Sam, if you and your mates glazed over at Shakespeare, it just means that you had horrid teachers of English. Which is I suppose part of the deepest problem.
And if you need to play historical fiction, stay closer to a period that you can study without glazing over, maybe more contemporary?
In the history of humanity, there have been hundreds, if not thousands of incarnations of a structure that can be called the state, all with their centripetal and centrifugal forces in constant struggle. Ideology of all stripes mythologises cherry-picked parts of history because they are susceptible of being used symbolically to strike the brains of the populace.
It is painful and rather below someone who considers himself an intellectual and is not part of a ministry of propaganda.
Look, although the rise of the nation-state is an European phenomenon, it is the ideologies of the 18th-19th century that create it, on the tides of the Industrial Revolution.
The state before that is a nebulous concept made of many different things. The idea of state as a super partes entity, starts with the idea/ideal of the power of the Crown as the manifestation of the essence of a country, and its roots are in very late classical and early medieval cultures, Celtic and Germanic, in which the King was MATERIALLY the personification of the land. Where it began to develop into a coherent idea, in England, was with Henry II and his Assizes. The Charta that his son John was forced to sign was a setback, which yet started more interesting developments.
And the kinds of state developed in the kingdoms of France and of England were very different from each other. Nor cannot you understand Wolsey without understanding the War of the Roses and what Wolsey was trying to balance.
I understand that the Tudors are an attractive thing to point at, because they made for an amazing amount of popular sex-and-history shows in the last 30 years.
Like the Tudor nobles of old, he’s rallying a coalition to challenge the modern centralized state."
You say that like it's a bad thing. This may come as a surprise, but America is in fact largely a private concern, or used to be before the bureaucrats completed their slow motion, quiet coup. The Tudors had nothing in common with today's ordinary Americans reclaiming control of their country.
You need to go back further than the Tudors to the Crisis of the Third Century to see what happens when Mafia government collapses. In the halcyon days of the High Empire there was very little bureaucracy. The Roman Empire was a family business--a patronage system where magnates who were precursors of contemporary Mob bosses dispensed largess to their clients and funded public works--the senatorial class in Rome and, on a smaller scale, the curiales in the provinces.
But the business wasn't sustainable so it went to hell in the third century, with military coups, emperors lasting a matter of months, and general misery until Diocletian installed the Administrative State which became Byzantine in every sense of the word. This was the origin of the bureaucratized Deep State, and it lasted 1100 years. It would probably still be around if it weren't for militant Islam and we'd all be speaking Greek, with all the miserable case endings and middle voice. Bureaucracy is good.
The parallel between a mafia system and the system of the early Roman Empire does not hold, I am sorry to say. Analogies of this kind are always dangerous. The system of clienteles was a constitutive trait of Roman society since the very founding of the Republic, a tribal structure; the laws of Rome instituted check and balances to very skilfully prevent the capture of the res publica by one class, one rank, or one faction; yes, factions were organised around family names -- but the gentes were broad, widespread, often openly at odds internally, and over all not at all hierarchical: there was no head to which the members of a gens owed obedience (the Mafia family is entirely hierarchical, a militarised structure based on the principle of support and protection of members, which reveals its origin as a secret society initially formed in Sicily to counter first Spanish and then Bourbon rule).
Yes, much of the political struggles in the Roman Republic were conducted in manners that remind the modern man of gang wars... one has just to look at the actual historical Gracchi brothers to see this. But faction violence and mafia violence are far from the same.
As for the High Empire, I would like to introduce you to the administrative state established by Augustus. Nothing that Diocletian did was radical innovation, except for the Tetrarchy (which failed miserably at preventing the succession of Emperors through coups and murders); although the Diocletian reforms rendered the administration of the state more efficient, the Empire suffered from the foundational instability of not having a definite and clear law for the succession of Emperors -- Emperors fell and rose with appalling swiftness (from Tiberius onwards) not because the Senatorial class and the provincial Curiales did too much faction fighting, but because Emperors were raised by acclamation and mostly by the army, and dispatched by court conspiracies mostly involving the Praetorian Guard.
And I'll give you that hands down, the Byzantine administration (developed mostly by Justinian) was impressive -- although it did not prevent several even more impressive crises, coups and upheavals. It had some amazingly modern traits as well, like a social acknowledgement of the agency of women that one can see, in many spheres of public and private life, as ahead of the times.
Still no, we would not all be speaking Greek if the Byzantine Empire had lasted to this day, because the Western Empire had become Germanic long, long before the fall of Constantinople, and still kept writing Latin, with all its blessed case endings, in everything of public momentum for centuries.
