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Why did Rome fall? Generally, the ultimate reasons for the fall lied in original flaws in the cultural design of the Roman society. The destruction of Rome was the consequences of a cultural fundament that was painfully inadequate for the societal building it should support. The destruction of Rome was cultural in gestalt but political in manifestation. The cognitive-cultural make-up of Rome was from the beginning one-sided and insufficient. On the operative dimension, these flaws resulted in at least four basic problems. First, within the balance of the Empire’s various “subsystems,” it resulted in disproportional emphasis on power as a factor of social action. Second, Rome was characterized by a too one-sided cultural tradition with an inclination toward the unstable or “neurotic.” There was a strange ambivalence in the Romans attitude to the world; its inhabitans were generally, aggressively “openminded” almost innocently so; yet at the same time the Romans lacked some fundamental absorptive capacities in regard to spiritual and intellectual issues, which made it very difficult for the system to progress into a higher type of human civilization. Third, it resulted in a too one-sided approach to technological inventions; the consequence of which was a relative “stalemate” in the promotion of the general means of production. This problem was also reflected in the way in which the technological advances that originally had marked the Roman army slowly diminished relative to the strength of the barbarian tribes at the Roman frontier. Fourth, it produced a shallow intellectual culture hunting the occult and exoteric; this inclination was particularly notable in the way broad groups became emotionally vulnerable in the socio-political crisis characterizing that last centuries of the Empire’s lifetime. One will see that in opposition to Montesquieu who analyzes Rome from the standpoint of cultural decline; I on my part do not see any deterioration of an original golden age. My argument stresses that it is not “decline” but a fatal one-sidedness in the original cultural matrix of Roman society that is the ultimate cause in the puzzle; Rome was an Empire debased by birth and not simply the victim of a process of decadence. For Montesquieu, Rome was a great project that failed, while I see it as a “great project there never was.” As Talcott Parsons has assessed; Rome never succeeded in building a sufficiently substantial system of cultural-constitutive symbolization. Indeed, what Parsons calls the “unstable welter of exotic cults, sects, syncretistic belief systems, and the religious movements” that characterized Rome was never adequately grounded in the general culture. Since, Rome’s value-system was depending on the “legitimacy” of its power cult; it had no coherent answer to the spiritual needs of its population and was unable to effectively counter-act a hostile ideology in the midst of its system. Indeed, rather than counter-acting it, it was eaten alive. In the end of the line, as Parsons has assessed, the Romans “failed to build a viable societal community.”   

In this way, the cultural institutions of the Roman Empire were relatively underdeveloped (or peculiarly one-sided). The focus of power as the all-embracing social gestalt was notable. Naturally, most societies at the time used large resources on building military machines and generally, it was not unnatural for the Romans to concentrate on military things yet the function of power as a factor of social life grew out of all proportions. The comparisons of Sparta with Rome is illustrative, in Sparta the military specialization went far beyond anything Rome ever did but Sparta’s culture was generally more sane and balanced than Rome’s. Although the Spartans could be cruel and cynical in many occasions, their relationship with power was much more “mature” than in Rome. In other words, the army was all-absorptive in Sparta but it never became a fetish in the way it occurred in Rome. Thus, in Rome, the quest for power and prestige tended to prevail over other values. The mechanisms restraining power-allocation in Rome were insufficient from an early point and its institutions were not able to grow with the challenge. Eventually, the quest for power in Rome broke all social and moral bounds. To kill one’s mother or brother in such a relentless pursue became ultimately a part of the obsession. In this way, power became more than a blunt necessity; it became a desire. In Greece, the army was always a means to an end; in Rome, its institutional symbolism became an end in itself, not only as a metaphor but also as bloody reality, perhaps most notable expressed during the reign of Sulla and the terror he released. The issue here is not the amount of power the Romans commanded but the impact power had on their mental fabric. Indeed, “the strongman” is not measured by the power he controls but measured by the extent power consumes him. The tyranny and extravagance that emerged with Nero was more than the idiosyncrasies of one man. The whole environment around Nero was a bizarre ocean of intrigues, murders and frenzy power-struggle; the fever of power was on everyone’s mind, not only the prerogative of Nero; it revealed the strange unrest of the Roman soul, which only would accelerate as time went by. It was as if a constant neurosis was chasing the Roman establishment and that the culture itself was lacking the necessary structure that could counter-balance the trend toward self-destruction. It all revealled a personality structure that was insufficiently culturally rooted and constantly needed to find “surrogates” and restless “confirmation” to fill out the void of cultural institutionalization.

This collective neurosis was link to the Roman he-man celebration. There was too much Sylvester Stallone in the Roman mentality. Indeed, Roman gladiator-games were a sign of the cult of domination and submission, which went to the core of Roman mentality. It was not accidental that the gladiator-theatres dominated the central urban space in the Roman cities. Indeed, few things are more revealing for the Roman character than its gladiator-games, which not only was cruel and inhumane but even trivial in its actual scene-sequences. In most cases, it was a caricature of a fight, where animals and humans had close to no chance in the first place. The Greek would most likely have regarded such “entertainment” for unworthy but this kind of entertainment went to the core of the Roman elite’s sense of superiority and civic identity. One cannot separate the vulgarity of these games from the Roman psyche. Indeed, during the gladiator-games, the killed were dragged away from the arena as if they were meat-loafs, not even the victims death was regarded as other than a triviality. The gladiator-game was popular beyond any measures, every new Roman colony insisted in having a gladiator-theatre because else they could not consider themselves truly Romans. Ordinary households would be decorated with motifs from gladiator-games; it was a national obsession. The gladiator-games would often have “ticket scalpers,” who would buy up seats and sell them to inflated prices, since people was ready to pay any price to see the game. Intellectual criticism of the gladiator-games was quite rare among Romans; the cruelties committed were generally regarded as self-evident, while the Greek had nothing of that kind. 

