[Marxism] Fall of the Roman Empire was not so bad after all

[Haines Brown]

It's always nice to see interest in ancient Rome. This citation of a
review of Peter Heather's The Fall of the Roman Empire is very
welcome.

> Heather is actually somewhat of a counterrevolutionary. His position
> as set up here is that the Western Roman Empire did in fact
> collapse, at roughly the time tradition has always set it had, but
> that this wasn't the overwhelming catastrophe of myth and that this
> wasn't a pre-ordained outcome. This is halfway between the
> traditional view of the End of Civilisation for a Thousand Years and
> the revisionist view of denying that a collapse happened at all,
> that the Roman Empire continued as Byzantium and in the west more or
> less morphed into its succesor states. 

I can't help but noting that the continuity thesis is hardly
"revisionist", for it or something like it seems to have been the
consensus among scholars thirty or forty years ago, and in the case of
the German idealist notion of Rome, it lasted into modern times. The
problem is that a scholarly consensus has only tenuous impact on the
popular press. I don't know where the idea that Rome fell in 476 got 
started, but it is probably fairly modern. Even Edward Gibbbon does
not seem to assume that (but it's been a long time since I've read
Gibbon).  

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).

I can't help noting that Heather's suggestion that Rome _did_ fall in
476 AD to be extraordinary. I don't know of anyone who would agree
with that. I believe a safer date would be 7th century for a myriad of
reasons I'll not explore here. 

Folks here might be amused to know that an old idealist view of "Rome"
(common in German literature in the late 19th century) is that Rome
was "translated" to become Rome II (Constantinople), which after 1453
became transated to Rome III (Moscow), which "fell" only in 1917 ;-)
Like the Chesire Cat, Ancient Rome slowly faded until all that was
left visible was its smile.
-- 
 
       Haines Brown, KB1GRM