The Byzantine Empire shrank over the centuries, from the Mediterranean-Anatolian hegemony of Justinian to the puny remain that the Fourth Crusade joyously sacked at the dawn of the 13th century. It shrank because it lost military efficacy and cultural attraction, it became increasingly isolationist in the middle of more belligerent neighbours.
Constantinople and its suburbs might still be around as some sort of political entity if the Turks (no militant Islam, just conquerors that happened to have become Muslim) had not seized it two centuries later. It is extremely doubtful that it would have re-created an Empire.
Truly, I believe that counterfactual history is a fun but quite idle past time.
We need more history buffs, always. The kind of buffs who have some knowledge, but not an excessively specialised knowledge, and speculate, but like you do not take offence at being told with solid explanations that their speculations may be interesting but are flawed on this and that. And who hopefully continue, do not abandon the speculation altogether, but seriously consider ways in which they can include new/reliable information in their speculation, which will thereby change and bring more fruit.
This is how the remarkable Philippa Langley found the remains of Richard III, in spite of strong academic scepticism and even obstruction. This is how actual scholarship is created, and knowledge is expanded.
Heck, I am Thecla Porphyrogenita, a citizen of Byzantium Novum http://byzantiumnovum.org/ and Countess of California (aka Hesperia) though not active in the micronation right now. My job is philosophy, specialty (analytic!) metaphysics. There are, with good reason, no philosophy buffs. Right now I'm involved in a book-length project which is a sustained attack on perdurantist accounts of personal persistence according to which persons are maximal R-interrelated aggregates of person-stages. Believe me you don't want to know. I 'do' identity puzzles. I'm addicted to history podcasts and always seemed to me that it must be exceptionally cool to be in an academic discipline that has some fallout, however dissipated, for rank amateurs--and is actually of practical value. Pleased to meet ya!
The pleasure is mine. I am 70 years old and spent a large part of my life before the advent of the internet, but have never turned up my nose at a good bit of creative anachronism. Interesting, fruit-bearing things happen when people strive to immerse themselves into a past culture and civilisation.
Aside of the simple pleasure of it. It is what drives academic historians too -- beyond the need to severely limit speculation with strict fact checking, which is absolutely necessary but still often frustrating (also because the original sources are often few and sparse, and we have passions).
I recommend you the book Open by Johan Norberg. He writes that empires failed in situations when they became less open and more closed as regarding politics, economy and institutions.
I am a historian of the Anthony Goodman and Jonathan Sumption school, and instinctively suspicious of any sweeping generalisation about the beginning, purpose and destinies of human social architectures throughout history. I know Norberg as a historian of ideas and an advocate of that specific ideology called libertarianism -- parts of which I agree with and parts of which seem to me the ravings of madmen intoxicated by their own hubris.
Norberg has mostly written about modernity, and very interestingly by what I have read. I somewhat dread his sallies into pre-industrial-revolution history, because I fear that he will only take the examples that prove his convictions and leave all the rest, and so deliver a comforting mythology to his circle. After all, he is the one who has written How Capitalism Will Save The World.. and that prophecy seems in this March even farther from becoming true than my dear Fukuyama's old "end of history" statement.
Thanks, Sam. This is a really dangerous development. Neither Trump nor Musk wants free markets or a more decentralised economy. Instead, they want the federal government to be pro-business and be used to reward loyal persons and organisations. Musk is what in Sweden is called bidragsentreprenör = benefit entrepreneur
If the stock market continues its downward spiral, inflation moves toward 6%, and unemployment jumps to 6% or so, a lot of people will be getting off the MAGA train.
Sam, I suppose that Harry Hopkins would be the closest example to what Musk is doing, although building rather than dismantling the state. He even lived in the White House with his wife. One of the most thoughtful commentators on the problems of empire is Wolfgang Streek. The recent English translation of his book Taking Back Control? States and State Systems after Globalism is very dense and thought provoking. The current global order held together because it profited the middle and working classes, Les Trente Glorieuses are just one example. Instead of the logic of the Cold War and the economic miracle that followed WWII, the centralized state faces a Wilsonian problem of how to convince citizens in the hinterlands that foreign involvement benefits them. This is always the problem with empire.
Oh dear, the pain.
Sam, if you and your mates glazed over at Shakespeare, it just means that you had horrid teachers of English. Which is I suppose part of the deepest problem.
And if you need to play historical fiction, stay closer to a period that you can study without glazing over, maybe more contemporary?
In the history of humanity, there have been hundreds, if not thousands of incarnations of a structure that can be called the state, all with their centripetal and centrifugal forces in constant struggle. Ideology of all stripes mythologises cherry-picked parts of history because they are susceptible of being used symbolically to strike the brains of the populace.