Thus, Rome never achieved a sufficiently deep culture; its talents were not only one-dimensionally organized but insufficient in its differentiational forms. Generally, Rome started as a war-machine and Roman culture reflected the emphasis of the instrumental-political mentality, which was “needed” in order to fulfil this role-pattern. Yet, what was crucial in this regard what not the functional specialization of the political subsystem per se but the lack of absorptive cognitive capacities that could raise the nation beyond the limits of a sheer instrumental power-approach. The ancient world in which Rome arose was a violent age, and the success of Rome, which was its organizing capacities became fixed on the key criteria for success, which was military might. The early Romans were primitive, much more primitive than the Etruscans but through the military strenght and rudeness mind, the Romans were able to prevail. Perhaps, this is not an unusual story of that age but what was notable was that the Romans never really went beyond their own original primitive state of mind, although its societal sophistication grew to the skies, the mindset of the people remained strangely archaic.

This lack of cognitive-cultural sophistication seem to be reflected in the way in which the Romans (in contrast to the Greek) was unable to find a sufficient mediating solution to its clash between its society’s major groups and “classes.” The kind of integrative mechanism, which we can observe in the Germanic and Greek societies (and which was related to the factor of “democracy”) was never able to penetrate the core of the Roman society despite many efforts to the contrary. Some would perhaps call it the Roman failure to establish a sufficient pattern of social justice. Despite various attempt to increase public participation, Rome remained very much a rather limited plutocracy. The consequences was that the Romans were unable to utilized the social intelligence of the lower strata in the way in which the Germanic order of the Middle Ages was able to do. The origination of Rome seems to have emerged around a comparatively frozen relationship between lord and serf. In this regard, Frank Tenney is arguing that the separation between patricians and plebeian in Rome had an almost caste-like quality. In this way, the social divide in Rome was not just a later “complication,” it appeared at its very birth.  

Indeed, the way Rome differs from the Greek in the manner of social stratification tell us a lot about the special character of the Roman society. Both Greece and Rome were agarian societies and the key to much of their social order lied in the way land was distributed. This was crucial not only for military reasons but also in regard to the institutionalization of civic society. During the period known of the “tyrannic rule” in Greece, the dominance of the aristocracy was “broken” and this gave way to a subsequent democratization of the Greek city. Hence, in Greece this gave way to the emerging of a sizable middle class not only as a social strata of traders and craftmen but also in regard to the size of farms characterizing the Greek agricultural structure. The famous Greek citizen with real influence on public affair was one of the outcomes of this process. The crucial point in this regard is that this was exactly what did not happen in Rome. As Perry Anderson, Rostovtzeff and other have highlighted what was characteristic for the Roman situation was that the “poor” or “proletarian” masses never was able to “grab the moment,” so that the power of the hereditary nobility (who was the big landowners) never was broken but essential remained in persistent control of the socio-political process despite the various twist and turns of Roman history. Generally, members of those pleberian families who got real, persistent influence would be admitted to the Senate. Yet, it happened rarely as Rostovtzeff explained. Also, the new pleberian senator would be regarded as “a new man” and often treated with contempt and suspiction by the old aristocratic families. It all highlighted the key role of the Senate in the politics of Rome. As Rostovtzeff maintains, “the reel control with internal affairs and foreign affairs belong to the Senate.” Without diminising the role of property, I think that the real factor in the strenght of the noblity was their general socio-cognitive capacities; it is most likely indicative that the first writers of the early Republic described the proletarians as rabble hardly caple of coherent thought. (In this way, “nobility” was much more than a presumtious title; in ancient time it took an extraordinary pool of social factors and economic surplus to establish the necessary rich conditions for persistent cognitive accumulation, which “the best families” represented). This power-correlation corresponds to the dominating position of the Senate, which represented the hereditary nobility; a position, which was as much a question of the accumulation of knowledge as it was a matter of financial wealth. This unbroken prevailence of the hereditary nobility has several effects, one was the limits it placed on the process of democratization in Rome even during the Republican period, the other was the drastic difference between rich and poor in Roman society to a degree unknown in Greece. People might be poor in Greece but as citizens they still had a important stake in the civic-political process (Socrates was certainly not a rich man); in Rome the poor tended to become socially excluded rather than included and the trend only increased in time. Rather than citizens, the urban “proletarians” became consumers of welfare, bread and circus, and so on. They tended to become statists in social life rather than proactive agents. Generally, the freezing of the aristocrats power in the special type of Roman “conservatism” functioned as a lowing of the level of societal differentiation, not only socially but intellectually. Generally, it sidetracked the whole development of Roman as a sufficiently integral community. 

