Political development

4. Wickham, Inheritance of Rome (14 Apr 2019)

by kurto

Assesses socioeconomic trends in formerly imperial Roman lands over 400 – 1000 AD, describing the collapse as tectonic but not catastrophic: culture especially displayed continuity and evolution if simplification.

The era’s most important event was the Empire’s breakup at the hands of the Vandals in 439, severing Rome’s food supply (i.e., grain and oil), followed toward century’s end by Gaul’s defection to the barbarian powers. These restricted trade, simplified wealth to land ownership, and restricted government (fisc, justice, administration). By 650 every successor kingdom had its own traditions. Islam’s rise further severed Rome from the Byzantine world (which for a time retained control of the Nile valley), completing the end of the Mediterranean regime and prompting two centuries of ferment. Taxation, shifting from commerce toward land, closed off the possibility of successors to Rome, prompting elites to favor military pursuits over luxury.
Roman culture emphasized great cities, which decayed. Medieval Christianity, by contrast, was not subsumed in Roman values: its structures changed the least, its critique of society and government persisted. Secular education gave way to religious inspiration.

Wickham organizes around the Roman West, the rising Islamic sphere, and Byzantium, and emphasizes archaeology, for example the dispersion of clay pots indicating trade, as free of ‘assumed narrative’ found in manuscripts and such traditional evidence.

In the European Common Era, the period 500-800 marks the greatest local autonomy, the least centralization. Population was sparse but not disorderly. There was little inter-regional trade, Francia being more active than its contemporaries (along the Rhine and the Meuse to the North Sea) and Britain less so: wealth maps accordingly. Most housing reverted to wood (until 1200); elites moved into towers as visually claim to leadership and status, the visual (and the miraculous) being more powerful than written word. Gaul and Germany formed under Merovingian customs over the 6th to 8th centuries, though not too far prior to Charles Martel’s ascendance. Visigothic Spain and Lombard Italy elaborated differently, the Spanish retaining greater cohesion until the Islamic conquest and the Italians fracturing entirely. Only the Franks sought empire, only the Spanish Visigoths retained imperial government. All militarized, all lost sophisticated taxation. Court-centered aristocracies persisted, of Roman stock but post-Roman custom. (English and Irish social structures congealed more easily under Anglo-Saxon or Gaelic patterns, the exception being Catholic influence). Though also disrupted, the Church retained its institutional shape – almost one-third of land in France and Italy was church-owned. To varying degrees, bishops (who tended to be aristocrats) held local sway. Literacy declined less than once supposed – government was still based on written instruction – but society’s elites militarized and much land was needed to feed and clothe armies. Europe’s early medieval ages have been seen as Germanic but though societies indeed localized, Wickham holds post-Roman sociocultural practices didn’t change much after 750 and the greater change was militarization. Reduced distribution of wealth (land) determined what the peasantry could and could no longer do. Under the Merovingians, for example, court was most important; some peasants were free, some were serfs, checking broader class solidarity; women were less present publicly than in Rome.

The Byzantine empire separated from Rome over 609-642, being unable to hold back Islamic (Persian) attacks and so losing the productive wealth of Egypt; Constantinople depopulated from 500,000 to ~ 50,000 residents, a much faster decline than Rome two centuries earlier. Byzantines survived by turning to the state.

Development in the Islamic lands is generally presented as contrasting with the West and Byzantium, rather than in terms of theology. From 630, Arabs sought to remain separate from the lands they conquered; to be on the military payroll was a badge of honor. Consequently Persian and Roman society did not blend. Beginning with late 8th-century Umayyads, administration shifted to viziers and the center of Islamic government commenced a continuous line of caliphs running to the early 16th century. In the 9th century, Baghdad became the cultural center of Islam, led by a community of scholars premised on ulama. (But: the 9th century also saw the Sunni-Shia split.). There were four main schools of law ranging from legal reasoning (interpretation) of caliphal legislation to hadith (premised on Mohammed’s statements). By 900 the latter prevailed – the ‘closing of the gate’ – no new laws promulgated by the caliph or anyone else was considered fixed. Land did not equate to power in medieval Islam, only position within the state, which brought tax wealth. Paradoxically, the succeeding Abbasid empire fell because the state grew too large.

