out local variables, we will be left with a co-
he had access to a very considerable body of"constitutional history" now lost herent sequence of events, motivated by a systematic causal mechanism. The
to us), the Athenians acted somewhat differently ("in a manner more noble goal is to be able to explain precisely «why" something happened. The record
and public spirited") than "all other people" when faced with the stasis situ- of the past is treated as a fertile source of «real world" case studies. The his-
ation. Even if overstated, this claim offers historians of classical Greece an torian sifts case studies in order to find cross-cultural regularities in causes
intriguing puzzle: how to explain the Athenians' startling and distinctive (if and effects with the aim of generating (through standard forms of hypothesis
not positively anomalous) behavior in 403? building and testing) one or more generalizable models for human behavior.
Once the model is in place (i.e., once it has been tested against an adequate
For those who accept that there is a puzzle here (i.e., that the democratic number of well documented case studies), it can be used to explain other
Athenian action in establishing and maintaining the Amnesty was unusual examples (including examples that are less well documented) of relevant
and was not pre-determined by the certainty of massive Spartan punishment

130 Josiah Ober Social Science History, Cultural History, and the Amnesty of403 131

"historical behavior:' Doing Social Science History is thus a circular process, To most historians this will, I suppose, sound at least unlikely, and prob-
but th~ circularity is not vicious: the process moves from reasoning on the ably pernicious. The notion that each human life should (at the right level of
basis of historical cases to the construction of hypothetical models, to testing reductive abstraction) tell exactly the same story about motives, because each
the model against other cases, to revision (if necessary) of the model. The individual human is motivated by the same causal drive to reproduce, flies in
proof of the worth of the model ultimately lies in its analytic power, in its the face of a huge body of empirical evidence pointing to a wild diversity
capacity to connect a single cause (or set of causes) with historically diverse among human lives and cultures. And so we may conclude that models built
effects, to show that the same cause yields similar effects cross-culturally and on this combination of genetics and rational choice theory are either silly or
trans-historically. malicious. Or, more charitably, we may allow that the level of reductive ab-
straction necessary to get each life and each society to tell the same story is so
Cultural Historians (among others) object that the models generated by high as to be ultimately without explanatory power. At a very advanced level
Social Science History are believed (at least by their inventors) to have greater of generosity, the historian may simply say that Wright's version of evolution-
explanatory power than can readily be accepted by those who honor all of ary psychology lacks the power to explain the phenomena that profession-
the recalcitrant particulars of specific historical situations. Let me illustrate ally interest him or her.
the problem with an admittedly extreme example from a field outside social
history: Robert Wright's The Moral Animal, an account of recent developments Now, in choosing Wright on evolutionary psychology as a paradigmatic
in the field of evolutionary psychology.3 In Wright's lively prose, various events case to exemplify what many Cultural Historians (inter alios) may find wrong
in the private life of Charles Darwin become a case study to demonstrate the with Social Science History, I have intentionally taken an extreme example of
analytic power of some of the central claims made by evolutionary psycholo- reductionist "scientism"-one outside the realm of history as such and one
gists. This is certainly a witty idea, since evolutionary psychology claims to which I suppose would be vigorously championed by none of the authors and
apply Darwinian principles (along with rational choice theory, also favored few readers of these essays. The question of how much weight one can put on
by some Social Science Historians) to explain diverse aspects of human be- analytic models derived directly or indirectly from social science gets much
havior. But if Wright's rigidly pars pro toto argument holds, presumably any murkier, of course, in genuine historical practice. How, for example, should
other human life would be just as exemplary, and so each human life, in the we explain the underlying causes of revolutionary movements? In a hotly
end, tells only one story: the story of how making "rational choices" that debated case study (still safely outside the ambit of classical Greek history),
maximize an individual's own reproductive chances, along with maximizin~ historians of early modern England argue about the origins of the "English
the survival chances and subsequent reproductive chances of an individual's Revolution" of the mid-seventeenth century C.E. Are the events of the 1640s
offspring and kin, provide the motor driving every individual human (and best explained by reference to underlying economic and/or technological
animal) existence. That is to say, Darwin, like anyone else, instinctively mi- changes-i.e., causes that could be extrapolated to other historical cases of
cro-managed his life (although obviously not completely consciously); his revolutionary action? Or-as is argued by the so-called Revisionists-should
choices were determined by the imperative to improve the likelihood of the historians be focusing on very specific and local responses to very specific and
reproduction over time of his own genetic material. In this vision of human local events?4 This debate is a long way from evolutionary psychology, but
motivation, apparent differences in human lives (e.g., Darwin vs. Plato) and the basic concern is the same: explanatory models derived from social sci-
in the organization of human societies (e.g., nineteenth-century C.E. England ence are regarded by some historians as implausible, in that they do not mani-
vs. fourth-century B.C. Athens) are due to environmental differences alone: fest an adequate "fit" to the observable empirical data; or they are regarded as
we humans (as individual genetic utility maximizers) are faced with a wide irrelevant, in that they do not gain any substantial «purchase" on the phenom-
range of contextual circumstances, so our societies look rather different. Yet ena that the historian feels professionally committed to understanding.
underneath, all societies and all individuals are necessarily (because biologi-
cally) committed to the same mechanism of choice. And so we come to Cultural History itself, which focuses directly upon
cultural difference, specificity, contingency, and the capacity of local societ-
3 The term "evolutionary psychology)) has largely replaced "socio-biology.)) ies to construct their own local meanings. Cultural History tends to be con-

