Winston S. Churchill: The River War An Historical Account of the Reconquest of the Sudan. James W. Muller, editor. South Bend: St. Augustine’s Press, 2020.

 

This review originally appeared in City Journal on April 30, 2021.

 

The Nile is the river in question. Without it, no war. “It is the cause of the war,” Churchill writes. “It is the means by which we fight, the end at which we aim.” On the Nile, the British could run their formidable gunboats into their enemy’s territory, upriver to its stronghold at Khartoum, itself located at the geostrategic chokepoint where the Blue and White Niles meet: “the great spout through which the merchandise collected from a wide area streams northwards to the Mediterranean Sea.” Just as the Suez Canal, completed in 1869, connected Europe to Asian ports beyond the ‘Mideast,’ so the Nile, originating in smaller rivers that flow into Lake Victoria far to the south of Egypt and Sudan, connects Europe with the heart of Africa. Americans will think of their great Mississippi River, which allows farmers in the Midwest to ship their produce to the Gulf of Mexico and from there to the rest of the world. Today, when it’s easy to imagine that we live in ‘cyberspace,’ Churchill reminds us that geography matters.

Since the Nile flows from the great lake north through the deserts of Sudan, “the Sudan is…naturally and geographically an integral part of Egypt,” and “Egypt is no less essential to the development of the Sudan.” In the 1890s, politics (especially religious politics) had sundered that geographical and economic union, with war as the consequence.

At the time of its conquest and annexation of Sudan in 1821, Egypt was itself part of the Ottoman Empire, ruled by an Ottoman-appointed viceroy or “khedive,” Muhammad Ali, an Albanian who had served as an officer in the imperial army. But throughout the century the empire had weakened—almost proverbially, ‘the Turk’ was ‘the sick man of Europe’—and both Great Britain and France vied for influence there. In 1883, the Brits intervened in Egypt to suppress a nationalist revolt. “Shortly after,” Churchill recalls, Muslims in Sudan proclaimed an Islamic regime, captured Khartoum, killed a much-respected British envoy named Charles Gordon, and pushed the Egyptians out. Such jihadi movements in West Africa dated back to the eleventh century, so this was a perennial threat, one that persists to this day.

By the 1880s, the British regime itself had changed, gradually, from the mixed regime of Edmund Burke’s time to an increasingly democratic republic. Gordon’s murder spurred calls for revenge from the now-powerful general public, though Churchill never lets his reader lose sight of the geo-economic and geopolitical calculations motivating Parliament and Downing Street. In 1896, an Anglo-Egyptian army under the command of General Horatio Herbert Kitchener began to move south along the Nile. Some two decades later, during the Great War, Kitchener would prove inadequate to high command in twentieth-century military conditions, but in 1890s Sudan, he understood exactly how to proceed—in a word, methodically. Kitchener’s “organizing talents” were unsurpassed in his time and place. “Much depended on forethought, much on machinery; little was left to chance.” The river supported gunboats, which the British had and jihadis had not. The flat land could support a railway, so Kitchener built one, taking care to install telegraph lines for instant communications. “Fighting the Dervish was primarily a matter of transport.” By the end of 1897, when the railroad was completed, “though the battle [for Khartoum] was not yet fought, the victory was won.”

In inaugurating the reign of modern, experimental science in England, Francis Bacon had called for “the conquest of nature for the relief of man’s estate. Little need be left to chance, he contended, although much usually is. Kitchener was a Baconian through and through. Faced not only with jihadis but with epidemics and famine, but fortified with the world-mastering products of modern science for transport, communication, and warfare, he and his men soldiered on and overcame. “In nearly three years of war nothing of any consequence went wrong.” How many military commanders before or since can have that said of their campaigns?

Nor was it all a matter of machines. Kitchener and his officers showed the qualities of mental and moral discipline to keep at it, not to outrun their technological capabilities, which would have exposed their soldiers unnecessarily to the counterattacks of what Churchill often praises as a courageous, resilient, and smart enemy. The “stony cheerfulness” of the British officers kept the few British, many Egyptians and many Sudanese soldiers steadily on the path to victory. Crucially, the officers respected their men. “There is one spirit which animates all the dealings of the British officers with the native soldier. It is not only seen in Egypt; it exists wherever Britain raises mercenary troops. The officer’s military honor is the honor of his men…. The British officer of native corps is never known—on duty or off duty, officially or in private, before or after dinner, by word or implication—to speak disparagingly of his men.” As a result, the men esteemed (and consequently obeyed) their officers.

Kitchener himself, admittedly more stony than cheerful, nonetheless encourage this spirit in his subordinates. “Few generals have the good fortune to know their subordinates. Of all the advantages enjoyed by Sir Herbert Kitchener in the campaigns on the Nile, this was the greatest. Such “mutual confidence” makes not only obedience but also “beneficial disobedience possible.” Churchill means that Kitchener’s officers could countermand the general’s orders if some new, unanticipated circumstance arose, deploying their own intelligence and daring to fit any occasion. Method, yes; roboticism, no.

Abdallah ibn Muhammad, ruler of the Sudanese caliphate, had 50,000 Dervish troops at Khartoum. To call their defense of the city against modern weaponry “mad fanaticism” is “a cruel injustice,” Churchill insists. “In a few seconds swift destruction would rush on these brave men,” but through no fault of theirs or that of their general, who had given them “a complex and ingenious” battle plan. The trouble was that he had based his plan “on an extraordinary miscalculation of the power of modern weapons.” He simply had no way of knowing better. “Why should we regard as madness in the savage what would be sublime in civilized man?”

Not that Churchill wastes sentiment on the Dervishes. The war resulted in “the destruction of a state of society which had long become an anachronism—an insult as well a a danger to civilization,” depending as it did on slave trading, bound together by “mutual fear, not mutual trust,” and a religious ideology Churchill does not hesitate to denounce as veering from “frenzy” to “fatalistic apathy”—precisely the extremes that the English had learned to shun after their own vicious civil warfare in the seventeenth century. The war brought “the liberation of a great waterway” from the Khalif’s tyrannical regime, opening the possibility (a hope which would prove over-optimistic) of “the foundation of an African India” for Great Britain, and at any rate, and more soberly, “the settlement of a long dispute.”

Very well, we might ask, a century-and-a-quarter removed, “why should we care?” The British Empire has gone the way of the Ottomans—even if, fortunately, the Brits haven’t gone the way of the Turks.

Churchill, for starters. As early as his mid-twenties, when he wrote the book, he knew how to tell a story and paint a picture—especially one he played a role in, having arrived in Sudan in 1899, fresh from fighting the Pathans in the mountains of India. His description of the thrill of going into battle with the enemy will put to rest any questions of why men have always been drawn to war, even as he insists, against jingoes, that “war, disguise it as you may, is but a dirty, shoddy business, which only a fool would undertake” without serious reason.

That sense of balance, of holding up contraries for dispassionate consideration, stands as witness against those (very much like his eventual ally, Franklin Roosevelt) who take Churchill to have been an unthinking imperialist, and against those who take him for a racist. On the latter point, he is far more critical of Islam than of Muslims, and he rates the black Sudanese soldiers above the Arabs in terms of their battle readiness under modern conditions. Under pre-modern conditions, when Muslims conquered their way into Africa, “the dominant race of Arab invaders was unceasingly spreading its blood, religion, customs and language among the black aboriginal population, and at the same time it harried and enslaved them.” As for his white countrymen, he remarks their own occasional descent into savagery, especially in their abuse of helpless captives after some of the battles and in the mutilation of the Dervish commander’s corpse. He views both sides with some irony, reporting that Kitchener’s latest advance so “created a panic” in the capital of the caliphate that “all business” came to “a standstill,” so much so that “for several days there were no executions”; as for his fellow modern ‘whites,’ they must learn the military lessons of the Sudan campaign, lest “the science of human destruction…fall behind the general progress of the age.”

Churchill was indeed an imperialist, but his critics seldom meet his argument for imperialism. Throughout the modern West he sees young men who belong to “the only true aristocracy the world can now show”—the aristocracy of “brains and enthusiasm.” What will these young men do? In the United States, they go into commerce building great business corporations. In France and Germany, they go into the military. In England, they venture “to the farthest corners of our wide Empire, and infuse into the whole the energy and vigor of progress”—ending slavery in the Sudan, for example, building irrigation systems, railroads, and other infrastructure that will benefit men and women who might otherwise fall prey to squalor, disease, “war, slavery, and oppression.”

