Acceptance Speech – Bern, 14.11.2025

USA

Josiah Ober

2025 Balzan Prize for Classics: Athenian Democracy Revisited

For his groundbreaking research on the origins and functioning of Athenian democracy in classical times, which has had an influence far beyond the academic world. Josiah Ober has identified the factors behind its success using a refreshing, interdisciplinary approach that constantly draws comparisons with the present day, thus bringing these findings into contemporary socio-political debate.

President of the National Council,

Presidents of the Balzan Foundation,

Chair and Members of the General Prize Committee,

Ladies and Gentlemen,

With great pleasure, I accept the 2025 Balzan Prize for “Athenian Democracy Revisited.” I offer my deepest thanks to the selection committee, not only for choosing me for this great honor, but also for your choice of a topic that might once have seemed merely antiquarian. Your choice affirms the role that classical scholarship can and must have in modern debates about what it takes to live in a peaceful, prosperous, and democratic world. Next my thanks go to those who undertook to nominate me for the Prize – I am humbled by your choice to put aside your own projects to make the case for the Balzan committee. Reaching back, I thank my teachers, at the University of Minnesota, where I first fell in love with the study of Greek history, and the University of Michigan, where I began my apprenticeship as a Greek historian. If I once imagined that, upon receiving my doctorate, my education was complete, the illusion was dispelled as soon as I began my teaching career. The erudition and theoretical insights of both my colleagues and my students, first at Montana State University, and then at Princeton University, and finally at Stanford University, challenged me to continue learning. Their kindness and generosity emboldened me to embark on an interdisciplinary journey into literature, philosophy, political theory, and social science.

Finally, forgive the cliché – but it is eminently true in the field of classical studies: We stand on the shoulders of giants. The line of giants stretches from antiquity to the present. My work on Athenian democracy would have been impossible without the fundamental studies of Greek institutions and culture by generations of brilliant scholars – my profound debt to (among others) German, Italian, French, Swiss, Danish, Dutch, Greek, British, and American classicists, historians, philosophers, and theorists is evident to anyone who has read my work. I hesitate to choose among them, but were he still with us, my dear friend and frequent intellectual sparring partner, Mogens Herman Hansen, would surely be the obvious choice for the Balzan Prize. It is to his memory that I dedicate “The Phyle Project” – named for the rural stronghold, occupied by a few dozen bold Athenian patriots after an oligarchic coup overthrew the democracy in 404 BCE. It was from Phyle that democracy was restored in Athens – and I hope that the Phyle Project will aid in the work of restoring a vibrant, participatory form of democracy to our contemporary world.