4 See, for example, the discussion of the controversy in Zaret.

132 Josiah Ober Social Science History, Cultural History, and the Amnesty of403 133

cerned with functional explanation: how members of a society, or subgroups The first approach has resulted in the publication of many books and ar-
within a community negotiated a set of meanings that allowed them to con- ticles, but it has not, I think, actually ended many debates (the Peace of Callias
tinue to live in an existing community. Cultural Historians thus seek to un- is exemplary). The second approach, the extension of the range of "relevant
derstand the logic of relationships embedded in a society's discourse (as pre- facts;' has had the salutary effect ofwidening the chronological and geographic
served in texts) and implied by its practices. Cultural Historians tend to be range of Greek history, and stimulating excellent new work on Hellenistic and
particularly sensitive to the role played by ambiguous or even apparently "epichoric" history. But among historians who study the great central and
contradictory representations of lived experience. They read ambiguities and southern Greek states (especially Athens and Sparta) in the fifth and fourth
contradictions as evidence for strategic negotiations between individuals and centuries B.C., the "extension ofthe fact" has sometimes led to a focus on details
between diverse social groups, e.g., between elites and non-elites, men and so fine that it threatens to reduce their readership to the disappearing point.
women, insiders and outsiders. The "structure of society" is seen as a dynamic, M. 1. Finley fulminated against this second approach, damning the "democ-
but fairly stable context for these ongoing negotiations, which, on the politi- racy of facts"-the tendency to suppose that everything that can conceivably
cal plane, will determine who wields what sort of power under what circum- be known about the past should be known, and that everything known is of
stances and on the basis of what sort of legitimacy claims. Although cross- equal value.6
cultural comparisons are certainly possible within Cultural History-indeed
such comparisons are quite common-the goal is typically to elucidate what A related problem associated with the relatively paucity of"major new facts"
is distinctive about each society, rather than to find the "unitary underlying for "mainstream" classical Greek history, and the high value attached to im-
cause" that produced similar historical effects. portant new evidence about (say) Athens, is the tendency of some historians
to restrict access to evidence. Those who "own" publication rights to impor-
There are various explanatory problems that arise from the Cultural tant unpublished inscriptions, for example, occasionally delay publication for
Historian's focus on the specific and the local, on context and negotiation. extended periods, meanwhile allowing private access to the new material to a
One set of problems is familiar from critiques of positivism. While sharing limited circle of students and colleagues. There are reasonable enough expla-
the historical positivist's love of the particular, Cultural Historians today tend nations for this pattern of professional behavior, but it does lead to the suspi-
to distinguish themselves from practitioners of"traditional" positivist histo- cion that privileged access is sometimes given or withheld for extraneous
.riography-i.e., from the attempt establish secure facts about the past "for reasons, thereby raising concerns about fairness, and perhaps arousing (un-
their own sake;' to describe "what Alcibiades did and suffered."s Among the warranted) disdain for practitioners of the positivist approach in general.
perceived problems with the positivist approach to classical Greek history is,
that after the monumental work of the nineteenth-century historians of clas- Of course there are some recent and laudable successes of positivist his-
sical Greece (e.g., Grote and Busolt), Greek historians suffered a drought of tory to which Greek historians can proudly point. I think ofMogens Hansen's
significant and securely established new facts. The spate of important inscrip- splendid series of articles from the 1980s with titles beginning with "How
tions discovered in the course of the excavations of the Athenian Agora al- many?" "How often?" etc. Hansen's work established, to most scholars' satis-
lowed positivists to enjoy a second spring in the mid-twentieth century. But faction, a number of new and important facts about how the Athenian As-
in recent decades the slowed pace of excavation and publication has reduced sembly functioned. His conclusions left historians of Athenian democracy
the supply to a trickle. Which left positivist historians with two main options: dancing with glee, because we felt that we had learned something new after
either revisit a well known controversy, and attempt to end a debate by estab- finishing each article. The experience of sheer delight in the establishment of
lishing a new important fact (e.g., the existence of a "Peace of Callias" in the important new facts is an experience shared (I believe) by most historians.
mid-fifth century), or extend the range ofwhat are considered significant facts. This may be because there is after all a bit of the positivist in all of us, but it is
also (and importantly) because we recognize that established facts are what
5 For a defense of the positivist approach, arguing that it need not fall victim to a sim-
plistic view that it is possible to establish a completely "objective" account of the past, see 6 Finley. I write as one who spent years laboring happily to produce new, if minute,
Rhodes. facts (e.g., precise measurements of windows) about classical Greek fortifications. There
is no doubt that such work can be fun; the question is whether the facts it produces will
be regarded as useful by one's professional colleagues.

