3/31/2023 0 Comments Social empires 2020![]() ![]() ![]() He was eventually assassinated, and the empire descended into a period of crisis and corruption. The Roman emperor Commodus inherited a state with economic and military instability, and he didn't rise to the occasion instead, he was more interested in performing as a gladiator and identifying himself with Hercules. This pattern of amoral leaders destabilizing their societies goes way back-the paper uses the Roman Empire as an example. "Most societies have some kind of social contract, whether that's written out or not, and if you have a leader who breaks those principles, then people lose trust, diminish their willingness to pay taxes, move away, or take other steps that undercut the fiscal health of the polity." "In a good governance society, a moral leader is one who upholds the core principles and ethos and creeds and values of the overall society," says Feinman. The researchers also examined a common factor in the collapse of societies with good governance: leaders who abandoned the society's founding principles and ignored their roles as moral guides for their people. Whereas if an autocratic regime collapses, you might see a different leader or you might see a different capital, but it doesn't permeate all the way down into people's lives, as such rulers generally monopolize resources and fund their regimes in ways less dependent on local production or broad-based taxation." "And so social networks and institutions become highly connected, economically, socially, and politically. You have an economy that jointly sustains the people and funds the government," says Feinman. "With good governance, you have infrastructures for communication and bureaucracies to collect taxes, sustain services, and distribute public goods. But the flip side of that coin is that when a "good" government collapses, things tend to be harder for the citizens, because they'd come to rely on the infrastructure of that government in their day-to-day life. Societies with good governance tend to last a bit longer than autocratic governments that keep power concentrated to one person or small group. Credit: Giambattista Brustolon, Creative Commons ![]() They all had means to enhance social well-being, provision goods and services beyond just a narrow few, and means for commoners to express their voices."Īn engraving by Giambattista Brustolon showing the Great Council of Venice. "They didn't have elections, but they had other checks and balances on the concentration of personal power and wealth by a few individuals. You have to come up with some other yardsticks, and the core features of the good governance concept serve as a suitable measure of that," says Feinman. "There were basically no electoral democracies before modern times, so if you want to compare good governance in the present with good governance in the past, you can't really measure it by the role of elections, so important in contemporary democracies. These societies flourished hundreds (or in ancient Rome's case, thousands) of years ago, and they had comparatively more equitable distributions of power and wealth than many of the other cases examined, although they looked different from what we consider "good governments" today as they did not have popular elections. In their study, Blanton, Feinman, and their colleagues took an in-depth look at the governments of four societies: the Roman Empire, China's Ming Dynasty, India's Mughal Empire, and the Venetian Republic. "We refer to an inexplicable failure of the principal leadership to uphold values and norms that had long guided the actions of previous leaders, followed by a subsequent loss of citizen confidence in the leadership and government and collapse." ![]() "We noted the potential for failure caused by an internal factor that might have been manageable if properly anticipated," says Richard Blanton, a professor emeritus of anthropology at Purdue University and the study's lead author. "The states that had good governance, although they may have been able to sustain themselves slightly longer than autocratic-run ones, tended to collapse more thoroughly, more severely." Some pre-modern states had good governance and weren't that different from what we see in some democratic countries today," says Gary Feinman, the MacArthur curator of anthropology at Chicago's Field Museum and one of the authors of a new study in Frontiers in Political Science. "Pre-modern states were not that different from modern ones. ![]()
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