The logic of coordination

Paul Gowder

doi:10.1017/CBO9781316480182.007

Let us stay in Athens for a while. After the fall of the blood-soaked regime of the Thirty Tyrants, an amnesty was enacted for them and their collaborators. Why did it succeed? The Athenians had not managed to restrain themselves from judicially eliminating suspected oligarchs in the past; what changed after 403?The amnesty was a stunning success for the rule of law; understanding how it worked despite all the seemingly compelling political reasons to disregard it will help us understand how the rule of law is brought about and maintained in general. Thus, the first section of this chapter reviews the history of the two late-fifth-century oligarchic coups, and then argues that a commitment to the rule of law, in virtue of their recognition of the strength topos, gave the Athenians strong reason to respect the amnesty. It then backs out and asks how the Athenians could have successfully coordinated to carry out their commitment to the rule of law, even though they would have had reason to worry about one another's actual recognition of the strength topos, or susceptibility to the temptation to remove oligarchs for short-term political advantage. I argue that the institution of the mass jury gave the Athenian democrats the ability to send costly signals of commitment to the rule of law, allowing them to learn to trust one another, and thereby to build common knowledge of that shared commitment.The second section generalizes the Athenian case into a strategic model (very lightly formalized with some game theory) of the commitment problem facing states that wish to establish a rule of law backed up by coordinated enforcement from the public. From that, I develop some general claims about the sorts of legal systems that are consistent with the rule of law, which, in Chapter 9, I will offer as potentially helpful for the task of promoting it abroad (and at home). I conclude by offering a couple of thoughts for how the general model helps us understand contemporary problems of transitional justice.The strength topos and the amnestyI shall argue, in this section, that Athens managed to sustain the amnesty because the democrats learned, at the end of the fifth century, that the rule of law was necessary for the collective defense of their democratic system.

The logic of coordination

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