Based on _The Rise of Fall of Great Powers_? I don’t think that’s justified. Reading over his terminal chapter about the prospect fo the various candidates, I can’t fault his treatment of the United States as the preeminent power though one facing serious problems. Europe’s lack of cohesion, Japan’s unidimensional power, China’s poverty, and, above all else, the vast array of issues facing the increasingly outclassed Soviet Union all loomed larger in Kennedy’s tale.

As far as I can remember from the various histories I’ve read, the Empire was, in fact, vastly more egalitarian than the Republic.

No, the Empire merely granted titles while stripping real power. No matter how you look at it, the Republic had a far greater degree of power diffusion than did the empire. In the Republic, for example, the Tribunes, representatives of the common people, could and did stop wars. No such institutional office existed in Imperial times.

Common Romans of the Republic had real input into the decision making process of of the government. In Imperial times, not even the richest and most nobel did. Being a Senator meant nothing unless one also had a loyal legion to back ones claims. The Republic had a true rule of law that restrained even the most powerful. In the Empire, the emperor stood absolute.

Lex, I’d say Kennedy is on par with Lester Thurow. ;o)

The danger on the budget side is our transfer payments. Look at these pie charts. That is where we are potentially going to choke ourselves.

As to Kennedy, he is a very good historian. His Rise and Fall of British Naval Mastery is excellent, and his essay “Why the British Empire Lasted so Long” is a classic. But he is not a good futurist. He was predicting that Japan was going to displace us as the next superpower. I remember seeing him speak at the U of C in 1987, and he talked about how the Japanese were going to build aircraft carriers and challenge us for control of the Pacific.

The previous ice age at the end of the first millennium sent people heading south to the Holy Land. The Vikings came down from the north leaving blond children as far south as Sicily. The medieval warming period led to the massive building and population surge of the 1200s and the Black Death of the 1300s. By the mid 1200s the heat was too much and many Europeans left the Holy Land and went North. However Siberia had thawed enough so that Genghis Khan and his Golden Horde could chase the sunset across Asia into Europe. When Siberia refroze the Mongol empire ended.

The ice age of the 400s led to the fall of the Roman Empire as Vandals (the inventors of vandalism), Ostrogoths, Visgoths, Picts, Celts, and Attila the Hun all headed south to sunny Italy and Northern Africa. It is in this period that the medieval chroniclers note that the March Field is being held in May. In the late 700s thru the early 900s people started wars in the proper month creating the Carolingian Empire in Europe.

The ice age centered on 80 B.C. saw large numbers of Gauls heading south into the lands around the Mediterranean. Amazingly enough the weather was so cool in North Africa that Egypt, Numidea and Sicily were major grain exporters. Spain was a wealthy province known for its agriculture. In the warm period that followed in 100-300 AD there was a major building boom in France and England of roads and cities.

Warming periods come and go, Empire rise and fall in Europe, the Far East and the Americas. A major problem of Empires is communications over large distances. Distant places were ruled by governors with their own armies. If the central authority worked to keep the governors weak they were overrun by the barbarians at the gate. If the central authority allowed the governors too much power they set up their own countries.

It’s interesting that Kennedy was writing in the 80s, clearly alluding to the arms race with the USSR under Reagan. Kennedy stresses over and over again that it is not absolute might, but relative might that counts. The collapse of the Soviet Union was a bonus for us, who were able to cut back on our military budget in the 90s and have a decade of strong economy and balanced budgets. Things have changed since then. I have no idea if the US will collapse like every empire before it, but up and coming Asian countries and even the EU you all loathe so much look better on many indicators than we do. The question is what to do about it.

“Unfortunately, Genghis Khan broke his own rule when choosing his succession. He divided the empire among his sons and grandsons, many of whom could not handle the responsibility”

Ghengis remained and appointed a successor Khagan ( Great Khan or Emperor). It was Mongol tradition that the eldest son would take the outlier territories furthest from his father as the inheritence, thus spurring the Horde to new conquests. It was the subdivisions of the Horde in China ( who conquered the Sung dynasty) and the in far west who ravaged Russia, Iran and Mesopotamia, who were the most aggressive in carrying out Ghengis’ legacy.

