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Liam Julian: Welcome to an O'Connor Institute and Civics for Life conversation with Josiah Ober. Josiah Ober, his friends call him Josh, is the Konstantinos Mitsotakis Chair in the School of Humanities and Sciences at Stanford University and Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. He is the author of The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece, Democracy and Knowledge, Innovation and Learning in Classical Athens.
The Greeks and the rational, the discovery of practical reason and other books. His latest book, which we'll be talking about today, which he coauthored with Brooke Manville is the Civic Bargain, How Democracy Survives. Josh, thanks a lot for being with us. Thanks so much for having me, Liam. Yeah. So “The Civic Bargain, How Democracy Survives”.
You, one might take away from that title that. Democracy is in a tricky place. Democracy might not survive. So, maybe you can tell us, what's the genesis of this book? Why did you and your co-author decide to take this on?
Josiah Ober: Yeah, so, we, that we needed to write this book because we were very worried, and we are very worried, about the state of democracy in the United States around the world.
But we thought that a lot of the current discourse around it seemed to be almost a sort of death watch. You know just how long have we got? What's going to be killing it in the end? The symptoms are pretty bad surely fatal. And we thought that is not the whole story because there certainly have been democracies that have lasted a very long time hundreds of years anyway and they've survived really terrible crises and we thought that looking at how democracies overcome crisis how they have manage to grow and become, you know, effective in changing circumstances as the world changes, would be at least worthwhile, because then perhaps we could ask ourselves, not just how soon is this all going to, you know, go down the tubes but how might we pull out and actually rebuild for a better future.
Liam Julian: Yeah. And the way that you did that, you're a historian, the way that you did that was you looked at almost historical case studies. Maybe you tell us about, about how you went about this investigation.
Josiah Ober: Yeah, so my co-author, Brooke Manville, and I were both trained as historians originally. I've been in a political science department for a long time now.
Brooke has worked for years as a consultant for first McKinsey and then his own operation. So, we thought a lot about how organizations work and how organizations fail and how they can improve themselves. So, we thought that taking a case study approach would allow us to use our background training as historians but then to apply what we learned to what's going on now.
Out the way. political scientists or organizational theorists or consultants that try to do. So, we looked at the first ancient Athens. Both of us began our careers as scholars of ancient Greek history. Then Rome the world's most famous ancient republic then looked at the United Kingdom as an example of an evolving constitutional monarchy that eventuates in democracy.
And then of course looked at the United States focusing really on the founding era and the period thereafter. All of these histories had to be, in some ways, Truncated, you can't tell a complete history in a chapter, but we found that using the framework of the bargain and the civic bargain really helped us to illuminate these really quite important topics, familiar, at least to some people, histories helped tell us more about what was actually going on. And then stepping back from the cases generalizing from the cases, we felt that we were able to extract some real lessons about what it takes for a democracy to be successful over time to adapt to new circumstances and to survive challenges crises, periods of, you know, really terrible disruption.
Liam Julian: Yeah. You, you talk about this a bit in your book, but a reader might, might say, Josh. Come on, classical Athens, and you're comparing this to United States democracy today? I mean, this is not even apples and oranges. This is apples and rodents. I mean, what, what is you know?
So, how do you, you, you talk about this in your book. You maybe tell us about, a little bit about that.
Josiah Ober: Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, indeed. I mean, I've spent a fair amount of my career trying to think about how I can persuade people that studying antiquity really does tell you something other than a fascinating history of a place long ago and off there in the, in the Mediterranean.
I think that one of the advantages of looking at antiquity is that it really strips away a lot of the things that we tend to assume are just the normal or even the essential things that is going on in self-government by citizens. So that's our core definition of democracy is democracy is when there is no boss other than the citizens themselves.
Who choose to govern themselves rather than taking orders from anybody else. So, there's lots of ways that can be done. There are, you know, parliamentary democracies, presidential systems today. Elections, of course, are central in modern democracies. Political parties are taken for granted.
But we can strip away much of that to ask, what is the essential? To enable a large, you know, over a few hundred people diverse rich and poor alike, for example body of people to make decisions about really complex and life and death matters collectively rather than being told what to do by somebody else.
