I heard LW people talking about him, went to see what all the fuss was about and like you I just gave up after a while. I suspect his essays are long to keep people from thinking about them too clearly.
Don’t underestimate the inferential differences involved. Consider how much text the sequences amount to. Even individual entries are sometimes monstrous in length.
If you where to travel back in time and ask the people living in the Roman Empire what their system of government is, the surprising answer is that most would say “Republic”. Rome was formally still a republic for a very very long time. Not only that it also presented itself in both propaganda and action as a Republican government and most preserved sources even point to it being considered a republic by many living in it except those defeated in its power struggles.
What the Roman state considered itself to be, and whether it considered itself a republic, and what the people thought is something that is easily confirmed or falsified, as much as any historical fact or interpretation can be, by a moderate amount of scholarship.
But that’s because the meaning of res publica most foundational for them would have been “the system of government we live under,” and it wouldn’t have been ridiculous for them to consider it continuous with the system of government in place in Rome before the Principate. When Gibbons uses the idiomatic translation of the term, “commonwealth,” to refer to what he and we call the Empire, or James Madison and the bunch talk about how republics like Rome are the best sort of government because they combine monarchy with aristocracy and democracy, we shouldn’t be surprised; words change. Things changed with the Principate but they also changed with the Aventine Succession, Marsic War, rise of the Praetorian Guard, and so on.
Likewise for quite some time before the Principate Rome together with its holdings constituted an “empire” in the modern sense, but if you traveled back 21 centuries and inquired Roma rem publicam uel imperium habit? they’d consider the question confused.
But that’s because the meaning of res publica most foundational for them would have been “the system of government we live under,” and it wouldn’t have been ridiculous for them to consider it continuous with the system of government in place in Rome before the Principate.
The foundational event of the Roman state, on which its institutions based their claim to legitimacy, was the 509BC revolution that threw out the king and established the Republic. (Not at all unlike the U.S., in fact.) Even well into the imperial period, monarchy was seen by the Romans as characteristic of barbarians and Oriental aliens, and it would have been extremely offensive to suggest that the reigning imperatores were in fact monarchs, and the whole system utterly and irreconcilably different from the old Republic. It took three centuries of this charade until Diocletian finally ended the pretense and openly proclaimed himself a monarch and demanded to be approached and addressed as such.
That’s my strong impression at least, though admittedly I’m not an expert in classical history. So I think the analogy with the modern U.S. government is quite pertinent if, indeed, its de facto system of government is very different from what it is supposed to be according to its formal constitution and the political formulas that are piously declared in public.
Likewise for quite some time before the Principate Rome together with its holdings constituted an “empire” in the modern sense, but if you traveled back 21 centuries and inquired Roma rem publicam uel imperium habit? they’d consider the question confused.
My high-school Latin has rusted almost to the point of nonexistence, but shouldn’t this be vel and habet?
In any case, if you travelled back 21 centuries, the imperium would have been understood as an office given to certain military commanders within the republican institutions (sometimes only honorific, and sometimes conveying actual authority). It had nothing resembling the modern meaning of “empire.” And if you asked back then whether Rome was a republic or a monarchy (using any commonly recognized word for the latter), to a Roman it would have sounded as laughable as if you gave the same question to a modern-day American.
[EDIT: Due to sheer carelessness, I interpreted “back 21 centuries” as the early first century AD, i.e. the time of Augustus. Looking back, I’m now not sure what exact period it was supposed to refer to.]
My high-school Latin has rusted almost to the point of nonexistence, but shouldn’t this be vel and habet?
Habet yes, but “u” is actually a better transcription than “v”, and is in fact preferred by some modern scholars. (Latin did not have the sound represented by “v”, and Roman writing did not have the character “U”; instead, the character “V” was used to represent the phonemes /u/ and /w/.)
(ETA: Also, though my Latin is rusty as well, the word we want here is probably aut [roughly “xor”] rather than uel.)
Interesting—I know that the original Latin alphabet didn’t have the letter “U,” but I’ve never seen a modern transcription that uses “u” for both /u/ and /w/. How recent is this trend?
