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The Nation-State and Global Order: A Historical Introduction to Contemporary Politics, by Walter C. Opello, Jr. and Stephen J. Rosow
1. The Ancient Roman State:
Imperial Rule
The unique circumstances associated with the collapse of the Roman imperial state gave rise to the conditions that spawned the European medieval monarchies, which themselves eventually became the first territorial states. This development should not be understood in linear terms. It must be remembered that any image of continuities and discontinuities in the past is not part of that past itself but derives from the questions and understandings of contemporary analysts. We discuss the Roman state and the situation it spawned for Europe in order, first, to show how the situation created by the collapse of the Roman Empire conditioned the development of several key structures and institutions of the modern state. Second, we discuss the Roman state to show how it could be treated by the Renaissance and early legal apologists of modern sovereignty as the origin of the modern Western state. That is, we show how the Roman state became a crucial nodal point in the past onto which was grafted an imaginary (or way of imagining) of the modern state as heir to a singular “Western civilization” that underlay not only the legitimation of those states but the globalizing of the state as a representation of a universal modernity.
The political history of Roman rule can be divided into two broad periods: the first is the period of the Republic, which stretches from the founding of the city of Rome in 508 B.C. to the rule and assassination of Julius Caesar (r. 49–44 B.C.). The second is the period of the Empire, which extends from the rule of the Emperor Caesar Augustus (r. 27 B.C.–14 A.D.) until the sacking of Rome by a Visigothic chieftain in 410 A.D. 1
The Roman Republic
During the republican period the Roman state was governed by the Senate, which represented the patricians, or persons of high birth, wealth, and cultivation who could trace their ancestry to one of the original clan heads appointed to govern the city of Rome by its mythical founder Romulus. The patricians held most formal positions within the state administration, and articulated the ideology that justified or legitimated the institutions and structure of the Roman state. In short, the Senate represented the ruling aristocratic class of Rome.
During the early Republic, class warfare between the patricians and the plebeians, or the ordinary people, was common. In order to still this internal strife, the Senate allowed wealthier plebeians to gain access to the consul, the highest office of magistrates in the Republic, as early as 356 B.C. It also created the tribunate, which was composed of tribal representatives and functioned as a parallel executive office to the consul. The tribunate was designed to give the poor a voice in governing Rome but was ineffective because, as one scholar puts it, “[t]he tribunes, normally men of considerable fortunes,... [were] for long periods docile instruments of the Senate itself.” 2
In effect, the political institutions of the Roman Republic were “a complex mechanism that provided both an outlet for, and a restraint upon, the dynamics of class conflict, group rivalries, and personal ambitions.” 3 In addition to the institutional flexibility of the republic, a flexibility always kept from bending too far by the Senate, the Roman state managed political conflict and allegiance through the oratory of its politicians and their skill at playing the “seamier side of politics... patronage, bribery, vote-buying, tampering with electoral bodies, and the sale of public contracts.” 4 So long as politics remained centered in the city of Rome itself, this political practice managed to maintain order and secure for Rome significant wealth and power. It generated a remarkable military machine composed of all male citizens of Rome. By 275 B.C., the Roman army had conquered the Italian peninsula, defeated the Carthaginians in a century-long campaign known as the Punic Wars (264–202 B.C.), which gave the Republic control of the Western Mediterranean, and conquered Greece and Macedonia between 201 and 146 B.C.
The Roman Political Imaginary
Given the persistence of a political structure dominated by the patrician aristocracy, it is important to understand the ideas and cultural practices through which the state was imagined and represented under the republic. These ideas and representational practices portrayed certain ideals and values as normal for all Romans, and presented them as universally valid, as if inscribed in the natural ways of the world.
The Roman political imagination imbued the city of Rome with a special significance as a place possessing its own spiritual gravity. The Roman sense of the space of politics was intensive, consisting of a dense mythology and history that marked Rome as a special and privileged place. This gave its institutions and governing practices an assurance of their ethical rightness and superiority over vanquished enemies. It also constituted the Roman way: its traditions and especially its time-worn status and class distinctions, as rooted not in the contingency of political struggles and power but in the cosmological order, made Rome a special place. Even after absorbing a universalism drawn from Greek Stoic philosophy, which we will discuss shortly, Roman ideology assured Rome of its distinctive superiority and privilege as an ethical and political order.