So, starting with these ancient cases allows us to sort of cut to the core of what really citizen self-government is. Is and then what makes it possible for a large body of people to do this, to govern themselves? And then we can move forward to the somewhat well, the early modern stories about the UK and the U.S. And ultimately end up back in the 21st century and say to what extent are these baseline principles these conditions that are, make democracy possible, still relevant. And our argument is, as soon as you think about it, you recognize they are still relevant and that what we've learned then in those historical cases allows us to see somewhat more clearly what's going on today simply by now recognizing that underneath all of the noise of contemporary. political discourse, particular political activism there is in fact a core that either is being sustained so there are conditions that are being maintained or is being undermined the conditions then are being abandoned which to our mind puts democracy at, at great risk.
Liam Julian: Yeah. Well, tell, tell us about these conditions, what you found.
Josiah Ober: So, what we started out with our first definition of democracy no boss other than we the citizens ourselves. So, we said that really is the first condition for democracy that if a body of people is quite satisfied with having a ruler someone who tells them what to do then you're not going to get going on a democratic project.
So once a body of people have said, yes, we're, we're, we're tired of the boss or we want to throw out the boss would expel the king or revolt against the current oligarchy. The second condition and this is really essential is that the new system whatever it turns out to be, is going to have to be at least as good at maintaining basic security. and welfare as the old boss run system. If people have to trade off their basic welfare, their sense of being, you know, safe in their homes for self-government they're not going to do it. It's not going to work. So that's the, the second condition is security and welfare. And the third one is that it's imperative to define who is a citizen.
If we're going to talk about citizen self-government, we have to know who is at the table who has a vote, who has a voice. And that always means that some people are excluded. One of the hard lessons that we think are very important to learn about democracy is that there are always exclusions and the citizen body, however inclusive, is never completely inclusive.
So, the next one is I think in some ways quite obvious. It's imperative to get good institutions. You have to have the right kind of formal rules that enable citizen government. So, we can think about the American constitution as being the formal set of rules, but how do we get rules? And that gets us to our a fifth and really sort of an essential condition and that is good faith negotiation.
If democratic citizens are incapable of negotiating with one another, if they're incapable of seeking and finding win win solutions rather than looking for zero sum approaches to defeating one another, then democracy is in, in deep trouble. Good faith negotiation requires some basic belief that we trust each other or at least that we can work together.
So, we say that this is really, in some ways the sort of most difficult to understand is civic friendship. And civic friendship doesn't mean liking each other, doesn't mean the kind of thing we normally associate with friendship, but it does mean a willingness to recognize that we the citizens are in something together.
We are trying to do something. And in order to create and maintain civic friendship requires civic education. We've got to be able to teach ourselves as citizens. What it is what we need to have as background norms as background behaviors, if we're going to keep this going. And that, you know, requires that we engage in this project of civic education.
So that's it. That's the seven.
Liam Julian: Yeah. Well, so to a listener or a viewer hearing the seven, I, I feel that they, they might say Josh in the United States, I feel that we're not in a great place with these seven, or at least with quite a few of them good faith compromise, and civic friendship, perhaps civics education.
So, you must have seen in your historical case studies times when those democracies were also not maybe in a great place with the seven. So maybe you could talk a little bit about that. Maybe Athens or Rome, I know, had its own situation where the Republic was sort of, but maybe you could talk about how they navigated that.
Josiah Ober: Yeah, absolutely. So, we take Athens for a starter at the end of the terrible long 27-year Peloponnesian War Athens had lost the war against its rival Sparta the Spartans had set up a puppet government to run Athens the Athenians had then risen up against the Puppet government, and there was a civil war against the supporters of the Spartans and the opponents.
The opponents, the, the Democrats won that civil war. And at the aftermath of the, of the victory, it was widely expected that there would be revenge killing that they, people who had supported. public government would be executed or driven out; their property confiscated.
And instead, the Athenians decided that they in order for their society to survive they were going to have to not do that. And so, the Democrats proclaimed an amnesty. Said that there wouldn't be any revenge killing, there wouldn't be any prosecution of the supporters of the of the puppet government.
Even the members of the puppet government itself would be allowed to defend themselves in court and claim that they hadn't done crimes against the hadn't killed people, hadn't confiscated and so on. So, the and in that same time, the Athenians recognized That they had really neglected sort of the core principle of rule of law.