It is painful and rather below someone who considers himself an intellectual and is not part of a ministry of propaganda.
Look, although the rise of the nation-state is an European phenomenon, it is the ideologies of the 18th-19th century that create it, on the tides of the Industrial Revolution.
The state before that is a nebulous concept made of many different things. The idea of state as a super partes entity, starts with the idea/ideal of the power of the Crown as the manifestation of the essence of a country, and its roots are in very late classical and early medieval cultures, Celtic and Germanic, in which the King was MATERIALLY the personification of the land. Where it began to develop into a coherent idea, in England, was with Henry II and his Assizes. The Charta that his son John was forced to sign was a setback, which yet started more interesting developments.
And the kinds of state developed in the kingdoms of France and of England were very different from each other. Nor cannot you understand Wolsey without understanding the War of the Roses and what Wolsey was trying to balance.
I understand that the Tudors are an attractive thing to point at, because they made for an amazing amount of popular sex-and-history shows in the last 30 years.
But please. Have pity.
"Trump Is Privatizing America
Like the Tudor nobles of old, he’s rallying a coalition to challenge the modern centralized state."
You say that like it's a bad thing. This may come as a surprise, but America is in fact largely a private concern, or used to be before the bureaucrats completed their slow motion, quiet coup. The Tudors had nothing in common with today's ordinary Americans reclaiming control of their country.
Reclaiming control? How? By voting every 4 yours. And many are not even doing that
You need to go back further than the Tudors to the Crisis of the Third Century to see what happens when Mafia government collapses. In the halcyon days of the High Empire there was very little bureaucracy. The Roman Empire was a family business--a patronage system where magnates who were precursors of contemporary Mob bosses dispensed largess to their clients and funded public works--the senatorial class in Rome and, on a smaller scale, the curiales in the provinces.
But the business wasn't sustainable so it went to hell in the third century, with military coups, emperors lasting a matter of months, and general misery until Diocletian installed the Administrative State which became Byzantine in every sense of the word. This was the origin of the bureaucratized Deep State, and it lasted 1100 years. It would probably still be around if it weren't for militant Islam and we'd all be speaking Greek, with all the miserable case endings and middle voice. Bureaucracy is good.
Entertaining concept, but no.
The parallel between a mafia system and the system of the early Roman Empire does not hold, I am sorry to say. Analogies of this kind are always dangerous. The system of clienteles was a constitutive trait of Roman society since the very founding of the Republic, a tribal structure; the laws of Rome instituted check and balances to very skilfully prevent the capture of the res publica by one class, one rank, or one faction; yes, factions were organised around family names -- but the gentes were broad, widespread, often openly at odds internally, and over all not at all hierarchical: there was no head to which the members of a gens owed obedience (the Mafia family is entirely hierarchical, a militarised structure based on the principle of support and protection of members, which reveals its origin as a secret society initially formed in Sicily to counter first Spanish and then Bourbon rule).
Yes, much of the political struggles in the Roman Republic were conducted in manners that remind the modern man of gang wars... one has just to look at the actual historical Gracchi brothers to see this. But faction violence and mafia violence are far from the same.
As for the High Empire, I would like to introduce you to the administrative state established by Augustus. Nothing that Diocletian did was radical innovation, except for the Tetrarchy (which failed miserably at preventing the succession of Emperors through coups and murders); although the Diocletian reforms rendered the administration of the state more efficient, the Empire suffered from the foundational instability of not having a definite and clear law for the succession of Emperors -- Emperors fell and rose with appalling swiftness (from Tiberius onwards) not because the Senatorial class and the provincial Curiales did too much faction fighting, but because Emperors were raised by acclamation and mostly by the army, and dispatched by court conspiracies mostly involving the Praetorian Guard.
And I'll give you that hands down, the Byzantine administration (developed mostly by Justinian) was impressive -- although it did not prevent several even more impressive crises, coups and upheavals. It had some amazingly modern traits as well, like a social acknowledgement of the agency of women that one can see, in many spheres of public and private life, as ahead of the times.
Still no, we would not all be speaking Greek if the Byzantine Empire had lasted to this day, because the Western Empire had become Germanic long, long before the fall of Constantinople, and still kept writing Latin, with all its blessed case endings, in everything of public momentum for centuries.
The Byzantine Empire shrank over the centuries, from the Mediterranean-Anatolian hegemony of Justinian to the puny remain that the Fourth Crusade joyously sacked at the dawn of the 13th century. It shrank because it lost military efficacy and cultural attraction, it became increasingly isolationist in the middle of more belligerent neighbours.
