Walter
Annenberg suggested to
classical scholar Michael Grant that he should
revisit the events chronicled by Edward Gibbon. The
idea was to see whether the disunities behind the
fall of Rome held any contemporary significance in
the mid-1970s. Grant decided that the twentieth
century "empire" of the Western world,
represented by the US and Britain, had developed
serious flaws. His study sought to determine their
seriousness by revisiting and rearranging the
comparable internal flaws that proved to be fatal to
the Roman Empire.
The
fundamental Roman flaw, he found, was internal disunity.
(20) The external pressure of the German tribes
combined with the thirteen different manifestations
of that internal disunity to do the empire in.
Grant's
outline of the thirteen ancient Roman disunities is
worth keeping for reference. (6-7) They are in six
parts.
Part
I: The failure of the army.
1. The generals against the state. 2. The people
against the army.
Part
II: The gulfs between the
classes. 3. The poor against the
state. 4. The rich against the state. 5. The middle
class against the state.
Part
III: The credibility gap.
6. The people against the bureaucrats. 7. The people
against the emperor.
Part
IV: The partnerships that failed.
8. Ally against ally. 9. Race against race.
Part
V: The groups that opted out.
10. Drop-outs against society. 11. The state against
free belief.
Part
VI: The undermining of effort.
12. Complacency against self-help. 13. The other
world against this world.
In
an epilogue, Grant speculated on these themes of
disunity (or disharmony) as possible warnings to the
West in his own time. He found many parallel
conditions, such as continued poverty, resentment at
military preparedness, selfish motives among the
privileged, unmanageable bureaucracy, leaders
isolated from the people. Grant wondered whether
America and Europe would learn from the gulf that
separated the eastern and western empires of the
ancient world--would we be able to defy that example
and hang together?
I
read this book while pursuing
the flavor of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment,
of which I took Gibbon to be an important English
practitioner. It was a surprise to find in Grant a
kind of comparative historian, who left Gibbon's work
itself at the periphery. By 1976, I have to assume
that such a project already would have been suspect
in the most up-to-date circles of historiography.
Thinkers who would soon come to be
"postmoderns" already would have been
doubting the usefulness of grand historical
narratives and, even more, of grand historical
comparisons.
Nevertheless,
I found Grant interesting because, coincidentally, I
was reading Hegel's Philosophy
of History. This
was Hegel's theory, even grander than Gibbon's or
Grant's, of the rise of freedom in human
civilization, his marvelous story of the sweep of
human purpose from the ancient east to his
contemporary Germany. Along the way, Hegel plumbed
the spirit of the Romans.
Hegel
held that the Roman spirit was essentially valorous--because
the state itself was founded through predatory force.
Rome established a "unity maintained by
force." (Hegel, p. 295) Hegel thought the
Republic had no real substance; Rome needed a single
will to guide it into its fateful role in history.
That was why he thought Caesar was right to destroy
the Republic. (Hegel, p. 312-3) Only in an imperial
Rome could individual persons come to have unique
value as citizens. And only when individuals were
validated could the right to private property emerge.
The development of Roman subjectivity thus prepared
the way for Romans later to receive the Jewish idea
of universal reconciliation in the individual.
(Hegel, p. 323)
This
Hegelian perspective on Rome complements that of
Grant rather nicely, I think. Hegel found that Rome
could not reach its apex without submitting to a
unifying imperial force. Grant's analysis revealed
the disunity at the center of Rome's fatal fall. The
disunities of Rome followed from the decline of the
unifying imperial power.
Of
course, Grant's notions about
Rome's fall do not gain validity just because we find
them resonating to that old Hegelian tune, which
encountered its own critical problems long before.
Yet, Grant's notions and their Hegelian refrain lend
interest and intensity to that moment when Grant
wrote, in the mid-1970s. That was the moment when the
grand narrative of high modernism was coming apart.
And you can sense it in Grant's anxiety about the
"disastrous disunities" just as apparent to
him in the Western world of his day as in that
ancient world recreated by Gibbon. By chance, Grant
was writing his book as the Western world was facing
a cultural divide that was not yet fully understood.
In some sense, this divide was going to become nearly
as significant as that which Rome faced when it
opened its gates to the German general Odoacer in 476
CE. The definition of subjectivity itself--the
concept of the person that had its foundation in
ancient Rome--was about to be revised in ways that
Grant could only partly divine.
At
the end of his book, Grant sounded like a cheerleader
for contemporary Western civilization. He declared
that the disunifying tendencies of 1976 did not mean
necessarily that we were in for the same fatal fall
as that experienced by Rome. "...although
[contemporary] resemblances to the society of
declining Rome are so numerous and powerful, that
does not mean it is inevitable for us to succumb to
the same fate as the Romans did." (314) His
credo is that we are the masters of our fate,
regardless. To think of disunity in the West in 1976
was to raise the fear that we might reduce our
preparedness to resist our Cold War adversaries.
Grant did not say that, but it went without saying in
texts like this at that moment.
This
handsome book--the full-page sketches of Rome jump
with life--made me feel like an eyewitness to a
complex drama of ideas across the ages. It did not
matter that Grant's comparative project paid less
attention to Gibbon than I expected. Nor did it
matter that it lacked rigorous method and would
shortly be out of intellectual fashion. Grant
recharged one's thinking about the connections
between the beginnings and the late-breaking
difficulties of our civilization. And he did manage
to say enough about Gibbon at least to place him
appropriately in the Enlightenment pantheon:
In
the same way as [the Byzantine Emperor] Justinian's
reconquests were not, in the end, his greatest deeds,
but his "fair and everlasting monument" was
his code of laws, so too the British must seek their
renown in something more durable than military
victory, a wise and high-minded and tolerant system.
For this, Gibbon is a superb spokesman, expressing
the very spirit of enlightenment--in language beyond
all praise and imitation. (17)
.
