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Moses Finley and Politics Columbia Studies in the Classical Tradition Moses Finley and Politics Columbia Studies in the Classical Tradition Editorial Board William V. Harris (editor) Alan Cameron, Suzanne Said, Kathy H. Eden, Gareth D. Williams, Holger A. Klein VOLUME 40 The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/csct Moses Finley and Politics Edited by W. V. Harris LEIDEn • bOSTON 2013 Cover illustration: Moses Finley c. 1947. Photo from the collection of his younger sister, Dr Gertrude Finkelstein, by kind permission of his nieces Sharon Finley and Lia Barrad and his nephew Joel Tepp. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Moses Finley and politics / edited by W.V. Harris. pages cm. — (Columbia studies in the classical tradition ; volume 40) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-90-04-26167-9 (hardback : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-90-04-26169-3 (e-book) 1. Finley, M. I. (Moses I.), 1912–1986—Political and social views. 2. Classicists—United States— Biography. 3. Classicists—Great Britain—Biography. 4. Economic history—To 500. 5. Anti-communist movements—United States. I. Harris, William V. (William Vernon) author, editor of compilation. PA85.F48M67 2013 938.007202—dc23 [B] 2013032206 This publication has been typeset in the multilingual “Brill” typeface. With over 5,100 characters covering Latin, IPA, Greek, and Cyrillic, this typeface is especially suitable for use in the humanities. For more information, please see www.brill.com/brill-typeface. ISSN 0166-1302 ISBN 978-90-04-26167-9 (hardback) ISBN 978-90-04-26169-3 (e-book) Copyright 2013 by The Trustees of Columbia University in the City of New York. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Global Oriental, Hotei Publishing, IDC Publishers and Martinus Nijhoff Publishers. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper. CONTENTS Acknowledgements ........................................................................................ vii Notes on Contributors ................................................................................... ix A Brief Introduction ....................................................................................... 1 W. V. Harris Moses Finkelstein and the American Scene: The Political Formation of Moses Finley, 1932–1955 ........................................... 5 Daniel P. Tompkins Finkelstein the Orientalist ........................................................................... 31 Seth R. Schwartz The Young Moses Finley and the Discipline of Economics .............. 49 Richard P. Saller Moses Finley and the Academic Red Scare ............................................ 61 Ellen Schrecker Dilemmas of Resistance ................................................................................ 79 Αlice Kessler-Harris Finley’s Democracy/Democracy’s Finley ................................................. 93 Paul Cartledge Politics in the Ancient World and Politics ................................................ 107 W. V. Harris Un-Athenian Affairs: I. F. Stone, M. I. Finley, and the Trial of Socrates .................................................................................................... 123 Τhai Jones Bibliography ..................................................................................................... 143 Index ................................................................................................................... 151 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS For help in organizing the conference on which this volume is based I owe much to the Coordinator of Columbia University’s Center for the Ancient Mediterranean, Caroline Wazer, and for help in editing the book I am deeply grateful to Emily Cook. I also wish to thank Robin Osborne, who organized a conference about Finley at Cambridge in May 2012 and is co-editing its proceedings, for sharing information in the most collegial fashion. And no one should write about Finley without consulting Dan Tompkins, whose acumen and encyclopaedic knowledge of the man and his work have been invaluable, to me as to others. May 2013 WVH NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS Paul Cartledge is the inaugural A. G. Leventis Professor in the Faculty of Classics, Cambridge University, and President of the Fellowship of Clare College. He is the editor, co-editor, author or co-author of over 20 books, most recently After Thermopylae: The Oath of Plataea and the End of the Graeco-Persian Wars (OUP, 2013). He is co-editor of two monograph series, and sits on the editorial boards of three learned journals. He was awarded the Gold Cross of the Order of Honour by the President of the Greek Republic and is an honorary citizen of modern Sparta. W. V. Harris is Shepherd Professor of History and Director of the Center for the Ancient Mediterranean at Columbia University. His most recent book is Rome’s Imperial Economy (2011), and he was the editor of and a contributor to both Mental Disorders in the Classical World (2013) and The Ancient Mediterranean Environment between Science and History (also 2013). Thai Jones earned his Ph.D. at Columbia and is an assistant professor of history in the Bard College Master of Arts in Teaching Program. He is the author of More Powerful than Dynamite: Radicals, Plutocrats, Progressives, and New York’s Year of Anarchy (New York 2012), and A Radical Line: From the Labor Movement to the Weather Underground, One Family’s Century of Conscience (New York, 2004). Alice Kessler-Harris is R. Gordon Hoxie Professor of History and Professor in the Institute for Research on Women, Gender and Sexuality at Columbia University. She specializes in 20th century U.S. labor and social policy, and is the author of, among other books, Out to Work: a History of Wage Earning Women in the United States (1982), In Pursuit of Equity: Women, Men and the Quest for Economic Citizenship in Twentieth Century America (2001), and most recently A Difficult Woman: The Challenging Life and Times of Lillian Hellman (2012). Richard P. Saller is a professor of Roman history in the History and Classics Departments of Stanford University. His research has focused on subjects of social and economic history of the late Republic and early Empire, x notes on contributors including patronage, the family, and human capital. Most recently, he has published studies of gender and work, and training and education in the imperial economy. His books include Personal Patronage under the Early Empire (1982) and Patriarchy, Property, and Death in the Roman Family (1994). Ellen Schrecker is Professor Emerita of History at Yeshiva University. Widely recognized as a leading expert on McCarthyism, she has published many books and articles on the subject, including Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America (1998), The Age of McCarthyism: A Short History with Documents (1994, rev. ed. 2002), and No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities (1986). Her most recent book is The Lost Soul of Higher Education: Corporatization, the Assault on Academic Freedom and the End of the University (2010). She is currently working on a study of the politics of American professors in the 1960s and early 1970s. Seth R. Schwartz is the Lucius N. Littauer Professor of Classical Jewish Civilization in the Departments of History and Classics at Columbia University. He was a senior research fellow at King’s College, Cambridge, 1992–1995, and from 1995 to 2009 he taught history at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York. He is the author of Josephus and Judaean Politics (Columbia Studies in the Classical Tradition 18 Leiden: Brill, 1990), Imperialism and Jewish Society, 200 BCE to 640 CE (Princeton, 2001) and Were the Jews a Mediterranean Society? Reciprocity and Solidarity in Ancient Judaism (Princeton, 2010). Daniel P. Tompkins taught in the Department of Greek and Roman Classics at Temple University, retiring in 2010. He also taught at Wesleyan University and Swarthmore and Dartmouth Colleges. He has written on Moses Finley, Thucydides, Homer, the ancient city, Wallace Stevens, just war theory, and various topics in higher education. He won the American Philological Association award for teaching in 1980 and Temple University’s Great Teacher Award in 2010. His current projects include the intellectual development of M. I. Finley and language and politics in the speeches in Thucydides. A BRIEF INTRODUCTION W. V. Harris 2012 was the centenary of the birth of Moses Finley, one of the most widely read scholarly historians of his age, and in particular a transforma- tive influence on the study of the history of Greek and Roman antiquity. This volume contains most of the papers delivered at a commemorative conference held at Columbia in September of that year. Since Columbia was the institutional centre of Finley’s intellectual life from 1927 until about 1953—not simply the place where he earned his Ph.D.—it was appropriate, and also a matter of pride, that the university community should recall, celebrate and debate his legacy. In exactly what ways Finley’s influence was transformative is a com- plex question which will be discussed elsewhere
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