Authoritarianism and democracy in Europe, 1919-39 Book

In this study, Jones attempts to trace the outlines of Athenian society along modern historiographic lines. The book presents five essays, which include economic and demographic analyses of Athens during the classical period. He also attempts to answer the question, which can only be addressed conjecutrally, of the extent to which the Athenian economy was based on slave labor. In general, Jones provides the most reasonable hypotheses that I have seen about the total population, the distribution of wealth, the class structure and other vital statistics of classical Athens. In some cases, as in his discussion of trade balance at the end of the fourth chapter, he moves in the direction of conclusions that the evidence might not really warrant, but these instances are limited and do not affect the overall reliability of the book.

Most useful is his third chapter, entitled "The Critics." It is a commonplace that the Athenians practiced democracy without theorizing about it. Those philosophers whose writings survive to us almost exclusively represent the oligarchic perspective. Jones provides a plausible reconstruction of how the large majority of citizens and politicians who believed in, worked and bled for Athenian democracy would have answered the intellectual elites who invented political philosophy, had those citizens thought it worth their while to do so.