The political ideas of Rome focused on two attributes of the patrician class: virtus, and “nobility of birth and ancestry.” 5 Virtus, or “manliness,” as demonstrated by the great deeds and accomplishments of patricians, especially in the Roman army, provided the ruling class with a politically effective identity. To be a member of the Senate carried with it the honor of being the descendant of a family that had contributed greatly to the city in the past. The civic virtue of the ruling class carried both honor and responsibility to look after the affairs of the city, inclining that class to define the essence of politics in terms that transcended private “interests,” such as responsibility and honor. Even as the lineage of senators came to be diluted by social reforms and the introduction of plebeians into the Senate in the later republic, civic virtue remained part of the identity of the senator.
It is useful to talk about the conception of power embedded in the Roman republican state. To have power meant to act for the common good. Power prescribed a hierarchical decisionmaking structure, legitimating those “in power” to make and enforce decisions through a mixture of coercion, consensus, and organized violence. This idea of power and politics replaced the less hierarchical practices of earlier tribal, clan, and kinship systems in which politics involved ritualized reciprocity, such as gift-giving, as well as noncoercive allocations of collective roles, privileges, honors, responsibilities, and resources. 6
In Rome, political authorities were to be obeyed because they exercised certain offices, which were conceived of as having been created for the public good, not for the person who exercised the office. The idea that the public good was to be associated with political office rather than the particular office holder would make possible the reference to Rome as an original source of the bureaucratic and legal authority of the modern state, and help to establish a historical lineage constituting the modern territorial state as the culmination of a Western civilization.
In the Roman political imagination, masculinity was privileged. The deference given to ancestry associated power and authority with patriarchy ; that is, the supremacy of the father of the family and the legal subordination of wife and children. Women were to be silent and invisible in the “public” world of Rome, considered by Roman law as under the patria potestas, or power of the father, which “committed women to male guardianship as perpetual minors.” 7 In law, the power of the father was nearly absolute, although in practice women exercised some political power. Only fathers had rights before the law, could own property, and make contracts. Moreover, the ideology of Roman civic virtue, indeed of “armed civic virtue,” relegated women to the private world of the household dominated by their fathers or husbands, and constructed their public role as “civic cheerleaders, urging men to behave like men, praising the heroes and condemning the cowardly.” 8 The subordination of women in the political imagination as well as in the legal practices of Roman citizenship, which represented it, was an essential part of the Roman state.
The durability of the Roman Empire was bolstered by Roman law, which, when it was finally codified by the Byzantine Emperor Justinian (r. 527–565 A.D.), largely followed the patterns set centuries before. 9 Because the revival of Roman law will be central to the formation of the modern territorial states of Europe, it is important to discuss briefly some of its details.
Civil law was the most important element of Roman law. It dealt primarily with “the regulation of informal relationships of contract and exchange between private citizens.” 10 Public law, which set forth the rights and duties of the citizen toward the state, and criminal law, which was the law regarding crimes and punishments, were of considerably less interest and importance. The latter was especially concerned with keeping the lower classes in check, and was often arbitrary and harsh. 11 Roman civil law was concerned to a great extent with the protection of private property. With respect to indebtedness, for example, it protected the creditor far more than the debtor. 12 Roman civil law did not give legal and political protection to the entire population, or even to all citizens, because it was based on the idea of “absolute private property,” which separated property from political and moral restrictions. 13 As the preeminent principle of civil law, the institution of property itself never required justification. 14
Parallel to Roman civil law was another system of law based on the practical principles used by the governors of towns and justices when they tried specific cases in the law tribunals. This law was more sensitive to regional differences and the specific needs and customs of the people living in specific areas. Eventually, this customary law became known as the ius gentium or “law of the nations.” 15 It governed those economic and political relations which could not be adjudicated by the more traditional and inflexible civil law. With the introduction of the Greek philosophy of Stoicism into Rome, especially in the second century B.C., the ius gentium gained a philosophical basis. Stoicism emphasized order, and taught people to live their lives in conformity to the natural order of the cosmos, which governed all physical and moral being. As practiced by Romans, Stoicism meant peacefully accepting one’s duties and responsibilities even if such acceptance involved great personal pain and sacrifice.