Naturally, the above remarks need to be seen in the right context; the point is not to deny the existence of substantial democratic elements of the Roman Republics political institutions or to ignore the strenght that the Roman solution had in regard to political stability. The Roman Republic was not without a certain solidarity in the earlier stages of its existence. Indeed, Rome with its citizen-army could not have fought its wars without this kind of solidarity. This kind of citizen-army is not to be taken for granted, since Carthage during the Punic wars based its army to a high extent on mercenaries. Also, Rome’s upper classes were fully integrated in military activities, while this was not the case in Carthage. What concern us here is not to deny this kind of solidarity as an important factor in Rome’s history but to evaluate the long-term structural implications of Rome’s political institutions. What concern us here is that the Roman institutions might have been quite operative for each moment of short-term application but it failed, importantly, to serve the long-term build-up of more substantial integrative mechanisms in the Roman society and as an effect the Roman lower classes remain remarkably “proletarized” not only economically (as measured by income-gap) but especially in regard to fundamental cultural and cognitive factors. (One sign was that the archic pagan Roman religion (the ”pop-wisdom” of the masses) never really developed beyond its initial shape, which Rostovtzeff has deemed as remarkably primitive in the first case). It all sidetracked the process of societal differentiation, leaving the bulk of the Roman population in a strange limbo vis-a-vis the long-term development. For a while, this flaw in the integral mechanism of the Empire’s social structure was “covered up” by the use of the poll of multiculturalist intelligence that floaded into the center from all spheres of the Empire. In the end of the day, this “subsitute” for an endogenous intelligence established a superstructure of cosmopolitan ”efficiency” but did not address the deep structural problems (of the infantilization of the Roman underclass), which eventually was a crucial key to the overall collapse. Since the Romans never were able to assimilate the cultures under its regime, the substitute intelligence it received had never optimal conditions for deep institutional integration as factors of social-cultural entities and the input the system received remained fragments in a metropolitan universe. In this way, the ever increasing lower masses (and we are not even adressing the question is enormous masses of slaves) would at best become “clients” in a massive  plutocratic system (which tended to determining the real stake in politics); these clients had legal rights but they never became “citizens” in the more substantial sense that characterized Greece in the best of its periods. This “bias” not only proletarized the status of “the poor” but it debased the general development of Rome’s institutions although it took some centuries before its full implications became blantantly clear for the naked eye. The outcome was the emerging of a Eastern type of bureaucratic machinery, which in decisive moments failed utterly to provide an adequate efficiency because it ultimately was hierachy without substance.     

Octavian, who called himself Augustus, was not an accidental happening in Roman history; it was the logical conclusion of a society, which essence was power and which culture was too weak to facilitate the necessary institutional restrains. The degeneration which was symbolized by Caligula and Nero was just the further surrealistic indication that the force of Imperial power in Rome was marching on its own bewildered path; out of “symmetry” with other social functions. In a modern state Caligula and Nero would have been locked-up in asylums but in Rome, they were the leaders of humanity. But again it was nothing out of the ordinary; it was the logical conclusion of the power-fetishism that penetrated the Roman psyche. In this way, Rome as a societal community suffered from a build-in inflationary fixation with power as a generalized symbolic medium. The impact of this inflationary trend was a perversion of the equilibrium of societal differentiation. Thus, power became the standard to which everything else was reduced as an agent. Especially, more diffuse and intangible factors of culture connected to constitutive-cognitive socialization were generally under-nurtured. The overload of the performance capacities of the political institutions was itself indicative of a cultural-constitutive flaw. The signs that the system was reaching its limits became increasingly manifest and in Rome the key to the issue was the state of the army. As David S. Potter has highlighted “the fact that Marcus could not subdue the Danubian tribes was a more telling indication that something was wrong.” Given the Roman learning-pattern and especially the lack of any persistent solution to the issue of “succession,” Rome’s political institutions could do nothing but fail, as soon as social complexity went beyond a certain point. It was a disaster waiting to happen and not just an unfortunate series of events. However, the Roman political-military machinery was still a fórmidable enemy and its statesmanship was often brilliant. The brilliant side of the Roman institutions was exactly the factor that prolonged the process for so long time. Nonetheless, the power-struggle in Rome reached a point of sheer opportunism; an indication of the extraordinary lack of normative restrains and institutionally counter-veiling mechanisms that had been a persistent problem of Rome’s political culture. A part of the problem was that Rome was a quite “open society,” where cosmopolism and individualism was able to advance as social categories; it established a important dynamic but it also opened Rome to serious structural vulnerability, indeed, the hostility of Christianity was only one case in this regard, the self-serving interests of Germanic mercenaries yet another; the problem was that Rome lacked the deeper cognitive-cultural structure that should have “managed” the challenge of Imperial openness. As we know, the Hellenization of Rome had gone very far; yet, it might be argued that Hellenization of Rome actually camouflaged a cultural void; it made the Roman system appear as much more civilized than it was. In this way, Rome became increasingly multiculturalist under conditions, where its own culture was insufficintly shaped to address those isues of spiritual gestalt that the emerging crisis demanded; this fragmentation of values only deepened the crisis. Rome’s civic order built on ideas of virtue that was not shared by many of the new foreign masses, which swamped into Rome. As these virtues began to decay, Rome had no deeper cultural “treasure,” which could replace it beside a shallow cult of “the Emperor.” Rome had never “argued for its existence” beyond a doctrine of sheer glory and domination. Hence, Rome was mentality unprepared for the rabble-rousing rethoric of large-scale, cosmopolitan discourses.   

