First Man in Rome: A Political Novel

And so, in keeping with my obsession with how democracies fail, I will start addressing First Man in Rome in that light.  Colleen McCullough starts her series with Gaius Marius.  This is a reasonable choice if the series is supposed to focus on Julius Caesar as its hero.  Marius was married to Caesar's aunt, and their association played a major role in shaping his career.  Caesar's parents meet, marry, and set up a household in the novel, and he has just been born when it ends.

On the other hand, if the series is supposed to be about the fall of the Roman Republic, then it really ought to start with the Gracchi brothers.  The Gracchi brothers sought to reverse the baleful power of R > G.  While Rome was once a land of smallholder farmers, it had increasingly become a land of vast slave plantations with the small holders reduced to an unemployed urban rabble.  The Gracchi sought to reverse this trend by making land available to the urban poor.  In this, they ran into fierce resistance from the great land holders, violence broke out, the Gracchi were killed, their followers crushed, and a bloody crackdown followed.  These were events within living memory at the time of First Man in Rome and cast a shadow on everything that happens in the novel.  To the Senatorial elite, the Gracchi were the embodiment of a wild-eyed radicalism to be avoided at all costs.  To the broader public, the Gracchi were heroes.  By coming in later in events, McCullough avoids having to take sides and make any realistic assessment of the Gracchi.  However, as she acknowledges, it was with the Gracchi that the slow unwinding of the Republic began.  This is not to blame them for it.  After all, R > G had been undermining the Republic for some time, and, as countless T-shirts and bumper stickers proclaim, they only call it class warfare when we fight back.

Events start about 13 years later with the rise of Marius.  Marius' enemies call him a "peasant."  More accurately, he starts out as a country squire, a big fish in a small pond and comes to Rome to find himself a small fish in a big pond.  He comes from a non-Roman part of Italy, one that has been granted Roman citizenship, but that older Romans look down upon as not a real "Roman of the Romans."  Part of Marius' reputation as a radical no doubt comes from his outsider status -- not being part of Rome's ruling circles, he is constantly in danger of transgressing against some cherished tradition without meaning to, simply because he does not understand that it is a cherished tradition.

Part of his reputation as a radical comes from the reforms he is undertaking and his failure to understand their full ramifications.  Marius is portrayed as an old soldier who comes rather late into a political career, as not as wanting to upturn Rome's social order, but simply as wanting to introduce military reforms that will improve the operation of its army, not understanding their far-reaching effect on the social order.  Before the time of Marius, Roman soldiers were recruited from its small property holders and required to provide their own arms.  This arrangement was becoming less and less workable for a variety of reasons.  For one, not much emphasized in the novel, the numbers of small property holders was shrinking as more and more were squeezed out and became urban unemployed. For another, that was emphasized, constant wars drawn from a dwindling number of recruits meant that Rome was running out of men eligible to serve.  And another, that received intermediate attention, was that having citizen-soldiers leave their small properties to fight and then return worked reasonably well when Rome was small and fighting was limited to the Italian peninsula.  By Marius' time, Rome had expanded to a mighty empire and war often meant overseas campaigns of many years.  This, in turn, meant that small property holders were not able to attend to their small properties and tended to become impoverished as a result of the wars and end up propertlyless and unemployed.

What Marius proposed, then, was to recruit from the urban unemployed without property -- the Head Count.*  They would be provided standardized equipment at the expense of the state and receive standardized training.  McCullough discusses the advantage of standardized training and equipment in military efficacy.  Another advantage to recruiting men with no military background was that Marius could break some cherished but outdated military tradition without meeting resistance from his troops. A disadvantage was the low rate of literacy in his army, and good communications are, after all, a vital component of military effectiveness.

One can see other, far-reaching effects of such an army that McCullough does not discuss.  It offered men hitherto despised as rabble, good only for producing offspring, a career and self-respect.  It reduced the pressure on Rome's small property holders.  It raised taxes, as the state now had to pay for gear for a large force.  On the other hand, by recruiting from the unemployed, such an army did not reduce the productive members of society and presumably increased the tax burden that could be born. And (one may speculate) by sending away Rome's poorest, unemployed, undisciplined men of fighting age, it probably cut down on the crime rate.  Wikipedia also notes a huge advantage that, by creating a standing army, Marius saved Rome from having to raise and train a fighting force after a military emergency arose.

