Hoover Institution (Stanford, CA)—Senior Fellow Josiah Ober has won a 2025 Balzan Prize for his work connecting the characteristics of ancient Athenian democracy to the present day.
The International Balzan Prize Foundation of Italy and Switzerland announced that its board of academics selected Ober, along with three other scholars for honors earlier this week.
“I am humbled and profoundly honored by the award of one of the four 2025 Balzan Prizes,” Ober said. “It is especially gratifying that the Prize Committee chose ‘Athenian Democracy Revisited’ for one of this year’s categories. My own scholarship in this area would have been impossible without the groundwork laid by previous generations of fine Greek historians.”
The Balzan Foundation Prize Committee said it selected Ober for the honor “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.”
“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,” the committee said in a statement released this week.
Ober is also the Markos & Eleni Kounalakis Chair in Honor of Constantine Mitsotakis, professor of political science and of classics, and professor of philosophy (by courtesy) at Stanford’s School of Humanities and Sciences.
His scholarship focuses on historical institutionalism and political theory, especially democratic theory and the contemporary relevance of the political thought and practice of the ancient Greek world. He is the author of several books, including The Civic Bargain: How Democracy Survives (with Brook Manville, 2023), The Greeks and the Rational: The Discovery of Practical Reason (2022), Demopolis: Democracy before Liberalism in Theory and Practice (2017), and The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece (2015).
One of the ways Ober brings the lessons of ancient Greek democracy into today’s environment is through his work developing the Stanford Civics Initiative.
Ober helped bring together a group of political science professors, experts in the classics, and staff of the Zephyr Institute to offer courses to Stanford undergraduates that encourage the practice of democratic citizenship and the civil exchange of ideas.
Also founded by Ober is the Alliance for Civics in the Academy, a nonpartisan network of instructors in higher education involved in teaching courses and developing academic programs aimed at civic education.
This year’s fields selected by the Balzan Foundation Prize Committee were the classics: Athenian democracy revisited, the history of contemporary art, atomic research, and genetic therapy.
Other winners this year are Rosalind Krauss of Columbia University for her work in establishing the field of contemporary art research, Christophe Salomon of Laboratoire Kastler Brossel of Paris for his work on atomic time measurement, and Carl June of the University of Pennsylvania for his development of genetically engineered cell therapies to combat cancer.
Each of the four winners receives a prize of 750,000 Swiss Francs ($940,000 USD), with half of the money to be used by the recipient to finance a research project “involving a new generation of young researchers.”
“I plan to use the share of the prize funds devoted to helping younger scholars to develop a project that will complement and extend the work of the Stanford Civics Initiative,” Ober said.
The Balzan Foundation was created in 1957 in Lugano, Switzerland, to honor the life and work of Eugenio Balzan, who worked his way up from lowly editorial assistant to become a managing director and later shareholder in Corriere della Sera, Italy’s leading national newspaper, fleeing to Switzerland as fascism took control of his home.
The Balzan Prize is meant to “to promote culture, the sciences, and the most meritorious initiatives in the cause of humanity, peace, and fraternity among peoples.”
Ober will travel to Bern, Switzerland, in November to receive his award from leading European scholars who make up the Balzan Foundation’s Board.
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For more information, contact Jeffrey Marschner, Assistant Director, Media and Government Relations, at 202-760-3200 or jmarsch@stanford.edu.
