Introducting Story V: The Rise and Reign of the Res Publica Christiana, From Gregory the Great to Boniface VIII

The close-knit symbiosis between Throne and Altar known as "Caesaro-Papism" characterized virtually all states throughout ancient history, from the Egyptian Pharaohs who reigned as living incarnations of the god Horus, to the Athenian Democracy which executed Socrates for impiety, to the Roman imperial cult of Sol Invictus, to the literal Caesaro-Papism of the Byzantine Empire.


The first great sundering of the historic partnership of Altar and Throne began with the fall of Rome in the west.  The Papacy managed to survive in Rome even after the Empire had died out in the west, and managed to hold sway over the hearts of many converted barbarians, largely through the efforts of men like Gregory the Great.  The Papacy used this sway to play off ruler against ruler and to thus maintain a great deal of independence in spite of its diminutive temporal power.


It eventually was able to become dominant in Europe.  The moment that perhaps inaugurated its dominance was when Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV trekked barefoot to the Castle of Canossa in Italy in a hair-shirt to beg Pope Gregory VII to lift his excommunication.  In humbling the emperor, the Pope instituted the Papal Monarchy and heralded the Res Pulica Christiana of the High Middle Ages.


But this Papal Monarchy did not go on to become an empire.  The Church was powerful and independent enough to counter and limit the power of European monarchs, but not enough to become a full Europe-wide state itself.  The fragmentation of power that the church imposed upon Catholic Europe emboldened nobles and clerics against kings, lesser nobles against greater nobles, and peasants and burghers against lords.


This unprecedented breakdown of Caesaro-Papism set Catholic Europe on a course widely divergent from the rest of the world.  Caesaro-Papism and the despotism it made possible persisted in medieval and early modern times throughout the east, even including Orthodox Russia and Byzantium.  It is the history of political fragmentation shared by all of Catholic and post-Catholic Europe and its colonies that most distinctly sets "the west" apart from the rest of the world.  The Magna Carta, signed in 1215 in Runnymede was a check on royal power that was most characteristic of this relatively free age.

The relative freedom made possible by political decentralization led to the industrial and commercial revolution of the high middle ages which is egregiously ignored by contemporary popular history.  During the middle ages, water and wind mills peppered Europe like never before.  The increased energy thus harnessed and its automaticity had an explosive effect on productivity.  Cereals grains were processed with unprecedented efficiency.  The greater heat of medieval furnace technology initiated the true iron age, during which quality iron was available for widespread use for the first time.  There were huge improvements in agricultural technique, including in field rotation.  The medieval harness unleashed the motive power of the horse in agriculture, which dramatically increased productivity.  Scientific husbandry at monastery sheep farms led to an explosion in wool productivity.  All this happened, and much much more.


<sup>Unfortunately, 70 years after Runnymede, European saw the coronation of a monarch who would prove to be the herald of an age of absolute monarchy.  Philip IV of France (known as "the Fair" for his good looks) committed a wide number of atrocities (bringing on the Hundred Years War, expropriating and expelling the French Jews, expropriating and murdering the Knights Templar, imposing crippling taxes on the vitally important fairs of Champagne).  But the most significant of these was his arrest of Pope Boniface VIII in 1303.

As the culmination of an intense power struggle between the King and the Pope (particularly over the king's desire to tax the clergy), Boniface excommunicated Philip.  Philip responded by sending two thousand mercenaries to the Papal palace at Anagni.  The mercenaries plundered the palace, and captured the Pope, nearly murdering him.  Although rescued by locals, the Pope developed a fever shortly after this incident, and died.  Within a few years, the Papacy was relocated to Avignon, a French-dominated territory, and was relegated to slavishly generating moral authority for the French crown by rubber stamping its  atrocities.  Just as the humiliation of a monarch at the hands of a Pope at Canossa signaled the beginning of an age of relative freedom and prosperity, so did the humiliation of a Pope at the hands of a monarch at Anagni ring that age's death knell.</sup>

Introducting: Story IV, The Decline and Dissolution of Classical Civilization, From Commodus to the Execution of Boethius

Marcus Aurelius, who died in 180 AD was the last of the "Five Good Emperors", a succession of highly competent and fortunate Roman rulers that began with Nerva in 96 AD.  After Aurelius, and beginning with his son Commodus, Rome began its long, permanent decline.  Here is Ludwig von Mises on the fall of the Roman Empire:

