The Long View

The Katechonic Commonwealth

One of the odder spectacles of world history was the chrystalization of Classical Mediterranean state system into the Roman Empire. It should have been impossible. The model state of the Hellenic world (which included Rome on its periphery) was the polis, an atomic polity centered on a physical city, indeed on the body of citizens collected in the city forum. A polis could not really grow very much. It could interact with entities of the same class only by colliding with them or destroying them. So how did the Roman polis turn into a universal state? Oswald Spengler said (yes, the Atkinson translation of The Decline of the West is now online says it happened like this:

Imperialism is so necessary a product of any Civilization that when a people refuses to assume the role of master, it is seized and pushed into it. The Roman Empire was not conquered -- the "orbis terrarum" condensed itself into that form and forced the Romans to give it their name. It is all very Classical. While the Chinese states defended even the mere remnants of their independence with the last bitterness, Rome after 146 only took upon herself to transform the Eastern land-masses into provinces because there was no other resource against anarchy left. And even this much resulted in the inward form of Rome -- the last which had remained upright -- melting in the Gracchan disorders. And (what is unparalleled elsewhere) it was not between states that the final rounds of the battle for Imperium were fought, but between the parties of a city -- the form of the Polis allowed of no other outcome. Of old it had been Sparta versus Athens, now it was Optimate versus Popular Party. In the Gracchan revolution, which was already (134) heralded by a first Servile War, the younger Scipio was secretly murdered and C. Gracchus openly slain -- the first who as Princeps and the first who as Tribune were political centres in themselves amidst a world become formless. When, in 104, the urban masses of Rome for the first time lawlessly and tumultuously invested a private person, Marius, with Imperium, the deeper importance of the drama then enacted is comparable with that of the assumption of the mythic Emperor-title by the ruler of Tsin in 288. The inevitable product of the age, Caesarism, suddenly outlines itself on the horizon.... Pompey the Princeps and Caesar the Tribune -- tribune not in office, but in attitude -- were still party-leaders, but nevertheless, already at Lucca, they were arranging with Crassus and each other for the first partition of the world amongst themselves. When the heirs of Caesar fought his murderers at Philippi, both had ceased to be more than groups. By Actium the issue was between individuals, and Caesarism will out, even in such a process as this.

When reading Spengler, we must remember that he was a high-school teacher by profession. He well knew how to ginger-up the story to catch the attention of those slackers at the back of the room. In this endeavor he re-heated some of the commonplaces of the popular history of his time; among these was the characterization of late Republican history as a battle between Optimates and Populares. That really is a fitting target for revision. Nonetheless, there is merit to his argument that polis turned to cosmopolis when the factions of the city began to represent the factions of international society. Tom Holland's view of the matter in Rubicon is not so different. To quote from my review

The other great movement of the spirit, and a far more popular one, was millenarianism. The author makes the fascinating proposal that, in a world ruled by a republic (or at least overshadowed by one) monarchism was a revolutionary idea. It blended with the legends and folk traditions about Alexander the Great and the possibility of divine kingship. The author has a great deal to say about the prophecies that circulated through the East of a coming royal liberator. Some of these prophecies were quite ancient and some manufactured by Mithridates as part of his propaganda against Rome.

The stroke of genius that secured the Roman power in the East was Pompey's embrace of this tradition. Even in Rome, his military reputation had made him something more than the first among equals; in the East, in an informal way, he was a savior god. Julius Caesar understood this, too. He could be a paramount chieftain in Gaul, and a tribune in Rome, and a hegemon in Greece, and a god in Egypt. The power of a man in his position might rest on Rome and Italy, but his legitimacy need not.

The Stoics had been presenting arguments for several centuries for the political unity of mankind, of course, but the route by which it actually happened was unpredictable and idiosyncratic; historical, in other words.