The ambitions of continental European ‘aristocrats’ would lead to two world wars; the ambitions of the young Brits and Americans would lead to prosperity and better government—albeit not without serious problems, of which Churchill is well aware. And this leaves out the ambitions of the young Arabs the imperialists fought and the young Russians who would soon set about imposing another form of empire.

Given the ambitions of the young—their will to rule and their ability to take rule—which of the available imperialisms do you prefer? If you say, ‘none at all,’ then you do not understand the intelligence and ambition of youth. And as for the ameliorating humanitarian sentiments which derive from Christianity real or ‘secularized,’ consider: “Were it not that Christianity is sheltered in the strong arms of science—the science against which it had vainly struggled—the civilization of modern Europe might fall, as fell the civilization of ancient Rome.” Without a strong arm, humanitarianism stands no chance against enemies who despise its softness.

Finally—and speaking of civilization—the production of this book itself upholds it. The publishers have given us two beautifully turned-out volumes, restoring the original maps and drawings omitted from the editions that followed the first. The volumes are a pleasure to read and to hold. For his part, the editor had scrupulously retrieved the original text severely truncated in the subsequent editions. He has also written a fine introduction that gives Churchill’s readers a helpful overview of his long and complex (if unfailingly lively) narrative and has inserted well-chosen, carefully researched footnotes explaining conditions familiar to Churchill’s first audience but lost to us. In these things, publisher and editor alike share a bit in an old British triumph, which is as instructive for us now as it was for Churchill’s countrymen then.

 

 

Alexis de Tocqueville: “My Musings about English History.”

 

In October 1828, while staying “at Tocqueville, my old family ruin,” Alexis de Tocqueville wrote to a friend—Gustave de Beaumont or possibly Louis de Kergolay—who had asked for his thoughts on English history. The Napoleonic Wars had concluded only in the last decade; the French and the English had hated one another for centuries, and only the rise of a newly united Germany would bring them into alliance, decades later. The two young men evidently intended to collaborate on an analysis of France’s old enemy: “I will write haphazard what I think for you to put in order if you can or will.”

This was more than a matter of knowing their enemy, however. Just as, a decade later, Tocqueville would study America not so much to know America as to understand democracy, which America then exemplified better than any other country, so he considers England for a broader purpose. “There is hardly anywhere better than England for studying the underlying factors and the details of the armed emigrations which overturned the Roman Empire, because there were more of them there and they lasted into a time when the barbarians in the rest of of Europe were already refinding civilization.” What is more, England in its early times put the much-touted revolutionary spirit that swept Europe in the nineteenth century very much ‘into perspective.’ In England, “revolution after revolution” wracked the country; by comparison, the revolutions “of our own time are trifles.” The Scots defeated the “British tribes”; the Saxons invaded and conquered both; the Danes followed, “a third race of conquerors.” It was only “until the Normans…endowed both with the impetuous energy of the Danes and with a higher civilization than the Saxons, united them all under one yoke.” The Tocqueville family estate was only a short distance from Barfleur, whence William the Conqueror embarked. “I am surrounded by Normans whose names figure in the lists of the conquerors.”

“One thinks with horror of the inconceivable sufferings of humanity at that time.” Yet it was also a time and place where one might find evidence of the origins of feudalism. France is not that place. Feudalism didn’t begin there. It originated more or less simultaneously in France, the Germanies, Poland, Spain, and Italy—in Europe north to south, west to east. “Clearly the feudal system of the twelfth century is but the result of an underlying cause,” just as democracy would be, centuries later. “If you want to understand the first underlying principles of the feudal system, and you need to understand them to see how the wheels work in the finished machine, you cannot do better than study the time before the Norman conquest, because…we know of no people nearer to their primitive state than the Saxons and the Danes. Nor other people show a clearer record of their institutions, and I am sure that deep research into those times would enable us to explain many things which cannot now be explained in the history of other peoples, as for instance certain maxims of legal procedure which have become laws throughout Europe, but of which we can neither trace the origin, nor account for the reason why people are so obstinately attached to them.” Far removed from the Romans, the Saxons “are precious as a type of the peoples from whom we all, such as we are, are sprung.” They alone are reason enough to study English history.

The problem is that neither Tocqueville nor his friend had engaged in such deep research. What he can discuss is “the history of England after the conquest.” William’s conquest was easy. The three “races” on the the British Isles were still at odds with one another; the capital city was small and the provinces unfortified; the Normans enjoyed “vast intellectual superiority” over the natives. But easy conquests don’t necessarily last. This one did because William introduced “the fully developed feudal system,” as distinguished from the haphazard collection of its elements that already existed there. William made feudalism in England “a more coherent whole than in any other country, because one head had thought out all the machinery and so each wheel fitted better.” If William wasn’t the founder of feudalism in England, he was its organizer, and his achievement prompts Tocqueville to consider the difficulties of that kind of effort. “There are two great drawbacks to avoid in organizing a country. Either the whole strength of social organization is centered on one point, or it is spread over the country.” If centralized, and the center does not hold (as in Paris in the 1790s), “everything falls apart and there is no nation left.” If spread out, “action is clearly hindered”—no “one head” can make an authoritative decision and coordinate the actions needed to implement it. “But there is strength everywhere,” and this may contribute to a nation’s longevity in the longer term. The loss of the capital city won’t ruin the country because capable and well-organized bodies of men pervade it, from border to border. A centralized people “will do greater things and have a more active life” than a decentralized people, “but its life will be poorer,” as the nation’s resources will flow to the capital, draining the provinces. 

“I don’t know if a mean between these extremes can be found, but it would seem that William did find it.” He granted land and power of government “in return for a money rent and, more important, the obligation to provide an armed force for a stated time.” That is, he established an aristocracy which owed revenue and soldiers to the monarch in exchange for rule over local lands and the people living on them. Crucially, if a foreign army invaded and “extraordinary levies” of men and good were needed, the king needed the consent of the aristocrats, having “no other armies but those of his barons, and no revenue but that from his domains.” Understanding this, William, “master of all as conqueror of all, gave lavishly but kept still more. Power was so divided among the ruling class that a handful of Normans could hold down an unwilling country for a century; at the same time, the royal power was so strong that it could crush any individual baron who would have wished to break away from the king’s general supervision”; only “a general combination against him” could depose the king of feudal England. Had William’s successors to the throne proved capable, “his work would surely have lasted as he had conceived it, and in spite of the revolutions that followed,” thanks to tyranny of his line. And even despite the follies and other vices of his successors, “his version of the feudal system is nevertheless by and large the one which caused the least harm and left the smallest legacy of hatred.” For comparison, one need only consult Tocqueville’s treatment of French feudalism, The Old Regime and the Revolution. 

But to the tyrants. “There have been few worse rulers and, especially few rulers more inclined to abuse their powers than the Norman kings and the first Plantagenets.” “William Rufus was like a wild beast”; Henry I and Stephen were little better. The first Plantagenet, Henry II, was less just or prudent than fortunate, marrying Eleanor of Aquitaine and thereby acquiring “the whole Atlantic coast…without a sword being drawn.” A “hard, autocratic ruler as were all the rest of his family,” Henry II was succeeded by Richard, “a wild madman, one of those brilliant beings who burn but give no light,” exhausting his people by exorbitant taxes. Tocqueville re-emphasizes: “If William’s work did not produce the results we might have expected, the bad behavior of his successors is alone to blame.”

By the time of King John’s reign, not only had the monarchy caused restiveness among the aristocrats but a new class “was beginning to emerge” in England and throughout Europe. This was the mercantile class, the “third estate,” a class “which the kings of France took trouble to encourage in their domains.” Prudently so, for when the French king undertook the reconquest of occupied English provinces, he “met hardly any resistance.” 

“John’s tyranny grew no less through the loss of those provinces, for it is a law of all dominions past, present and future, to make greater demands in proportion as power decreases.” By 1214 the aristocrats had had enough, realizing “that, if they united, they would be stronger than the king though each by himself was still weaker than he.” John signed the Magna Carta in the following year. The old principle of government by the consent of the governed was formalized.