These are things that as far as I can see, simply wouldn’t have taken place in the stratified Rome of the middle and late republic, where the lines between Roman citizen and subject population were sharply drawn, and where, within Rome proper, the patrician and plebian classes, and the equestrian and senatorial orders were all quite distinct. All the great military commanders of the Republic appear to have been toffs. Cincinnatus was a patrician, and (wikipedia tells me) fiercely opposed to granting plebians equal status under the law. Sulla was a patrician. So was Caesar. The only exception, I think, is Pompey, who was not from one of the illustrious old gentes, and he only appears on the scene when the Republic is well on the way to the Empire.

A successful historical theory does not, however, have to predict that the West will stay on top. One of the factors that drove innovation in Europe was the lack of a strong central authority, so heretics in religion or science or anything else could always find a place to hide. If their ideas were successful they and the people who sheltered them, flourished. There was just enough of a unifying force in the Church and the Holy Roman Empire to keep things from degenerating too badly – in most cases, and over the long haul. There certainly have been blips of outright craziness.

But a certain amount of decentralization of decision making is key to creating a Darwinian, self-correcting system, which is the only one that works in the long run. It can be taken too far, though. With too much decentralization of authority, you get Poland just before the partition, with too little, you get the USSR. Neither works. The struggle between States Rights and the Feds has to be carefully balanced, it was carefully balanced by the Founders. It’s too far out of whack towards the Feds, now. That may be our downfall, and it would be predicted by a formalization of Shannon’s ideas into a theory.

I think there’s an even better example close at hand, though – the EU is doing much worse damage much quicker to Europe, even in the non-member states.

Evaluating the validity of a historical argument based on its perceived utility in a current political debate is just plain stupid. In any case, nothing in my argument justifies any war. I just wanted to demonstrate that the basic idea that empires arise out of runaway aggression and fall from overreach is silly regardless of the era in which the claim is made. It was silly in civil war. It was silly in Spanish American war. It was silly in WWI, WWII, Korea and Vietnam.

The idea that the war du jour represents the supposed imperial overreach has been around for centuries. It is, like the vast majority of anti-war arguments, merely mindlessly recycled from generation to generation.

And this begs the question: Does, or will, this kind of improvement occur because of, or with respect to, a federal Dept. of Education?

Fugedaboudit.

I suggest that the egalitarian societies you describe are really those which have decentralized decision making”

I think decentralized decision making is an inherent attribute of an egalitarian society. Of course, it’s kind of a chicken-and-egg type feedback loop. You can’t have decentralized decision-making without egalitarianism and you can’t have egalitarianism without decentralized decision-making (almost by definition).
Most empires seem to arise when those at the top of a centralized society discover that they need the voluntary cooperation of elements of the society that previously they merely commanded. Since the price of such cooperation always includes greater political power, decentralization and greater equality evolve hand-in-hand.

Logically, the same issue should be decided the same way thruough out the empire. Once logic governs there develops a bureaucracy which implements intricate rules which slows down or halts the decision making process so that the empire is unable to react swiftly.

A quick bad decision is better than a good decision that takes five or ten years to produce. A quick bad decision can be fixed by another quick decision until a good decision is made. A good decision reached 10 years after the fact is of interest only to lawyers and bureaucrats.

In computer terms decentralization is paralell processing. Ten million decision makers working on individual problems will always outperform a single central processor, no matter how brilliant.

Under the Roman republic, before Gaius Julius Caesar, each consul on completing his six month term became governor of a province
where he held the maius imperium – absolute authority to raise taxes, make war and make peace. He was expected to use his authority to make himself rich so that when his term of office was over he could throw a really big party for all the citizens of Rome.

With ten governorships run by ten ambitious governors who personally paid for their own wars Rome could have ten wars going at once. Under the Empire after Octavian the Emperor did not trust other men with the maius imperium but kept it for themslves
(which is why they’re called imperatur). Thus they could only fight one war at a time. This slowed, then reversed, the growth of the emnpire. Id est, Decision making became over centralized.