THE ROMAN REVOLUTION (133BC)
"In order to explain the republic’s fall, it has seemed appropriate to ransack preceding
generations for symptoms of decline and signposts for the future. The portrait is shaped
to suit the result—a retrojected prophecy. Yet Cicero’s contemporaries did not know
what was in store. Nor should their every action be treated as if it conspired to determine
the outcome." - Eric Gruen.
Although the Roman revolution was not pre meditated, the republics demise was likely attributed to the failure of institutions and the ambitions of individuals.
"Their focus on conspiracies blinded them to the dependence of a polity for its health upon an underlying conception of just social order, an order seen as an expression of humanity’s properly understood place in the cosmic scheme of existence."
THE SIGNPOSTS and SYMPTOMS
"The roots of the Roman revolution, I contend, lie in the changes in social conditions that
crucially differentiate the revolutionary period from the time of relative political stability
that preceded it, and not in any paucity of rationalist principles with whose guidance the
Romans would have been able to preserve their republican liberty. While the Roman
constitution, grounded in tradition, had done its job for several centuries, that reliance on
the mos maiorum began to lose its effectiveness in the face of the vast power and wealth
that Rome’s expanding empire offered to anyone willing to ignore accepted practice, as
well as the widening gulf separating the fortunes of the Roman elite, of which the Senate
was the prime, formal representative, and the great majority of the citizens of the
republic."
The "Mos maiorum" was an unwritten set of honoured principles. This mos was a gentlemanly way of the elders that shunned bribery and corruption, it gave society a morally upright social behaviour pattern when it was pagan.
"As the historian Carl Richard argues, ‘the Romans’ rapid conquest of the
Mediterranean basin helped destroy… the republic. By further increasing the vast
inequalities of wealth between the rich and the poor, the new Roman expansion generated
class warfare, which, in turn, produced the chaos and violence that paved the way for the
emperors."
This could be compared to the expansion of the EU into both socially premature and financially unreliable nation states.
POLITICAL and ECONOMIC ORDER
"The history of this period illustrates Voegelin’s thesis, which noted that to flourish, a political order must represent the people’s understanding of their role in the cosmos. Once the Roman government was no longer representative in Voegelin’s sense, it was only a question of when, not if, it would be replaced by a new order that was representative."
What is representative? The economist and philosopher Friedrich Hayek (1899-1992) argued for an economic and political order that promoted individualism.
"While the theory of individualism has thus a definite contribution to make to the technique of constructing a suitable legal framework and of improving the institutions which have grown up spontaneously, its emphasis, of course, is on the fact that the part of our social order which can or ought to be made a conscious product of human reason is only a small part of all the forces of society. In other words, that the state, the embodiment of deliberately organised and consciously directed power, ought to be only a small part of the much richer organism which we call "society," and that the former ought to provide merely a framework within which free (and therefore not "consciously directed") collaboration of men has the maximum of scope. This entails certain corollaries on which true individualism once more stands in sharp opposition to the false individualism of the rationalistic type."
"The first is that the deliberately organized state on the one side, and the individual on the other, far from being regarded as the only realities, while all the intermediate formations and associations are to be deliberately suppressed, as was the aim of the French Revolution, the noncompulsory conventions of social intercourse are considered as essential factors in preserving the orderly working of human society."
"The second is that the individual, in participating in the social processes, must be ready and willing to adjust himself to changes and to submit to conventions which are not the result of intelligent design, whose justification in the particular instance may not be recognisable, and which to him will often appear unintelligible and irrational."
Read more of Hayek's work here.
CORPORATE ARISTOCRACY and THE GRAVY TRAIN
"Having valued their own desire for personal aggrandisement over the liberty of others, the Roman aristocrats inevitably lost the passion for liberty necessary to defend their own political freedom against the depredations of the most ambitious of their fellows. When the aristocracy ceased to display ‘certain standards of conduct’, it lost its source of authority vis-a-vis the masses, and the Roman social compact fell apart."
This could be compared to the exclusive lobbying by corporations and the relationship politicians therefore have with the public.
THE DANGER and OPPORTUNITIES of POPULARISM
"Populist leaders, whether they were sincerely motivated by the plight of the commoners or merely exploiting the grievances of the masses to enhance their own power, could use the leverage provided by large-scale discontent to break down, piece by piece, the edifice of tradition that had shaped Roman politics throughout most of the republican era."
This could be compared to the Italian populist Beppe Grillo and the British populist Nigel Farage.
EROSION of the CORE
"A crucial factor increasing the power of the populares, as the revolutionary politicians
were then designated, was the gradual disappearance of the yeoman farmer, the ideal type
of the Roman citizen, whose sturdy, agrarian virtues and austere outlook on life had been
the foundation of Rome’s unprecedented rise."
"The spoils of Rome’s conquests, which flowed chiefly to the aristocratic officers given credit for any victory, enabled those aristocrats to steadily enlarge their latifundia — vast agricultural estates, which were able to produce foodstuffs at a lower cost than their yeoman competitors, as the owners of the latifundia could exploit the forced labor of the multitudes of the defeated enslaved by Roman armies. The small farmers had little choice but to abandon their holdings and see them absorbed into some aristocrat’s estate, and then to seek their sustenance by becoming a faithful political supporter, of one or another of their former officers. Thus, there arose a growing population of dispossessed, disgruntled, and involuntarily idle citizens, readily available to serve as an angry mob or a band of thugs advancing some demagogue’s quest for power."
SPIRITUALITY and RELIGION
"The final influence sapping the strength of the republic that we will note, one again
intimately intertwined with the failure of the social compact, and one which also was not
amenable to treatment by a written constitution, was the gradual fading away of Roman
paganism’s ability to provide a viable understanding for its adherents of their relationship
with the cosmos."
Replace the Roman Republics depreciation of the Pagan 'Mos maiorum' with todays shunning of Christianity.
"Voegelin points out that the pagan religion of Rome, with its civic focus, was the foundation upon which Roman political life rested. However, as the Romans exported their armies and their rule to more and more of the known world, they, willingly or not, imported the ideas of the people they had conquered back to Rome. In particular, the Roman’s encounters with Greek philosophy and the novel religions they met in their eastern provinces, most notably that of the Hebrews, gradually eroded their confidence in the superiority of their indigenous mythology."
"A perceptive Roman leader such as Augustus Ceasar clearly understood the debilitating effects of this loss of religious conviction on Rome’s civic health, and sought to revive traditional beliefs through measures aimed to turn back ‘widespread scepticism and rationalism’ but such policies proved to offer not cures but temporary palliatives. It was not until the ascendancy of Christianity, several centuries later, that the Roman world finally re-discovered a cosmological basis upon which a coherent civil order could be erected. How could the hypothetical existence of a written constitution have succeeded in animating a political body whose soul was fading from the world?"
As R.E. Smith would have it, ‘Thus concludes our study of the Republic's failure, a failure of the spirit, not of government."
Read the full essay on the Roman Revolution here.
No comments:
Post a Comment