Tocqueville refuses to magnify the importance of the Charter. “Many people treat the words ‘Magna Carta’ as magic. They see the whole English Constitution in it; the two Houses [of Parliament]; ministerial responsibility; taxation by vote and a thousand other things that are no more there than in the Bible.” On the contrary, “Magna Carta served no national purpose, but was devised to serve the private interests of the nobles and to redress some intolerable abuses which harmed them. the few stipulations that affected the common people amount to so little that it is not worth talking about them.” Still, Magna Carta did cause “great things”: “it was decisive; it gave a clear shape to the opposition.” It proved that the aristocrats could organize themselves effectively against a monarchy that had veered into tyranny.

John’s successor, Henry III, was “a nonentity who let the revolution slide on.” It was his successor, Edward I, who took the steps necessary to prevent the balance from tipping too far against the monarchy. “He was a skillful ruler who knew that one has to tack in a storm,” taking “the measures which are almost always successful after a revolution, when there are a great many private disasters and the first need is for personal safety.” He established and enforced “good civil laws which, as you know, often make people forget good political laws.” Tocqueville is thinking of Napoleon, whose civil legal code stabilized French civil society without returning the regime to republicanism. Edward organized English legal procedure, encouraged trade, and generally “soothe[d] popular passion and succeeded pretty well”—a “bad man” but an “able” one. 

Where did this lead the Third Estate in England? “They were composed of all the hard-working people of independent spirit who were put upon in every sort of way by the tyranny of barons and king.” Resisting, they organized what Tocqueville would later call civil associations in every town. “As time went on this class became, for that age, very enlightened and rich, as all commerce had gradually fallen into its hands. It gained what the others lost, for it was nearer than the others to the natural state of mankind.” If man is by nature a social animal, then he who animates civil society by exercising the capacity to organize it will prevail over his rivals in the long run—a point parallel to Tocqueville’s commendation of decentralization.

How did the Third Estate proceed? How did it exploit its natural advantage, which was by no means evident to anyone, including its own members? The monarch ruled in the capital city, but “the capital was of little importance in feudal days, so it was possible that, at same time as a baron, safe in his corner, struck money, held court and made war with his serfs and his liegemen, a bowshot away there might be a town, appointing its magistrates, managing its finances, and having its armed band under its own flag, in a word a real republic.” “An odd mixture of oppression and liberty, one can see no unity in [feudalism’s] variegated confusion, but everywhere centers of active life.” Republicanism or popular self-government by elected representatives fosters not only the commercial virtues of prudent bargaining and mutual trust among those tested for their reliability; it can also encourage sterner virtues. “In such republics there were often heroes worthy to have lived in Rome or Sparta,” men capable of standing up to monarchs and aristocrats alike.

And what if the gentler virtues of commerce and the tougher virtues of civic and even martial courage combine? “Suppose that two men have been engaged in a long and determined fight although one of them is a little weaker than the other. A third man comes up, weaker than either of the two but who, whichever side he took, would be sure to tilt the balance that way. But who will think of asking him for help, who will urge his claim for help most strongly? It is sure to be he who feels himself weakest.” Thus did aristocrats, monarchs, and merchant-citizens find themselves in a struggle in which the merchant-citizens, still the weakest, nonetheless held the balance. Just as William the Conqueror found the Aristotelian mean between the extremes of governmental centralization and decentralization, so the Third Estate acted as the Aristotelian balance-wheel, not between the few who are rich and the many who are poor (as in Aristotle’s ‘mixed regime’) but between ‘the few’ aristocrats and ‘the one’ monarch. “There, my dear friend, is the whole history of France and of England in the story of those three men.” Typically, the king, “the weaker of the first pair,” would “call the Commons to his aid, and join forces with them and lead them, to use their help to destroy the feudal system,” as Philip the Fair did in France. “In the end” the monarchy itself “would be swallowed up” by the commoners “when the two were left face to face in 1789.” But in England, beginning with Lord Leicester in the early seventeenth century, it was the aristocracy that was the weaker; the feudal nobles took the initiative to bring the third estate into Parliament, “year by year to put forward claims in its interest as if they were their own, to build up its strength, promote and sustain it every time.” By 1640, the commons “threw over the nobility” and “established the republic.” True, “that revolution was not final.” In general, however, “in every case the weakest becomes the strongest, and the ally gets his master down.” This shows “that after all rational equality is the only state natural to man, since nations get there from such various starting points and following such different roads.” Rational equality is the natural equality revived under feudal aristocracy and monarchy by the Third Estate as it established republicanism under the noses of its rulers and then extended what began as civil-social associations to the political sphere. The fact that Tocqueville wrote from the old family ruin must have brought this point home; he lived in symbolic surroundings. 

“The third estate had to be called in to the management of affairs as soon as anything was to be feared or hoped from it. That’s the natural way for the world to go,” as Tocqueville would argue, famously, in Democracy in America. He had his thesis in hand a decade earlier.

Once Edward I took command in 1272, he saw an advantage in reorganizing and recalling the House of Commons, so long as “he chose who should represent them and united them under his control.” It was simple: he “needed money” and “the Commons were rich.” He elevated commoners to parity with the lords in Parliament, thus making it easier for him to raise taxes. Aristocrats nonetheless retained their ancient rights and privileges; England was not yet a modern, fully democratized civil society with a centralized administrative state. One still “needed the consent of all that lot of people to do a heap of things,” including “the imposition of all extraordinary taxes.” 

Initially, long before Edward’s reign, Parliament was composed of the leaders of the higher aristocracy, the lords, and representatives of the lower aristocracy or gentry class. Eventually, the Lords became dominant. “It was then that the Commons became strong enough and rich enough for others to have an interest in summoning them to Parliament,” as Edward did. After that, the same ‘triangulation’ strategy seen in the relations of aristocrats and monarchs to the commoners now began to occur in Parliament itself. Initially distrusted by both lords and gentry, restricted to voting on taxes and barred from the exercise of other governmental powers, eventually the landed gentry and the commoners in the towns joined to form the English House of Commons. Hence the English electoral system: each county elects two members from the lower nobility and every town or “borough” can send one or more members to Parliament, “choos[ing] them as it likes, that is its affair.” In addition, English clergymen, with their own revenues in the form of tithes and their own property, “took their places as of right in Parliament.” Parliament as a whole then consisted of “turbulent Lords and weak and timid Commons, themselves surprised at the part they [had] been called to play.” With the power of the purse, they enjoyed a powerful check on the monarchy, being “careful only to vote taxes for a short period.” Keeping an eye on the rival executive branch, the House of Lords and the House of Commons usually have collaborated—”two orders of men who, in the rest of Europe, have been irreconcilable enemies.”

The Commons gained the upper hand over the aristocrats and the clergy by declaring that only taxes approved by the Commons could be levied. Aristocrats and clergymen agreed in this, thinking of it as a guard against monarchic exactions. This enabled the Commons to establish the right to petition the king for address of grievances—essentially a formalized process of bargaining. Eventually, “several times the Commons bluntly declared that they would not vote a tax until their wrongs had been righted, and it was done.” “One must admit that there is much to admire in the English people at that time. Their constitution was famous already and was thought to be different from that of other countries. Nowhere else in Europe as yet was there a better organized system of free government,” and “no other country had profited so much from feudal organization.”

In 1307 Edward II succeeded his father. He made the mistake of marrying Isabella, daughter of Philip the Fair; “few human beings have ever brought so much ill to the human race.” Isabella eventually “threw England into confusion” by siding with one of the barons against her husband and “had her husband assassinated” after he was captured by the insurgent forces. These acts eventuated in war with France. In 1328 Charles IV of France died without a male heir, ending the Capetian dynasty. Because Isabella’s young son was the late king’s closest male relative, the ambitious queen put in his claim to the French throne. Wanting no English king, the French nobility installed Philip, Count of Valois. Isabella waged war.

After a brief interregnum by Isabella and her lover and co-conspirator, Lord Mortimer, Edward III took the English throne, becoming “one of the greatest of England’s kings,” sitting “on his father’s throne much as Alexander after the death of Philip.” Unfortunately, he exercised his greatness in the war with France—the “most heroic, the most brilliant and the most unhappy time in our history,” wherein French “valor was always crushed by superior [English] discipline.” “Thence derives that often unreflecting instinct of hate which rouses me against the English.” In France, Edward “waged a war of devastation,” his forces defeating the French at Crécy and then at Poitiers. “Almost the whole of the French nobility fell into the power of the English in those two days,” and “the French commons and serfs who had nursed an implacable hatred” against the aristocrats “took this chance to seize power,” bringing on “a most terrible civil war” in addition to the war against the English.