The showdown came when in the political troubles of the third and fourth centuries the emperors resorted to currency debasement. With the system of maximum prices the practice of debasement completely paralyzed both the production and the marketing of the vital foodstuffs and disintegrated society's economic organization. The more eagerness the authorities displayed in enforcing the maximum prices, the more desperate became the conditions of the urban masses dependent on the purchase of food. Commerce in grain and other necessities vanished altogether. To avoid starving, people deserted the cities, settled on the countryside, and tried to grow grain, oil, wine, and other necessities for themselves. On the other hand, the owners of the big estates restricted their excess production of cereals and began to produce in their farmhouses--the villae--the products of handicraft which they needed. For their big-scale farming, which was already seriously jeopardized because of the inefficiency of slave labor, lost its rationality completely when the opportunity to sell at remunerative prices disappeared. As the owner of the estate could no longer sell in the cities, he could no longer patronize the urban artisans either. He was forced to look for a substitute to meet his needs by employing handicraftsmen on his own account in his villa. He discontinued big-scale farming and became a landlord receiving rents from tenants or sharecroppers. These coloni were either freed slaves or urban proletarians who settled in the villages and turned to tilling the soil. A tendency toward the establishment of autarky of each landlord's estate emerged. The economic function of the cities, of commerce, trade, and urban handicrafts, shrank. Italy and the provinces of the empire returned to a less advanced state of the social [p. 769] division of labor. The highly developed economic structure of ancient civilization retrograded to what is now known as the manorial organization of the Middle Ages.

The emperors were alarmed with that outcome which undermined the financial and military power of their government. But their counteraction was futile as it did not affect the root of the evil. The compulsion and coercion to which they resorted could not reverse the trend toward social disintegration which, on the contrary, was caused precisely by too much compulsion and coercion. No Roman was aware of the fact that the process was induced by the government's interference with prices and by currency debasement. It was vain for the emperors to promulgate laws against the city-dweller who "relicta civitate rus habitare maluerit." [4] The system of the leiturgia, the public services to be rendered by the wealthy citizens, only accelerated the retrogression of the division of labor. The laws concerning the special obligations of the shipowners, the navicularii, were no more successful in checking the decline of navigation than the laws concerning grain dealing in checking the shrinkage in the cities' supply of agricultural products.

The marvelous civilization of antiquity perished because it did not adjust its moral code and its legal system to the requirements of the market economy. A social order is doomed if the actions which its normal functioning requires are rejected by the standards of morality, are declared illegal by the laws of the country, and are prosecuted as criminal by the courts and the police. The Roman Empire crumbled to dust because it lacked the spirit of liberalism and free enterprise. The policy of interventionism and its political corollary, the Fuhrer principle, decomposed the mighty empire as they will by necessity always disintegrate and destroy any social entity.¹

Along with the classical civilization's economic dissolution came its cultural dissolution.  The primitive economy of the Dark Ages could not support scholars and artists.  Greek culture had pervaded Roman civilization, because Roman intellectuals learned Greek.  So, almost none of the Greek classics had been translated into Latin before Rome's fall.  And while many of the barbarians who supplanted the Roman elite learned Latin, they did not learn Greek.  So the untranslated Greek classics were eventually lost to the west.  The Roman philosopher and statesman Boethius foresaw this fate, and tried to avert it by embarking on a project to translate the complete works of Plato and Aristotle into Latin.  He only managed to get through the Timaeus of Plato and Aristotle's works on logic before being executed in 524 AD by Theodoric, the barbarian ruler of Italy.


¹Human Action, Chapter 30, Section 2

Introducing Story II: The Rise and Fall of the Early Great States, From Eridu to the Bronze Age Collapse and the Ancient Dark Ages

In Story II, I will tell of the rise of Eridu in ancient Sumer, which may have been the first state. I will relate the nature of the Sumerian state, and how a chain of influence extends from it to the Akkadians, the Babylonians, the Assyrians, the Persians, and even the Macedonian Greeks. I will also write about the histories of the early states of Egypt, Phoenicia, Palestine, Asia Minor, and Syria. And I will consider how it all came crashing down in what is known as "the Bronze Age collapse".