They had been too quick to make decisions fundamental decisions on what we would call constitutional matters in their open citizen assembly. And so, they changed that. They created a more complex process for creating basic law. And they really re. committed themselves to civic education ultimately by creating some formal institutions in which the young men, this is a world in which only men could be full participatory citizens, which the young men receive both military training but also Formal training in basically the values of the community.
So, they responded to this crisis by recognizing that something had to change. And that part of that was a recommitment to being in something together rather than killing your opponents or demonizing them or trying to drive them out, you had to find a way to change the constitutional order such that everyone in Athens could feel that they were part of something in common and that they would be protected and their property and their lives would be protected by a background, a rule of law.
So, you know, that didn't last forever. Ultimately one of the things we, we, we talk about in the book is the challenge of scale, is the need for democracies to get bigger over time in order to confront the challenges of autocratic rivals which have an easier time scaling up because they don't have to worry about how to integrate a diverse citizenship, a growing and diverse body of citizens into a decision-making body, they just have more people they can give orders to if it works out.
The way the autocrat wants. So, in the end Athens failed to scale up enough. They didn't figure out how to expand their citizenship in a way that would allow them to confront the great challenge of first the growth of the Macedonian Empire, Alexander the Great, and then the growth of Rome.
The, the Romans had a somewhat different a set of challenges. They did figure out how to expand their citizenship from very early on. We look at the Roman Republic incorporates former enemies into a citizen body gives them full rights. And so, the Roman citizenship expands quite dramatically as Rome is expanding into really a world empire, or at least a world empire, if you Think about the world as being the Mediterranean and its immediate environs.
But in the end the Romans had the great challenge that they needed to confront and ultimately couldn't was how to keep that citizen body all committed to the core values of the Republic of. Something in common of a common good. They had done that for a long time, once again through what we call civic education, through the stories that young Romans were told and that were retold in the honors that were given to Romans who did things that were important to them.
Sustained the Republic for example, saving the life of a fellow citizen in battle gave you special honors. So, there were ways in which the culture taught everyone within the culture that there were certain values that kept us, the Romans, together, but ultimately there were simply too many too diverse Romans and they weren't able to keep everybody on the same page.
The danger then is that someone will emerge as a boss or a would be boss who will offer a good deal. Now, follow me across the Rubicon. We'll take over, we'll distribute the property of all of our bad enemies and it'll all be good for us having made ourselves Better off at the expense of our rivals. And at that point the Republic can't survive.
Liam Julian: Yeah, I found it interesting in your book that that idea of Rome sort of devolving into these sorts of groups of people that were much more interested in their own enrichment at the expense of the larger sort of society. It's an interesting idea thinking about America where We have so prized diversity in the sense of diversity Americans we talk differently, we look differently, and this was a long time this was the idea was this was a strength.
Now you talk in your book about how it can still be a strength, but it can also be a weakness if, if it's sort of thought about in the wrong way.
Josiah Ober: No, that's quite right. I mean we argue, and this is some of the earlier work that Brooke and I have done together and some of the work that I've published is that democracy succeeds when Diversity management is well done that democracy's strength is that you can bring a large body of diverse knowledge, call it data call it information.
Into a solution space, into a place in which people are trying to solve the problem. Because you've got a diverse body of people who are engaged in trying to solve that problem. So, you have a lot of different forms of expertise that are available to a democracy. A lot of. different knowledge about experience of the world, about how things are actually going in a whole range of localities.
Autocrats have a much harder time organizing what the society knows, as it were solving problems by aggregating dispersed knowledge, because autocrats, by definition are not bringing a lot of diverse people into the solution space. They're trying to run everything and they, autocrat tends to live in a bubble and listen to you know, essentially yes men.
So, done well democracy can manage useful knowledge can make use of a wider range of useful knowledge than an autocracy, and I think that's one of the core reasons that democracies have done so well, why democracy works. Well, with a market economy, for example but if diversity simply becomes difference so that when I think of diversity, I think of how I am different from you or how my group is different from your group and I start thinking that our interests are really opposed to your interests and that everything you get We lose and vice versa, then diversity becomes a weakness.