Fairly recent, as far as I know; probably no earlier than the 1980s. (This is just a guess based on vague memory.) I’m not even sure it has spread much beyond people whose interest in Latin is specifically linguistic. (For instance I don’t know that there are any pedagogical materials—as opposed to linguistic treatises—that use this spelling, though there might be.)
Spelling Latin with u has always been there (but as a tiny minority of texts). Here are some occurrences of omnia uincit amor over the years: 1603, 1743, 1894, 1974.
If you compare the frequencies of vincit and uincit on Google Ngram viewer, you’ll see that the u spelling has always been present at a low frequency. There doesn’t seem to be any noticeable recent trend (other than the general decline of Latin as a proportion of printed material). I tried a few other Latin words and got similar results.
And if you asked back then whether Rome was a republic or a monarchy (using any commonly recognized word for the latter), to a Roman it would have sounded as laughable as if you gave the same question to a modern-day American.
I’m not sure about this. Caesar was murdered because of fears that he would become a king, and surely well-informed later Romans would have realized that the concentration of power under the emperors matched or surpassed the one under Caesar (plus hereditary succession, of course). And in fact Tacitus’ ‘Annals’ begin with a contrast between the “freedom and consulships” that started with Lucius Brutus and the “despotism” of Augustus and his successors. Perhaps a patriotic double standard (“we Romans are not slaves to a king like those Eastern barbarians”) would have prevented them from calling the Empire a monarchy, but if asked whether the actual organization of their government resembled more closely that of Rome in 200 BC or that of the Kingdom of the Parthians, they might have admitted to the latter.
Sure, with years the pretense became increasingly transparent—and of course, already in the time of Caesar, it was clear to any informed observer that things were very different from the heyday of the republican institutions. Still, I’m sure a second-century Roman would have been offended if one were to suggest that the proud republican “SPQR” inscriptions on public buildings and military standards were just a hypocritical sham, even if that claim would have been more or less correct.
Moreover, the imperial succession is one issue where it seems like the need to maintain the pretense had serious practical implications, since it was impossible to legislate clear succession rules that would recognize the imperial office as hereditary. In this regard, as much as the republican institutions had become increasingly irrelevant from Augustus on, there was still a deep and fundamental difference from explicit hereditary monarchies such as the Parthian Empire.
I heard LW people talking about him, went to see what all the fuss was about and like you I just gave up after a while. I suspect his essays are long to keep people from thinking about them too clearly.
Don’t underestimate the inferential differences involved. Consider how much text the sequences amount to. Even individual entries are sometimes monstrous in length.
Here’s most of my problems with Moldbug condensed into one sentence: a bold assertion with no literal meaning that I can easily confirm or falsify.
The literal meaning is the plain meaning.
If you where to travel back in time and ask the people living in the Roman Empire what their system of government is, the surprising answer is that most would say “Republic”. Rome was formally still a republic for a very very long time. Not only that it also presented itself in both propaganda and action as a Republican government and most preserved sources even point to it being considered a republic by many living in it except those defeated in its power struggles.
What the Roman state considered itself to be, and whether it considered itself a republic, and what the people thought is something that is easily confirmed or falsified, as much as any historical fact or interpretation can be, by a moderate amount of scholarship.
But that’s because the meaning of res publica most foundational for them would have been “the system of government we live under,” and it wouldn’t have been ridiculous for them to consider it continuous with the system of government in place in Rome before the Principate. When Gibbons uses the idiomatic translation of the term, “commonwealth,” to refer to what he and we call the Empire, or James Madison and the bunch talk about how republics like Rome are the best sort of government because they combine monarchy with aristocracy and democracy, we shouldn’t be surprised; words change. Things changed with the Principate but they also changed with the Aventine Succession, Marsic War, rise of the Praetorian Guard, and so on.
Likewise for quite some time before the Principate Rome together with its holdings constituted an “empire” in the modern sense, but if you traveled back 21 centuries and inquired Roma rem publicam uel imperium habit? they’d consider the question confused.