What accounted for England’s superior discipline in the Hundred Years’ War? “This is it: Geographical position and freedom had already made England the richest country in Europe.”

That point is worth lingering over. Tocqueville fully acknowledges the hard fact of geography. The word ‘geopolitics’ has yet to be invented but he knows what it is, and if there’s such a word as ‘geo-economics,’ he knows what that is, too. But he never loses sight of the importance of political freedom. When it comes to understanding causation in politics, he knows that civil societies and political regimes count, too.

Parliament readily put English wealth “at the king’s disposal,” enabling him to pay his army, “that is to say an army of men who had to obey all his orders, which he could keep in being as long as he wanted and use as he wanted.” The French king was hobbled by the older practice of the feudal system, whereby the barons were bound to his service only forty days at a time. “Chance alone decided which men they assembled, so that they were but an impetuous ill-disciplined mass.” Only after “bitter sufferings had taught the nobility to obey” and “the people had been toughened by all manner of affliction,” and “above all when the money provided by the States General had enabled Charles V to buy the courage of plenty of brave and disciplined adventurers,” did the French muster the strength needed to throw the invaders out of the country in 1378—the English “leaving nothing but their bones behind,” as the young patriot writes, grimly satisfied. Thus, after the English victories under Edward III and the French victories under Charles V, Edward’s successor, his grandson Richard II, found himself embroiled in domestic controversies spurred by “the turbulence of the Commons” and “the insolence of the Lords.” 

Richard would “try to destroy that dangerous constitution, as yet ill defined, which made the strength of skillful princes, but which threw the unskillful from the throne.” Calling Parliament to assemble, he “made it choose from its body commissioners to represent it when it was not assembled”—representatives of the representatives, so to speak. Except the new body was too small and weak to resist monarchic dominance and “national representative was then only a name,” as “Richard ruled without control.” This spread seeming calm over England. But when Richard imposed a tax not enacted by the full Parliament, that “proved the drop of water which makes a glass overflow.” Henry of Lancaster rallied a one hundred thousand-man army in revolt, capturing the king “without a fight.” and installing himself as Henry IV, with popular support. “As I think about all this…and about the fearful consequences of these events. I feel that the history of this time should be written in huge letters in all public places and in the palaces of all kings. Perhaps the peoples would realize what it costs to sacrifice the principle of legitimacy, and doubtless their rulers too would learn that one cannot make sport of the rights of nations unpunished, and that triumphs of that sort do not always last long.” Henry V succeeded “the usurper.” Although “the English regard [him] as a hero of their history,” Tocqueville, being French, does not. Henry “made use of the best means of distracting the restless energy of a people still shaken by the after-effects of a revolution; he decided to break the truce with France and profit from the internal disturbances which were again rending our unhappy country.” Landing in Normandy, winning “the decisive battle of Agincourt,” he “had himself crowned king of France.” But upon his death the French struck back, with Joan of Arc leading them. Hers is an “incredible story,” which “one cannot understand but can still less question.” The English “began to retreat and for the second and last time France was saved.” England soon descended back into civil war, with the houses of Lancaster and York fighting “for the throne through fifty years of unparalleled bitterness” in the War of the Roses. “Each party triumphed in turn more than ten times, and each time the vanquished suffered all manner of punishments and confiscations.” The war burnt itself out; “the whole tyrannical and cruel race of the Plantagenets vanished from this world”; the peace of exhaustion was solemnized when a Lancastrian man married a Yorkist woman.

It is impossible not to see that Tocqueville’s account of this period of English history tracks more recent French history, with the Plantagenets standing in for the state-centralizing Bourbons, the Lancastrian rebellion standing in for the French Revolution, Henry V for Napoleon. Although France in the eighteenth century suffered nothing like the War of the Roses in the fifteenth, some of the combustibles for such a civil war were there, and French politics remained embittered by struggles over the regime for more than a century. Tocqueville hoped that the Orléanist line would restore legitimacy, reigning over a mixed regime with a strong republican element. But France had nothing like the English constitution.

Neither did the English, at least not in that constitution’s well-established condition. “There are many people, both among those who have studied English history and those who have not, who suppose that the English constitution has passed through various regular, successive stages until it has reached the point it now is. According to them it is a fruit which every age has helped to ripen. That is not my view.” On the contrary, England’s “forward movement” toward constitutionalism has suffered from numerous interruptions and even times of “a most marked retrogression.” This is what happened after the Plantagenet dynasty disintegrated. The Tudor Dynasty which replaced it saw “something like a general agreement by all orders in the state to throw themselves into servitude.” What British constitution, then? The aristocrats “seemed reduced almost to nothing,” with “all the descendants of the Normans…dead or ruined.” “New unstable families without roots in the nation had risen in their place.” Without the support of the Lords, the Commons “lost all that republic energy which had marked their fathers,” hoping “that what they lost in freedom, they had gained in security.” England was far from the only country so afflicted. “A similar movement was taking place all over Europe,” as “all monarchies were tending to become absolute,” replacing “the oligarchic liberty which had been enjoyed for two centuries.” The statist monarchs crushed the feudal aristocrats and removed many of “the vices of the feudal system,” but at the price of the liberty aristocrats had taken for themselves and, acting in their own interests, advanced among the commoners, at the same time.

This clearly shows (it should be noted, in passing) that Tocqueville is no more a historical determinist than he is a geographical determinist. Causation isn’t that simple. He always leaves room for statecraft and for human freedom, generally. This makes it possible for him to offer lessons to statesman, as he does in his next remark.

The movement toward state-centralizing or ‘absolute’ monarchy “was more marked in England than anywhere else” because in England it took on the veneer of legality. “Note that well; nothing gives more food for thought. When a despot forces his way to sovereignty, his power, however great, will have limits, be they only those imposed by fear. But a sovereign clothed in power to do everything in the name of law is far more to be feared and fears nothing.” “I know no more complete tyrant in history than Henry VIII.” (Tocqueville is thinking also of Napoleon and his legal code.) If a Plantagenet imposed a tax, it had no support of the full Parliament; “when one of the Tudors asked the people for an exorbitant tax, it was the people themselves who granted it, for Parliament had voted for it,” and “when the blood of the highest fell on the scaffold,” the monarch could again rest on the appearance of legality, as the Lords had signed off on the execution. “Thus [liberty’s] own instrument,” the rule of law, “was turned against liberty.” The Tudor regime established the device of Bills of Attainder, “a diabolical invention which even the Tribunal of the [French] Revolution never revived,” whereby a legislator may impose the death penalty without the defendant being afforded the benefit of trial. 

Although Thomas Hobbes saw the possibility of a peaceful religious settlement under new regime, no such thing happened. “When I see the English people change their religion four times to please their masters, and when I think that almost in our own day we have seen the French clergy nearly in mass prefer exile, poverty and death to the mere appearance of a schism, when I see that, I am prouder to be born on this side of the channel than I should be to claim that the blood of Plantagenets and Tudors ran in my veins.” Religious instability breeds political strife. “Men need authority in questions of religion.” “They go astray when they lose a sure basis and appeal to their reason alone.” 

How, then, to explain the Revolution of 1688, which reinstated a better balanced, constitutional regime in England? “What was able to raise the English people from that state of degradation” they had reached under the Tudors? “The same thing as had thrown them down”: “The spirit of the constitution had been broken, but the forms remained: it was like the corpse of a free government,” but a corpse that did not rot. “When spirits stupefied by the disasters of the civil wars began little by little to revive, when numbed hearts beat again, when the passage of time had given the Commons the strength they lacked or thought they lacked, in a word, when the nation awoke, it found the tools for regeneration to hand, and with the spirit of its ancestors all the means to be like them.” By 1688, “the spirit of argument introduced by the Reformation began to bear fruit: the Commons already began proudly to take thought of their power and their wealth,” and the monarchy, “which had lost its foundations in the hearts of Englishmen,” collapsed.

Tocqueville ends his letter with that. What began as an inquiry into the origins of feudalism, and therewith of the aristocracy which was now declining, quickly turned to a discussion of the origins of the modern state and of the democratic civil-social conditions that undermined aristocracy, whose works were literally crumbling around Tocqueville as he wrote. For the rest of his life, he would plan the architecture of a new home for aristocracy, a home in but not entirely of modern political conditions.