Both Muslims and Byzantines were concerned with representation – what is holy, what is idolatrous. Aversion to the visual was a factor in the Roman-Byzantine schism of 843 (the popes long since having identified as Roman). Both Byzantine and Arab commerce were closely tied to the state: private wealth gave access to the state, which led to more complex ways to accumulate and recycle wealth.

The Byzantine city-state, which saw declining trade over the 7-8th centuries, recovered in the 11th-12 centuries notwithstanding the coming Arab conquest. By the 10th century, the second great Mediterranean trade cycle, including in the following century the Italian ports as well as the Crusade-fueled trade, was underway. But intra-regional trade among Europe, Islam, and Byzantium did not recover.

After 800 the West saw the introduction of moral political practice, exemplified by the Carolingians: the church and state working together. Yet by the period’s end, Carolingian public structures had failed, replaced by the rise of aristocratic power, the exclusion of peasantry from the public sphere (somewhat analogous to the collapse of the caliphate), and the eventual rise of European kingdoms. Charlemagne matches Justinian in advancing basic literacy, religion, socially minded legislation, and participation in assemblies. He patronized scholars but the sociopolitical world of 6-8th centuries pertained into the 9th – a time that matched the French Revolution as a hotbed of education invading politics. Carolingian rulers allowed elites to rise according to intellectual ability, for purposes of promoting Christendom (theology), unlike the Byzantines, who favored tax-funded officials and army commanders. Leaders felt it necessary to moralize their decisions; however, Carolingian initiatives reached local societies via public justice not moral reform measures. The Carolingian era was destroyed by the multiplication of successors; these regional hegemons were more important than the overall rise of aristocrats; its decline undermined the pope’s international stature.

Culturally, Carolingians evidenced the dynamic of kings choosing bishops and bishops correcting kings; Byzantines relied on Roman tradition for assurance; the Abbasids looked to the now-defined ulama. As in Byzantium, in Islam education trained one for statecraft. Solidity came from tax (which was absent in the west), but religion of the elite was not seen to be essential to state survival or that the task of the state to provide for communal salvation. Frankish aristocrats after the Carolingians were less likely to be literate; the church upheld ‘international’ culture.

In the Viking era, southern England suffered no permanent regional breakdown before 1066. Only Dublin and Normandy, plus north Scotland and Ireland, survived as Viking political retains. The rest of Danish settlements were soon culturally absorbed. Aristocratic dominance based on property was more pronounced than the continent; yet the king maintained more political control. Arguably the main political creation was the catalytic of unifying England.
Russia exhibited Byzantine influences, but was too far from Islam, and so developed of internal dynamics. Spain’s government stems from the Visigoths not Francia or Al-Andalus. Sociopolitical systems in ‘ouher Europe’, notwithstanding this diversity, stemmed from solidifying aristocratic power as well as borrowing government mechanisms from neighbors, for example specialized royal officials, top-down judiciary, or military service owed the state. In 400, stable systems stopped at the Rhine-Danube border; by 1000 recognizable polities were evident west of the Volga, albeit in weaker forms than during the Roman era.

Institutional politics were most effective where there was a strong tax (e.g., Rome, Islam, Byzantium), and less secure if dependent on land grants to aristocrats since the metropole was likely to run out of land. The decline of public culture, which was the strongest remaining link to Rome), for example in law, often devolved to private rule (e.g., inside private castles). The land tax which underpinned the Roman fisc continued in simplified form, hurting the peasantry (as well as intraregional trade) since it was not distributed. The 10th century was often like the 9th yet saw substantial changes in public assemblies.