Roman Expansion And Imperial Policy
The political structure and ideology of the Roman Republic were most appropriate to a city-state, a geographical and cultural space in which political life focused on the city of Rome itself. However, the expansion of the Roman republican state into an imperial state was driven in good part because, to increase wealth, its economy needed additional land. The state’s revenues were drawn largely from agriculture, and its more ambitious public works were funded from tribute paid by conquered peoples. Also, important social reforms, such as the grain subsidies and distribution of provincial lands to the poor during the tribunates of Tiberius and Caius Gracchus (r. 133–121 B.C.), were paid for largely by wealth drawn from Roman colonies in Asia Minor. 16 Moreover, the Roman economy was dependent on a continuous supply of slaves, whose primary source was conquered territory because slaves practiced various forms of birth control, which limited their numbers. Expansion from a republic into an empire was also implicit in the idea of virtus, which militarized Rome. War provided an important social and cultural arena where Roman citizens distinguished themselves in the eyes of their fellow citizens. In the words of one historian, “Loyal soldiers were rewarded with generous grants of land.” The “result was a growing territory that needed ever more troops to defend it, and a growing army that needed ever more land to support it.” 17
The Roman Empire, which expanded greatly under Caesar Augustus (r. 27–14 B.C.), reached its greatest territorial extent during the reign of Trajan (r. 98–117 A.D.). Rome’s army was stationed along the empire’s limes (frontiers), which were demarcated with walls and fortifications. Rome’s legions constituted the world’s first standing army ; that is, a permanent military force paid, fed, uniformed, and armed by the state. It was the finest military organization of its time, highly trained, superbly disciplined, and extremely mobile. It was virtually invincible from the Punic Wars to the third century A.D. At the time of its greatest strength, the Roman army numbered about 30 legions of 6,000 men each. 18
Administratively, the Roman Empire was divided into Italy proper and the provinces. The city of Rome and the Italian peninsula were governed by the Senate, the supreme council of the empire. The eastern and western provinces outside of the peninsula were governed by the emperor, the supreme ruler of the empire and commander of the army. The purpose of Roman imperial administration was to collect the taxes that supported the army and paid for public works such as roads, temples, baths, and aqueducts. Administration and control were facilitated by the Roman road network (originally built to allow for the rapid movement of troops), which created a communications system within each province and connected each province to the capital city; hence the expression “all roads lead to Rome.”
The practice of Roman imperial policy was not the same in all of its provinces, however. In Italy and the eastern provinces, especially Greece and Asia Minor as well as Egypt, Rome established its domination indirectly by spreading Roman ideology and manipulating local rulers. The Romans generally left local power struggles to work themselves out so long as they did not threaten Roman control and Pax Romana (Roman peace). When the Romans believed their hegemony was threatened, Roman provincial governors, called prefects, intervened militarily.
In the western provinces, military campaigns were constantly necessary to subjugate the largely seminomadic tribes of Celtic peoples, whom the Romans called “barbarians,” meaning foreigners, who inhabited these provinces. Roman policy in the West required more direct forms of rule, which often amounted to brutal and violent repression of local populations and extensive exploitation by Roman businessmen, money lenders, and tax collectors. Although the eastern provinces had provided Rome with much of its culture and wealth, the western provinces remained a perpetual battleground, where generals of the Roman army gained power and prestige. Julius Caesar, the general in charge of military operations in the western province of Gaul, and other generals like him would play an important role in eroding the power of the Senate and, eventually, replacing the oligarchic Republic with an imperial state centered on the emperor.