 

 

 

 

Polybius: The Histories. Robin Waterfield translation.

 

Having completed his first pentad of books on the beginning of the Roman Empire, Polybius interrupts his narrative to describe Rome’s regime. “I am sure that some people will wonder why” (VI.2). Such readers have forgotten what he wrote at the beginning of his history: “I said that the most admirable and educational part of my project was that it would let my readers know and understand how, and thanks to what kind of regime, an unprecedented event occurred—the conquest of almost all the known world in somewhat under fifty-three years, and its submission to just one ruler, Rome” (VI.2). 

But why insert the promised regime analysis at this point in the narrative? Polybius invokes ordinary experience. “In everyday life, if people intend to reach a true assessment of someone, to decide whether he is bad or good, they do not base the investigation on those periods of his life when he was untroubled by external circumstances; they look at how he behaved when he was afflicted by misfortune or blessed by success, because they think that the only way to tell whether a man is fully qualified is to see whether or not he is capable of enduring total changes of fortune with courage and without compromising his principles” (VI.2). So, too, with a regime: “and so, since I could find no change in recent history more rapid or extreme than the one the Romans experienced at that time, I postponed the account of the Roman constitution until I had reached this point of my narrative,” when Rome found itself assailed and nearly ruined by the greatest general it ever faced (VI.2). What is more—and here Polybius shows that he is preeminently a political historian—whatever the circumstances might be, “the chief cause of either success or the opposite is, I would claim, the nature of a state’s regime”—not ‘race, class, and/or gender’ or any other subpolitical cause, or any concatenation of such causes (VI.2). 

The Roman regime isn’t easy to describe, being what classical writer call a ‘mixed regime’ or ‘polity.’ Aristotle calls the mixed regime the hardest of all regimes to identify because, depending on which element seems to predominate at a given time, it might appear to be a democracy to one observer, an oligarchy to another. Aristotle famously classifies regimes into six main types: kingship and tyranny, aristocracy and oligarchy, mixed regime and democracy. That is, the rule of one, few, or many can be good or bad, and their goodness or badness derives from the kinds of rule Aristotle already noted in the household, namely, the rule of parents over children, whereby parents command their children for the good of the children, the rule of masters over slaves, whereby masters command their slaves for the good of the masters, and the mutual rule of husband and wife, a reciprocal rule, a relation of both ruling and being rule that Aristotle describes as ‘political’ rule. Good monarchs, kings, rule their subjects as parents rule children; good aristocrats rule their subjects that way, too. Bad monarchs, oligarchs, and democrats rule their subjects for the good of themselves, not the good of their subjects. The mixed regime, a mixture of two bad regimes, oligarchy and democracy, is nonetheless good because it alone features reciprocal rule; neither the oligarchs nor the democrats can rule the other class without its consent. If no law can be passed without approval of both classes, then only such laws as serve the interests of both are likely to be enacted. As an additional precaution, Aristotle recommends that founders of mixed regimes take measures to foster the growth of a third class, a ‘middling’ class, neither rich nor poor, which can act as an arbiter, a sort of balance wheel, between the few who are rich and the many who are poor. The word Aristotle uses for ‘polity’—politeia—is also the word he uses for the element of any regime that consists of offices, ruling institutions. This emphasizes the fact that the mixed regime best exhibits the reciprocity, the ‘ruling and being ruled’ seen in the reciprocal rule of husbands and wives in the household, the strictly ‘political’ form of rule.

Specifically, Aristotle recommends institutions that borrow practices and ruling institutions characteristic of oligarchy and of democracy, insuring that each class can defend itself from the other and act freely. So, for example, fine the rich if they don’t serve on juries and pay the poor for serving. Have a minimum property qualification for those who vote on laws, as oligarchies and even some democracies do, but set it at a level lower than that of oligarchies, higher than that of democracies. When filling ruling offices, choose some officers by lot—which is the truly democratic method—others by election and/or property assessment. 

Although Polybius shares Aristotle’s esteem for the ‘polity’ or mixed regime, he defines it more broadly and offers a somewhat different way of classifying regimes generally. He concurs with Aristotle in identifying two forms of monarchy, one good and one bad. “We reserve the name ‘kingship’ for monarchy which has the subjects’ consent and which governs by rational principles rather than by fear and coercion,” which are the techniques of tyrants (VI.iv). Like Aristotle, he finds gradations within each regime. For example, “what we call democracy is a system where the majority decision prevails, but which retains the traditional principles of piety towards the gods, care of parents, respect for elders, and obedience to the laws,” whereas the worst democracy is really “ochlocracy” or mob rule (VI.iv). All of this follows Aristotle.

He begins to venture beyond Aristotelian analysis—actually introducing a motif resembling Socrates’ account of regime change in the Republic—with his famous account of the natural cycle of regimes. Modern readers accustomed to such ‘historicist’ philosophies as propounded by Hegel and Marx, often confuse this with historicism. In the thought of modern historicists, ‘history’ consists of the course of events whereby human beings systematically and progressively master nature rather than embodying it. But Polybius conceives of no ‘Absolute Spirit’ unfolding dialectically over time or any other super-natural law governing the overall course of events. For him, ‘Fortune’ is random. What is not random is nature, whose laws govern the conception, growth, and decline of individual entities, including human bodies and human regimes. Natural law accounts for the regime cycle. The course of events—what we, following Hegel and his epigoni call ‘history’—is actually “the natural, spontaneous course of events” (VI.iv), fundamentally similar to the orbiting of planets. Like other natural phenomena, the course of events is governed by a law that works through individual entities—in this case, political communities. It doesn’t govern the world as a whole; Rome rises to rule the “known world” by virtue of its regime, and eventually it will lose its rule over the world primarily because the laws of nature will cause it to decline, not because the world itself will ‘evolve.’ In fact, the main worldwide natural phenomenon is catastrophe, not progress, as Polybius will soon argue.

The archē or beginning of human life is unclear, but “legend has it that in the past the human race has been annihilated by catastrophes such as flood, famine, and crop-failure, and there is every reason to think that the same will happen in the future too, over and over again” (VI.v). Such telluric disasters “also entail the simultaneous loss of all the arts and crafts” (VI.v). Being human—that is, social and political—the survivors “naturally enough…form bands,” “compensat[ing] for their natural weakness by herding together with others of their own kind” (VI.v). “Under these circumstances, it is inevitable that anyone with exceptional physical strength and mental daring will take command and set himself up as ruler over the rest,” just as we see in other animal herds, also ruled by an ‘alpha male,’ “the strongest and most aggressive man among them”; “it is a truly natural function” (VI.v). Polybius calls this regime neither kingship nor tyranny but monarchy, simply. 

Kingship arises when (again, naturally) “there gradually arise within these groups feelings of kinship and intimacy, and then for the first time people acquire the concepts of good and bad, and right and wrong” (VI.v). This occurs because “the urge to mate is a universal, natural instinct” resulting in the birth of children; when “some of these children, after being reared and reaching maturity, fail to defend or otherwise show gratitude towards those who brought them up,” even “speaking ill of them and doing them harm,” this displeases and offends not only their parents but those who witnessed “the care lavished on them by their parents and the trouble they took” to feed and otherwise ensure their survival (VI.vi). Why? Because “human beings differ from other animals in that they alone have rational intelligence” and thus will not “overlook this abnormal behavior, as other animals do” (VI.vi). Not only do they disapprove of such ingratitude, they think “that in the future each of them too might find himself at the receiving end of such treatment” (VI.vi). That is, with the capacity to reason, human beings can generalize from particulars and to some degree foresee that a given action or set of actions might be harmful not only to others but to themselves. “As a result of these situations, a certain conception gradually arises within each individual of the importance of duty, and he begins to reflect upon it. This is the be-all and end-all of the sense of right and wrong.” (VI.vi).

Therefore, “if someone takes it upon himself to be the chief defender of everyone in times of danger, by resisting and retaliating against the most aggressive animals, it is likely that the general populace will signify their gratitude and respect for him while condemning and disapproving of anyone who conducts himself in the opposite way” (VI.vi). They will begin to differentiate between good and bad alpha males. If “the man of the greatest strength consistently supports what the general populace has come to think of as good and bad” they will “stop being frightened of his power, and accept his rule more because they approve of his policies,” going so far as to “work together to preserve his rule” and to “wholeheartedly defend him against the assaults and schemes of those who would put an end to his dominion” (VI.vi). “In this way, monarchy imperceptibly slides into kingship, when reason replaces forcefulness and strength at the helm” (VI.vi). Having gained “first-hand experience” of the difference between “excellence and intelligence” on the one hand, and “physical strength and all forcefulness” on the other, they establish criteria of what philosophers later call natural right by which they judge their rulers (VI.vii).