134 Josiah Ober Social Science History, Cultural History, and the Amnesty of403 135

allow us to test our models and theories: if my approach easily accounts for a gral part of Greek history? How do we rank-order the meanings that substan-
new fact, I expect that to count when my fellow historians evaluate my work. tially affected people's actions, as opposed to the meanings that were so local
But, for classical Greek historians, encounters with really important new facts and specific as to have had no significant part to play in the larger issue that
remain rare and Cultural History offers one way to extend the scope and we have agreed (in this collection of essays) we should be trying to explain?-
broaden the significance of what we may hope to accomplish. Those Greek i.e., the distinctive Athenian response to a stasis situation in 403 B.C.?
historians still fascinated by the "mainstream" poleis in the classical period,
who are unimpressed by the claims of Social Science History, who despair of The Athenian stasis of 404/3 and its distinctive outcome seems to be a par-
ever solving old riddles, who are uninterested by the study of minutiae, and ticularly good testing ground for the competing claims of Social Science His-
who may be disenchanted by limited access to new material, have consequently tory and Cultural History. It may also provide a particularly good paradigm
sought to develop a fresh approach to local and specific history, one that fo- case of why historians should to pay attention to both approaches. As I sug-
cuses more on the social and cultural meaning of discourse and practice than gested above, stasis is a genuinely important historical (and political) issue
on the establishment of new institutional or chronological facts. and was recognized as such by contemporaries. It is not susceptible to charges
that, as a phenomenon, it is epiphenomenal, minute, or of narrowly local
But there remains a problem, the Social Science Historian contends, in that concern. Understanding the Athenian stasis demands that the historian con-
Cultural History fails to offer an adequate explanation for change. The ques- front the issues of change and discontinuity. The stasis of 404/3 represented a
tion of «why" new things happened, why historical actors make the (some- radical break in the continuity of Athenian life, and Athenian politics and
times very unexpected) choices they do, can get lost in the pleasures of thickly society in the fourth century were clearly not identical to the politics and
describing «how" people negotiate identities and existences within and against society of the pre-stasis fifth century. And yet there is also a very real issue of
pre-existing protocols. In extreme cases, the Cultural Historian's assumption cultural/political continuity. One need not accept the teleological perspective
that negotiation within established protocols is what really matters approaches of the Aristotelian Ath. Pol., which sees the restored democracy of the fourth
the ontological claim that cultural rules are «always and already" in place. At century as the culmination of a political development dating back at least to
this point, the historical enterprise itself seems to be in doubt: if social rules, Solon, to accept that the Athenian political structures and social protocols that
substantial enough to ensure that action is coextensive with negotiations emerged in the aftermath of the restoration of 403 manifest an organic con-
within the frame they define, are «always and already" pre-existing, then the nection with those that pertained before the reign of the Thirty.
space left for meaningful social change shrinks to zero. Ontologically-based
and historically-based explanations for social and cultural phenomena are not So where does all this leave us? In a recent refutation of Plato's claim that
necessarily incompatible. But I think they occupy interpretive spheres that human reason might finally bring an end to all conflict (in the polis and in
remain distinct enough that Cultural Historians must acknowledge that at the soul), Stuart Hampshire argues that there will always be conflict over
some point (one might dispute just where) an argument ceases to be histori- substantive questions associated with justice and fairness (e.g., who deserves
cal if it has lost the capacity to address even the possibility of change. what in the distribution of goods and punishments). But, he asserts, there is
a high degree of cross-cultural agreement about the need for procedural jus-
The Cultural Historian must also be ready to make some hierarchical tice and fairness based on institutionalized «adversary reasoning" (i.e., dispute-
choices among the universe of «significant meanings." Presumably anyone
impressed by Finley's attack on the «democracy of facts" should be equally " resolution procedures, predicated on "hearing the other side;' that decide who
critical of an approach based (explicitly or tacitly) on a «democracy of mean- gets what in any given situation).7 Hampshire's argument (his conjunction
ings:' The attachment of the Cultural Historian to the local and specific makes of an acceptance that conflict over questions of morality and substantive jus-
it easier to fall into the «democracy of meanings" trap. After all, if each soci- tice is inevitable-even between sincere, well-meaning, and rational persons-
ety (or sub-community) is distinct, negotiating meanings in response to an with an argument that a deep commitment to fair procedure is an attribute
infinitely variable environment, then there are equally an infinite variety of
meanings that can be generated and negotiated by participants-and then 7 Hampshire 19-20 argues that "hearing the other side" is the core cross-cultural prin-
described by the astute historian. But which of these had any measurable af- ciple of fairness. He offers "weighing of evidence for and against a hypothesis in a social
fect on the course of (say) classical Athenian history understood as an inte- science" and "the weighing of evidence in a historical ... investigation" as prime examples
of adversary reasoning.