But Marius' army also created a huge problem -- what to do with his soldiers after the fighting was over.  After all, unleashing a group of men with no property, no civilian work history, no future and no hope, but plenty of military training and discipline on Rome is not a prospect anyone would want to contemplate.**  Marius' solution is to give his soldiers land in the conquered areas.  This raises the specter of the Gracchi brothers and scares the hell out of the ruling class, even as Marius argues that, he differs from the Gracchi in two important aspects:  He is not giving away land for free, but only to men who earn it in service to their country, and he is not giving away land in Italy, but land in conquered areas.  These arguments, plus perhaps the fear of what would happen if Marius' soldiers don't get land, ends up convincing Rome's rulers.  His soldiers get their land.

The Wikipedia notes that this ended up having two far-ranging effects, for good and for ill.  On the plus side, settling these veterans in far-flung Roman provinces tended to assimilate and Romanize all parts of the empire, reducing the risk of unrest and revolt.  On the minus side, it made soldiers loyal to their individual general, rather than the Roman state and started the undermining of the Republic.  It seems most unlikely that anyone in Marius' time would have foreseen either of these outcomes.  Nonetheless, McCullough portrays foresightful people as recognizing both the promise and the danger.  Marius describes the tendency of his soldiers to form colonies and assimilate the areas where they settle as a positive -- it reduces danger of unrest by Romanizing the entire empire.  Conservative forces are outraged and see their Roman-ness as a precious quality to be held closely and not shared with outsiders.  Some of his friends, in turn, see the possible danger in the power the he could have in dispensing so much land to so many followers.  They say that the danger could be avoided by arranging for the state to give such a land grant to all retired veterans as a matter of routine.***


Finally, the novel establishes that Marius is no true radical and is loyal to the Republic when a real radical becomes a demagogue of the lowest order -- making unrealistic promises about cheap grain in time of famine that he is unable to keep, and then touching off a revolt when the promises are not kept. Faced with the real danger of revolt to the Republic, Marius and his conservative foes join forces, the conservatives not hesitating to give him emergency powers to suppress the revolt, which he sorrowfully does, using minimum force.  Shipments of grain come in, and Marius promises cheap prices for the next 19 days of his consulship, leaving to his successor what to do after.  Of course, he knows that his successor will have to continue providing cheap grain or face all-out revolt.  Having then served an unprecedented six terms as consult and an unprecedented five right in a row, Marius retires.  The ending seems happy, but, of course, we know that merely means the phantom menace has been vanquished, and that things will go downhill later on.

Next:  The real radicalism of Marius, accidental and intentional.


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*So-called because the census inventoried property as well as persons.  If there was no property to inventory, the census simply counted head.  The Head Count were also referred to as the proletariat, not in the modern, Marxist sense of urban working class, but something closer to what Marx would call the lumpenproletariat -- the unemployed urban rabble.  Proletariat to the Romans meant one good only for producing offspring.  This group might neutrally be called the propertyless.  In more pejorative terms, they could be called the rabble or the mob.

**True, they did get a share of spoils from the war.  But people getting a lump sum and no long-term source of income tend to burn through it fast and end up worse off than ever.

***And, having peeked ahead, McCullough ends up having Octavian keep Marius' system of enlisting the Head Count as soldiers and starts giving them a routine reward after 20 years' service, but not in land, which cannot be guaranteed available, but in a pension.  I do not know the historical accuracy here.

First Man of Rome: A Literary Review

A review of Colleen McCullough's Masters of Rome series (that, alas, I can no longer find) makes several trenchant comments about it.  One is on the huge profusion of characters, all with three names each, makes it seem almost like a Russian novel.  Another is the difficulty in exposition when you want to make a detailed portrait of Roman society.  And yet another is McCullough's tendency to have her villains run around kicking every dog in sight.  I agree, these three things are a good starting point in looking at First Man in Rome.