Rome had undoubtedly developed very strong capacities to play the instrumental game of war and conquest. At the same time; its cultural identity was very narrowly organized around sensory gain of status and material well-being, while the nurturing of the soul was facilitated through spectacular entertainment. The slogan of “bread and circus” was much more than an accidental saying; it was a very precise description of the basic reward-systems of Roman life or at least an illustrative signification of the key to their mentality. The immanent value of knowledge in the Greek sense was a strange concept for the Roman mind. The Romans knew of reasons but no Reason. Higher intellectual issues were beyond the Romans, unless it was broken down in concrete components or signified as concrete techniques or “real projects.” All this become remarkably clear, when we compare Greek civilization with the Romans; the intellectual sophistication of the Greek was lost on the Romans; their talent was materialist-instrumental, understood within a narrow behaviourist mode; any higher intellectual consideration was, with remarkable few exceptions, generally lost on them. Roman philosophy was never more than a pale reflection of the Greek. Indeed, the Greek was like the Romans excellent and successful soldiers but their culture and social life was never fixated on power in the way it characterized Rome. The Greek had raised a a compelling vision of reflextive, cognitive Man as a totality of infinite values; the Romans were fixed on the ”legitimative” quest of the might of superior domination (with “civilization” and “Pax Romana” as the concrete bonus goods). In Greece, the real challenged of Man lied in the opening of his mind; while in Rome, conquest and superiority was always perceived as physically and concrete. In this way, the concept of science as a cognitive gestalt was millions of light-years from the Roman mind; the Romans built in stone, blood and in factors of domination, the rest was a flash of nothingness in their minds. The Romans’ power was (to a high extent) built on a kind of material consumption of its environment (slaves, tribune, land, etc. etc.); when this process came to a close at the end of their expansion, they ran out of the crude magic of their own superiority and while the Germanic barbarians actually (in their own confused ways) was on a path of learning; the Romans could only wait until the moment, where the cognitive talent of the barbarians turn into some kind of social and military reality (by whatever “bewildred” way or process). The real way, the barbarian won over the Romans was through their cognitive superiority (that is, their capacity for cultural-embedded learning) and not as such through their military virility but it was through their militiary virility that the cognitive factor revealled its ”latent” process in the social matrix of the historical context.  

The Romans borrowed almost all their socio-cultural components from the Etruscans and the Greek without ever being able to really understand or internalize the true sophistication of the two other cultures. The warm, human element of the Etruscan culture was never really replicated in Rome: who was too intoxiated of their own military machinery, as they were intoxiated during the killing-orgies in the Gladiator-games. In almost everything the Romans borrowed from the Greek, there was lacking something essential. One often speaks about “the ancient world” with the implicit connotation that the Roman simply was an extension of Greek culture; nothing can be more deceiving. In the Roman copy of the Greek, there always seemed to lack the higher points of cultural refinement. (Especially, in intellectual issues, the Roman position represented a vulgarization of what had been a Greek point). Not surprisingly, the Romans education was fixed on form rather than substance. What was important for the Roman “intellectual” was rhetoric not thinking. Intellectualism for the Romans was not a calling but placed its focus on poetic entertainment or the mastery of rhetoric as a way to promote one’s power and prestige. (Not surprisingly, Augustine was known as a teacher of rhetoric long before he became a “religious icon”). If one is looking for (the equivalent of) a Plato, Leibniz or a Kant among the Romans, one is looking in vain; the Romans had absolute nothing of that kind. The closest they came to an intellectual deed was to turn Platonism into a vulgar, quasi-religious cult. Indeed, it is very unlikely that the thing which we call “Christianity” would have looked the way it did without the invention of “neo-Platonism.” The intellectual origins of neo-platonism appeared to lie in an attempt to Egypt-orize Plato. The original idea can be traced to an Alexanderian Greek by the name of Ammonius Saccas, who beside his philosophic credentials apparently worked as a dock-worker. It might also be of some interest to notice that some of the other famous neo-Platonists at the time, Porphyry and Iamblichus, both were Syrians; it is clear that neo-Platonism was a result of the increasing Asian impact on the social structure of Rome in the last centuries of the Empire’s history. (In neo-Platonism there is a shift from Plato’s emphasis on Reason and Being into an emphasis on the purification and salvation of the soul; it is not accidental that Plotinus was influence by the doctrines of Persian and Indian philosophers; in reality it turned Plato’s epistemic thinking into a salvationist doctrine about quasi-mystical soul-redemption). It was a part of the process, which Rostovtzeff has described as the increased Eastern influence on Rome. For Montesquieu, Rome was exposed to a wave of immigrants, who lacked any deeper compassion for Roman traditions and values. Indeed, the early Christians regarded Rome as the incarnation of evil. It is naturally indicative that both Paul and Peter according to legend were executed in Rome. In this way, it is true that Christianity was a component of the destruction of Rome but only as a symptom of a much broader trend. The progress of Christianity among citizens of Roman was the sign of an alarming development in regard to the legitimation of the regime, since Christianity openly defied the highest authority. Yet, Christianity was just a component in an increased “dissolving” of the social structure. Its increase popularity correlated with the deterioration of the economy in the third century, which brought society to the brick of chaos. In 235, the year Maximus Thrax became an emperor, bands of brigands and desperate people swept through Italy, pillaging as they went. Christianity was part of this turbulent frenzy of the times. However, the intellectual attraction to Christianity was not necessary so clear-cut as it often have been presented. Indeed, Augustine was very close in ending up as a Manichaean; it was not Christianity but an esoteric desire for mystery religions that was the driven motif of his character. Under other circumstance, he would have written his famous “confessions” as a zealous defence of Manichaeanism. (Indeed, Augustine had zealously defended Manichaeanism and Neoplatonism in earlier stages of his life; what credibility had he as a “unique defender” of Christianity?) The fragile nature of the Roman intellectual ballast made them mentally defenceless in regard to the Eastern supermarket of salvationist “solutions.” In Rome, reason was the first casualty when crisis stroke. Indeed, at the time of Augustine, Rome was a boiling pot of spiritual despair; a kind of stock-market of salvationist merchants buying and selling ideological “security” to a nation in a stage of spiritual panic. Rome became increasingly the catalyst for despotism from the East, not only politically but mentally. In the West it resulted in total collapse, in the East it resulted in another kind of collapse, that is, the fossilization of the social structure.    