The decline of the peasantry, ‘encaged’ in castles, figures prominently in Wickham’s writing. During the Carolingian and succeeding eras, aristocrats consolidated land ownership though peasants did not. But inheritance became normal only post 1000 (in Francia, post 900), which cramped monarchies. Private castles were a 10th century development, tying aristocrats to regional more than political interests, and leading to division among those who fight, those who work – the so-called feudal revolution. Feudal seignory is not a Carolingian structure writ small but a structural change; but not all aristocrats left court to rule local regions. Peasants in the 9-10th centuries were slowly excluded from the public sphere. Carolingian political economy promoted the demesne, ‘encaging’ the lower classes on the estate: they were dependent on the lords for land to farm and live. By the time they re-emerged after 1000, the Middle Ages were effectively over: villages were spheres of public power, estates of private rule.

The key major trends (shifts) of the era from 400-1000 by chronology are:
1. The breakup of the Roman Empire, which was more economic and fiscal than culture, aided by the rise of Islam severing Rome from the Byzantine world and fueling two centuries of crisis. In this time, governmental changes in the Islamic regions were more dramatic even then Carolingian lands.
2. The introduction of moralistic political practices exemplified by the Carolingian project – the church and state working together.
3. The end of the Carolingian empire’s public structures circa 1000, most obviously demonstrated by the rise of aristocratic power and the exclusion of peasantry from the public sphere. A somewhat analogous trend is evident in the breakup of the Caliphate. In northern Europe, modern kingdoms emerged.
4. Wealth was accumulated via land ownership, and land could be effectively taxed. The peasants suffered, regional exchange increased.
5. Institutionalized politics were most effective if there was strong tax revenue, and less so if the government was dependent on land grants to aristocrats.
6. The development of public culture with the strongest links to Rome was law; the decline to private rule on the estates (in French castles) illustrates the point.

Of note: French historiography has predominated the later Medieval ages, but the Frankish experience was not typical of Europe.

3. Fitzgerald et al., Made in Queensland (11 Feb 2023)

by kurto

Narrates politics and government from formation in 1859 to the early 2000s, lamenting the persistent, centrifugal influence of such industries as ranching, sugar, and mining while emphasizing education and the arts in a state not known for such disciplines. The book often reads as a historicist critique, for example failure to sooner adopt 20th-century voting standards – notwithstanding the Sunshine State and Australia being in the world’s vanguard. Left unexplored are such matters as how the Australian Labor Party’s assumption of party supremacy over parliamentarians became Peter Beattie-era ‘consultative government’ or why ‘primary industries’ and country regions have retained influence despite two-thirds of the citizens coming to live in the southeast portion of the state (‘imagined ruralism’ lacking explanatory rigor).
Of note:
• In the late 1800s, the bias toward inland rails, rather than coastal connections, evinced opposition to Brisbane interests
• Queensland uniquely favored importing islanders, running contrary to white Australian policy – notably favored by the ALP as a means of raising wages
• The period 1903-15 marked a political sea change, including such innovations as industrial wages arbitration, as the state reacted to 1893’s depression with ‘New Liberalism’ – the state fostering equality of opportunity – as well as Federation
• During the Depression, the Labor government funded infrastructure without upending the primary industries, in part because the ALP was strongest in the country districts. The party believed regionalization had helped sidestep some urban hardships of New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia
• Queensland modernized in the postwar era: railway mileage exploded; suburbs were retrofitted for utilities and sewage; motels were popular as women’s holidays. Politically, the state was isolated from Australia by the reactionary, sleazy Bjelke-Petersen government (to 1988). More specifically, Brisbane’s 1987 Fitzgerald policy-corruption industry offset the 1982 Commonwealth Games and 1988’s World Expo
From the 1990s, globalization (as if international competition was a new economic phenomenon) changed public policy from regionalization to neoliberal rationalization, as evidenced in the closing of state schools in small towns. Fly-in, fly-out employment took root. At last a falsifiable thesis, if minimally unexplored. The book lacks an analytical structure to underpin the state’s character. (On the policy side, schools and the arts are perpetually underfunded, and reconciliation is always exacerbated, unfinished; there is no discussion of sport, especially rugby league.)
It seems the continuing role of primary industries as well as tourism reflect the scale of revenue and employment, which along with expansive landmass countervails Brisbane; the state has continuously attracted intranational migration; and citizens are consciously proud of their work and lifestyle.