Roman imperial expansion caused tremendous social upheaval, which strained and eventually transformed the state. Expansion impoverished the small independent farmers, who had been the backbone of the Roman economy, and enhanced the wealth and power of the patrician aristocracy. As these farmers were drafted into the army to increase its size so that the empire could be expanded and maintained, their farms were taken over by the patrician aristocracy. Such takeovers created latifundia, or large estates, and intensified the use of slave labor. 19
The republican state created conditions that transformed the state from a republic into an empire dominated by emperors and military strongmen, who came to rule more and more autocratically. As one historian has put it: “The Republic had won Rome its Empire: it was rendered anachronistic by its own victories.” 20 The Senate gradually declined in power. The position and role of the army changed. Its ranks were filled increasingly by dispossessed farmers and the poor, as well as by “barbarians” who agitated for land and, most important, Roman citizenship. When the traditional aristocracy refused and resisted demands for land and citizenship, legionaries became increasingly loyal to their local military commanders, who promised such rewards. As the citizenry expanded to include the poor and non-Romans, the centralized political power and authority of Rome and the ideology that justified rule by the senatorial aristocracy were undermined and eventually collapsed.
Political Economy And Imperial Decline
The collapse of the Roman Empire was gradual, extending over several centuries. The fall of the empire was caused by four interrelated factors involving the inextricably interconnected state and economy. Note that the conception of economic and political life as separate and distinct spheres of activity is not characteristic of Rome but is a modern invention of liberal states, as we will see in a later chapter.
First, the empire ceased to expand during the reign of Hadrian (r. 117–138 A.D.). Lacking the booty and tribute from newly conquered peoples, the empire could no longer pay for its vast army, large bureaucracy, and extensive public works. The only resources available to the state were drawn from the agricultural sector within the empire. Rome did not have a rich and extensive industrial and commercial base from which to draw revenues. 21
As the expenses of the state increased, taxes had to be increased. In addition to money taxes, a tax in kind was levied on land and labor. A percentage of what was produced by farmers had to be turned over directly to state warehouses and granaries. Manual labor of a certain number of days per week had to be rendered on public roads, buildings, bridges, and aqueducts. To pay these taxes, farmers had to keep land under cultivation. Therefore, laws were passed that compelled farmers to stay on their land and urban dwellers to stay in their occupations for life. Gradually, the extraction of resources necessary to maintain the army and the civil service as well as build public works became confiscatory and the Roman state became despotic.
Second, Rome’s reliance on slave labor as the major source of economic productivity also contributed to imperial decline. Although the Roman economy was in certain respects quite innovative, having invented new agricultural techniques and machines, such as bread-kneading devices and the screw press to extract olive oil, which increased productivity and wealth, throughout its history the economy remained predominantly agrarian. However, the aristocracy limited the use of laborsaving devices because it wanted to moderate unemployment and prevent idleness among slaves. With the concentration of land ownership in the latifundia system of the later republic and empire, reliance on slave labor expanded. This system of agricultural production depended on the state’s continuing to expand militarily because military campaigns on the frontiers of the empire were the most significant source of new slave labor. 22
Third, the empire’s economic problems, especially the inflation of prices caused by falling productivity (a result of the dwindling supply of slave labor), were compounded by urbanization. Rome was an urban culture because Romans imagined political order and the political good as being possible only within cities. Its distinctive architectural and engineering innovations were the arch, dome, and vault, which made possible the construction of large public buildings and aqueducts necessary to city life. Therefore, Romans constructed cities wherever they conquered. Each of these cities was a small replica of Rome itself, with a central square, colonnaded streets, public buildings, forums, triumphal arches, baths, amphitheaters, and aqueducts. This urbanization, which accelerated as power shifted from Rome itself to the provinces, became increasingly difficult to pay for with the financial resources provided by a largely agrarian economy.