Then it becomes very hard for us to get together at the sort of imagined negotiation table and hammer out a best solution to the. problem that confronts us because we're just each thinking, you know, what am I going to get out of it? Or what, what, what are my bunch going to get out of it?
And how much can I extract from you to benefit myself rather than asking the background question of how are we together as a democratic community going to solve this problem, assuring our welfare assuring our security and each doing as well as we can individually through the flourishing of the whole society.
Liam Julian: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, this gets back to what just, it was like a, just coursed through your entire book, Josh, was this idea of negotiation and compromise as being just absolutely. I mean, it's in the title of your book, Bargaining. This is tricky today, I think, for a lot of Americans. I think there are a lot of people who reject the, this idea because There's this notion of democracy and, or sorry, of compromise and negotiation as being rather sleazy as being some ways in which you sell out your ideals or your values.
But you, you see it quite differently.
Josiah Ober: Yeah, indeed. I think it is important in studying democracy and thinking about democracy to recognize that there is all by definition, a democracy brings a diverse body of people into some kind of a common enterprise ruling ourselves, but the diverse body of people remains a diverse body of people and different interest groups will emerge within any society.
Aristotle recognized this back in the fourth century B. C. So, it really is a challenge then to ask how are we going to create a world or create a norm around which yes, of course, I'm concerned with my own interests. Of course, I'm concerned with the interests of my group, but I'm also concerned with the interests of.
Our wider, our larger democratic community, our country, our nation and that I'm going to have to recognize that there will be sacrifices in order to solve the problems we need to solve to maintain the security and welfare that we need to maintain. And that doesn't mean. That I'm going to, that means, well I should say, that does mean that I will never get all I want my group will never get all we want, our conception of the best possible society will never be perfectly instantiated.
Because there are other groups that have somewhat different interests have a somewhat different conception of what the ideal, most just form of society could be and therefore, one of the really Difficult things, I think, about democracy is the recognition of imperfection. That democracy is never utopia.
Democracy never creates a world in which everybody is completely satisfied with the conditions as they are, because it is always a matter of negotiation of bargaining and getting the best bargain that is available. If people recognize that they're better off within the bargain, that they are doing better when they make a bargain with people who have somewhat different interests than if they walk away from the table and say, you know I'm gonna fight or I'm just gonna go away If people recognize they're better off within the bargain than outside the bargain then democracy works because you can always come back to the bargaining table.
It's never done. It's an ongoing process but if people start Clinging to the idea that I need to, we need to, my group needs to get everything now, and that compromise on that everything is something vile or something, you know, distasteful then once again we're in real trouble.
Liam Julian: Yeah, did you find cases in, in the historical, you know, case studies where the values were just simply so far apart that negotiation, I suppose the Civil War, but potentially is a case of this.
Josiah Ober: Yeah, that's so I mean, I think that's one of the really, you know, key moments, obviously, in American history.
One of the most terrible moments in American history is this long civil war. And it is over something that in the end, you know, People could not negotiate over the question of slavery. So, if we back up and think about the fundamental bargain that creates the constitutional order for the United States it was a bargain that was imperfect by the, by the lights of every one of the American founders.
I mean, it's easy to sort of imagine the founding moment is these men of great genius all coming together and, you know, having this great gestalt. And they see now the magnificent they all sing kumbaya and deliver the perfect constitution to the rest of us. That's, that's not how it worked.
It was tough negotiation and a tough negotiation that, that resulted in the best bargain on the table, but a bargain that was recognized as imperfect by everybody. At the table. So, this is really explicit in this really terrific speech that Benjamin Franklin gives at the very end of the Constitutional Convention, in which Franklin basically underlines the imperfection of the bargain.
He says this this is not perfect, but he says, I sacrifice my doubts about it to the common good. I think that idea that that is exactly what you have to do to create a workable bargain is to. Sacrifice, give up something and give up things that are very important in order to be able to confront the current set of crises certainly were in 1787, a set of crises that needed to be addressed and addressed in a, in a timely manner and the assumption that the bargaining will go on.
So, the real tragedy, I think of American history before the Civil War is not that the Constitution was an evil compact. It was the best bargain available. That was the bargain that was going to enable the country to go forward. They, they, the sad thing is there weren't ongoing negotiations that actually addressed the core issue you know, of slavery in a way that could enable all of us to go on together.