As for the profusion of characters -- the book has a glossary at the end.  It really needs an index.  I know indexes are not customary in works of fiction, but it is quite frustrating when you run across some Lucius Tiddlypuss (McCullough's fictitious Roman equivalent of Joe Blow) on page 350 who you are supposed to recognize from page 75 but can't quite place.  It would be very helpful in that case to be able to look in the index, see where he first appears, and go back to see who he is, rather than to have to hunt blindly.  As for the Russian novel feel, it is greatly increased because at the early time of the series, male characters are invariably addressed by their praenomen et nomen (first name and clan name), even though in the text they are referred to by their cognomen (which can either be a sub-clan name or title bestowed for some accomplishment).  In this, the men resemble characters in a Russian novel, who invariably address each other by their imya i otetsva (first name and patronymic), even as the text refers to them by their familia (surname).  In fact, sometimes I had to pinch myself to remember that the characters were Romans and not Russians, because Russians are the only people I know of who normally address each other by two names.*  It doesn't help either that women have no praenomen, so all women of any given clan all have the same name (the feminine of their clan name), or that sons invariably take their father's names, and that all male members of a single clan keep recycling a handful of first names.

The reviewer I quote complains that exposition too often takes the form of conversation, with two characters telling each other things that every Roman of the time would have taken for granted.  I actually thought McCullough handled the exposition quite well, at least in her first novel.  She does a marvelous job, for instance, in having a character marvel at how life-like the coloring on a statue is. This is a useful but not at all blatant bit of exposition to remind us that, while we are accustomed to seeing statues in classical marble white, that is only because we inherited them with all the paint washed off, and in Classical times statues were painted to look like actual people.**  Or having lots of retired gladiators running around serving as body guards drives home the point that gladiatorial combat was not as lethal at the time as it would later become. Or having characters receive a letter and struggle to decipher the writer's chicken scratch reminds us how much more difficult reading was before the invention of print.

Mostly, though, her exposition takes the form of letters to Marius (the hero and title character) from his best friend, Publius Rutilius Rufus (doesn't it just roll off the tongue?).  Since Romans are allowed more than one cognomen, Rutilius in this novel really should be called Publius Rutilius Rufus Expositious because he role in the in the novel is almost entirely to provide exposition. Once he does this in public speech, as consul, explaining Rome's military situation.  For the most part, though, he does it in his letters to Marius, to the point that, although First Man in Rome is by no means an epistolary novel, it can fairly be described as a historical novel with epistolary exposition.  (That rolls of the tongue quite nicely, too).  Which means, of course, that Rutilius has to be portrayed as an incorrigible gossip, since a large part of exposition is really just gossip, anyhow.  This is pretty well justified in that Marius is an outsider, not part of Rome's political class, so he doesn't know all their ins and outs and all the pieces of gossip that any insider would take for granted, so Rutilius fills him in on all the latest news and gossip.  He can be highly entertaining when he does so.  And it fits well with his character on the few times we meet him in person, particularly at the family dinner party where his niece, Aurelia, announces her pregnancy with the future Julius Caesar (meaning, of course the Julius Caesar) and everyone gossips.  Rutilius spends the whole conversation either trailing some juicy tidbit of gossip for the others to pick up on, or spotting that someone else has some gossip and eagerly asking to hear about it.  The main failing here is that he really gives us more gossip than is strictly necessary to advance the plot and tells us about a lot of extraneous characters, as if we didn't have enough characters to worry about anyhow.  (Some of these extraneous bits may be significant in later stories, though).

Finally, there is the author's tendency to have her villains run around kicking every dog in sight. She certainly does that.  It is understandable to some degree, but overdone.  Certainly I can understand why she does it.  Consider.  Rome's most famous villains are undoubtedly Nero and Caligula.  If you want to introduce a young Nero as a character in your novel, well before he has committed any of his famous outrages, there is no need to have him run around kicking dogs.  Simply introducing him as Nero is sufficient.