Fourth, Rome’s policy of recruiting barbarians into the army to maintain its strength eventually led to the de-Romanization of the army. Gradually, the ranks of the army were filled with legionaries whose commitment to Rome was slight. The influx of barbarians into the army was speeded up after the third century A.D. because the Roman state was facing a serious manpower shortage brought on by a declining birth rate and a high mortality rate among Romans, both the result of civil war, epidemic diseases such as the plague, and increasing economic hardship produced by confiscatory taxation. The civilian reign gradually gave way to military dictatorship. From 193 to 285 A.D., Rome was ruled by a succession of soldier-emperors from the provinces who were elevated to and removed from office by their troops. Military dictatorship exacerbated the empire’s economic problems because more of its wealth was given to soldiers to buy their loyalty. 23
In an attempt to stave off further disintegration, the empire was divided, for administrative purposes, into eastern and western portions by the emperor Diocletian (r. 284–305 A.D.). Diocletian ruled the eastern portion and appointed a co-emperor in the west. Each portion was subdivided into dioceses, or regional governments under the control of civil and military rulers appointed by the co-emperors. When Diocletian abdicated in 305 A.D., he was followed on the imperial throne by Constantine (r. 312–337 A.D.), who established a new capital city on the Bosporus, called New Rome, on the site of Byzantium in 330. Eventually, the division into Eastern and Western Empires became permanent and Byzantium, the capital of the Eastern Empire, was renamed Constantinople in honor of its founder.
Roman Religion And The Rise Of Christianity
Something must be said about Roman religion because developments in this sphere eroded the ideology that allowed the Romans to imagine and maintain an imperial state centered at Rome.
The official state religion of Rome was paganism (i.e., the belief in many gods). Romans worshipped the gods of the Greco-Roman pantheon, such as Jupiter, Juno, Minerva, and Mars, as well as dead emperors who had been deified. These gods were tied to the life-world of the Romans and were seen as protecting Rome itself. As the disintegration of the empire and the harsh methods taken to counteract it created extreme economic hardship, Romans began to turn away from official paganism. They turned either to foreign gods, such as Mithras, the militant god of the sun from the Persian Zoroastrian religion, especially popular with Roman legionaries; Isis, the Egyptian goddess of motherhood; or to ancient natural and fertility gods from pre-Roman times. They also turned to a variety of mystery cults from the eastern provinces of the empire. Initially, the state allowed people to follow these new religions, provided that they continued formally to recognize the gods of Rome and the cult of the deified emperors. The devotees of these new religions were largely, but not exclusively, from the lower and most economically distressed classes of Roman society, especially slaves and the very poor, who were desperately seeking relief from economic misery. Roman aristocrats continued to be loyal to the gods they believed had made Rome great.
One of these oriental religions was a Jewish sect that originated in the eastern province of Judea. At first the disciples of Jesus of Nazareth, an early nonconformist, itinerant teacher, and the sect’s founder, proselytized among Jewish communities elsewhere in the eastern portion of the empire. After Jesus’s crucifixion by the Romans, his disciples began to proselytize in the empire’s western portion. Christianity (from the Greek Christos or Messiah, meaning annointed one) was a revolutionary social movement that spread rapidly, especially among the lower social classes as well as aristocratic women, because its theology (1) was clear cut (good versus evil), (2) was universalistic (all are equal in the sight of God), (3) satisfied emotional and psychological needs (belief in life after death), and (4) emphasized concern for the poor (charity). Christianity’s rapid spread was facilitated by the Pax Romana and the existence of good Roman roads, which made movement about the empire relatively easy for its missionaries. 24
At first the Roman state tolerated Christianity. However, because Christians refused to acknowledge the pagan gods of Rome and the cult of the deified emperors, they came to be seen as enemies of the state. Its monotheism (i.e., the belief in the universality of the one God) and its idea that all people everywhere were equal in the eyes of God threatened the way Rome had understood its distinctiveness. The Christian emphasis on humility, charity, and love for one’s neighbor proffered an alternative understanding of virtue, which in turn undermined the Roman association of virtue with manliness and war. Christian virtue was manifested in private acts of piety and charity rather than in civic acts of courage and honor. Consequently, the most pious and energetic adherents to Christianity were women. 25