See also: http://www.oeler.us/2021/07/07/19-gorman-heartland-30-oct-2020/

6. Fukuyama, Origins of Political Order (10 Nov 2013)

by kurto

Efficient apparatus, rule of law, and accountability are the pillars of effective government and thus political order. Bypassing the thinking of Ancient Greece, Fukuyama relies on anthropology to locate the modalities of government and simultaneously man’s tendency to underline structure through familial instincts. Premodern China, 13th-century Egypt, 16th-century Turkey, and the medieval Catholic Church provide leading case studies of statecraft and its demise. As ever, decline is an important theme: moral and cultural advancement suggest political decay. To paraphrase Chris Caldwell, in this taxonomy of political forms (up to the French Revolution), the author as political thinker considers what is best for man, and as political scientist what is best for government. As such, passages are dry and detached; however, the beginning each chapter helpfully limns its contents. Worth rereading.

26. Decker, Utah Politics (16 Dec 2022)

by kurto

Utah’s exceptionalism stems from the Latter-day Saints’ deplorable opposition to the sexual revolution, animating its Republican affinities and consequently separation from the American mainstream. ‘Traditional morality conflicts with American ideals of freedom and equality’, Decker ventures (p. 343) without substantiation, not to mention why the GOP is beyond the pale. Further, as the author himself shows, the state’s strongly GOP character springs from resisting federal diktats. Preconceptions of normalcy trump the considerable evidence amassed: Decker is unwilling to grapple with civic purpose. The Mormon church and therefore Utah rely on ‘habit, culture, religion, which are hard to instill and not good tools for government’ (p. 347).
Having acquiesced to Washington’s animus against polygamy, Utah sought Washington’s favors over 1890-1940, particularly during the Depression – the only period of Democratic rule. Interestingly, this was also an era of net emigration. Then the postwar state eschewed economic growth for social alignment with the reactionary GOP. Notwithstanding the Salt Lake valley-rural dichotomy, the ‘Downwinder’ phenomenon described herein, and extensive opposition to US land and water management policies, propelled as they have been by unelected NGBs and bureaucrats as well as Democratic politics, for Decker religion is foremost: the LDS votes GOP, non-members Democrat, and thus the state is monocultural. (NB: per capita income in counties where the federal government owns most of the land is one-third lower than counties where the majority is otherwise.)
In the second part, the author shows state government evolved from corruption to integrity – save for the courts’ declining to follow the US Supreme Court’s progressive sociology and unaccountable education policy. More important, he reiterates the canard that one can’t (shouldn’t) legislate morality. There is also little effort to evaluate schools ‘outperform[ing] their poverty’ or other contrary metrics, not to mention his own observation that Utes are happy not angry. Surprisingly, Decker concludes quoting Strauss: neither Athens nor Jerusalem can triumph over the other. Yet the Hellenic city-state too sought not for modernity’s ‘low but solid’ goals but civic virtue.

13. Bailyn, Origin of American Politics (2 Nov 2014)

by kurto

The political climate of pre-revolutionary America was based on the worldview of anti-Walpole politicians in Britain. Simultaneously, although formal colonial executive power was in fact stronger than in the British system, the absence of monarchical-aristocratic features (patronage or ‘influence’) reduced the government’s power. Thus the government paradoxically was notionally stronger but actually weaker; royalists meanwhile worried of the democratic (populist) elements threatening the crown and ‘mixed’ constitution. Therefore the situation was latently revolutionary. Overlong sentences but clearly organized and persuasive.

On corruption at the core of American government

by kurto

America’s unresolved tension between Hamiltonian pursuit of political development and Madisonian balance of interests is corruption: ‘maldistribution of federal resources to vested interests’. Hamilton, seeking to address the young country’s evident political needs, sought to tap economic resources by appealing to elite self-interest. Madison wrote (in Federalist 10?) that ‘a power independent of the society may as well espouse the unjust views of the major, as the rightful interests of the minor party, and may possibly be turned against both parties’. Madison thought of government as a referee among domestic citizenry, Hamilton as a coach facing rival nations.

