Goliath’s Curse: The History and Future of Societal Collapse, by Luke Kemp Viking, 592 pp, £25, ISBN: ‎978-0241741238

Peak Human: What We Can Learn from the Rise and Fall of Golden Ages, by Johan Norberg Atlantic Books, 512 pp, £22, ISBN: 978-1838957315

The year 1776, whose quarter-millennium we mark this year, was a good vintage for documents that would last. Almost four months before the publication on July 4th of The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America (sic), the publishers William Strahan and Thomas Cadell in the Strand published, on March 9th, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith. A few weeks before that (sources disagree about the exact date), the same publishers launched the first volume of a projected six-volume work, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon. It’s surprising that subsequent historiography has drawn few explicit comparisons between the second and third of these documents, almost as if the chronological coincidence were an embarrassment for serious scholars, like a form of astrology. The disciplinary separation between history and political economy is doubtless part of the story. One of the rare books to treat both works together, Harold James’s The Roman Predicament: How the Rules of International Order Create the Politics of Empire (Princeton) is by a scholar unusually at home in both traditions.

Smith and Gibbon certainly knew each other, at least through correspondence. In a letter dated November 26th, 1777, Gibbon writes to Smith: ‘Among the strange reports that are every day circulated in this wide town, I heard one today so very extraordinary that I know not how to give credit to it. I was informed that a place of commissioner of the customs in Scotland had been given to a philosopher who for his own glory and for the benefit of mankind had enlightened the world by the most profound and systematic treatise on the great objects of trade and revenue which had ever been published in any age or in any country. But as I was told at the same time that this philosopher was my particular friend, I found myself very forcibly inclined to believe what I most sincerely wished and desired.’

Gibbon probably knew Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments. It’s hard to read Smith’s ironic account in 1759 of the social function of religion (‘That the terrors of religion should thus enforce the natural sense of duty, was of too much importance to the happiness of mankind, for nature to leave it dependent upon the slowness and uncertainty of philosophical researches’) without wondering whether it influenced what may be Gibbon’s most famous sentence: ‘The various modes of worship, which prevailed in the Roman world, were all considered by the people, as equally true; by the philosopher, as equally false; and by the magistrate, as equally useful. And thus toleration produced not only mutual indulgence, but even religious concord.’ Smith had begun writing The Wealth of Nations in 1764 in my home city of Toulouse. This was just a year after Voltaire (whose interest in universal history was certainly an influence on Gibbon) had published his Treatise on Toleration in response to the terrible miscarriage of justice in that city in the Calas affair. It makes sense to think of these two writers as exercised by a common set of preoccupations, even if neither framed them in the same terms.

Smith’s ostensible subject is what makes nations wealthy, while Gibbon’s is what makes empires decay. But each of them is fascinated by the mirror image of their focal question. For Gibbon, what made the Roman empire decay was not a single cause but an accumulation of political, fiscal and religious trends, themselves the fruit of prosperity, that together undermined both civic virtue (especially through luxury consumption) and institutional capacity. For Smith the qualities that made nations wealthy were precisely the qualities that could be blocked by the short-sightedness of opportunistic political leaders. These included not just environmental and technological qualities – the division of labour, mechanisation, the absence of constraints on trade. He also believed in the importance and fragility of civic virtue (trustworthiness, prudence, a sense of justice), albeit in a more sober and less martial version than Gibbon’s, and as a supporting condition rather than a central motor of historical change.

Right down to our day we see writer after writer ask a question about growth or decline, which obliges them to attend to the alternative. Sometimes the two aspects are explicitly placed side by side, as in works that tackle the ‘reversal of fortune’ question: why did the industrial revolution take place in northwestern Europe, when at the end of the first millennium China was by most measures more advanced than Europe, and a millennium before that the Roman empire was at its most prosperous while China was being rebuilt under the Han dynasty after the chaos of the Warring States period? Avner Greif, Joel Mokyr and Guido Tabellini are the latest to weigh in on this massive question, in Two Paths to Prosperity (Princeton). To simplify their complex argument, they locate the key difference in the growing strength of clans in China, and the correspondingly greater social importance of corporations in Europe, during the second millennium AD.

The two books under review here, by Luke Kemp and Johan Norberg, are in the Gibbon (decline) and Smith (growth) mode respectively, and for that reason are worth assessing together. Norberg’s is the easier to describe and better written. It is also the neatest in its arguments, which makes me a little suspicious. He looks at the determinants of seven golden ages in human civilisation: Athens, Rome, the Abbasid Caliphate, Song China, Renaissance Italy, the Dutch Republic and the Anglosphere. He is not the first to conclude that each of these societies succeeded by being open to outside influence (through immigration and cultural borrowing) and therefore nimble, innovative, prosperous and militarily strong enough to defend itself against envious predators. Until it wasn’t. Athens lost the Peloponnesian war to Sparta. Rome lost out to illiterate horsemen from the steppe. The Abbasids were brought down by authoritarian religious zealots. China in the Song dynasty built a prosperous civilisation that was unable to defend itself against … well, yes, against illiterate horsemen from the steppe. Renaissance Italy lost to … authoritarian religious zealots. (What goes around, comes around.) The Dutch Republic emerged from an astonishingly successful war against an empire many times its size and didn’t so much decline after that as escape chaos at home by exporting its recipe to England in 1688. England did something similar with the United States in 1776. The US is now doing its best to dismantle the very openness that has made it for a quarter millennium a world-beating success. Should this last development be filed under ‘authoritarian religious zealots’ or under ‘illiterate horsemen from the steppe’?

