Labour Monthly
Source: Labour Monthly October 1947, pages 317-318
Publisher : The Labour Publishing Company Ltd., London.
Transcription/HTML markup: Ted Crawford/D. Walters
Public Domain : Marxists Internet Archive (2013). You may freely copy, distribute, display and perform this work; as well as make derivative and commercial works. Please credit “Marxists Internet Archive” as your source. Published here under the Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 license 2013.
As our own civilization develops signs of instability — no greater than those which it showed between 1550 and 1650, but certainly greater than any which have been apparent since then — we naturally turn for guidance to the history of the Roman Empire. Professor Walbank, has something new to say about it. To emphasises the point, which is familiar to readers of Prof. Farrington’s books, that as a result of slavery technique, and therefore wealth, declined. But he goes on to a novel account of the economic and political measures taken by the later Roman Emperors, and particularly by Diocletian, to deal with the economic and political crisis of the third century.
The historians of that time gave no name to these changes, and to a bourgeois historian of the nineteenth century the debasement of the currency, the fixing of maximum prices, the formation of industrial guilds in which membership was hereditary and the establishment of a secret police, seemed mere perverse mistakes. Professor Walbank shows it is possible to equate the late Roman Empire with the Fascist Corporative State. He makes out a very strong case for this identification, and he makes it the more cogently because he claims that those who made the change could not have avoided doing so if they wished to preserve a class system, as they inevitably did. Future scholars will doubtless question some of Walbank’s analogies. For example, it could be argued that the collegia, or guilds, had already become important before the second century A.D., and that under Augustus capitalism was still developing rapidly. Nevertheless Professor Walbank’s book will probably be a permanent contribution to historical thought.
It will also be an excellent starting point for Marxists who wish to begin a study of ancient Roman history, particularly on account of the bibliography, whose only flaws, to my mind, were the exclusion on the one hand of books dealing specifically with the religious movements of his period, and on the other of Petrie’s The Revolution of Civilisation. For the Christian Church organised itself in the period under consideration and absorbed much of its ideology, so that it is no accident that the Vatican is backing Fascism today as it backed Constantine sixteen centuries ago. And Petrie produced many of Spengler’s seminal ideas before Spengler, using far less paper in the process, just as Bottornley anticipated much of the Fascist ideology, and might have become dictator of Britain had he been fortunate enough to live in a revolutionary situation.
I must, however, end on a note of doubt. Shi Huang Ti gave China a political system which withstood both internal crisis and foreign invasion for two thousand years, and was only overthrown by the pressure of Western industrialism. Could Antonius Pius have done the same for the Roman Empire? And if not, why not? Until this question has been seriously discussed by scholars with the necessary knowledge, I cannot admit that the evolution of European society followed an inevitable path. J.B.S. HALDANE.