So, you know, ultimately slavery had to go. It was clear that it had to go from the ideals that were embedded in the Declaration of Independence. It was Absolutely, you know, against the core conception of natural rights and equality that were, in fact, agreed upon by pretty much everybody, the slaveholders had to do a clever dance to show why big people of African descent were outside of that, everybody.
But unfortunately, the bargains that were cut allowed the can to be kicked down the road just for too long to the point where ultimately the thing blew up. So, it's a, it is a deeply tragic story. But I think that the tendency that, you know, I think is, is now not.
Universal, but for many people to say that the Constitution itself was the problem is I think wrong. The Constitution itself wasn't the problem. It was the failure to renegotiate as all of the founders imagined would happen in a way that would solve ultimately this this core issue.
Liam Julian: Are we kicking cans down the road now?
Josiah Ober: Well, I worry we are. The I think the real issue that I worry about is that identities have really hardened and that people are increasingly, or American citizens, are increasingly seeing themselves as a member of, group, whether that's identity group is political party or whether it is some other sociological specification that means that we my group is, implacably hostile to, and an enemy of these others so red versus blue.
And the notion that there's got to be a winner in this debate or this confrontation. And that one side will win. And the other side will lose that our enemies must be defeated because they are our enemies. Once we're in that place and in that place such that we can't imagine each other as civic friends, we can't imagine good faith negotiation, then I think democracy is in really serious trouble.
Are we there yet? I don't know. What I think. We can do about it because I can't fix the political parties. I can't, you know, solve the, you know, the, the, the imperfections now in the, in the current constitutional bargain which could be fixed, but I'm not the person who can fix it.
What can we do? I mean, what could you do? What can everyone listening to this podcast I think is to go to the very end of our series of conditions. And think about civic education. What can you do if you are worried about the future of our democracy? If you actually believe that we are in some You know, we're in an enterprise together that we ought to be able to talk with one another to express disagreement without expressing the, you know, position of being an enemy then ask what you can do to educate your fellow citizens.
We're doing things at Stanford University. I run a Stanford civics initiative that is aimed at incorporating education of citizens into the curriculum of Stanford. We've had quite a lot of success of that in the last few years. There are a lot of big efforts going on at the K-12 you know pre secondary or pre secondary and secondary levels of American education.
There are going to be very different approaches to this. Red state, blue state, you know, there are certainly no one size fits all for a return to civic education. But I think there have to be some principles that unite those of us who think that this is the long-term solution to our problems.
And surely those principles are going to include a deep commitment to free speech, you know, a deep commitment to the freedom of association so we can gather together in whatever groups we choose. And a deep commitment to civil discourse to speaking to one another with respect even when we disagree deeply on fundamentals.
So, I think that can be built into just about any. Yeah, respectable model of civic education, and it can be built into primary education, secondary education university education, but it can't just be done in the schools. This has got to be something that citizens do for other citizens. In fact, it might be, you know, a nice idea if we thought of this as something like.
I'll call it civics for life.
Liam Julian: I appreciate that. You know, Josh, I was going to ask you about the Stanford's Stanford Civics Initiative. I'm curious the reception that that, that that's had at Stanford. You know, of course, those of us who don't work directly on a college campus what we're seeing in the news today is kind of in line with what we've seen over the past few years, maybe longer from college campuses, which is Sort of in opposition to everything you just said civil discourse and, you know, free speech and some guys isn't at Stanford.
There was an example of that not long ago. That that sort of, you know, was in the headlines. So, what is the reception been there on Stanford's campus to this initiative? How are you seeing this playing out on college campuses that you visit, or what's your experience here?
Josiah Ober: Yeah, certainly there have been lots of bad headlines for higher education, for elite universities like Stanford, Harvard, MIT, Penn, you name it.
You know, intensely in the last few months, but as you rightly say, this goes back for some years. So we were at Stanford, a group of faculty that I gathered were really worried about this. And we felt that one of the things that Stanford had failed at of late was actually educating.
Citizens educating students to think about the problems of citizenship, not just American citizenship, but the problems that confront any purposeful organization that includes a diverse membership. So, we proposed a return because after all, Stanford had had back in the middle of the 20th century courses, mandatory courses on problems of citizenship.
