Moses I. Finley Quotes
What I am arguing, in effect, is that the full democratic system of the second half of the fifth century B.C. would not have been introduced had there been no Athenian empire.
Finley, Moses I. Democracy Ancient and Modern. Rutgers University Press, 1973, p. 42.
There are some who have argued that the United States 20th century of world dominance was an empire. Perhaps so, but it did not have most of the characteristics that Thucydides and most others thought of as characteristics of empire—occupation of nations, rule by the Imperial country, privilege in other nations of the Empire, control. Most important, in historical empires, money—in the form of taxes or goods was commandeered by the Empire for the mother country. The US taxed no one, and money flowed the other way in the most generous sharing of foreign aid in human history. The United States had great influence and was able to exert economic and sometimes military pressure on many nations of the world; American culture was adopted by many nations, but America rarely behaved as Empires historically did.
Sir Moses Israel Finley, FBA was an American-born British academic and classical scholar. His prosecution by the United States Senate Subcommittee on Internal Security during the 1950s resulted in his relocation to England, where he became an English classical scholar and eventually master of Darwin College, Cambridge. His most notable publication is The Ancient Economy (1973) in which he argued that the economy in antiquity was governed by status and civic ideology, rather than rational economic motivations.