In so judging, they usually consent to hereditary kingship because “men born from kings and brought up under their influence will share their principles” (VI.vii). The problems arise from the ensuing prosperity. As kingly authority passed “from generation to generation within the same family,” and the necessities of life have been not only acquired but secured, “there was so much of everything” that kings were “tempted…to begin to indulge their appetites” (VI.vii). They began to put on airs, dressing differently from their subjects and eating foods “prepared in distinctive and elaborate ways,” demanding “total sexual freedom, even to the extent of sleeping with inappropriate partners” (VI.vii). But the people now had criteria of justice. They resented such behavior, find it disgusting; this “in turn kindled hatred and hostile anger in the kings, and so kingship gave way to tyranny” (VI.vii). Conspiracies began to form against the new tyrants, “not in the lowest strata of society, but among the most noble, high-minded, and courageous men, because they are the ones who find it hardest to bear insolence from those set over them” (VI.vii).

Crucially, the “common people” allied with these aristocrats-by-nature, the people’s “new champions” (VI.viii). “Kingship and tyranny were wholly obliterated, and a new era of aristocracy began” (VI.viii). But again, as nature would have it, the aristocrats’ sons, having “no conception of hardship and just as little of political equality or the right of any citizen to speak his mind, because all their lives they had been surrounded by their fathers’ powers and privileges… either dedicated themselves to rapaciousness and unscrupulous money-making, or to drinking and the non-stop partying that goes with it, or to seducing women and preying on boys, and in the process, they changed aristocracy into oligarchy” (VI.viii). As before, “feelings of resentment and disgust” arose among the people and the oligarchs “met with just as catastrophic an end as the tyrants” (VI.viii). That is, just as nature moves in natural cycles on earth, with birth, growth, decay followed by telluric disaster, so too are political regimes founded, strengthened, weakened, ruined, and replaced. 

In the case of oligarchy, “sooner or later, someone noticed how his fellow citizens resented and hated the ruling oligarchs, and when he summoned up the courage to speak or act against them, he found that the general populace was ready to back him all the way” (VI.ix). But not all the way back to kingship. “Fear of past monarchic injustice deterred them from setting up a king, and the recent villainy of the oligarchs dissuaded them from entrusting the government to just a few men”; being rational, the people therefore consented to “the only remaining untried alternative,” that is, “to rely on themselves” (VI.viii). Such autarchia or self-rule, self-sufficiency, “changed the regime from oligarchy to democracy” (VI.ix). Decline began in the third generation of democratic rulers, when “the principles of equal and free speech were too familiar to seem particularly important, and some people began to want to get ahead of everyone else”; such wealthy men “squandered their fortunes on bribing and corrupting the general populace in all sorts of ways” (VI.ix). The “inane hunger for glory” of the rich “made the common people greedy for such largesse and willing to accept it” (VI.ix). “For once people had grown accustomed to eating off others’ tables and expected their daily needs to be met, then, when they found someone to champion their cause—a man of vision and daring, who had been excluded from political office by his poverty—they instituted government by force; they banded together and set about murdering, banishing, and redistributing land, until they were reduced to a bestial state and once more gained a monarchic master” (VI.ix). This is “the natural way in which regimes develop, metamorphose, and start all over again” (VI.ix). 

Rome itself will experience this. “The Roman regime is a superb example of a system whose formation and growth have always been natural, and whose decline will therefore also conform to natural laws” (VI.ix). Hence the mixed regime, whereby the founder seeks to arrest the natural cycle seen in the succession of the other regimes by blending their elements. Lycurgus understood this. In Sparta, he “bundled all the merits and distinctive characteristics of the best systems of government in order to prevent any of them from growing beyond the point where it would degenerate into its congenital vice. He wanted the potency of each system to be counteracted by the others,” establishing “a high degree of balance and equilibrium,” thanks to “the principle of reciprocity”—that is, the political principle strictly speaking (VI.x). It is noteworthy that Polybius does not follow Aristotle in his account of the mixed regime, inasmuch as the kind of mixture he favors consists not of elements from two bad regimes but of good elements of the good regimes. He also does not follow Aristotle in his judgment of Lycurgus’ mixed regime. Aristotle finds almost nothing good in it. [1] It is an open question whether Polybius intends his readers to compare his account to Aristotle’s and to draw certain conclusions about Rome thereby.

Be this as it may, Polybius assures us that in Sparta’s mixed regime “kings were prevented from becoming overbearing by fear of the citizen body, who were assigned a fair share in government; the common citizens, in their turn, were deterred from disrespecting the kings by fear of the elders, all of whom were bound to cleave constantly to justice, because the criterion for selection for the Council of Elders was virtue” (VI.x). As a result, “the regime so framed by Lycurgus preserved independence in Sparta longer than anywhere else in recorded history” (VI.ix). Rome has been similarly on track, although in their case they did not found their regime by reasoning, as Lycurgus did, but by “many struggles and trials” (VI.x). Although the Roman polis had a legendary founder, Romulus, its characteristic regime had no one founder or set of founders. The Romans came to it over a long period of time. “On every occasion, they drew on the knowledge they had gained from their setbacks to make the best choices, and this enabled them to achieve the same result as Lycurgus, and to make theirs the best regime in the world today” (VI.x). 

“There were three fundamental building blocks of the Roman regime” (VI.xi): the monarchic consulship, the aristocratic senate, and the democratic assembly. The consulship isn’t literally monarchic but dual. When in Rome, before taking armies into the field, they are “responsible for all matters of public concern,” as they present envoys to the Senate, set the Senate’s agenda, carry out Senatorial decrees, convene, present bills to, and preside over the popular assembly, and enjoy “almost unlimited” powers over war preparations and wartime measures (VI.xii). The Senate controls the treasury—the collection of all revenues and the management of their disbursement, except for monies withdrawn by consuls in wartime. For example, other officials must request its permission to spend money on the construction and repair of public buildings (“by far the state’s greatest expense” [VI.xiii]). The Senate also deals with all crimes “that require public investigation,” such as treason, conspiracy, mass poisoning, and gang murder (VI.xiii). The Senate conducts foreign policy, commissioning embassies and declaring war. “None of these matters is the responsibility of the people, and so…a visitor to Rome who arrived when the consuls were away would think the regime was thoroughly aristocratic” (VI.xiii). But “the people do have a part to play, and a very important one at that, because they control rewards and punishments” in matters concerning ordinary criminal law (VI.xiv). Without “these functions,” “human life itself has no coherence, let alone governments and regimes” (VI.xiv). For example, they adjudicate death penalty cases. And although the Senate declares war, it is the popular assembly which decides “whether or not to go to war” and whether or not to “ratify or abrogate alliances, truces, and treaties” (VI.xiv). 

How do these three ruling bodies check and balance one another? Even in the field, the consuls still need both the people and the Senate. The Senate appropriates supplies for the army, chooses whether to limit his term to one year or to extend it, and chooses whether to honor a returning victorious consul with a triumph or to minimize the honors. The popular assembly not only controls the peace settlement after the war but audits the consul’s conduct after his term has expired.

The Senate “has to pay particular attention to the masses in the political sphere and to defer to the people” (VI.xvi) because any punishment of political crimes adjudicated by the senators must be approved by the assembly. The people can also cut senatorial salaries, “deprive the Senate of some of its traditional authority, or abolish senatorial privileges such as the right to the best seats in the theatres”—the last a formidable power, indeed. “Most importantly, if one of the tribunes of the people uses his veto, not only can the Senate not complete its deliberations, but it is not allowed even to meet or assemble at all” (VI.xvi). But although the Senate therefore fears the people, the people “depend on the Senate and are obliged to defer to it” both in their public and their private lives (VI.xvii). Contracts for the construction of building projects are controlled by the Senate, and so can “do those who manage state-owned property a great deal of harm or a great deal of good, since it has the final say on all these matters” (VI.xvii). And while the assembly adjudicates public crimes, the Senate adjudicates most major commercial lawsuits, “private or public” (VI.xvii). 

