Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Review of Mortal Republic: How Rome Fell into Tyranny

economist.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 88 posts

Re: Review of Mortal Republic: How Rome Fell into Tyranny

#71

Post by microtherion »

hannasanarion wrote: post #58
microtherion wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Every office except senator was decided by majority vote For some values of "majority vote". The voting was by centuries / tribes, both of them being extremely unbalanced in voting power. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elections_in_the_Roman_Republi...

So? They were still elected by popular vote. The fact that votes were grouped in a certain way doesn't suddenly change the system from democracy to something else. If you demand that all matters must be decided by simple-majority popular vote in order to call a government "democratic" then there has never been a democratic government in all of history. Even Ancient Athens had assemblies, councils, tribunals, and othe…

In the centuriate assembly, senators + equites, a few thousand men among several million citizens, represented a majority of the votes (98 of the 193 tribes). This is pretty much a textbook oligarchy.

Re: Review of Mortal Republic: How Rome Fell into Tyranny

#72

Post by hannasanarion »

jimjimjim wrote: post #50
all2 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>the question is not if, but when the us will be under single person rule and what shape will it take. The question will remain if as long as the right to bear arms remains a right. No tyranny can survive an armed and angry population. The problem that follows that, though, is something the French faced during their revolutionary years. We could be in for a bloodbath if we don't move correctly.

The population BECOMES the tyranny. Tell 51% of the population that they are gods and if they don't feel like that it must be because of the other 49% percent. fascists. tyrants. populists.

Talk about tyranny of the majority can be counter-productive. Whether they believe they themselves are gods or not, many Americans believe that the framers were practically gods [1]. The framers were very concerned about tyranny of the majority, and had it in mind when designing the federal system. [fuzzy non-logic goes here]. Therefore whoever governs in America is not tyrannical, regardless of whether they hold a majority, and they are justified in whatever they do.

1. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/86/Fl...

Re: Review of Mortal Republic: How Rome Fell into Tyranny

#73

Post by wisdomoftheages »

hannasanarion wrote: post #61
wisdomoftheages wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Leaving aside the historiographical issue of how projecting modern descriptive terms onto the past fundamentally distorts our understanding of how people back then conceived of their society, I'm afraid you're laboring under some extreme misapprehensions about the nature of the late Republican government. That Republican Rome was governed by an aristocratic land-owning oligarchy for pretty much its entire existence i…

Can you name a historical society where there wasn't any manner of "aristocratic ruling class"? It is a historical constant that rich people are more likely to find themselves in office. Campaigning takes time and effort and you don't get paid for it, so you pretty much have to have some wealth stashed up before you can run for office. That was true then as it is true now. That doesn't mean that there has never been…

I didn't say that there has never been a democratic government in all of history. I said that the Roman Republic could not in any sense of the word be described as democratic. It was fundamentally and wholly governed by wealthy land-owning elites, who derived their position in the system from their wealth, despite the presence of institutions that bear a superficial similarity to institutions present in modern democracies.

I'd really urge you to crack open an academic textbook on the subject. If you'd like to dive a little deeper, I'd recommend W.G. Runciman, "Capitalism Without Classes: The Case of Ancient Rome" (British Journal of Sociology), Wilfried Nippel, "Policing Rome" (Journal of Roman Studies), Peter Baehr, "Caesar and the Fading of the Roman World", Peter Brunt, "The Army and the Land in the Roman Revolution" and Douglass North, "Institutions, Institutional Change, and Economic Performance" which has a large stretch of summary of Roman political economy.

Re: Review of Mortal Republic: How Rome Fell into Tyranny

#74

Post by munk-a »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #60
munk-a wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uh, so why has citizen's united been allowed to stand. If the 2nd amendment will magically save us all some day... why is it waiting? I am more cynical and think that the 2nd amendment does protect against sudden tyranny but slow insidious tyranny is quite able to work around it. On the other hand, I'm pretty hopeful that the first amendment will be able to get us out of our terrible situation.

Because (despite what you seem to think) Citizens United did not create a tyranny. And it seems ironic that you oppose Citizens United, but favor the First Amendment. If Citizens United had been decided the other direction, that would have been a blow against the First Amendment.

Some rulings against Citizens United would have been tyrannical, it was and is a very complicated question where assets of a campaign like their access to media and a copy shop offering to print bulletins for free can become really sticky questions.

The US needs to heavily reform how election funding, free speech and volunteered labour all relate and it is a complicated question. But Citizens United did take us a big step in the wrong direction by lowering the impact of individuals' expression of free speech in relation to financial endorsement.