Introducing Story I: The Rise of Prehistoric Man: From the Dawn of Man to the Halaf Culture

Mainstream history textbooks hail the origination of the state as a crucial step in the “march of progress.”  However, great prosperity is the fruit of society, not the state.  And society antedates the state.

Civilization first arose in Mesopotamia, the “land between the rivers”.¹  However, many societal advancements associated with “civilization” antedated the state in that region.²  Paleolithic families commerced with people as far away as Anatolia and Palestine many millenia before the rise of the Sumerian city-states.  Village life arose in Mesolithic times.  And the Neolithic agricultural revolution and introduction of pottery got underway quite nicely under stone age anarchy.

Three successive (though overlapping) proto-historical cultures arose in northern Mesopotamia: the Hassuna, Samarra, and Halaf cultures.  All three made great strides in art, trade, and the technologies of agriculture, building, implements, pottery, and even irrigation.³  And not one of them showed any signs of having a central government.  The Hassuna culture developed stamp seals, an important development in the protection of private property and in trade, as well as a precursor to the written language.  The Samarra culture invented irrigation with which they produced amazingly abundant harvests, as evidenced by the remains of capacious granaries.  The Halaf culture even had cobbled streets and specialized centers which mass produced a distinctive pottery (which has been called by the French antiquarian Georges Roux, “the most beautiful ever used in Mesopotamia”¹) for peaceful exchange abroad. Pre-state Mesopotamian society was accomplishing wondrous things for itself.

Then something happened.   Several Halafian towns were for some reason depopulated.⁴  And their exquisite pottery was replaced by a cruder style: a sure archaeological sign of cultural displacement.   A very different people, the Ubaid culture, had come from the south and supplanted the Halafians.  The Ubaid culture had shrines, altars, offering tables, and enormous temples: sure signs of a priestly elite.  And their temples consistently grew in size and grandeur as the ages went by: a sure sign of consolidating priestly power.   It is highly likely that the people of this culture are the famous Sumerians themselves in their proto-historical form.   If so, then the cult which originated in the Ubaid temples is the very tradition which evolved into the monstrous temple-states of Sumer, Akkad, Babylon, and Assyria.  The north Mesopotamian tradition of freedom that lasted for a millennium and a half was replaced by the yoke of the state.

This is the basic framework of Story I.

¹History Begins at Sumer by Samuel Noah Kramer
²Ancient Iraq by Georges Roux
³Ibid
⁴Ibid

Society Versus State in Seven Epochs

I perceive political history as Murray Rothbard and Albert Jay Nock perceived it: as a struggle between free society and the state.¹  I do not pretend to be an impartial observer of that struggle.  As an amateur historian I aim to be what Lord Acton called a "hanging judge", freely condemning acts of evil, as well as extolling acts of virtue.  In my analysis of history, I aim to "hang" the criminals who fill the ranks of the state, commiserate with their victims, congratulate the free men who manage to escape their grasp, and extol the moral men who strive against them.

Mainstream historians, in spite of pretensions of impartiality, often, in practice, have a similarly judgmental view of history.  However, they reserve their hangman's noose for relatively free men, and extol princes.  An excellent example of this is in Egyptology.  Ancient Egyptian history is divided up by western scholars into "Kingdoms" and "Intermediate Periods".²  The Old, Middle, and New Kingdoms are eras during which all of Egypt was united under the yoke of a single pharaoh.  The First and Second Intermediate Periods are eras when state power, while not extinguished, was diminished and localized.  The implication of this naming scheme is that Pharaonic rule is the "normal" condition of the land, and that periods of political decentralization are merely awkward transitions.  Most Egyptologists characterize the Intermediate Periods as unhappy, chaotic times, hardly worthy of mentioning.  And they extol the "Kingdoms" for their unity of purpose and the splendor of their royalty.  Never mind the crushing of the individual required for such unity.  And never mind how much rapacity was required to squeeze enough wealth from the people to fund the opulence of the Pharaonic court.




Ramses II of Egypt


In my division of history into political epochs, I will take the exact opposite tack as does the Egyptologist.  I will characterize eras of advancing freedom as the "normal" periods.  Instead of "Kingdoms", my "normal" periods will be called "Freedoms" (and I will use the Egyptologist's "Old, Middle, and New" scheme).  I will term eras dominated by swelling states as numbered "Intermediate Periods", in order to rightly mark them as aberrant and perverse.