Naturally, there are many other factors in the fall of Rome; some scholars have highlighted the economic trouble that the Empire ran into in the end of its reign. Also, Arnold J. Toynbee and Joseph Tainter have both highlighted the Empire’s predatory nature, its irrational waste of economic resources and diminishing marginal return of its general design. In its later stages, Rome became increasingly bureaucatized and began to show the kind of signs associated with the fallacies of state socialism. It is in this regard, we shall understand Bruce Barlett’s statement that “excessive government killed Rome.” I think that a major part of these problems was caused by a fatal inadequacy in Rome’s political administration and its pattern of decision-making. Generally, many of the Empire’s decisions on economic questions in the later stages reinforced problems rather than reducing them. The Government debasement of money was a case in point; it started a chain-reaction of events with disastrous consequences. Hence, when the monetary system collapsed the taxation system collapsed with it. In the case of Rome, one shall recall how intimate taxation was correlated with military expenditures. The result was clearcut; troops went unpaid, supplies could not be purchased and bribes could not be paid to Germanic chiefs. But even worse the industrial structure disintegrated and people began to leave the cities. The harsh counter-measures by Theodosian and others had little effect. However, the exact structure of the economic crisis is still scholarly disputed yet generally, the bulk of economic problems was restricted to the West while the situation in the East was different. Also many of the Roman problems, especially those of the industrial kind, were the outcome of the fact that the Roman never changed the basic premises of their mode of production. The problem was not that various new inventions didn’t exist (at least to some extent), it was rather than they never really appeared on the decision-makers radar-screen. This was also the problem in regard to the barbarian Germanic tribes; in contrast to the Roman society, the German tribes went through very extensive learning-processes. The socio-technological gap between the Roman and the Germanic tribes became importantly reduced as time went by, especially within the question of military technological capacities, which was the decisive “high-tech” capacities of the time. In the end the Germanic weapons was a least as good as the Romans. Also many Germanic people had served in the Roman army and knew its military techniques by heart; when they turned against the Roman army, they were experts knowing everything about the training and techniques of their enemies. Indeed, the invasion of the Germanic barbarians came, there was no clear-cut the socio-technological lead, which the embattled Romans could rely on. The Roman historian Taticus called the Germanic warriors “a nightmare of which their is no awaking.” And in the fourth and fifth centuries this Roman nightmare turned into a full-scale catastrophy.

In sum, the problem of Rome was present at its genesis. Rome succeed by specializing its military-political capacities at the time it was a tiny city-state but this specialization became also a fixation of its cultural-mental development; so the pursue of power as a generalized symbolic media, tended to overrule other aspects of the system’s socio-cultural process of differentiation. The consequences of this perversion of the system’s process of societal differentiation became more and more critical as the Empire grew in scope and became “actualized” at those points in time, when various systemic processes ran into exhaustion or “trouble.” The degeneration Gibbon talk about is in a sense nothing but the manifestations of the increase structurally disjointed gab between the overloaded political system (and its symbolization in the media of power) and the “black holes” left in the social matrix, where a balanced process of societal differentiation was not able to proceed. The effect was not only socio-cultural but also socio-technological and gave the Germanic tribes located beyond the border of the Empire an option to bridge the socio-technological gab at least in regard to operative military battle capacities. In the end, when the barbarian Germanic warriors entered the Empire in horde after horde, they only knocked down the door of a building, which already was weaken by its own immanent pathology and structural limitations.

Even so it took a while for the Empire to collapse; in part it was the consequence of the fact that the Germanic tribes were not a combined, organized invasion army under unified command but a system of independent tribes and groups floating around in a vast area by the function of their own inclinations. In this way, the collapse of the Empire did not occur through “one stroke” but rather through an overlapping series of events of which the fall of Rome to the Visigoth in 410 AD was a particular signficant moment. Also, the Roman army was still (when it functioned) a very tough fighting-machine and was only undermined bit by bit. Also, the Romans were often able to turn one Germanic tribe on the throat of the other; which gave the Empire a breathing-space for a while. However, one of the devastating elements in the process was that the Empire fought a major civil war at a time, when it should have concentrated on pressing back the invaders. The civil war was, of course, nothing than the opportunist behavior inherent in the Roman power-fixation in the moment of its full bloom. (As in the case of Clausewith’s ”total war” thus an outbust of ”sheer opportunism” can only last so long, in the same way that a burning house consume the source of its own burning). The phenomenon was naturally linked to the Roman lack of any real solution of the issue of succession, which meant that this process persistently broke down in sheer chaos. It was however, only the ultimate consequence of a system, where power triumph over any other normative institutions. In the end of the road; the Romans’ love-affair with power was nothing but self-destructive. It all created a process, where the Empire point by point lost the upper hand in dealing with the overall situation. 

In this analysis of the origin of the Industrial revolution I have emphasize the paramount role of two cultures as the seed-bed for Europe’s general developmental direction. It is the Greek and Germanic cultures. What characterized Greek and Germanic societies was that they opened the door for a world, where free institutions and the freedom of the mind could prevail. The Greek established the first democratic societies; especially Athens was the role-model. Their societies was by no means perfect by modern standards yet the Greek was the first to raise the idea of a free society in a practical and compelling manner; it was more than an utopian notion, the Greek society was an embodiment of the idea. In this way, the hope for a path-breaking higher civilization was first born with the Greeks. The Greek established a new vision of civic life, which was unknown outside their sphere; indeed, the sphere outside the Greek territory was one of despotism and absolutism in various forms. The concept the Greek introduced to the world was not only the question of freedom but also the idea of natural explanations of natural phenomena summed up in the overall concept of “Reason.” These ideas were inherently linked to their special way of arranging their civic institutions and embodied in their idea of what was essential for a human being. Greek society was later subjugated by other autocratic powers but their significance lied in the way in which they established the principles of rational critical thinking and the idea of a free society.

