ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on some remarkable transformations that occurred in research on ancient economies in the 2010s. After outlining the relationship between late XIX and late XX century controversies in the study of the ancient economy and contemporaneous ideological and political ‘struggles for hegemony’ in the Western world, the chapter argues that after the financial crisis of 2008 it is possible to appreciate the unprecedented positioning of two prominent scholars of the ancient economy, namely Ian Morris and Walter Scheidel, as ‘organic intellectuals’ who explicitly take sides on the current dominating political agenda. The chapter describes the encompassing ‘Social Development Model’ devised by Morris, in which historical human societies are ranked based principally on their capacity to capture energy – and according to which the West would ‘rule’ the world – and Scheidel's 2017 work where the equation between violence and social levelling is stressed as omnipresent in human history – thus advocating for the naturalness of unequal political forms. Drawing inspiration from Gramsci's reflections on materialistic economism, mechanistic positivism and on the gimmicky use of the idea of common sense the chapter attempts to elaborate a critique, and a relativisation, of these hegemonic, and historically relative, approaches.