Thus, “each of the three components of the Roman regime can harm or help the other two” (VI.xviii). They are very much inclined to help one another whenever some foreign threat looms, as it did most spectacularly in the Second Punic War. In such a circumstance, “the state gains extraordinary abilities, “as everyone competes to devise ways to combat the emergency, and everyone cooperates in their public and private capacities to complete the task at hand”; moreover, “decisions are made and acted on extremely promptly” (VI.xviii). “This gives the Roman state its characteristic feature: it is irresistible, and achieves every goal it sets itself” (VI.xviii).

It can also resist the complacency and decadence that begins to undermine the other regimes within a couple of generations. When at peace, enjoying prosperity, if idleness induces one class “to arrogance and presumption,” the other classes become its rivals and prevent it from overbalancing the regime (VI.xviii). 

In addition to this institutional regime element, Rome’s military way of life has been crucial to its endurance, so far. Rome is a mixed regime, a ‘polity’ or ‘republic,’ but it is a military, not a commercial, republic. (Montesquieu’s On the Grandeur of the Romans and Their Decadence in effect reverses Polybius’ argument, charging that a military republic must decay, it it ever achieves its purpose, the conquest of the known world.) Accordingly, Polybius devoted twenty-four chapters to describing its military organization.

Military tribunes are elected after the annual consuls have been installed. There are twenty-four tribunes, fourteen with five years’ previous military service, ten with ten years. There are six tribunes per legion; each legion has 4,200 men, except in emergencies, when the number is increased to 5,000. Each legion is divided into three groups, based on age (men are eligible to serve up to the age of forty-six). Foot soldiers must serve sixteen years, cavalrymen ten. Since army men supply their own arms, the poor go into the navy, where no armor is necessary. “No one is eligible for any political post until he has completed ten years of military service” (VI.xx). Each man must swear “that he will obey his officers and carry out their orders to the best of his ability” (VI.xxi)—the moral foundation of Roman discipline. Consuls supplement the Roman troops by notifying “the ruling bodies of allied cities in Italy” concerning how many men they will be required to send; the same process of selection and oath-taking occurs in each (VI.xxi). 

After the troops have assembled, the tribunes select “ten men of suitable calibre” as company commanders or ‘centurions’; they serve on a military council; another ten men are selected as company commanders who will not serve on the council (VI.xxiv). Each centurion selects an adjutant; the centurions command units or ‘maniples,’ two centurions and two adjutants per maniple. Each maniple consists of men culled from one of the three age groups, with a fourth group, the youngest, sprinkled evenly among all. “It makes sense for there to be two centurions for each unit, because it is never clear how any given centurion is going to behave or what may happen to him. War allows no excuses, and [the Romans] never want the maniple to be without a centurion to lead it.” (VI.xxiv). “The ideal centurion, from the Romans’ point of view, is a natural leader, with a stable and resourceful cast of mind, rather than being a daring risk-taker. They would prefer to see him stand his ground under pressure and in the face of defeat, and die at his post, than launch attacks and initiate battles.” (VI.xxiv). The cavalry and the foreign troops are also carefully organized and led by Roman officers.

“When everything is ready, the tribunes take over command of both the Roman and allied contingents and make camp” (VI.xxvi). Unlike the Greeks, who adapt the configuration of their camps to the available terrain, the Romans use one one configuration, adapting the terrain to it. Although this means more work initially, it makes for far less confusion when the troops muster for battle, as every soldier knows exactly where he is and where he needs to go to break camp. The camp is a square (it “resemble[s] a town,” Polybius remarks) and it allows adequate space between the tents for getting the troops in and out of the camp in an orderly way (VI.xxxi). After the camp has been established, not only the soldiers but the accompanying slaves take another oath, not to steal from the camp “and to bring even things they find to the tribunes” (VI.xxxiii). Each company receives its assignments and the nightly watchwords are announced. Any violation of regulations will be adjudicated at a court martial consisting of the tribunes. The guilty must run the gauntlet, which few survive. Survivors may never return to their homeland; “to suffer this catastrophe once is to be completely ruined” (VI.xxxvii). Polybius drily observes that “the punishment for transgression is severe and brutal enough to ensure the faultless conduct of night watches in the Roman army” (VI.xxxvii). Fear of punishment accounts for discipline not only within the camp but in battle, keeping “men in a support force at their posts in the face of certain death against vastly superior numbers” (VI.xxxvii). 

Discipline isn’t only a matter of fear, however. “They also have an excellent system of incentives to motivate the men to face danger” (VI.xxxix). The soldier who commits an act of bravery receives a speech in his honor in front of an army assembly from the consul himself. Those who risk their lives to protect others receive medals or crowns, and the man whose life is saved by a comrade “looks up to his savior as a father, and is obliged to treat him in all respects exactly as if he were the one who had given him life” (VI.xxxix). Nor are these honors known only to the soldiers; upon returning home, the honored men may wear their decorations in public and participate in parades and processions. In all, “the meticulous care taken by the Romans over rewards and punishments in the army helps to explain their outstanding success in warfare” (VI.xxxix). 

The spirit of such a regime in the army thus pervades the general population. Habits of mind and heart including discipline, steady courage, love of honor and fear of disgrace, fostered in universal military service as a prerequisite to full citizenship, honored through the years, make the Roman regime far less likely to fall into the complacency and self-indulgence that bedevils other mixed-regime republics. This leads Polybius to an exercise in what our contemporary political scientists call ‘comparative regimes.’

He selects Sparta, Crete, and Carthage—regimes which “have long enjoyed a reputation for excellence” (VI.xliii). By contrast, the regimes of Athens and Thebes deserve less attention; although Fortune has allowed them “to flare briefly into brilliance” they quickly “experienced a complete reversal” (VI.xliii). “The Thebans’ reputation or excellence” derived from the accomplishments of “just one or two outstanding individuals,” not to the regime itself (VI.xliii). “For Thebes’s growth, prime, and collapse exactly coincided with the lives of Epaminondas and Pelopidas, and so we should regard the cause of Theban ascendancy at the time to be these men, not the regime” (VI.xliii). Similarly, the glory that was Athens really derived from the efforts of Themistocles; at most times, Athenian democracy resembled “a ship without a captain,” on which the sailors ignored those who attempted to command them, fell into factional fighting and ruin (VI.xliv). Significantly, Polybius never mentions Pericles, the most notable celebrant of Athenian democracy. Both Thebes and Athens disintegrated into ochlocracy, rule “by the whim of mobs” (VI.xlv). 

Although many political writers, including Plato and Xenophon, praise the Cretan regime, comparing it to the regime of Sparta, Polybius disagrees. The distinctive characteristics of Sparta are equality of land ownership, equality of income based on contempt for money-making, and lifetime tenure of both the king and the Council of Elders. “None of this bears the slightest resemblance to the Cretan regime,” under which Cretans litigate endlessly about landed property and money-making is considered “the most honorable occupation a man can take up” (VI.xlvi). “In general avarice and greed are so deeply entrenched in Crete that it is the only place in the world where no gain of any kind is considered sordid” (VI.xlvi). Further, all offices have one-year term limits, so the regime is far more democratic than that of Sparta. The Cretan regime should “neither be praised nor emulated” (VI.xlvi). Whatever its ruling institutions may be, any regime needs “good customs and traditions,” owing to a good way of life, to sustain it (VI.xlvii). “When we come across a state where individuals are rapacious and public policies are unjust,” the rest of the regime must be bad (VI.xlvii). So it is with Crete.

Polybius next considers an unannounced regime, the one Socrates and his dialogic partners build ‘in speech’ in Plato’s Republic (the Greek word is in fact Politeia or Regime). “It would be unfair to admit it into the discussion” for, just as “we do not let craftsmen or athletes take part in competitions unless they have been certified or trained,” it “would be just as inappropriate to let Plato’s regime compete for first prize, unless or until it proves that it can act in the real world”; otherwise, “discussing and comparing it with the Spartan, Roman, and Carthaginian regimes would be no different from bringing forward a statue for comparison with real, live human beings” (VI.xlvii). Although Plato’s dialogue itself suggests that Socrates’ regime in speech fully partakes of Socrates’ proverbial irony, Polybius needs no careful interpretation to rule it out of consideration as what Aristotle calls the best practicable regime. He need only say to those who miss Plato’s irony, put up or shut up.

