No subject

belief that Gibbon is not just old hat, but still indispensable for those
seeking a broad overview, and wonderfully written to boot. But the  title,
"Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire," while certainly appealing from the
point of view of style, has come to seem a little exaggerated to me.  

Of course the Eastern Empire did fall, i.e, somebody overthrew it, the
Ottomans with a different history, language, culture, class structure, and
all the rest, and the whole region has been different ever since.

But I am not sure you can put a real date on the fall of the Western Empire.
The date I learned in high school, 406 ad, with the "barbarian" Odoacer's
overthrow of the last emperor based in Rome does not work. Nor does the date
476, when some important event that I currently forget took place.

Gibbon is often identified with the view that the end of the western
emperors was a catastrophe brought about by weakness before "barbarians" but
my reading of him gives little or no support to this interpretation of this
truly great historian and writer.

Gibbon describes a process of disintegration, not a "fall" in the West, in
my opinion.  He recognizes the substantial "Romanization" of the non-Roman
forces -- of whom the Roman general Odoacer was one -- who tried to inherit,
not destroy the empire, although none could arrest the disintegrative
processes. 

When Pirenne wrote his ultimately very controversial posthumously published
draft Mohammed and Charlemagne, his emphasis on the continuity of the Roman
tradition from Odoacer on seems not to have been a source of controversy.
There were a lot of challenges, however, to his argument that the Islamic
conquests in Afrioa and Spain, and the rise of powers to the North, the Holy
Roman Empire based in what is now Germany and the "Scandinavian" peoples.

Most of the challenges to his views were purely economic, at least in the
collection of essays on Pirenne's thesis that I read in one of those
college-oriented essay collections. But while his economic arguments did not
hold up -- though I think there may be more to them than was thought -- I
still think there is something sound to his dating, and I tend to use it as
I picture the history,

One thing the review cited by Haines seems to ignore is the decline of
agriculture in the Roman heartland -- "Italy" itself and also, I believe,
Greece, which were also the centers of slavery. Gibbon takes frequent note
of this, although he wrote before the days of economic interpretation, and
his line of thought about the decline and "fall" is more rooted in the
declining combat capacity and the Romanized "barbarian" character of the
army. He sees Christianity as a symptom of decline, although it certainly
became indispensable to the Roman state.

One point where I partially disagree with Haines is his judgment that the
Holy Roman Empire of Charlemagne had nothing to do with the Roman Empire. I
see his point, but I am not quite convinced (Pirenne also didn't totally win
me on this) .

Why the name "Holy Roman Empire"? Why the need for the approval of the Pope
in Rome?

And this brings me to the key institution of the Roman empire that has NOT
yet fallen, the Roman Catholic Church, which remains a significant
intellectual, psychological, and material-economic power to this day.  When
will the fall of the Roman empire be complete?  Frankly, I have no idea.
That fucker had staying power.

Haines says:

Whether the empire fell because of accident (confluence of factors
that need not have happened) or was inevitable because of structural
contradictions is not a question that can be answered in any simple
fashion. It is not an empirical question, but but determined by one's
philosophical preconceptions. That is, you can't prove either one
right or wrong by an appeal to the facts.

Since this is a Marxist list, the issue is important here, for a
conventional Marxist position is that social systems are
contradictory, and therefore doomed eventually to fall. I've done some
work on the structural contradictions of ancient Rome, and can make a
good case for it. But that is because I bring to the issue certain
preconceptions (i.e., I'm not an empiricist, who seeks explanation in
terms of a factor analysis).

And I remark:
It is important to be careful on this.  Marx was always clear that there was
no revolutionary class in Rome -- not even the slaves in their maximum
effort under Spartacus from around 60-72 bc.  Because of this lack, I
recall, he argued that the "fall" of Rome took the form of the mutual ruin
of the contending classes.

This is a process that can take an enormous amount of time, and, as Gibbon
bears witness, that it did. About 1200 years if you count the Eastern
Empire, and down to the present if you count the Roman Catholic Church and
its not insignificant world empire.

People who are counting out the US working class should be hoping real hard
that they are wrong, because the decline of the US empire, which has
actually been declining historically since the aftermath of World War II, in
my opinion, is otherwise going to be a very rough ride, and the outcome may
not be at all pretty.

I remain a cockeyed optimist myself.
Fred Feldman