The Roman society originally looked as if it had the potentials of copying the idea of a free society; their early republic had at least elements of such a path. But for various idiosyncratic reasons linked to the balance of forces in the Roman society, its institutional setting never matched the Greek ideal; in Rome power was always keep within the hand of a comparatively narrow oligarchy, more or less represented by the senate-elite. For a while, Rome was a strange hybrid of oligarchic and “democratic” components. Although the Plebeian Assembly in principle was the only body capable of passing binding lays, it was Senate, which controlled the finances; it meant that the legislation in the final end could be controlled from the Senate. For this and other reasons, the “democratic” components in Roman society never added up and consequently, the collective community of citizens that characterized the Greek society never really emerged in Rome, where money, possessions and old entitlement tend to carry the day. In Greece, “the people” often had the upper hand; that hardly ever happened in Rome. As the Empire grew the autocratic tendencies in the Roman Empire became only strengthened until they were absolute as a power-base. However, even to the last the Roman Empire had a complex double nature; it never became despotic in the Eastern sense but nonetheless its political power-structure became increase despotic in its actual make-up. If Rome hadn’t fallen; European history would undoubtedly have become another version of Eastern despotic societies: This was exactly the fate of the Byzantine Empire.

Hence, if Rome had continue, Europe would have joint the tale of absolutist and despotic Empires, which on to that point had been the all-prevailing component of the world’s socio-political type. Nothing in the past was as standardized as the despots who came and went; some despots’ societies would expand and other would weaken but in the end of the day it was a political spectacle with no deeper socio-technological substance. With the exception of the Greek, no other place in the world had experience anything else than authoritarianism and despotism in one form or another. What is significance for our discussion of world development is that no absolutist and despotic society has ever showed decisive socio-technological and cognitive progress of the kind leading to science and to the breakthrough of an industrial revolution. Generally, despotism in whatever name and form has been nothing but a dead-end in history. What were typical for the world’s autocratic empires and kingdoms before the industrial revolution were their incapacities to progress beyond a certain point. Generally, they might occasionally invent new types of technologies within transport, architecture, medicine or warfare but it never had any decisive impact on their general mode of production from a developmental point of view (as far as their own societies were concerned); the despotic societies was archaic agriculture societies and remained agricultural societies. Moreover, most people who were farmers would live more or less as their ancestors, toiling like beasts; the target for deceases, hunger and natural disasters, which would come and go like waves. Most of these farmer systems could hardly progress due to Malthusian factors and other mechanisms. The story of glory, magnificent temples and aristocratic comfort most often had little or nothing to do with 90 percent of the population. To get the story right, many of these absolutist societies contributed richly to the knowledge, art and techniques of Mankind but they themselves were never able to establish the overall dynamic process within the core of their own societies, which was necessary to reach the point of a significant breakthrough in the basic mode of production. In the best of cases, these despotic societies contributed with bricks to a house they never built. It would be the Greek, who provided the master-plan for “the house” and the Middle Age Europe, who eventual build it.

Generally, in the era of the United Nation, we would like to think that development lies immanent in any society; indeed, even the Amish appeared to change inch by inch. It might even be plausible that all societies in principle embodies the seed of development but what is remarkable in world history until 1750 was not the capacity of the world to develop but rather it capacity to “stand-still” as far as the general mode of production paradigm is concerned. With the exception of Europe what was remarkable in all the world’s societies, who generally was despotic, was the strength of those part of their societal institutions that prohibited, restrained or drastically slowed down any tendencies in these societies in regard to decisive socio-technological, cognitive and industrial developments. As one observer lately phrased it, the industrial revolution was at least 10.000 years delayed, while I would rather stress that it most likely was a miracle that it occurred at all. Indeed, it is not implausible that the modern world never would have emerged, if the battle of Marathon would have been different or if Leonidas had not taken a stand at Thermopylae.

The Battle of Thermopylae, Part 1.

The Battle of Thermopylae, Part 2.

The Battle of Thermopylae, Part 3.

One of the reasons why I mentioned the despotic character of these countries is exactly to highlight the importance of the absolutist freezing of the political structure in some form or another, which is crucial in understanding the institutional obstacle for development. However, those forces that restrained development can be of all kinds of which religious traditionalism is a classical one. In India, of course, the caste-element brings in a very unique contributor to this pattern of restrain, while at the same time religious orthodoxy is a part of the restraining institutions, which has keep India in an iron grip until this very day. China in this regard has a special role, since religion has never played the kind of influence which has characterized Islam and India, so the mechanisms of restrain in the Chinese civilization have been of a different kind.

One of the things we need to understand is the meaning of golden periods in some of these absolutist or despotic societies. What do these golden periods actually mean? One of these golden periods is “Islam’s golden age,” which according to legend is associated with the Abbasid Caliphate, dating from the 8^th century and some period ahead. Many Islamic scholars have emphasized the great achievements of this period, but if this is the case, it only makes it more compelling to explain why this period came to an end and the whole Islamic system started a long period of socio-technological and economic decline? Because what was in reality the effect of this golden period? What difference did it make? In this way, from time to time, some of these despotic Empires had “golden periods” but these “golden periods” were often the old structure in full speed rather than real preludes for higher development. Thus, economic growth in and by itself is not a freeway to a higher type of civilizational development. Growth and development are two separate analytical entities. Indeed, “capitalism” in some of its early archaic regime-forms is only at best a necessary but not a sufficient factor on the road to higher development. One can argue whether Rome had capitalism and if we assume that Rome had capitalism; this in and by itself did certainly not mean that Rome already was half the way toward an industrial revolution. As a general rule, it is important to be careful and restrained, when we analyze the function of commercialism and capitalism in a historical process; they might or might not be elements in a process toward an industrial revolution.