He returns, then, to the Spartan regime as founded by Lycurgus, and his praise remains unstinted: “The laws Lycurgus drew up and the provisions he took to ensure concord within the citizen body, to keep Laconia safe, and to preserve Spartan autarchia strike me as so admirable that I can only regard his intelligence as superhuman” (VI.xlviii). Equal land distribution and “the simple, communal way of life” of Sparta have resulted in an ethos of self-rule, toughness, and courage within a political society free of faction (VI.xlviii). The achievements of great statesmen seldom last much beyond their lifetimes; the achievements of great founders—if you will, the greatest statesmen—last for generations.

For the first time, however, Polybius offers a criticism. Lycurgus “failed to put in place some provision or requirement, binding on his fellow citizens, that would have made the overall character of the city self-sufficient and self-restrained”; Sparta is politically and militarily aggressive, seizing its neighbors’ territory and seeking political hegemony over those farther afield (VI.xlviii). “He did nothing to stop them acting towards their fellow Greeks with extreme aggression, out of self-seeking ambition and the lust for power” (VI.xlviii). Their military prowess was instrumental in vindicating Greek liberty against the invasion of the Persian empire, but they soon turned their own imperial ambitions against the poleis they had liberated.

Empire ruined them. “They had outstripped their regime. As long as their aim had been to rule over their immediate neighbors, or even just their fellow Peloponnesians, they made do with the resources and supplies of Laconia alone, where it was easy for them to gather what they needed…. But once they began to send out fleets and land forces to campaign outside the Peloponnese, clearly Lycurgan legislation…was no longer adequate” (VI.xlix). For starters, they need “a commonly accepted currency,” not the heavy iron money they used at home; they also needed to supplement their own troop with mercenaries (VI.xlix). Not only did this require imposing taxes on the Peloponnesians and tribute from all Greeks but they chose to look to the Persians, of all peoples for newly-needed resources. 

What has any of this to do with the Romans? For self-government, “there has never been a better regime than that of the Spartans. But if one has greater ambitions than that—if one thinks that it is a finer and nobler thing to be a world-class leader, with an extensive dominion and empire, the center and focal point of everyone’s world—then one must admit that the Spartan regime is deficient, and that the Roman regime is superior and more dynamic” (VI.l). Whereas Sparta’s imperialism “brought them to the very brink of losing their own self-government,” Roman imperialism survived the Carthaginian onslaught and soon came “to subjugate the entire known world” (VI.l). 

As to the Carthaginian regime, Polybius judges its “original design” to have been “good, at any rate where its main features were concerned” (VI.li). Like Sparta and Rome, it was a mixed regime, with kings, a Council of Elders consisting of aristocrats, and offices held by the people, as well. However, “by the time they embarked on the Hannibalic War…the Carthaginian regime had become worse than that of Rome” (VI.li). By then, the people “had become the dominant political force,” whereas “in Rome this was still the Senate. Since policy was decided in Carthage by the masses and in Rome by the best men, Roman policies would prevail”; “thanks to sound decision-making, they defeated the Carthaginians in the war” (VI.li).

Specifically, the Roman regime fostered superior warcraft. Although the Carthaginians remained preeminent at sea, the Roman army was better than anything the Carthaginians could field. “The reason for this is that the Carthaginians use foreign mercenaries, whereas the Roman army consists only of domestic troops and Roman citizens,” supplemented by men culled from the Italian city-states they dominate (VI.lii). Mercenaries are loyal only to their salaries, and even those won’t motivate them to risk their lives, much. By contrast, “the Romans depend on their own valor and on the support of their allies” and they fight to death, as “their country and their children are always directly at stake for them” (VI.lii). As seen in their customs of honoring those who display battlefield courage, “the glory of those who benefited their homeland becomes common knowledge and is passed down from generation to generation,” as “young men are inspired to heroic feats of endurance, in order to gain the fame that accrues to the brave” (VI.liv). 

Reliance on mercenaries mirrors the Carthaginian regime’s commercial republicanism. “In Carthage, nothing that leads to profit is considered disgraceful, whereas in Rome nothing is more disgraceful than accepting a bribe or seeking to profit by disreputable means” (VI.lv). Likely associated with Romans’ superior morality is its “markedly superior” dispensation respecting the gods (VI.lvi). Here Polybius offers a critique of the modern Enlightenment centuries avant la lettre. “It seems to me that superstition, which we criticize in other people, is precisely what gives the Roman state its cohesion. In Rome, nothing plays a more elaborate or extensive role in people’s private lives and in the political sphere than superstition. Many of my readers might find this strange, gut it seems to me that it has been done for the sake of the common people. In a state of enlightened citizens, there would presumably be no need for such a course. But since the common people everywhere are fickle—since they are driven by lawless impulses, blind anger, and violent passion—the only option is to use mysterious terrors and all this elaborate drama to restrain them.” (VI.lvi). Indeed, “those nowadays who want to abolish religion are acting far more thoughtlessly and foolishly” than “the men who in ancient times introduced the masses to the ideas of the gods and the concept of Hades” (VI.lvi). “A Greek statesman cannot be trusted with even just a talent; that is enough to corrupt him, along with ten accountants and their seals, and twice as many witnesses,” whereas Roman statesmen are safely entrusted with “enormous sums of money in the course of their official activities” because “they feel bound by the oath they have pledged,” an oath sworn with the gods as its witnesses (VI.lvi).

Despite the character of its regime, Rome will decline. “Every existing thing is subject to decay and decline; the inescapable facts of nature are convincing in themselves” (VI.lvii). “I think there can be no doubt what lies in the future of Rome” (VI.lvii). Having achieved the prosperity of world empire, it too will begin to see increasingly luxurious ways of life and factionalism. “The causes of the deterioration will be lust for power combined with contempt for political obscurity, and personal ostentation and extravagance. It will be called a democratic revolution, however, because the time will come when the people will feel abused by some politicians’ self-seeking ambition, and will have been flattered into vain hopes by others’ lust for power.” (VI.lvii). Ochlocracy will ensue. In the event, Rome did see Caesarism, although ochlocracy came in the form of foreign invasion by barbarians, not so much the plebeians, whom the Caesars co-opted and tyrannized.

Polybius ends his account of the Roman regime with a story of Rome after Hannibal had defeated its army at Cannae. He held 8,000 Roman prisoners. The men selected ten senior officers to return to Rome and ask the Senate to ransom them. The officers swore that they would return to Hannibal’s camp after making the request. One clever fellow pretended to have forgotten something he needed for the journey, returned to the camp, then went on to Rome, thinking that by returning he’d filled the condition of the oath and so could remain in Rome. The officers came before the Senate and asked for the ransom.

“The Romans had suffered terrible defeats. At that point they had hardly any allies left, and they expected at any moment to be fighting for Rome itself. Nevertheless, after listening to hat the officers had to say, they did not let the crisis push them into responsible action, but debated the issues rationally.” (VI.lviii). They saw that Hannibal’s intention in allowing the mission was to raise money and undermine the resolution of Roman troops “by letting them know that they could hope for safety even after defeat” (VI.lviii). Not only did they refuse to grant the ransom but they sent the clever one back to Hannibal in chains. “Hannibal’s delight at having defeated them in battle was crushed by awe of the principled stand the Romans had taken in their deliberations” (VI.lviii). Given the character of its regime, Rome would not be defeated.

 

 

 

 

 

Notes

1. See Aristotle: Politics II.ix. The Spartans haven’t found a good way to govern their helots; they neglect the moral education of their women; they have misgoverned property by allowing too great disparities in wealth; the office of overseers, which has “authority over the greatest matters,” is filled “entirely from the people”—who, given their poverty, are easily bribed; nor are the overseers’ actions restrained by law; the supposedly aristocrat senate in reality consists of oligarchs, also bribable; kingship is hereditary, not based on virtue; the famous common messes in fact exclude the poor because they are funded by donations from individuals and the poor cannot afford to attend. Finally, and most significantly, “the entire organization of the laws is with a view to a part of virtue—warlike virtue; for this is useful with a view to domination. Yet while they preserved themselves as long as they were at war, they came to ruin when they were ruling an empire through not knowing how to be at leisure, and because there is no training among them that has more authority than the training for war. This error is no light one.” (1271b 34-36). This latter defect portends poorly for Rome, insofar as it is a military republic.