At the other end of the spectrum is, say Quintus Servilius Caepio.  Most readers have probably never heard of him, but his record speaks for itself.  He took the extortion courts out of the hands of the equestrians and limited members to Senators, who could be counted upon to protect their own.  He was sufficiently arrogant about his patrician pedigree that when he was sent off to war against the Germanic tribes, he refused to take orders from his military superior, or even join his camp, because he considered him a social inferior.  In fact, according to his Wikipedia article, it was even worse than that.  His superior, realizing his military weakness from an insubordinate officer, started negotiating with the Germans and was on the verge of obtaining favorable terms when Caepio, unwilling to let a social inferior take credit for a favorable settlement, launched an unauthorized attack and got his army wiped out.  Clearly, such a man need not run around kicking dogs to convince the readers that he is a villain.  When McCullough portrays him as an arrogant, snobby jerk, it seems most plausible.  When she treats him as the embodiment of everything wrong with Rome's elite, it doesn't seem too unfair. When she has him disdain Marius' proposal to enlist property-less men in the army and sticks to the dwindling ranks of small property holders, some kidnapped by force, many forced to mortgage their small holdings to buy gear and driven to destitution -- well, I don't know if this is historically accurate, but again, it sounds plausible.  When he camps on the exposed side of a river, burns his army's boats to keep the from retreating, but secretly saves one for himself and uses it to flee when his army is wiped out -- well, that is starting to sound like dog kicking, but then again, he somehow survived when his army was wiped out.  The most sensational charge against him of all involved a large cache of gold and silver he captured in Spain, more than Rome's entire treasury.  The silver he shipped safely home to Rome.  The wagon train carrying the gold was ambushed, its escort wiped out, and the gold disappeared, never to be seen again.  After Caepio lost his army and became widely hated, the accusation arose that the bandits who stole the gold were working for him and turned the gold over to him.  It sounds most implausible.  (Let's get this straight.  He hired a bunch of bandits to steal the gold and they stole it and then meekly turned it over to him?!?!?!  On what planet?)  In fact, it sounds a lot like dog kicking, i.e., people who hated him and wanted to believe the worst, as if the reality was not bad enough.  McCullough accepts this far-fetched story.  In her defense, although it sounds like dog-kicking, a lot of Caepio's contemporaries believe it too, so it is not purely gratuitous.

Lucius Cornelius Sulla, now, is a different matter.  He was undoubtedly a villain, but not so well known that McCullough can count on all her readers having heard of him.  And at the time of events in First Man of Rome, he hadn't actually done anything in his public career that would mark him as a villain. So how do you signal to your readers that this is a bad guy, if many of them have never heard of him, and nothing in his public career marks him as such?  Well, having him poison all the other members of his household, kill a vanquished enemy in a gratuitously sadistic manner, and contemplate killing his wife*** with the most sadistic relish will probably clue in even the most obtuse reader that you are not supposed to like this guy.  None of it has any basis in historical fact, you understand, but it does make for a good, juicy story, and it is some of the most entertaining part of the novel.

One final comment.  I have peaked ahead at some of the future novels and seen enough to get at least one impression.  There are various recurring motifs, various things you see happen again in future stories, introduced earlier on.  I intend to keep an eye open for these things.

I will move on to the political aspect of the novel in my next post, or several, will be about the political side of the novel.

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*Romans differ from Russians in other respects as well.  In Russia, everyone has exactly three names, no more and no less.  Romans were not so tidy.  While the aristocracy invariably had cognomina, commoners often had only two names and no cognomen.  (Gaius Marius, the hero and title character had no cognomen).  Women had no given names, only the feminine form of their clan name and sometimes the cognomen.  And there was no limit on how many cognomina any individual could have, or any strict rule about them being hereditary.  Since the original cognomina were often unflattering, meaning something like cross-eyed or swollen feet, so their bearers were eager to win an important victory and get a new cognomen to commemorate it.  Thus Lucius Caecilius Metellus Calvus' daughter was Caecilia Metella Calva, while his sons were Lucius and Quintus Caecilius Metellus.  Lucius won an important victory at Dalmatia and became Lucius Caecilius Metellus Dalmaticus and his daughter was known as Dalmatica.  Quintus won a victory in Numidia and became Quintus Caecilius Metellus Numidicus, but his son, instead of being another Numidicus, became Quintus Caecilius Metellus Pius for his championship of his exiled father.  Oh, yes, and cognomina could keep piling up until there was one Roman named Quintus Caecilius Metellus Pius Scipio Nasica.  It makes you head spin.

** And to treat solid white statutes, even if nude as artistic, but statutes painted to look life-like as gross pornography.  An Arab sheikh in California learned this the hard way when he painted his nude statues to look like actual nudes and discovered that he had unwittingly cause great offense to the neighbors.

***He married her after poisoning all the other members of his household, so she escapes his first round of murder.

First Man of Rome: A Short Introduction

But before I continue with some of the problems that result from guaranteeing everyone the right to form a private army dedicated to the violent overthrow of the US government, I want to move into another topic that has been tantalizing me for some time -- Colleen McCullough's Masters of Rome series.  So far, I have read the first book, First Man of Rome, starring Gaius Marius as the title character.  Really, I shouldn't be getting to Rome before finishing Greece, and I should start with non-fiction before moving into fiction, but the series has been a temptation to me ever since reading Shakespeare's Julius Caesar for a more favorable look at the man himself.  (Although he has just been born at the end of First Man in Rome).