Re: Review of Mortal Republic: How Rome Fell into Tyranny

#75

Post by hannasanarion »

microtherion wrote: post #71
hannasanarion wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So? They were still elected by popular vote. The fact that votes were grouped in a certain way doesn't suddenly change the system from democracy to something else. If you demand that all matters must be decided by simple-majority popular vote in order to call a government "democratic" then there has never been a democratic government in all of history. Even Ancient Athens had assemblies, councils, tribunals, and othe…

In the centuriate assembly, senators + equites, a few thousand men among several million citizens, represented a majority of the votes (98 of the 193 tribes). This is pretty much a textbook oligarchy.

The Centuriate assembly was only used to elect three offices: consuls, praetors, and censors.

The plebian assembly, where all votes are equal and senators and equites aren't allowed, elected Tribunes who had an absolute veto over all government activity, including the senate and the consuls, and controlled the treasury.

This is like saying that US senators are with equal state representation, some senators representing hundreds of thousands and others representing tens of millions, therefore the US is an oligarchy. You can't just ignore the rest of the government and its other electoral mechanisms.

Re: Review of Mortal Republic: How Rome Fell into Tyranny

#76

Post by dv_dt »

hannasanarion wrote: post #69
dv_dt wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That ignores that the norms came to be norms in the first place.

The norms are generally established at the same time as the constitution is; ie, after a revolution or other major political event. I'm not a historian, but I can't think of an example of democratic norms being re-established peacefully after being violated.

Reunification after the American Civil War? Though I suppose some might argue that we are still suffering from that divide.

Re: Review of Mortal Republic: How Rome Fell into Tyranny

#77

Post by ebertx »

My theory is that every book written about the fall of the Roman Empire is more about the political climate of the time it was written and the political perspective of the author writing it.

In the mid- to late-00s when sentiment against the Iraq was its peak, I remember seeing the claim that Rome fell because of military overreach and being in a constant state of war. On the more right-leaning side, I remember seeing the claim that Rome fell because Rome became a weakened, welfare state.

Obviously there are real reasons why Rome fell, it just seems to me that more often than not the explanation for its fall is a reflection of the times in which it was written.

edit The word "every" in the first sentence is too strong. I stand by the general sentiment, though.

Re: Review of Mortal Republic: How Rome Fell into Tyranny

#78

Post by hannasanarion »

dv_dt wrote: post #76
hannasanarion wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The norms are generally established at the same time as the constitution is; ie, after a revolution or other major political event. I'm not a historian, but I can't think of an example of democratic norms being re-established peacefully after being violated.

Reunification after the American Civil War? Though I suppose some might argue that we are still suffering from that divide.

But the norms of democracy were never challenged during the civil war. Nobody ever denounced the press or said that votes shouldn't count, or that the courts are illegitimate, or that the constitution was somehow wrong. It was a formal rebellion seeking independence under a different democracy.

Re: Review of Mortal Republic: How Rome Fell into Tyranny

#79

Post by thomasz »

hannasanarion wrote: post #26
jdpedrie wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rome at the end of the Republic may have technically been republican (if oligarchic republicanism counts), but it was neither democratic nor liberal. Liberalism didn’t exist in name or form for another 1800 years. One must be extremely careful and judicious drawing straight line comparisons from Ancient Rome to today. And as usual, the correct answer when confronted by a discussion along these lines, the correct answ…

It was definitely democratic. Every office except senator was decided by majority vote with universal male suffrage. And even Senators were de-facto elected, since elevation to the Senate was automatic upon the completion of a term in an elected office. Sure, Rome began as an Oligarchic Republic, but after the secession of the plebs in 494 BC 12 years later, it was solidly Democratic. Think about it, if Rome wasn't a…

> It was definitely democratic. Every office except senator was decided by majority vote with universal male suffrage.

That's very, very wrong. First of all, the Roman Republic was an oligarchy. Political power was monopolized in the hands of very few families who formed the nobility. When somebody outside this incredibly tiny elite, a homo novus, completed the cursus honorum, it was a seen as sensation.

Furthermore, the most important offices of the cursus honorum were not selected by something we would recognize as a democratic election. If you did not belong to the equites or the first class, your vote in the comitia centuriata which elected the consuls, the praetors and the censors had basically no effect.

Re: Review of Mortal Republic: How Rome Fell into Tyranny

#80

Post by Balgair »

hannasanarion wrote: post #18
e40 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This implies that once a political norm is broken, it will forever be broken. That does not bode well for our current political situation in the US.

It is hard to un-break democratic norms, but there is no theoretical reason it can't be done. It'll just take a lot of work and some major changes. Here's a little game that pop historian Mike Duncan released a little while ago. See if you can figure out the political moves you have to make to pull the Roman Republic back from the brink: https://www.riddle.com/showcase/165065/narrative

Haha, that's a good one from Duncan. All you have to do it put the republic above yourself each time (also the order is citizenship > war > land reform, and watch out for loops in the decision tree)
Post reply on HN