Norberg’s book is such a pleasure to read that I feel almost guilty comparing it to a book that explains the secret of a champion football team by its having hit on a great way to score goals. And the team’s subsequent failure by its inability to keep scoring them. Openness to cultural, economic and military innovation is indeed the secret of all the successful civilisations Norberg studies. But what, exactly, made them achieve that? It’s not as though you can just decide to be open and innovative. Openness and innovation are emergent properties that are in nobody’s power to bestow.

Perhaps Norberg thinks there was an inevitable life cycle: a young civilisation can become great provided it can tap (initially for random reasons) the energy of innovators who understand there are not enough resources to steal so they must create their own. Then, as the civilisation becomes rich, increasing numbers of predators ask themselves: ‘why innovate if you can steal the fruits of the innovations of others?’ Paul Kennedy proposed something like such a cyclical mechanism in The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers. In Kennedy’s case it mainly involved states preying on other states rather than interest groups within states preying on each other (as captured in Gibbon’s assertion that ‘from the reign of Augustus to the time of Alexander Severus, the enemies of Rome were in her bosom’). Norberg may have something similar in mind but he is too coy to say so. And if he does, why does the golden age continue for less than a century in Athens (from the battle of Salamis in 480 BC to the defeat by Sparta in 405 BC) and in Holland, but for over two centuries in Rome, Song China and the United States? Is this just brute luck or is something more systematic involved?

The story Luke Kemp has to tell is messier. The process of state-building was messy enough, so maybe mess is a feature of his account, not a bug. He wants us to take on board that state collapse was a common aspect of societies throughout history and even prehistory. That’s doubtless a corrective to readers who think there is something pre-ordained about the present, in which people nearing retirement in Western Europe and North America will have lived an entire lifetime without war, sustained economic decline or even a plague worse than Covid-19. That was emphatically not the norm in previous ages, not even in Periclean Athens or Renaissance Florence.

It is certainly salutary to be reminded that complex societies are not automatically self-stabilising. Sometimes they can really collapse. And collapse is multifaceted: it’s one thing for an elite to be guillotined and replaced by a rival elite. It’s quite another to trigger a society-wide calamity in which ordinary people face starvation or massacre. This happened to millions in the Taiping Rebellion, although the Qing dynasty just about survived for another half-century. Kemp reminds us of a third pattern: the earliest instances of state collapse simply involved populations deciding they’d had enough of being taxed, and heading off into the archeologically undocumented hinterland.

Kemp’s account meanders in multiple directions to an extent that makes it almost inevitable he will contradict himself. He writes that ‘corruption tends to increase over time, alongside wealth inequality’, but four sentences later says, ‘in the pre-modern world, with less-advanced bureaucracies and weaker accountability mechanisms, there would have been even more opportunities to exploit the system’. To take another example, he wants to claim that human beings are naturally pacific and ‘need to be programmed to commit murder’ (a claim he is not alone in making but that ignores a vast amount of evidence marshalled by researchers such as Richard Wrangham, to whom he makes no reference). He writes that ‘it wasn’t until the Vietnam War that the US developed more immersive training experiences to overcome … squeamishness and brainwash men into being better fighters’. This is a claim that makes no sense considering the evidence he marshals elsewhere of the massive, brutal and often enthusiastic infliction of violence throughout history (and reaching far back into prehistory).

More to the point, Kemp explains the rise of Goliaths (his term for what others, beginning with Hobbes, have called Leviathans) by the presence of lootable resources, the availability of monopolisable weapon technologies and the inability of most populations to flee by cultivating what James Scott, studying a rare exception, called The Art of Not Being Governed (Yale). This is a compelling insight but runs against his earlier hypothesis. It would be startling if the history of state-building turned on the exploitation of these conditions by oppressors who exercised violence only with great reluctance: natural selection has a strong record of making us enjoy what contributes to our fitness.

We have two contrasting narratives: one too neat and the other too messy. Can we possibly justify using such aesthetic responses in our evaluation of them as accounts of the past? The philosopher Alex Rosenberg argues in How History Gets Things Wrong that narrative history is both deeply misleading and highly addictive. We can’t help responding to history as stories, and the best we can do is to be cautious in using these stories as guides to our future. Brandishing Norberg as a response to Donald Trump or Nigel Farage is somehow missing the point, and Kemp’s proposals for avoiding societal collapse in the twenty-first century have a distinctly utopian feel. That doesn’t make Rosenberg a nihilist, just a believer in experimental science in a field where experiments are hard to conduct.

Perhaps Rosenberg’s insight also explains why so few historians have wanted to compare Gibbon and Smith explicitly. These two great writers each have their partisans, and the partisans have their own (largely aesthetic) reasons for what they like. For that very reason (and because we are, says Rosenberg, inexhaustibly addicted to hearing stories again and again), there will be no shortage of writers aiming to emulate Gibbon and Smith. We want to know what makes nations rise, what tempts them unwisely but irresistibly into becoming empires and what then makes them fall. None of these stories will convince us enough to stem the flow. That’s a scientifically sobering, but literarily promising conclusion to draw at the quarter millennium of the founding of the American Republic. The stories will keep on coming.