I have now read the first book, and while it would be an exaggeration to say that I couldn't put it down and was walking around reading it and bumping into things, it did absorb my attention to the point of neglecting other things I probably should have been doing (like posting here), and I got through it faster than would ever seem possible for a 781 page novel.

I also read it at several levels.  One was purely a literary level, approaching it as a work of literature, albeit one bounded by actual historical events.  One was as a historical novel -- how well does it match actual historical events.  And one was as a political novel, seen from the perspective of my consuming obsession -- the failure of democratically elective government, in this case, the Roman Republic.

So I intend to discuss it in (a minimum of) three posts -- first as a pure work of literature, second as a political novel, and third, to compare it to historical events and see how accurate it is.

Presser v. Illinois

There is at least one Supreme Court case that addresses whether the Second Amendment authorizes private armies -- the case of Presser v. Illinois.  This case, like Luther v. Borden, is troubling from today's perspective precisely because it does not allow armed resistance to injustice.  Yet, like Luther, it is also useful as a reminder that, even in the case of serious injustice, armed rebellion is a terrible thing and not one to be taken lightly or romanticized.

A little background is in order that the opinion is less than clear about.  The case took place in the Gilded Age, when labor violence was at an all-time high in this country.  Powerful companies hired the Pinkerton Detectives and other private goons as their de facto private armies.  Unions countered them by raising their own armed forces, in this case, with the Socialist Labor Party.  For this Presser, the head of the armed company, was charged with violating an Illinois statute forbidding military organizations other than those authorized by the state.  As a defense, Presser argued that the statute violated his Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms.  (Unsurprisingly, no such charges were brought against armed forces for powerful companies).

The Supreme Court decision is in some ways deeply offensive to our present-day understanding of the Constitution, but in other ways still current.  It took the view current at the time distinguishing between the rights of "citizens of the United States," which were protected by the Fourteenth Amendment, and citizens of a state.  In particular, most of the Bill of Rights was held to be a restriction only on the Federal Government and not the states:

The provision in the Second Amendment to the Constitution, that "The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed" is a limitation only on the power of Congress and the national government, and not of the states. But in view of the fact that all citizens capable of bearing arms constitute the reserved military force of the national government as well as in view of its general powers, the states cannot prohibit the people from keeping and bearing arms so as to deprive the United States of their rightful resource for maintaining the public security.

The provision in the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution that "No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States" does not prevent a state from passing such laws to regulate the privileges and immunities of its own citizens as do not abridge their privileges and immunities as citizens of the United States.

In this it cited the odious case of US v. Cruikshank, a case that deserves to live in the same infamy as Dred Scott and Plessy v. Ferguson,  holding, in effect, that armed vigilantes in the South could deprive black people of their rights to their hearts' content, and the Federal Government could not intervene.  But one can condemn Presser for citing Cruikshank and still regard it as sound in other ways.

Presser also avoided addressing the issue of whether the Illinois Military Code was in violation of Article I, Section 10, Clause 3 of the US Constitution, forbidding states from keeping troops other than the militia authorized by Article I, Section 8, Clauses 15 and 16.  But it did make clear that states could ban private armies, and its basic reasoning is sound, even if it was unjustly applied in this particular instance:

Military organization and military drill and parade under arms are subjects especially under the control of the government of every country. They cannot be claimed as a right independent of law. Under our political system, they are subject to the regulation and control of the state and federal governments, acting in due regard to their respective prerogatives and powers. . . . The exercise of this power by the states is necessary to the public peace, safety, and good order. To deny the power would be to deny the right of the state to disperse assemblages organized for sedition and treason, and the right to suppress armed mobs bent on riot and rapine.

And though we may be appalled at the narrow reading of the Bill of Rights at the time, that applied it only to the Federal Government and not the states, and although we may be offended that the double standard here, enforcing the ban on private armies only against labor and not against management, let us concede the opinion a point here that remains just as valid to this day.  Military organization and drill and parade under arms are, or at least should be, subjects especially under the control of the government in every country.  To allow unchecked proliferation of private armies is, indeed, an invitation to anarchy.