We suggested a return to that, not to go back to the old syllabus but to create a new syllabus, a new curriculum. For citizenship in the 21st century. We worked at this for a while developed a class test, marketed the class. Tried it at increasing scale and ultimately, we got a lot of buy-in from the Stanford administration.
We took it to the Faculty Senate of Stanford. And it was passed unanimously. What we found is that when you actually talk with faculty at universities, you talk with students beneath the, you know, noise of people who, let's say have made careers out of being extremely provocative and stirring things up.
There actually is a pretty deep desire on really a very wide coalition for doing things that would be more in tune with what I'm calling civic friendship. So, we found that there was not a lot of organized opposition to this. This year about 1200 Stanford first year students will all be taking our citizenship in the 21st century course.
We did it last year about the same number of students. It's all taught seminar style. So about 50 faculty teaching this course but with a common syllabus and in some ways, to a lot of people's surprise, the students greeted it happily. Got very high marks to mandatory, four credit, graded course.
And yet the students seemed to feel they were actually getting something really good out of this. In the meantime, we've been trying to develop a series of more advanced courses taught by people who are faculty who are really bought into the idea of the civics initiative.
Some Hoover senior fellows now have joined us and they're teaching courses as well. Our goal then is to have really a more worked out civics’ curriculum such that in the next couple of years, we hope. Every Stanford first year student will take our freshman course. And then those who get interested will have a chance to take a series of advanced courses in various sort of citizenship relevant tracks.
Receive a certificate say civic preparedness at the end of this. And we hope this is going to be a model for other universities and colleges around the country. I've been talking with a lot of people around the country. And what I'm finding is, is once again, red states, blue states, there's a lot of desire for this, a lot of sort of fed upness with the noise and the contention that makes the headlines.
I think that people who really are, you know, working at the coal face as it were in higher education are a lot more committed to, you know, civic friendship than the nasty headlines would, would lead you to expect.
Liam Julian: Yeah, and perhaps this gets to my, my final question, which is reading your book I think a lot of people could, could say oh you know but you write in the book that you and your co-author are guardedly optimistic, I think is what you say.
So maybe you could tell us why. Where did that, where does that come from?
Josiah Ober: Yeah, well, I think it comes, maybe Brooke and I are by nature optimists. It comes in part from saying if you're not guardedly optimistic, if we all simply say, it's over there's really nothing that can be done, I'm gonna, you know, get out of politics, it's all too dirty, or I'm going to try to, you know, defeat the enemy once and for all and create a victory, then basically it is all over pessimism is the route to I think or at least complete pessimism is the route to, to loss to loss of something I think that I care about deeply, the idea that citizens are capable of Organizing, governing themselves without being told what to do.
I think losing that to the world would be just terrible. Why it would be terrible would be a whole other podcast, but it's but I think, I think many people would agree that it would be and so I think that what we need to do is ask ourselves if we're going to be realists but we're also going to have some optimism.
What does that mean we do today? You know, what, what does an optimist actually act to do? And the most straightforward thing that we came up with is well, what you can start doing today is working on some form of educating your fellow citizens whether you're, you know, in education in a formal way, or whether you're simply someone who, you know, believes that you're not.
Civics is actually an important thing. There are ways to do that. Just simply engaging in conversation with people that you don't agree with and working to do so in a way that is civil and respectful. Starting out by saying instead of, you know, you're an evil person because you believe X and I believe not X by saying, I'd like to understand why you believe X I'd like to see, you know if there's any common ground at all between that we could, that we could develop, you know, so I think that's the, the guarded optimism is somehow in some ways sort of an existential choice that if you're not an optimist, you've given up But it ought to be guarded.
I mean, Pollyannaism, oh, it's all fine, don't worry it'll all correct itself, is also self-defeating. So foolish optimism, unguarded optimism, I think, is as dangerous as complete pessimism. So, I'm urging people to, you know, cling to the sense that there are ways forward that democratic states have survived really terrible crises in the past, but we've got to work at it if we're going to do that.
Liam Julian: Yep. It's a choice. Yep. I think that's right. The book is The Civic Bargain, How Democracy Survives. Josh, thanks so much. This was fantastic. I really appreciate it.
Josiah Ober: Liam, I much enjoyed the conversation. Thank you for the opportunity to talk about it.