The foundational event of the Roman state, on which its institutions based their claim to legitimacy, was the 509BC revolution that threw out the king and established the Republic. (Not at all unlike the U.S., in fact.) Even well into the imperial period, monarchy was seen by the Romans as characteristic of barbarians and Oriental aliens, and it would have been extremely offensive to suggest that the reigning imperatores were in fact monarchs, and the whole system utterly and irreconcilably different from the old Republic. It took three centuries of this charade until Diocletian finally ended the pretense and openly proclaimed himself a monarch and demanded to be approached and addressed as such.
That’s my strong impression at least, though admittedly I’m not an expert in classical history. So I think the analogy with the modern U.S. government is quite pertinent if, indeed, its de facto system of government is very different from what it is supposed to be according to its formal constitution and the political formulas that are piously declared in public.
My high-school Latin has rusted almost to the point of nonexistence, but shouldn’t this be vel and habet?
In any case, if you travelled back 21 centuries, the imperium would have been understood as an office given to certain military commanders within the republican institutions (sometimes only honorific, and sometimes conveying actual authority). It had nothing resembling the modern meaning of “empire.” And if you asked back then whether Rome was a republic or a monarchy (using any commonly recognized word for the latter), to a Roman it would have sounded as laughable as if you gave the same question to a modern-day American.
[EDIT: Due to sheer carelessness, I interpreted “back 21 centuries” as the early first century AD, i.e. the time of Augustus. Looking back, I’m now not sure what exact period it was supposed to refer to.]
Habet yes, but “u” is actually a better transcription than “v”, and is in fact preferred by some modern scholars. (Latin did not have the sound represented by “v”, and Roman writing did not have the character “U”; instead, the character “V” was used to represent the phonemes /u/ and /w/.)
(ETA: Also, though my Latin is rusty as well, the word we want here is probably aut [roughly “xor”] rather than uel.)
Interesting—I know that the original Latin alphabet didn’t have the letter “U,” but I’ve never seen a modern transcription that uses “u” for both /u/ and /w/. How recent is this trend?
Fairly recent, as far as I know; probably no earlier than the 1980s. (This is just a guess based on vague memory.) I’m not even sure it has spread much beyond people whose interest in Latin is specifically linguistic. (For instance I don’t know that there are any pedagogical materials—as opposed to linguistic treatises—that use this spelling, though there might be.)
Spelling Latin with u has always been there (but as a tiny minority of texts). Here are some occurrences of omnia uincit amor over the years: 1603, 1743, 1894, 1974.
If you compare the frequencies of vincit and uincit on Google Ngram viewer, you’ll see that the u spelling has always been present at a low frequency. There doesn’t seem to be any noticeable recent trend (other than the general decline of Latin as a proportion of printed material). I tried a few other Latin words and got similar results.
I’m not sure about this. Caesar was murdered because of fears that he would become a king, and surely well-informed later Romans would have realized that the concentration of power under the emperors matched or surpassed the one under Caesar (plus hereditary succession, of course). And in fact Tacitus’ ‘Annals’ begin with a contrast between the “freedom and consulships” that started with Lucius Brutus and the “despotism” of Augustus and his successors. Perhaps a patriotic double standard (“we Romans are not slaves to a king like those Eastern barbarians”) would have prevented them from calling the Empire a monarchy, but if asked whether the actual organization of their government resembled more closely that of Rome in 200 BC or that of the Kingdom of the Parthians, they might have admitted to the latter.
Sure, with years the pretense became increasingly transparent—and of course, already in the time of Caesar, it was clear to any informed observer that things were very different from the heyday of the republican institutions. Still, I’m sure a second-century Roman would have been offended if one were to suggest that the proud republican “SPQR” inscriptions on public buildings and military standards were just a hypocritical sham, even if that claim would have been more or less correct.
Moreover, the imperial succession is one issue where it seems like the need to maintain the pretense had serious practical implications, since it was impossible to legislate clear succession rules that would recognize the imperial office as hereditary. In this regard, as much as the republican institutions had become increasingly irrelevant from Augustus on, there was still a deep and fundamental difference from explicit hereditary monarchies such as the Parthian Empire.