Freedom’s Progress?: A History of Political Thought, by Gerard Casey
…compared with the statist, pillaging, slave-based and tax-burdened nightmare that was fifth-century Rome, ‘the world of the so-called barbarians was free and enlightened,’ with superior economic and personal freedoms.
Casey offers an examination of the European Middle Ages. To summarize my view of this period: the European Middle Ages – at least for those regions influenced by the combination of the Germanic and the Christian – offered the most libertarian law and decentralized society that I have found in history.
There is much in Casey’s treatment of this period that will be familiar to those of you who have been here awhile.
The Unfree World
Casey offers that the empire did not fall because of unstoppable barbarian hordes (“The numbers of barbarians were always small”); it fell due to its internal corruption and contradictions, it fell because its citizens emigrated to the freer barbarian lands.
The late Roman Empire was, according to Lucien Musset, a ‘totalitarian state, which was almost constantly in a state of siege, using savage means in its attempt to ensure the survival of a limited ruling class made up of learned senators and uncouth military officers.’ It was, he says, ‘A regime of appalling social inequality, a political organization which for the previous two centuries had been based on constraint and suspicion, biased courts and laws of an absurd and ever-increasing savagery….’
Next time you need a quick reference to the similarities of the fall of Rome and the fall of the current global hegemon (well, except for the “learned senators” part), come back here.
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