In spite of persecution, the greatest of which came during the third century when many thousands were tortured and put to death, the number of Christians within the empire increased during the fourth century. Converts began to come from the upper classes of Roman society. The early church, which was composed of small, independent congregations that elected their own deacons and bishops, was replaced by an ecclesiastical hierarchy modeled on the Roman system of provincial administration. In 313, Constantine lifted the ban on Christianity and a few years later became a Christian himself; probably from religious conviction, not political expediency, he fostered Christianity throughout the empire. When he died in 337, the Roman Empire was thoroughly Christianized. The Emperor Theodosius (r. 379–395 A.D.) declared Christianity to be the official religion of the Roman Empire and outlawed paganism. As the empire disintegrated, the Christian Church replaced the politico-military institutions of Rome with its own law (canon law), ecclesiastical courts, and administrative hierarchy of priests, bishops, and cardinals. The capital of the empire became the capital of the Catholic (meaning universal) Church. In the fifth century the bishops of the diocese of Rome were able to achieve ascendency over the Church’s religio-administrative hierarchy by reference to St. Peter, the first bishop of Rome and the Apostle to whom Christ reputedly gave the “keys of Heaven” and established the papacy. Christianity’s message of kindness, humility, patience, mercy, purity, and chastity was fused with the governing practices of the Roman imperial state: hierarchy, order, virtus, patriarchy, and law. In effect, the Church had become the Roman Empire. In the words of one scholar, the Church “took over the vestments of pagan priests, use of incense and holy water in purification, burning of candles before the alter, worship of saints, the architecture of the basilica, Roman law as the basis for Canon law, the title Pontifex Maximus for the pope, the Latin language, and the vast framework of the government of the Empire.” 26 At this point the Catholic Church had grafted itself onto the framework of Roman administration and became a form of organized rule that did not recognize territorial boundaries to its authority over its community of believers.
Germanic Invasions
At the time the Roman Republic was expanding northwestward, Germanic tribes of Franks, Lombards, Frisians, Burgundians, Alemmani, Jutes, Angles, and Saxons were moving westward from the Baltic region and overran the indigenous Celtic inhabitants of Europe. By 200 B.C. they had reached the Rhine River and by 100 B.C., the Danube. Other Germanic tribal peoples such as the Suevi, Visigoths, Ostrogoths, and Vandals moved to the south and east.
The Rhine and the Danube became the frontier between the seminomadic Germanic peoples and the Roman Empire. Only in Scotland, Wales, Cornwall, the Isle of Man, Ireland, and Brittany did the Celts survive. In about 378 A.D. the Huns, a nomadic warrior people from central Asia, swept westward and pushed some of these Germanic peoples across the Rhine and Danube into Roman territory. The Romans settled them on uninhabited land within the empire as self-governing allies of Rome and under obligation to furnish troops for the Roman army in exchange for land and money. The Germanic tribes accepted Christianity after being settled within the empire.
The Germanic tribes were by and large communal groups. Their economies were based on primitive agriculture and animal husbandry, which required them to move perpetually, probably annually, to seek virgin land to cultivate and new pastures for their herds. Land was considered the property of everyone. Because tribes lacked formal institutions of government, decisions affecting the tribe, such as which clans and families would work which areas of land, were made by assemblies of leading warriors according to custom. Many of the clans that made up these tribes were matrilineal (i.e., they traced descent and inheritance through the female line), which gave women important social roles as clan leaders and involved them in decisionmaking. Finally, because the tribe was considered to be the family writ large, no distinction existed within the Germanic tribes between the public and the private.
In places where tribes had settled within the empire, there grew a hybrid society, which blended Roman and Germanic institutions and practices. In many places Germanic peoples abandoned communal ownership and accepted the Roman idea of private ownership. Leading warriors carved out latifundia for themselves, creating differences in social standing and status that had not existed before the encounter with Rome. Increasingly, women were subordinated to men as the Germanic tribes accepted Rome’s patriarchal inheritance laws and Christianity’s definition of the identity “woman” in relation to God and “man.” 27
Barbarian Invasions of the Fifth Century
For their part, the Romans gradually accepted the Germanic institution of the comitatus (from the Latin comes, or one who dines with the king), which was a band of young men who attached themselves to a famous warrior to whom they pledged unswerving loyalty. Such a warrior’s followers were companions who were treated with distinction and given gifts, such as weapons and horses, rather than wages for their support. As more and more Germanic peoples were brought into the Roman army, most generals during the last centuries of the empire were of Germanic origin. Gradually, loyalty to Rome was replaced by personal loyalty to a particular commander. Thus, the chain of command from the emperor downward was broken and the Roman imperial state was left without a reliable means of defense. 28
Eventually, the slow infiltration of Germanic peoples became a full-scale invasion. From 407 to 429 the provinces of Italia, Galicia, and Hispania were invaded. In 410 Visigoths invaded the Italian peninsula and sacked Rome. Rome was sacked for a second time in 455 by Vandals who invaded from Africa after having overrun the Iberian peninsula. The frontier provinces were also overrun: Jutes, Angles, and Saxons invaded Britannia between 441 and 443; Galicia fell to the Franks, Burgundians, Alemmani, and Visigoths. Hispania was overrun by the Suevi, Vandals, and Visigoths. In 476 the last Western Roman emperor was deposed and replaced by the German chieftain Odoacer (433–493), who ruled the Italian peninsula as a king. The Roman Empire in the west had come to its end. Visigoths attacked Constantinople in 378 but were defeated by the Byzantine emperor. After this victory, the Eastern Roman Empire was able to maintain itself until defeated by Ottoman Turks in 1453.
