This chapter covers the rise and fall of Rome and European history up to the end of the nineteenth century.
1. The setup and development of political institutions of the "Italic city" is similar to the Greek. Of course Sicily and other parts of Italy were Greek colonies before they were conquered by Rome.
In the primitive Italian city, "we find a king, a council of notables, and a popular assembly." But by the early third century, as Italy was coming under the domination of Rome, there is no mention of kings. "What we do find are rivalries between aristocracy and plebs." In its quarrels with other cities, Rome sided with the aristocrats and often granted Roman citizenship to notables.
Initially Rome had its kings, its senate of the heads of the patrician clans, and a popular assembly. Then the kings were replaced by consuls and other magistrates that were elective, temporary, and "multiple," meaning the same office was entrusted to multiple persons. There were class conflicts between the old patrician citizenry and the new plebeian citizenry descended from settlers from elsewhere and freed slaves.
Rome had a four-stage citizen assimilation policy, as follows:
- Private rights of Roman citizen -- jus commercii
- Allow marriage with Roman citizens -- jus conubii
- Allow participation in the assembly -- jus suffragii
- Allowed to hold public office -- jus honorum
This system seduced people into Roman citizenship and allowed people to become Roman citizens that lived far from Rome itself, and expanded the rolls so that Rome had nearly 300,000 citizens available to fight the Punic wars.
The Roman maintained the aristocratic nature of its regime. It reformed the senate by expanding its membership from the ancient clan leaders using a "censor" that chose men who had already held high office. The popular assembly -- comitia -- was also reformed over the years to include less propertied members. A law had to be proposed by a magistrate, passed by the assembly and approved by the senate. Elective offices were only available to patricians and usually men who had been military tribunes, selected from the patrician class.
2. The aristocratic order began to break down, because the appropriate political institutions of a city-state could not work for an empire. Citizens scattered over the empire could not in practice attend the assembly. And annual election of magistrates could not work when incumbents were absent for years in the provinces. Nor could the army be an annually recruited citizen militia. Thus, at the end of the civil wars, the republic was transformed into the Empire.
The assembly was convoked from time to time, but less and less as time went by, and then after about 100 AD, not at all. Executive and judicial powers were divided between the senate and the emperor, with the senate influential for Italian questions. But in "imperial provinces" the power of the emperor was absolute from the beginning: after all, they were under military occupation. The emperor ruled through a bureaucracy whose directors were sometimes senators, but usually not. As time went by the senate began to be recruited from the higher bureaucracy, and from the great families of the whole of Italy, and then from the whole Roman world. In due course, the senate's authority became what the emperor decided it was.
After a political crisis in the second half of the third century only two principles survived from the old days. One was that the "emperor derived his authority from the people." The other was that "every magistrate has a sharply defined sphere of jurisdiction and should, at least theoretically, exercise his authority in accord with the law."
The power of the Roman system is that "it succeeded in spreading the language, laws, manners, and customs of Rome" throughout the Empire, and brought it all into a single "moral unity."
3. The question of the decline of the Roman Empire is "perhaps the most intricate and obscure problem in human history." The great questions are: "Why that falling off in the supply of superior men? Why that artistic and literary decadence?" Mosca has no answer, but recites the burdensome taxation, the brigandage, the low birth rate, the wage and price controls, the official corruption. And that the eastern Empire did not decline.
But perhaps empires are like aging individuals.
There are times when moral bonds seem to slacken, when the religion, or the patriotic sentiment... and the natural healing force, the power to react, fails to operate. This is because the better elements in society are paralyzed, and they are paralyzed because they have turned their activity and their energies to purposes other than the things essential to the salvation of the state.
But when the empire was crumbling, "the church glitters with a constellation of superior men... [yet] there is hardly a native Roman of any character or brains who devotes himself to the service of the state."
4. The barbarians that invaded the Roman Empire tried to continue the Roman civil administration but failed. In any case they needed to reward their followers with grants of land, and that transformed the local landed proprietor into the local sovereign. Charlemagne attempted to revive the Roman tradition of unity and centralization, but disintegration continued with invasions of Hungarians, Normans, and Saracens.