 And the unequal way in which the ban on private armies was enforced raises another question that applies to the Patriot movement to this day, and that I plan to address in the near future -- if the Second Amendment guarantees a right to private armies and armed rebellion, just who is guaranteed that right.

Regulatory Capture: It's Not Just About Regulatory Agencies

And on the phenomenon of regulatory capture, the term should be applied in a broader context than just regulatory agencies being captured by the industries they regulate.  Any time the Watchers go from outsider to insider, regulatory capture becomes an issue.  Consider:

Surveillance.  Attempts to regulate government surveillance and intelligence were made in the 1970's following the Church Hearings.  The Senate and House Intelligence Committees were given greater oversight over executive intelligence agencies.  The FISA court was created to decide whether foreign intelligence surveillance was warranted.  Both attempts have proven toothless.  Congressional intelligence committees have simply been coopted into the intelligence system and provide no meaningful oversight.  The FISA court has been reduced to a rubber stamp, routinely approving requests like a warrant to gather meta-data on all telephone calls in the country. So far as I can tell, what happened in both cases was that outsiders who originally came in wanting to exercise meaningful oversight became insiders and part of the system.

The press corps.  These are supposed to be the watchdogs who keep government honest.  Instead, they have become increasingly deferential to the powerful for fear of losing access if they publish anything critical.  The press has gone from outsider to insider and been captured by -- government.

Doubtless there are many other examples that can be found.  The point here, I think, is that regulatory capture is not evidence of something especially noxious about government regulation, but part of the general tendency of outsiders to become insiders and insiders to protect their own.  The question is what to do about it.

Libertarians and "Plutocratic Capture"

Paul Krugman has written another column that expresses my basic concerns for our future.  He comments that conservative economists (i.e., libertarians) worry about regulatory capture, i.e., that regulatory agencies will end up being captured by the industries they are supposed to regulate, but not about "plutocratic capture," i.e., that extreme concentration of wealth will lead to the one percent hijacking democratic institutions.

I don't think that is quite right.  In my experience, libertarians are well aware of the dangers of plutocratic capture; they just differ from liberals on what to do about it.  I confess I am not clear as to what liberals propose to do about regulatory capture.  To libertarians the answer is easy -- no regulations, no regulatory capture.  Just don't regulate and regulatory capture will be a non-issue.

I have a better sense of the liberal answer to plutocratic capture.  It comes in two basic parts.  One is to avoid extreme concentration of wealth, whether by redistributive taxation or otherwise.  The other is to have other strong power centers in society to counter the strength of the plutocracy -- such as unions, consumer organization, home owner associates, or government.  It is a bit glib to say that libertarians' approach to plutocratic capture is the same -- no government, no plutocratic capture.  But that is more caricature than total misrepresentation.  Libertarians tend to assume that the way to avoid plutocratic capture is to keep government as small and as weak as possible so that it won't be worth capturing.  The unstated assumption here is that if plutocrats are not able to exercise power by capturing a strong government, then they will have no power and the rest of us will not have to fear its abuse.

I consider the libertarian viewpoint to be hopelessly naive.  It is true, I agree, that the combination of a strong, active state and extreme concentration of wealth creates the danger of plutocratic capture -- of the rich treating the state as their private instrument.  But there are two problems with the assumption that keeping the state small and weak will avoid these dangers.

First of all, just how small and weak does the state have to be?  After all, the state was much smaller and weaker in the Gilded Age than it is today, yet powerful concentrations of wealth nonetheless thought it worth capturing.  Some libertarians describe the state as a monopoly on violence and conclude that it exceeds its proper limits whenever it does anything other than violence.  Well, powerful interests of the Gilded Age were entirely happy to use the state's monopoly on violence as an instrument on their behalf to crush unions.  But I suppose a libertarian might argue that with today's increased mobility of capital, in the absence of artificial limitations, a company might simply fire any troublesome union organizers and, if this failed to work, relocate to somewhere without unions, so there would be no need to resort to brute force.  Other libertarians want to limit the state to the criminal justice system and a civil court system.  But the effect of this would simply be to shift the arena for contesting concentrations of economic power to the courts.  For instance, if we end all environmental regulation, the best recourse for a victim of a polluting company would be a common law action enjoin a nuisance.  But that would not so much shrink the power of the state as shift it to the courts, and thereby give the rich and powerful a strong interest in wanting to capture the process for choosing judges.  Other libertarians allow a greater scope for the state, but in that case the state would clearly be worth capturing.  In short, I do not think it possible to make the state too small and weak to be worth capturing.