Because, this was the trademark of despotism; its Empires might be growing, trade might be booming, and religious systems might flourishing but in the end of the day, it would often lead nowhere, since it had no major impact on socio-technological progress and growth would become self-exhausted after a while. In the pre-industrial Eastern world, growth was never self-transformatory, the forces of productivity would be carried primarily on “weak” sources of energy and it placed strict limits to productivity and to the organizational matrix of society. All ancient and pre-industrial empires of the Eastern type were all agricultural systems relying on muscle-power, and on comparatively primitive types of technology. The real constrain on development, however, was not the lack of energy but the lack of an adequate social order able to open the gateway of a rational encounter with the socio-technological conditions for the organization of society. Not surprisingly, these absolutist systems left little option for a decentralized, spontaneous order. Traditionalistic inertia was the prime state of affairs. Cultural and political constrains paralyzed or distorted any decisive attempt in establishing the kind of cognitive and civic environment necessary for the special blend of entrepreneurship and science, which at least historically should prove essential for breaking the ice.

There was no moment in European history short of the miracle of the Greek, which is more crucial than the fall of Rome. As I have argued in some of the previous instalments without the fall of the Roman Empire, it is highly unlikely the socio-economic development in Europe would have lead to the kind of institutional progress necessary for an industrial revolution. In this way, the impact of the barbarian Germanic tribes who determined the political-cultural landscape in Europe after the fall of Rome was absolute crucial. By highlighting the Germanic tribes, I don’t try to ignore the many other cultural contributions shaping the European experiments but it was undoubtedly the Germanic tribes who had the options of shaping the main cultural-political agenda as it emerged as a new reality in the early Middle Ages. As the new Germanic kingdoms rooted themselves in various corners of the European territory, they introduced a completely different way of shaping the institutions of civic society compared with that of the Roman Empire and what was especially significant was their attitude to the general build-up of adequate cognitive learning-process of society. These new cognitive structure was facilitated by the societal community of the Germanic tribes and was not a “gift of Christianity,” since the presence of Christianity in the Byzantine Empire did not produce the same result. The long-term significance of the Germanic culture codes was their ability to promote a fruitful historical development of vibrant entrepreneurship and scientific agendas within the general societal build-up. The new cognitive orientation in the German kingdom was itself a part of the different way in which the new Germanic kingdoms developed the institution of citizenship, a development that grew out of the tribes’ traditional heritage in which democratic and egalitarian factors place a sufficiently critical role. Indeed, the inadequacy of the Romans cognitive habits and the flaws of Rome’s institutional make-up were in the final analysis two sides of the same coin. In the new Germanic setting power was distributed in such a way, so the total equilibrium of forces made it difficult for any hegemonic power to prevail for long. It was the opposite of the Roman situation, where hegemonic tendencies existed in a constant rhapsody with itself. It is claimed that Rome was ruled by law but at least after Augustus powerful men was always stronger than the law (although it is true that Rome was a hybrid of both). Early Germanic Europe remained so fragmented and decentralized that many scholars have spoken about “the failure of state-building” (in many of these areas) but in reality it was not really a question of a the failure of state-building but about a radical different approach to the build-up of the ground-units of the society as a institutional category.   

In this way, the destruction of Rome was a destruction of a dead-end for European history. It is another way of emphasizing that the Middle Ages was not some kind of “extension” of the Roman Empire into the future or a “transformation” in that sense; in contrast the emerging of the Middle Ages constituted a radical break with the past. Naturally, in any radical transformation from one cultural-political system to the next, there always exists a transfer from the past into the future. For example in the case of Hitler’s Germany, the new Reich was build on many elements characterizing the Weimar-republic but few would claim what Hitler’s Reich just was the Weimar-republic in “transformed form:” few would doubt the radical break with the past despite the fact that many elements of the past was transferred into the future in the case of Hitler’s Germany. The same is true about the Roman elements being transferred into the new Germanic order of the Middle Ages; it is senseless to claim that the Middle Ages just was the Roman Empire in a “new version.” The factor of a radical break is fundamental for any deeper understanding of the new institutions that emerged.  

Naturally, the question of the degree to which the Germanic tribes used the Greek-Roman heritage in building more sophisticated versions of their own cultural-political system is naturally an important issue for academic debate but generally there existed strong limits to the success by which the Romans was able to “Romanizing” the indigenous people under their submission and control. In the end of the day the Germans remanded the Germans, the Celt the Celt, the Arabs the Arabs and the Jews the Jews. There were exceptions to this rule; Syria appearedly according to Maurice Sartre had been greatly Hellenized in ways, which for example never happened in Great Britain despite claims to the contrary. However, the Hellenization of Syria was a fact even before the Romans arrived, so this development was not simply the fruit of the Empire’s civilizational might. Much has been written about how much various indigenous tribes became “Romanized” but in reality this question varied in the extreme and in the end of the day, it didn’t seem to touch upon the core of the ethnic phenomenon (in at least significantly many cases). Indeed, if anything in the world has long-term systemic survivability; then it is the ethnic factor.  

