A. Toynbee "Universal States: Ends or Means?"

Excerpts from "A Study of History", abridged, illustrated, chapters 32-33.

I have referenced Arnold Toynbee, an encyclopedic historian a few times in interviews, most recently in this discussion with James Delingpole:

My recent discussion with James Delingpole

There is a misunderstanding, usually divided along political party lines, about the United States and other nominally sovereign independent countries of the world. Typically the “leftists” call them “democracies”, while the conservatives in the US counter this with “we are a constitutional republic, not a democracy”. Other groups decry the corporate form of the US government. I think trying to pinpoint the ill invariably misses the point, as any state will undergo all of these forms before a given civilization ends.

According to Toynbee, a “universal state” is the last phase of a society before extinction. This doesn’t mean people go extinct: they don’t disappear as a group, however they may be reduced in numbers. We are talking about the concept of a “state” in this case. As Toynbee describes, universal states typically last a century or two, and all eventually disappear, but all proclaim that they are eternal right up to the point of their demise. The chapters I am quoting from primarily deal with Rome as a universal state, but draw comparisons and reference from many others - Chinese, Russian, Ottoman, Japanese. Toynbee postulates that the imperial Rome (but not its earlier versions, i.e., royal, magisterial and republican) became the universal state for the disintegrating Hellenic (Greek) world. Reproduced below without commentary. I hope the quotes from ~2000 years ago ring a bell…

One World Government is a desperate last-ditch “Indian summer” attempt at staving off the collapse and disintegration of the existing world order. IMO, it has no chance of coming to fruition now.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Objectively, no universal state has ever been literally universal in the sense of having covered the entire surface of the globe; but in a significant subjective sense these states have indeed been universal, for they have looked and felt worldwide to the people living under their regime. The Romans and the Chinese […] thought of their respective empires as embracing all the peoples in the world that were of any account…

[…]

Universal states are, let us remind ourselves, essentially negative institutions. In the first place, they arise after, and not before the breakdown of civilizations to which they bring political unity. They are not summers but Indian summers, masking autumn and presaging winter. […] There is, however, an element of ambiguity in them, for, while universal states are thus symptoms of social disintegration, they are at the same time attempts to check this disintegration and defy it.

[Universal states invariably position themselves and are perceived by contemporaries as immortal and divine.]

[After it’s establishment after the battle of Actium in 31 BC], the secret of Roman imperial government was the principle of indirect rule. The Hellenic universal state was conceived of by its Roman founders as an association of self-governing city-states with a fringe of autonomous principalities in the regions where the Hellenic culture had not yet struck political root. The burden of administration - which even at the end of the Hellenic time of troubles, was still publicly regarded as an honorable and covetable load - was to be left resting on the shoulders of these responsible self-governing local authorities; the imperial government was to confine itself to the twofold task of keeping the local communities in harmony with one another and protecting them against attacks from the outer barbarians; and for these limited imperial activities, a slender military framework and a light political superstructure were all that was required. This fundamental policy was never deliberately revised; yet, if we look again at the Roman Empire as it emerged from a spell of two centuries of Roman Peace, we shall find that its administrative structure had in fact been transformed as a result of innovations that were reluctant and piecemeal, but were far-reaching in their cumulative effect because they were all in the same direction.

By end of the reign of Marcus Aurelius (AD 161-80), the last of the client principalities had been gleichgeschaltet [uniformized, often in a forced or totalitarian manner] with the provinces, and, more significant still, the provinces themselves had become organs of direct administration instead of remaining mere frameworks for local groups of self-administering city-states. […] in the course of … two centuries, however, the human resources for the conduct of local government gradually ran dry, and the central government, faced with this increasing dearth of the local administrative talent on which it had been accustomed to rely, found itself constrained not only to replace the client-princes with imperial governors but to put the administration of the city-states in the hands of ‘city-managers’ who were appointed by the imperial authorities instead of being elected (as the city-state magistrates were) by the local notables, and who were indirectly responsible to the Emperor himself. […] while the self-complacent local magistrates and town councilors of the once self-governing city-states have been degraded into becoming unwilling instruments of the central exchequer for extracting ruinously heavy taxes from the local notables…

[…]

Another cause of the persistence of the belief in the immortality of the universal states is the impressiveness of the institution itself, as distinct from the prestige of the successive rulers who are its living incarnation.

[…]

Appian of Alexandria (AD 90-160) [a Greek who became a Roman propagandist, wrote] in the preface to his Studies in Roman History,

“the [Roman] state has reached its highest point of organization and the public revenue its highest figure, while as long and stable peace has raised the whole world to a level of secure prosperity. A few more subject nations have been added by the emperors to those already under the Roman dominion, and others which have revolted have been reduced to obedience; but, since the Romans already posses the choicest portions of the land and water surface of the globe, they are wise enough to aim at retaining what they hold rather than extending their Empire to infinity over the poverty-stricken and unremunerative territories of uncivilized nations. I myself have seen representatives of such nations attending at Rome on diplomatic missions and offering to become her subjects, and the Emperor refusing to accept the allegiance of peoples who would be of no value to his government. There are other nations innumerable whose kings the Romans appoint themselves, since they feel no necessity to incorporate them in their Empire. There are also certain subject nations to whom they make grants from their treasury, because they are too proud to repudiate them in spite their being a financial burden. They have garrisoned the frontiers of their Empire with a ring of powerful armies, and keep guard over this vast extent of land and sea as easily as if it were a modest farm”.

In the view of Appian and Aelius Aristeides [AD 117-181], the Roman Empire was eternal:

“…just as the sum total of things is eternal, because there is no room, outside it, for its components to fly apart, and there are no extraneous bodies that can collide with it and disintegrate it with a mighty blow.”

In these lines of the Roman poet Lucretius [BC 90-50], his teacher Democritus’s [BC 460] argument looks as impregnable as the Roman limes [borders] itself:

“Nor is there any force that can modify the sum of things. There is no space outside into which any kind of matter can escape out of the totality. Nor is there any space outside from which some new force can arise, break in, transform the whole nature of things, and deflect its motions.”

A universal state has indeed as little to fear from outer barbarians as the Universe has from stray star cluster that are ex hypothesi non-existent; yet the argument is a fallacy nevertheless, for, as we have seen in an earlier context, ‘things rot through evils native to their selves’ [Menander, BC 342-292, fragment 540]. In physical Nature there are elements whose atoms disintegrate by spontaneous radioactivity without requiring any bombardment from extraneous particles; and in human social life, universal states ‘are betray’d by what is false within’ [George Meredith] into revealing, for those who have eyes to see through their specious appearance of impregnability, that, so far from being immortal, these are spontaneously fissile polities.

However long the life of a universal state maybe drawn out, it always proves to have been the last phase of a society before its extinction. Its goal is the achievement of immortality, but the attempt to secure immortality in this world is a vain effort, whether blind or deliberate, to thwart the economy of Nature.

Art for today: Isis, pastel on paper.