Adrian Buck > Recent Status Updates

spiritual community of values, national community, community within the family - I have a difficulty in believing that insincere and shallowly held values are real.

Fidesz recognised the potential in the psychological force behind self-acquittal and scapegoating others for one's own fate...and deliberately based their politics on this.

a western political establishment struggled with an eastern pattern of wealth and property accumulation

Under the mafia state private interest takes the rightful place interest systematically and permanently, rather than by chance and on occasion.

For this system worked in a quasi egalitarian manner, after all the opportunities for illegitimate ways of accumulating wealth were greatly limited even for leaders in the economy built on state monopoly, while by means of their mini-monopolies the hundreds of thousands people in the lower strata of the system could also impose their allowances.

"putting a pecuniary value on the military service which the inhabitants of the provinces, village by village, had been accustomed to furnish....This change was the origin of many disasters to the Roman empire subsequently.

...the government was no longer [the emperors] at all. Instead it belonged to the person who had paid for a militia..

What he finds intolerable is the destruction of the patron-dependent relationship that he had for so long maintained a village under his control.

purchase of bishoprics was not uncommon in the eastern provinces...

It was thus the most natural thing in the world that the army's presence should be thus so often and universally referred to as a species of enemy occupation..

...fictitious charges almost always aimed at financial profit, whereas in the Principate they have been more often instruments or intimidation.

In the eyes of the western church, militia and morality were radically incompatible.

...there was a steady pressure across the whole front of governmental operations to introduce charges, invent fees, and generally apply the principles of private enterprise. - the UK?

In the civil service of the late empire some thirty to thirty five thousands were employed, to be set against perhaps 300 career civil servants under Caracalla.

Sheer abundance of legislation matched it's fuzziness and contradictions, and its interpreters at every level gained a corresponding increase in power. - Hungary under Orbán too?

There were many circles in society, each with its own, slightly different, or very different, ideas of right or wrong.

Like the tips hoped for and more or less exacted by domestic or staff underlings, XENIA lay along a boundary separating two close countries of good feeling and good business. The one was approved, polite, the other disapproved to the point of legislative prohibition.

So loyalty to others of their condition and a sense of class never developed.

The Roman solution ritualized and moralised dependence, and so fixed people in stable relations with each other.

...I do not need to stand here, an almost-eighteen-year-old with a really sexy girlfriend, even if she's not allowed to see me anymore, and worry about the fact that my stepbrother seems to own thousands of Legos.

Was government in [Probus's] hands a thing in itself, as an instrument of society taken all together, or was its authority rather an extension of his personal power? It was (and at all periods of history has always been) the two together, but the proportions of the mix vary in different times and places.

What emerges from modern comparative description [19/20th C. Italy] is thus no different from the relations discovered in the third century Gaul or second century Asia Minor

In the absence of public prosecutors, the government could hardly forbid [informers] to operate, so the way lay open to abuse of the law.

...every rural labourer or tenant must, out of prudence, protect himself against the worst by seeking the patronage of the best district magnates known to him. - i.e self-reliance wasn't an option.

Bishops of the major cities... seem to have succeeded their relatives on the throne as often as praetorian prefers or vicarii.

it should not therefore be taken as a sign of sycophantic conformity... when a vote, a decree, an honorific resolution turned out to be unanimous.

There was, however, no middle class in any modern sense, defined in terms of place within the economy; nor did contempories think of such of a thing - i.e. they had no class consciousness, no sense of belonging to a group, just a sense of the status relative to their immediate interlocutors.

In describing power, one can in fact almost ignore the distinction between public and private, so great was the overlap between the two.

The longer a population had enjoyed security and some degree of membership in the empire, the less likely its youth would be enrolled in the legions.

Over the course of the third century a sort of elite or executive committee of ten (occasionally of twenty) persons took shape within curiae.