America is Hamiltonian, in part because Madison and Jefferson never development an alternate dynamic. The trouble is politics remains Madisonian: national powers are inherently weak, and parochial interests must be mollified. To compound, economic ends have been supplemented by sociopolitical goals (e.g., environmentalism, egalitarianism) which add another layer of faction.

23. Hill, Reformation to Industrial Revolution (18 Nov 2022)

by kurto

Politics shaped England’s socioeconomic development over 1530-1780, as the island nation alone in Europe progressed from monarchy-and-aristocracy toward the proto-bourgeois, from agricultural toward commercial and early industrial.
In the Tudor era, the Commons gained influence; in the Reformation, absolutism was undermined by conscience and education of the gentry. London’s economic power acted to unify England (if not the soon-to-be United Kingdom). Domestic policy aimed at controlling the peasantry via justices of the peace. Foreign policy, which began in medieval thrall to Rome and Spain, grew to be independent (though the country remained a 2d-line power).
1640’s destruction of the Stuart bureaucracy was the most decisive event in British history. The dynasty’s unsustainable economics – spending more than it received – led to the Civil War (see also 18th-century France). But predictable causes do not guarantee predictable outcomes: nonconforming religion (e.g., Lollards) as well as the new urban culture evinced popular opposition. When the conflict came, richer peasants aligned not with the lumpen but the gentry, which had learned to lead in the schools.
During the Interregnum and Restoration, the abolition of northern and Welsh councils unified the legal system and the economic dominance of London gathered pace, acting to radiate Puritanism. But the Restoration’s key feature was anti-democratic. Aristocrats and bishops returned; nonconformists were excluded by the Clarendon Code; enclosure accelerated, promoting agricultural productivity. In this respect, Jacobitism was an outcome not a cause: unimproving, gentry and freeholders were liquidated; the ‘new men’ were ascendant before 1745. The Navigation Acts of 1651 and 1660 marked the transition to national monopoly (i.e., to colonial mercantilism from chartered companies) and the Dutch wars. Then joint stock companies deployed capital where previously it had been in limited supply. (Ireland, after African slaves, was the principal victim of this trend.) The Restoration did not halt labor migration but favored employers. Excise and land taxes acted to shift resources from peasants to landowners and the City. Following the Toleration Act, Quakers and others saw to it that favorable legislation was enforced across England, again promoting more uniform administration and tempering the influence of JPs. Intellectually, the Newtonian revolution as well as dispersion of ‘natural hierarchy’ undermined views of social organization: men no longer were united to each other.
After the Glorious Revolution and over the 18th century the colonies supplanted Europe as England’s biggest market; 1763’s Peace of Paris converted these markets from suppliers to buyers, until the American revolution and Irish revolt shook the system. Thus there were five periods of export trade: old draperies to 1600; new draperies to 1650; colonial monopoly – entrepot – re-export to 1700; manufactures to the colonies to 1780; and afterward the industrial revolution, enabled by modernized banks and credit, facilitated worldwide export. Bacon’s aspirations for society advanced by scientific approaches advanced dissent. Freeborn men thought to enter the factor was to surrender their birthright; laborers now sought protection for Elizabethan regulations (e.g., prices, standards, apprenticeships, etc.). By 1780, rural distress was evident, though grand landowners had regained ground.
Heavily focused on structural analysis, there is no discussion of even the Whig Ascendancy or George III’s new system. Event are Whiggishly inevitable. The neo-Marxist approach also surrenders credibility in such observations as Soviet collectivization costs ‘thousands’ of lives.