The most important component the Germanic tribes adopted from Rome was in the final analysis literacy (which was not any particular Roman invention per se) and it was Christianity, which functioned as the prime agent in this task; indeed, the prestige of the Church was strongly connected with its role as an agency for the new technology. The key to the realities of the new Germanic kingdoms lied in its radically different institutional conditions for citizenship, which was introduced into the societal build-up and this issue was strongly correlated to new attitudes toward learning and cognitive orientation. Again, it is important to emphasize the radical different way in which the Middle Ages addressed the issue of knowledge in ways that had never existed in Rome. It didn’t mean that the Romans, as far as the upper classes went didn’t care for education; indeed, education was and became increasingly a popular target for the upper-class Romans, for whom education was associated with status and prestige. A famous picture form Pompeii portrays a young woman and a young man with various writing tools in their hands; it was indicative for the great prestige that literacy and education had among the upper-class and upper-middle classes of society. The difference between Romans and Germanic approach was not simply a question about the interest in education as such but rather the context, which each culture endowed in the institution. The crucial difference lied in the level of discourse. Although there were philosophers in the Roman Empire (in most cases people of Greek decent), the Romans either didn’t care much about philosophy or to the extent they did, their command of the topic was generally mediocre. (Stoicism is the shining exception from the rule). Beyond their significant intellectual capacities in statesmanship, the Romans, generally, had a compassion for the exotic, simplistic and occult and their idea of knowledge and cognition was geared within that frame of mind. Intellectually, on the spiritual level, the Roman had never progress far beyond the point, which Plato would have characterized as a Kindergarten state-of-mind. Religiously, they never really went beyond a low-key, ritualized hodgepodge of “household” Gods and icons. Create a statue and call something a “God,” and the average Roman would be intellectually content and happy. This pattern of cognitive mapping corresponded to the strange way in which the Romans both was cynically street-smart on the one hand and strangely intellectually naïve on the other. It was not accidental that rhetoric was the most estimated discipline among the arts of the Roman academic community; in Rome it was more important to persuade than to understand. The wise man in Rome was a lawyer, Cicero was the prototypical case. Knowledge in Rome translated most of all into sophisticated power-interpretations; a capable Roman “intellectual” dealt with war, politics and taxation not with something as lofty as philosophy. Generally, social prestige in Roman society was a persistently inflationary and the claim about a trend toward decadence as argued by Gibbon lied implicit in this pattern. Because the social institutions were comparatively weak, there was no deeper obstacle restraining the political scene. As a phenomenon, it was correlated to the cybernetic domination of the political system in the interpenetrative mechanisms of the Roman social system; it resulted in a race for power, which knew of no limits or moderation. In the end of the day, education in Rome had much to do with the Romans’ obsession with power and the cognitive gestalt was seen as just another way of power-control and a path to personal gain. The idea of the Greek that knowledge should be loved for its own sake was a very strange notion for any Roman. The Roman nation had been born in a harsh (almost desperate) struggle for survival and this quest for power-control became constitutive for their world-view as such.  

It is true that as the Empire began to decline and as various alarm-signals began to flash; the Roman population  (which now have become increasing “multicultural”) showed signs of increasing intellectual (or spiritual) interests, which clearly expressed a psychological quest of understanding the meaning of the alarming development characterizing the fate of the Empire. Yet, the Romans were ill prepared for this intellectual challenge. Again, it was the Romans tendency toward the exotic and occult that prevailed. In the moment of spiritual crisis, many Romans were easy prey for the emerging supermarket of salvationist and exoteric cults arriving as specialities from the Middle Eastern, of which Christianity just was one of many.

Let me start this instalment of my essay on the industrial revolution by reminding the reader that I have suggested that the key preconditions for Europe’s historical road to the industrial revolution could be found in three distinct elements: Greek philosophy, the Germanic tribes in their function as the initiator of the spirit of the Middle ages and the concept of the metaphysical quest. In this instalment, I would like to continue the discussion of the rise of the Middle Ages and how its historical initiation changed the course of world-history for ever. The great accomplishment of the Middle Ages was the combined synthesis of Greek philosophy with the type of dynamic society that was created by the Germanic tribes as they settled after the tumultuous period surrounding the fall of Rome. What was particularly important in this new kind of medieval society was its vibrant intellectual environment, which included what I have chosen to call a metaphysical quest and by which I imply, the way in which Europe interpreted the meaning of life and regarded itself as a project in the world. This synthesis of factors, however, would first emerged bit by bit over time; in the beginning of the process, the Germanic tribes and other people of the times had certainly little time for discussing metaphysical problems, since they were struggling to survive in the plainest sense confronted with hunger, infrastructural collapse and plundering bandits of all kinds in the tumultuous period that characterized Europe in the first many centuries after year 300 AD.

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During the Greek age, the metaphysical quest was one of a general philosophical interest in reason and knowledge as basic categories. Based on actual observations, the Greek thinkers asked basic questions about the nature of the universe without predisposing any idea of some supernatural creation. What concerned them was the order of nature itself without any supernatural assumptions. The Greek approach was epistemological of orientation; the focus was rational and abstract, while at the same time based on empirical observations. They wanted to understand the very nature of knowing. The spirit of this agenda is reflected in Thales famous maxim, “Know thyself.” The key to the Greek scientific method was to look for “general principles” induced from nature itself yet on the same time understanding such principles as a part of logos, that is, the architecture of reason itself. As Frederick Klemm has argued, “the great cultural achievement of ancient Greece was undoubtedly the development of a scientific sense. The Greek was in fact the first Man of theory.” The condition for intellectual discussion in classic Greece was basically secularist, while higher knowledge in Babylonia and Egypt was in the hands of priests and entangled in religious dogma, rational thinking in Greece became a lay movement and was devoted to reason alone.

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