Summary
Rome grew from a primitive tribe of herdsmen living on an estuary of the Tiber River in the Italian peninsula of Europe into the most powerful and extensive empire of the ancient world. The situation it left was one of political disintegration amidst the growing unity of a Christian community. The fragmentation of the Western Roman Empire by the successor Germanic kingdoms, combined with the spiritual universalism of the Catholic Church, produced a particular political space called “Europe” and had significant consequences for the emergence and globalization of the modern state.
Endnotes
Note 1: Karl Lowenstein, The Governance of Rome (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973), 3–5. Back.
Note 2: Perry Anderson, Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism (London: New Left Books, 1974), 55. Back.
Note 3: Sheldon S. Wolin, Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought (Boston: Little, Brown, 1960), 83. Back.
Note 5: E. Badian, Roman Imperialism in the Late Republic, 2d ed. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1968), 8. Back.
Note 6: Alternative concepts of power and politics to sovereignty rooted in kinship and clan systems have been studied largely by anthropologists who usually focus on so-called non-Western societies. It is part of contemporary ideology not to recognize alternative concepts of power and politics as themselves part of the Western legacy and “heritage.” For an account of clan and kinship concepts of politics as alternatives to sovereignty-based concepts of politics, see Pierre Clastres, Society Against the State, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Zone Books, 1989). Back.
Note 7: Diana Coole, Women in Political Theory. From Ancient Misogyny to Contemporary Feminism, 2d ed. (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1993), 36. Back.
Note 8: Jean Bethke Elshtain, Women and War (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 121. Back.
Note 9: Hans Julius Wolff, Roman Law: A Historical Introduction (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1951), 63. Back.
Note 10: Anderson, Passages, 65. Back.
Note 12: Ernst Block, Natural Law and Human Dignity, trans. Dennis J. Schmidt (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986), 18. Back.
Note 13: Anderson, Passages, 66. Back.
Note 14: Block, Natural Law, 18. Back.
Note 16: Badian, Roman Imperialism, 44 ff. Back.
Note 17: Norman Davies, Europe: A History (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 159. Back.
Note 18: Graham Webster, The Roman Imperial Army, 3d ed. (Totowa, NJ: Barnes and Noble, 1985), 1–27. Back.
Note 19: Anderson, Passages, 60–62. Back.
Note 21: Solomon Katz, The Decline of Rome and the Rise of Medieval Europe (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1955), 1–24. Back.
Note 22: On the importance of slavery to the Roman economy and its limits, see Anderson, Passages, 76–79. Back.
Note 24: Katz, The Decline of Rome, chap. 3. Back.
Note 25: William H. McNeill, The Rise of the West: A History of the Human Condition (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1963), 338–339. Back.
Note 26: Will Durant, Caesar and Christ: A History of Roman Civilization and of Christianity from Their Beginnings to A.D. 325 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1944), 618–619. Back.
Note 27: See Anderson, Passages, 107–111 and Coole, Women in Political Theory, 35–40. Back.
Note 28: Joseph R. Strayer, Feudalism (Princeton, NJ: Van Nostrand Press, 1965), 156. Back.
The Nation-State and Global Order: A Historical Introduction to Contemporary Politics
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