136 Josiah Ober Social Science History, Cultural History, and the Amnesty of403 137
edge that a work of Social Science or Cultural History is "good of kind" (even
common to societies embracing very diverse values) provides an analogy for if not to his taste).lO And it is why (a fortiori) Cultural and Social Science
the debate between Social Science History and Cultural History. There are, as Historians can and should engage in productive dialogue over important
the essays presented here demonstrate, substantive differences among Social questions, including "the Amnesty of 403 B.C."
Science Historians and Cultural Historians in terms of what they suppose are
the most historically relevant phenomena, in their understanding of human f
motivations, and in their judgment about whether change or continuity is of WORKS CITED
greater interpretive moment. Yet there is also, or so I imagine, a substantial
common ground between Social Science Historians and Cultural Historians: Finley, M. 1. 1985. Ancient History: Evidence and Models. London.
they are not historical positivists (despite a delight in and a respect for facts) Hampshire, S. 2000. Justice Is Conflict. Princeton.
and they are committed to avoiding strongly ontological explanations in or- Loraux, N. 1997. La cite divisee: L'oubli dans la memoire d'Athenes. Paris.
der to leave space for social and cultural change (whether or not they are pri- Ober, J. 1996. The Athenian Revolution: Essays on Ancient Greek Democracy and Political
marily interested in explaining change). Moreover, I suppose that both sides
in the debate (along with positivist historians) share a basic faith in the pro- Theory. Princeton.
cedural means by which Greek historians test one another's arguments.8 ---.2000. "Political Conflicts, Political Debates, and Political Thought." In R. Osborne,

I discussed the problem of historical models and paradigms (although not ed., Classical Greece, 500-323 B.C. Oxford. 111-38.
in the specific context of Social Science or Cultural History) in a short essay
first published in 1989.9 I argued that the employment of models is neces- Rhodes, P. J. 1984. "What Alcibiades Did or What Happened to Him": An Inaugural Lec-
sary and inevitable if history is to make any advance, and that we test one
another's model-based explanations by reference to the specifics of the his- ture. Durham.
torical situation, by paying attention to what established facts the model does Wright, R. 1994. The Moral Animal: Evolutionary Psychology and Everyday Life. New York.
and does not explain. Any model that requires a great deal of analytic ma- Zaret, D. 2000. Origins ofDemocratic Culture: Printing, Petitions, and the Public Sphere in
chinery and yet explains rather little about the evidence we care to explain
will not be judged very useful. By contrast, a model that explains a great deal Early-Modern England. Princeton.
in comparison to the machinery it needs to muster is likely to be judged both
elegant and useful. It comes down to a matter of how good the "payoff" is: ..
how much we feel we have learned about the society in question, how much
of the recalcitrant mass of"evidence" gets organized, and how efficiently it is 10 I take this opportunity to express my pleasure in my long dialogue over "how to do
organized. Rethinking this series of methodological claims in terms of Athenian history;' with a model "fair-minded positivist;' Peter Rhodes.
Hampshire's substantive conflict/procedural agreement distinction, I would
suggest that there is actually quite a high degree of agreement about evalua-
tive procedure among historians who continue to disagree sharply on mat-
ters of interpretive substance. This is why historians who have mastered a
common body of"facts" (e.g., historians of classical Athens), and yet employ
very different approaches for explaining those facts, feel that they can fairly
evaluate one another's work. It is why a fair-minded positivist can acknowl-

8 Hampshire 45 suggests that those who "share certain professional attitudes and cus-
toms, and a common professional morality" constitute the "true communities" of mo-
dernity.

9 Reprinted in Ober 1996 ch. 3.