But even assuming we can shrink the state to the point that it is not worth capturing, libertarians are quite wrong in assuming that this will prevent abuses of power by great concentrations of wealth. What actually happens when a society combines great inequality of wealth with a small and weak state is that the rich use their power to form their own state-within-a-state, which they use entirely for their private interests because there is no pretense of public accountability.

We are already seeing an early and relatively benign form of this in the form of gated communities. Gate communities hire their own private security guards -- and resist paying taxes for community police forces.  Likewise, people who can afford to may send their children to private schools.  They may resist paying taxes for public schools, but even if they do not, public schools lose important advocates and participants.  Powerful companies are bypassing the courts by putting arbitration clauses into their contracts and assuring that any dispute under the contract will be arbitrated in a forum favorable to the company.  Libertarians will probably defend all these things as appropriate exercises in self-interest, and as proof that the private sector does these things better than government.  But to individuals who cannot afford their own private security guards, or private schools, or arbitration forums, the result is an undercutting of public services and access to the courts.

Nor does the state-within-a-state necessarily stop there.  In many countries with strong concentration of wealth and a weak state, the rich invade the state's monopoly on violence to form their own private forces, like the Pinkerton Detectives or Latin American death squads.  In its most extreme forms, the state can break down altogether and the rich and powerful become warlords.

All of which points up to the central error of libertarianism -- its assumption that the state has a monopoly on power and oppression, that if one eliminates the state, on eliminates power and its potential for abuse.

Beware R > G

I have not read Thomas Picketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century, but really I probably should.  Its basic hypothesis is simple::  Historic trend is for return on assets to grow faster than the overall economy, leading to ever increased concentration of wealth.  We broke from trend for a while, but are returning to it.  Or, to put it more simply, the rate of return on assets is greater than overall economic growth.  R > G, in economic speak.  That could explain a lot.

As I understand it, Picketty focuses mostly on modern times, but modern times have been unusual. His data apparently goes all the way back to 0 A.D. and shows that historically, the return on assets has generally been around 4.5%, going up slightly to about 5% around the time of the Industrial Revolution. World economic growth has never been this high.*  Indeed, world economic growth was minimal from 0 to 1000 and under 1% until the Industrial Revolution got going.  R abnormally dropped to around 1% around 1913-1950; G reached the extraordinary height approaching 4% (still below the historical return on assets, bear in mind) between 1950 and the present, while R has been moving toward its historical level, but remains (narrowly) below G.  Picketty presupposes that R will return to its historic level, while G falls, though not all the way to its historic level.

This graph (and, presumably, Picketty's book) does not go back to pre-0 A.D., but his hypothesis could explain a lot.  Because so far as I can tell, the failure of democratically elective government in Classical Antiquity can roughly be summed up as R > G.  There was (I assume) real economic growth in classical Greece and Rome (remember, the G in the graph is world  economic growth).  The wealth became increasingly concentrated, while growing portions of the population became impoverished.  In Rome, at least, a lot of what was happening was the growth of vast slave plantations that really could grow more food with less labor -- but the result of supporting a larger population with less work was massive unemployment.  England suffered the same problem pre-Industrial Revolution and ultimately solved it with industrialization.  In Classical times, no such resolution was found.  Wealth simply accumulated in fewer and fewer hands and more and more people were poor and unemployed, with no relief in sight.  The details, of course, differed from time to time and place to place, and I look forward to learning about them.  But underlying it all was the iron law of R > G.

And Picketty's hypothesis, if true, has scary implications for the future.  I do not expect R > G to be as much of an issue in the modern failure of democracy as in Classical times (although do not forget that democracy is most likely to fail when a country's G falls) because the massive increase in G from industrial development came to the rescue.  But if Picketty is right, and if others are right in their fears that automation will make people obsolete, we could end up right back where so many other societies -- from Classical Greece and Rome to England before the Industrial Revolution -- great at producing stuff, but unable to make room for large portions of the population.

R > G may prove to be a major difference in failing democracy in Classical versus modern times.

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*Economic growth has reached and exceeded this level in individual countries, but only up to a point, and never world-wide.