By the tenth century the old system had become "feudal." But it was not the status quo before the Romans. Serfdom, binding tillers to the soil, had a Roman origin. Feudalism created the political supremacy of a warrior class, and the religious supremacy of the Church, preserver of the "bits of culture" that survived the catastrophe. An important feature of feudalism was that local leaders were bound by loyalty to their immediate feudal superior, not to the king. So they would fight for their liege lord against the king.
5. Charlemagne attempted to revive the Roman Empire in 800, and Otto I of Saxony tried the Holy Roman Empire in 962. But they failed.
They had neither a sound financial organization nor a regular bureaucracy, nor, finally, a standing army that was capable of enforcing obedience to imperial edicts.
But civilization would rise again, this time reabsorbing local powers into the central organ of the national monarchy. Meanwhile the medieval town began to rise -- federations of guilds, neighborhood associations and trade corporations -- middling people neither nobles nor serfs that provided for mutual defense, and become most powerful in northern Italy, Germany, and Flanders.
The national monarchs began as the nominal head of a federation of great barons -- as was the King John that signed the Magna Carta in England -- and it took six centuries of struggle "for the feudal king to develop into the absolute king, the feudal hierarchy into a regular bureaucracy." They did it by building up material resources, by getting the support of the trading towns, and invoking the divine right of kings. And then there was the firearm and the cannon that could batter down the walls of a baronial castle.
In Japan, "monarchical centralization, with the shoguns of the Tokugawa family, prevailed over feudalism shortly after the introduction of firearms, which were made known to that country by the Portuguese."
6. The absolute bureaucratic state is fully established with Louis XIV in 1661, with central authority absorbing local authorities throughout Europe except places like Poland or Venice, that lost power and disappeared.
Even as the absolute monarchy was established a new age began within it.
Inside it, and under its wing, new ruling forces, new intellectual and moral conditions, rapidly grew up, so that in less than a century and a half its transformation into the modern representative state became inevitable.
This transformation was symbolized by a new class that arose between the common people and the descendants of the old feudal aristocracy.
The bourgeoisie, in the broad sense of the term, comprises the numerous class of people who find employment in the liberal professions, in commerce, and in industry, and who combine moderate means with a technical and often a scientific education that is far superior to all other classes.
And once it got established and conscious of its power and importance "it perceived that it was the victim of a great injustice." The old nobility, deprived of territorial sovereignty, now had jobs in the absolutist government. That might have been OK had not the new class begun to surpass the old nobility in "education and technical preparation."
The new bourgeois class might have pushed the nobility aside without radical change in the absolute state had not England developed a practical model that seemed to realize the aspirations of the new class and thus attracted its support.
First, the absolute monarchs based their political formula on "divine right;" yet religion "had been greatly weakened in the eighteenth century." Meanwhile the new class began to study the "classical political doctrines of Greece and Rome." Then there was the Contrat Social of Rousseau that developed the idea that the only legitimate government was one that expressed the will of the majority of citizens "for a specified length of time." This differed from classical democracy, under which the manual laborers and slaves were forever barred from participation.
As the absolute monarchies had destroyed the power of the intermediate feudal powers, they had created a gap in which to imagine popular sovereignty as the sovereignty of the numerical majority of the people in a country. This popular sovereignty was different from the Middle Ages, that conceived of the "people" as legitimately led by its natural leaders, the "barons and the heads of corporations and communes." In the absolute monarchies the intermediate leaders had no place in the system.
But where was the practical model, to get from the absolutist regime with its bureaucracy, standing army, and authoritarian traditions, to a new popular sovereignty? Right there in England.
The constitution of England seemed to demonstrate that the constitution of the absolute state could be worked over into something that was fairly consistent with the ideas that had been inherited from classical antiquity and, more important still, with the desire of the bourgeoisie to participate extensively in sovereign powers.