Constantinople and its suburbs might still be around as some sort of political entity if the Turks (no militant Islam, just conquerors that happened to have become Muslim) had not seized it two centuries later. It is extremely doubtful that it would have re-created an Empire.
Truly, I believe that counterfactual history is a fun but quite idle past time.
This is good history. I’m just a buff—enjoying speculation.
We need more history buffs, always. The kind of buffs who have some knowledge, but not an excessively specialised knowledge, and speculate, but like you do not take offence at being told with solid explanations that their speculations may be interesting but are flawed on this and that. And who hopefully continue, do not abandon the speculation altogether, but seriously consider ways in which they can include new/reliable information in their speculation, which will thereby change and bring more fruit.
This is how the remarkable Philippa Langley found the remains of Richard III, in spite of strong academic scepticism and even obstruction. This is how actual scholarship is created, and knowledge is expanded.
Keep it up.
Heck, I am Thecla Porphyrogenita, a citizen of Byzantium Novum http://byzantiumnovum.org/ and Countess of California (aka Hesperia) though not active in the micronation right now. My job is philosophy, specialty (analytic!) metaphysics. There are, with good reason, no philosophy buffs. Right now I'm involved in a book-length project which is a sustained attack on perdurantist accounts of personal persistence according to which persons are maximal R-interrelated aggregates of person-stages. Believe me you don't want to know. I 'do' identity puzzles. I'm addicted to history podcasts and always seemed to me that it must be exceptionally cool to be in an academic discipline that has some fallout, however dissipated, for rank amateurs--and is actually of practical value. Pleased to meet ya!
The pleasure is mine. I am 70 years old and spent a large part of my life before the advent of the internet, but have never turned up my nose at a good bit of creative anachronism. Interesting, fruit-bearing things happen when people strive to immerse themselves into a past culture and civilisation.
Aside of the simple pleasure of it. It is what drives academic historians too -- beyond the need to severely limit speculation with strict fact checking, which is absolutely necessary but still often frustrating (also because the original sources are often few and sparse, and we have passions).
Also, since it is your province, I would recommend to you the mind output of this brilliant young man from my country:
https://www.conspicuouscognition.com/
I find his thoughts highly enlightening, often in unexpected ways.
I noticed that you are not a young bird either. I am pleased.
I recommend you the book Open by Johan Norberg. He writes that empires failed in situations when they became less open and more closed as regarding politics, economy and institutions.
I am a historian of the Anthony Goodman and Jonathan Sumption school, and instinctively suspicious of any sweeping generalisation about the beginning, purpose and destinies of human social architectures throughout history. I know Norberg as a historian of ideas and an advocate of that specific ideology called libertarianism -- parts of which I agree with and parts of which seem to me the ravings of madmen intoxicated by their own hubris.
Norberg has mostly written about modernity, and very interestingly by what I have read. I somewhat dread his sallies into pre-industrial-revolution history, because I fear that he will only take the examples that prove his convictions and leave all the rest, and so deliver a comforting mythology to his circle. After all, he is the one who has written How Capitalism Will Save The World.. and that prophecy seems in this March even farther from becoming true than my dear Fukuyama's old "end of history" statement.
But thank you, I will get and read the book.
Bureaucracy is good first and foremost if you're a bureaucrat.
Do you prefer the mob?
I am completely satisfied that those are not the only two choices.
So you prefer woke activists governing your town or?
Better than a traditional society were women breed, men fight, and Big Men rule.
Thanks, Sam. This is a really dangerous development. Neither Trump nor Musk wants free markets or a more decentralised economy. Instead, they want the federal government to be pro-business and be used to reward loyal persons and organisations. Musk is what in Sweden is called bidragsentreprenör = benefit entrepreneur
If the stock market continues its downward spiral, inflation moves toward 6%, and unemployment jumps to 6% or so, a lot of people will be getting off the MAGA train.
I'm not optimistic. Trump has prepared his Base for pain and they have faith that it's just temporary.
We understand that one does pushups, painfully, to get stronger.
Sam, I suppose that Harry Hopkins would be the closest example to what Musk is doing, although building rather than dismantling the state. He even lived in the White House with his wife. One of the most thoughtful commentators on the problems of empire is Wolfgang Streek. The recent English translation of his book Taking Back Control? States and State Systems after Globalism is very dense and thought provoking. The current global order held together because it profited the middle and working classes, Les Trente Glorieuses are just one example. Instead of the logic of the Cold War and the economic miracle that followed WWII, the centralized state faces a Wilsonian problem of how to convince citizens in the hinterlands that foreign involvement benefits them. This is always the problem with empire.
The real question is privatization of America its only hope for survival? You could view it as Morganesque. My word.
How?