11. Barraclough, Crucible of Europe (7 Apr 2015)

by kurto

An overview of politics, war, and state-building in western Europe from 768, the accession of Karl der Grosse, to 1056, the death of the Holy Roman Empire’s Henry III. The German-speaking Merovingian Franks began consolidating the lands of France, Germany, and Italy, a process completed in 800, whereupon Carolingian society immediately lost its conquest-fueled dynamism, for commerce continued to lag Roman times, learning was limited to déclassé clerics, and government lacked centralizing power (often erroneously attributed to the missi dominci). It could not withstand the 9th-century raids of the Vikings, Turks, and Magyars, which accentuated the political division of Karl’s successors. In France, power devolved to the counts; in Italy, to city-states ruled by dukes; only in Germany did power remain monarchical — and of course in all cases the writ ran short. After the invasions crested with Otto I’s defeat of the Magyars at Lech in 955, the Saxons conquered Italy in 962 and so became the first Holy Roman Emperor, succeeding Karl and in contrast to the Byzantine monarchy. By the time of Henry’s passing a century later, however, a second medieval era arose. Present throughout both stages are rivalries among the crown, aristocratic classes, and church figures (both the papacy as well as the monasteries). Barraclough detours to contrast England’s contemporary development, prompted by Viking raids, in which the six rival kingdoms were consolidated and the country’s ‘ancient liberties’ ostensibly took root. Briskly synthesized and mostly readable, the work does contain whiff of progressivism to it: key elements are important for their contribution to the present day. Still, an excellent survey.

5. Sandoz (ed.), Roots of Liberty (26 March 2022)

by kurto

A series of essays exploring shifting interpretation of England’s ‘ancient constitution’ and Magna Carta, sweeping from Fortescue to Augustan England and colonial America, addressing the charter as emblematic of Saxon culture, original intent, rule of law and government by consent, and the source of executive power. Effectively premised on JGA Pocock’s

    Ancient Constitution and Feudal Laws

, the contributors agree one’s views on such topics as the rights of subjects (e.g., trial by jury of peers) and limits of authority are relevant not only to jurisprudence but also the political conditions of liberty. Pocock had observed (among other things) that it was judicial process, rather than black-letter law, which was immemorial. Sandoz writes Fortescue and the common law grounded Coke’s opposition to the monarch. Holt observes Magna Charta was both a grant of liberties and a legislative act. Brooks writes, somewhat against the grain, that 16th-century lawyers were little concerned with constitutional theory and more interested in humanist (neoclassical) law. Christianson, sketching the skirmishing between early Stuarts (i.e., James I’s absolutism) and the Parliamentary opposition (Selden’s mixed monarchy, Hedley’s constitutional monarchy grounded in common law) which came to blows in the Five Knights case and provision of supply, essentially pitted rival views of the ancient constitution rather than absolutism vs constitutional government. Reid: 17th- and 18th-century lawyers thought the ancient constitution gave Parliament and common-law courts standing against arbitrary monarchy (which resonated with American revolutionaries). The common laws which had survived were the best evidence of English liberty. (Later, Burke held prescription the most solid of the titles to property, custom being the proof point of time time.) The merit of ancient constitution was security against government caprice – in an unwritten charter, no element was more essential to thwarting slavery to government. Reid adds: in this era, forensic historical work deployed the ancient constitution for proof of authority, establishment of consent, and bulwark against new government claims; in the latter century, the British chose government by consent (i.e., king in parliament) whereas the Americans settled on rule by law (following Coke, not a sovereign granting rights but a people delimiting executive power). The Saxon constitution represented liberty; the Norman charter arbitrary power; the Americans converted the dynamic to the notion of original intent. He asks why English lawyers, alone in Europe, sought to formalize understanding of rule of law – a matter now relevant to American originalists (vs progressivism) and Brexiteers (vs European Unionism).

9. Paulsen and Paulsen, The Constitution (18 May 2016)

by kurto

Illustrates vital political concepts and shortcomings in the American constitution, before going on to narrate five distinct periods of jurisprudence: to 1860, postbellum, to World War II, to 1960, and the current activist era. The Constitution does not establish judicial supremacy but the document’s supremacy: it is intended to surmount the clash of opinions. The authors view the document as broadly successful, save for the stunning failure of allowing slavery, because it has tended to move toward justice rather political fashion. But the justices themselves have often stood in the way of progress for long periods of time, and continue to legislate from the bench. The heroes in fact are Lincoln, Frederick Douglas, and others who have fought for the Constitution’s preservation and the revision of its application.