7. England was different. First its feudal system under the Normans was colored by the need of the Norman nobility, "encamped in enemy territory," to unite around the king. Then there was Magna Carta, that established reciprocal rights and duties between king and baron. Then there was parliament, primarily a House of Lords with a lower house of lesser notables that "were the allies and tools of the lords and the high nobility rather than of the kings."
In the latter half of the fifteenth century the continental kings were struggling with their great vassals.
In England a long civil war, called the Wars of the Roses, split the great lords into two bitterly hostile parties, which exterminated each other.
Thus the Tudors found a House of Lords full of upstarts without the resources and prestige of the old barons, and a docile House of Commons in a country without a developed urban bourgeoisie. And since they did not face powerful barons they neglected to create a powerful standing army and bureaucracy.
In the early sixteenth century the Stuarts attempted and failed to establish an absolutist system, and ran into opposition from the rural and urban middle classes. The English Civil War began with urban militias of Parliament against the rural militias of the Cavaliers. But then Oliver Cromwell established "a real standing army in England," and that was that. The middling forces in parliament overcame the "supporters of royalty."
Thus did England gradually transform itself from a feudal system into a representative system. However, its representative system only included the property owners in the boroughs and on the land.
When Rousseau came along with his mathematical demonstration of legitimate authority issuing from a numerical majority of citizens, and Montesquieu issued his doctrine of the separation of powers between legislative, executive, and judiciary based in part on his analysis of the English constitution, their influence helped create constitutional systems that blended the separated powers of the English model with "a thread or two of principles of pure democracy."
8. Although the nineteenth century liked to view the overthrow of the absolutist regimes "as the greatest of cataclysms," really they were nothing compared to the collapse of the Roman Empire and the barbarian invasions -- let alone the Mongol invasions. Mosca suggests that the transition upon the end of "liberal institutions and the representative system" will be more interesting.
The most violent transfer from absolutist to representative government was in France, because it was unprepared for change and the old system collapsed. Napoleon had to "reconstruct virtually the whole state" using elements from both the old nobility and the new middle class. But other nations were able to inaugurate the new system without such disorganization.
The representative system... resulted from notions and concepts that had been inherited from classical antiquity but were adapted for the requirements of nineteenth century.
But it all worked pretty well, maintaining a fairly good public order, and with scientific discoveries and a material prosperity unmatched in all other ages and civilizations. And then the Europeans established a world supremacy throughout the world.
Of course, the actual political system is quite a bit different from its theoretical assumptions. The wealthiest and the middle classes maintain most of the power, and dominate "the controlling cliques of political parties... the reporting and editorial staffs of the daily press, the personnel of the bureaucracies and army officers." Yet the "combination of bureaucratic and elective elements" of the representative system utilize "almost all human values" in government with "the door open" to "all elements in the governed classes to make their way into the ruling classes."
All in all, the modern state is "the most complex and delicate type of political organization" in world history. It might be a bit lacking in "artistic and literary forms," but it is far superior in "its wise organization of economic and scientific production and in its exact knowledge and shrewd exploitation of the forces of nature." Of course there are organized minorities that prevail over the collective interest. But still the state machine is so powerful and perfected that it can attain remarkable collective purposes -- as in, unfortunately the World War. Nothing comes close to the current system, except perhaps Rome at the height of her glory.
But every human organism contains the germs of decay. Economic decline is likely to bring on some sort of dictatorship, especially when linked to universal suffrage. An especial danger is the detachment of a clique from the middle classes seeking power by "seeking leverage in the instincts and appetites of the more populous classes," and insisting that political equality must mean economic equality.
The idea of democracy plus liberalism, that the numerical majority ought to rule and that "the good sense of the people is enough to distinguish truth from error," has become a religion. And, for Mosca, it is "unfitted for reconstructing a better, and especially a more moral, system of social and political organization" than the present ones. Certainly the present present religion of democracy plus liberalism "could not be better fitted for destroying the present system."
And the present complexity and specialization of the modern economic system makes it peculiarly vulnerable to "small minorities" wrecking the system simply by "folding their arms."
Next: Principles and Tendencies in Ruling Classes
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