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In ancient China, the transition to universal polity was conceptually much easier, though arguably more difficult to bring off in fact. (Spengler's Future may help to clarify this comparisons, slightly.) As my recent review of Yui Pines' Envisioning Eternal Empire explains, there was a primordial tradition of hierarchical unity in China, culminating in a sacred monarch who interceded with Heaven. When China fell into the condition of a state system, the arguments took a turn towards pragmatic violence management. Nonetheless, the class of administrative experts, the shi, who moved from state to state during during the Warring States period, governed in the name of the Way. In their hands, this ideal came to resemble something between the Kantian Perpetual Peace and Hegel's (or at least Bosanquet's) model of the state as the incarnation of reason. It is hard not to compare them to modern transnationalists. The difference is that these transnationalists did not just lobby the Great Powers to comply with universal norms; they managed the departments of state. If they did not like the policy of the state they served, they would depart in a prima donna huff to another state, which had probably already been soliciting them. It was quite a racket, while it lasted.

The racket ended when the shi got their wish and All Under Heaven got one government. At that point, famously, the First Emperor tried to kill them all, or at least reduce them to clerks. This enterprise did not quite succeed, but the book emphasizes their far more subordinate role in the long imperial centuries that followed.

An interesting comparative point is that the great regime-changing popular revolts that characterized imperial China (revolts the shi often sanctioned and guided) were largely absent from the Roman imperium. Revolts happened in the provinces, and there might be coups and civil wars at Rome itself, but there were none of those mass-movements that episodically welled up in China, like weird psychic weather, to sweep away emperors and landlords. Part of the reason may be that the Roman Empire was technically a system of alliances. Its units were cities that pretty much ran themselves until the late third century. The mark of the final decline of the empire was administrative centralization, and that seems to have happened less because of imperial authoritarianism than because of the decay of local institutions. Perhaps another part of the reason is that the Chinese had a fiercely held theory about what a universal state was supposed to look like and what it was supposed to do; the Romans, in contrast, just had some edifying but laxly held philosophical opinions. Reality in the East was therefore frequently not just regrettable, but intolerable.

* * *

As for the West and the universal state to come, there too, we may be sure, things shall be at the end what they were at the beginning; but louder.

The West, too, has a tradition of primordial unity in Christendom. The pope, in fact, bears more than a few points of correspondence with the Western Zhou kings. However, one of the other primordial features of the West is the dyarchy of Church and State, of the pope contesting with emperor. The emperor of first instance, of course, was the emperor of the Holy Roman Empire. The point was touched on in my review of Carl Schmitt's Nomos of the Earth:

The Holy Roman Empire enjoyed a sort of preeminence in the system, but Schmitt says its ideal characterization as a universal sovereign was an aspect of late medieval theories about the "perfect society." (The Church was supposed to be the other perfect society.) Rather, Schmitt lays emphasis on the early identification of the Empire as the "katechon," the "Restrainer" of Antichrist mentioned in II Thessalonians 2:6–7; the end of the Empire would be the end of the age.

And of course Friedrich Heer had more to say on the subject in his history of the empire, as I noted here:

They emperors always did certain things. They hunted. They cured by touch, at least reputedly. They protected the Church. They made peace. More precisely, they had the duty to give peace. Also, the emperors, and the empire as a whole, were the restrainers of Antichrist. (Curiously, Heer does not cite II Thessalonians 2:7.) The German emperors played this role when they defeated a Magyar invasion of the West in 955 at the Battle of Lech, and thereby created the sense of "Germanness." They played the same role six centuries later, when they were the only European rulers to offer serious, systematic, and ultimately successful resistance to the Turkish jihad aimed at central Europe. According to persistent myth, when the Emperor of the Last Days lays down his crown at Jerusalem after finally defeating Babylon, then the Antichrist will appear.

The model here is a polity (not necessarily s state: Heer calls the empire "a system of dispensing justice") that claims a universal jurisdiction in order to forestall a universal catastrophe. It's a doomful sort of universalism, as Tom Holland (again) made clear in The Forge of Christendom. Nonetheless, what made Western Civilization possible that this preparation for a Last Stand was not a regime of emergencies. That is the suicidal temptation of revolutions. Rather, it was a determination to end emergency as far as possible through institution building.

So, with suitable upgrades and bells and whistles, that's what progress is about for the next century or so.

Please get busy.