I list my epochs below.  Next to each epoch, I also provide two "markers" to bookend each age.  Each marker is a geographic location which represents a high point characteristic of its age: one at each age's beginning and one at each age's end.

The Old Freedom: From the First Society to the Halaf Culture


It has been argued that man has only risen from the depths of squalor upon becoming “civilized”, that is, upon coalescing into a civitas, or state. Thus mainstream history textbooks hail the origination of government as a crucial step in the “march of progress.”  However, great prosperity is the fruit of society, not the state.  And society antedates the state. 

Civilization first arose in Mesopotamia, the “land between the rivers”.³  However, many societal advancements associated with “civilization” antedated the state in that region.⁴  Paleolithic families commerced with people as far away as Anatolia and Palestine many millenia before the rise of the Sumerian city-states.  Village life arose in Mesolithic times.  And the Neolithic agricultural revolution and introduction of pottery got underway quite nicely under stone age anarchy.

Three successive (though overlapping) proto-historical cultures arose in northern Mesopotamia: the Hassuna, Samarra, and Halaf cultures.  All three made great strides in art, trade, and the technologies of agriculture, building, implements, pottery, and even irrigation.⁵  And not one of them showed any signs of having a central government.  The Hassuna culture developed stamp seals, an important development in the protection of private property and in trade, as well as a precursor to the written language.  The Samarra culture invented irrigation with which they produced amazingly abundant harvests, as evidenced by the remains of capacious granaries.  The Halaf culture even had cobbled streets and specialized centers which mass produced a distinctive pottery (which has been called by the French antiquarian Georges Roux, “the most beautiful ever used in Mesopotamia”¹) for peaceful exchange abroad. Pre-state Mesopotamian society was accomplishing wondrous things for itself.




An Iranian Granary




The First Intermediate Period: From Eridu to Hastings


Then something happened.   Several Halafian towns were for some reason depopulated.⁶  And their exquisite pottery was replaced by a cruder style: a sure archaeological sign of cultural displacement.   A very different people, the Ubaid culture, had come from the south and supplanted the Halafians.  The Ubaid culture had shrines, altars, offering tables, and enormous temples: sure signs of a priestly elite.  And their temples consistently grew in size and grandeur as the ages went by: a sure sign of consolidating priestly power.   It is highly likely that the people of this culture are the famous Sumerians themselves in their proto-historical form.   If so, then the cult which originated in the Ubaid temples is the very tradition which evolved into the monstrous temple-states of Sumer, Akkad, Babylon, and Assyria.  The north Mesopotamian tradition of freedom that lasted for a millennium and a half was replaced by the systemic deceit and coercion of the state.

 Where did this “Ubaid” culture start and how? It seems likely that that culture, and the state itself first arose in Eridu (my full argument for this is in my post Cradle of the State.  Eridu is the oldest Sumerian city known to archaeologists. And it is the first place in which evidence of the “Ubaid” culture is found. In fact, the early phase of the Ubaid period is known as “Eridu”.

The archaelogical site of Eridu reveals that a series of successively larger temples was built on the same spot, starting with a simple, tiny one-room building, and ending with a vast sprawling proto-ziqqurat.⁷ This is the first instance in the archaeological record in which any kind of heavy centralization of power is evidenced by a few buildings being dramatically larger than the rest. And one can see that centralization of power growing as each successive temple is built with ever greater opulence, while the surrounding buildings stay humble.

At some point, a separate palace is constructed one kilometer north of the temple site. This palace site, the earliest known in the world, also undergoes a series of upgrades through the ages. However, most of the palace levels were not archaeologically recoverable. Level 2 is the most complete. It bears resemblances to palaces in the city-state and later holy site of Kish. It is distinguished from temples in the absence of altars and the presence of gates, chambers, courtyards, guard’s rooms, and living quarters.

Perhaps this palace, and palaces in general, developed as a residence for top priests, who evolved into kings. Alternately, perhaps the priests gave some local uneducated ruffian command of the army, so they would not themselves need to get in harms way. This “general” acquired a power-base of allegiance of his own among the soldiers, and evolved into a king, then demanding his own lavish quarters.

Eridu’s place on the King’s List also indicates that it was something of an empire. The King’s List is known to have only included kings whose cities reigned over (or were at least hegemonic over) the entire region of “Sumer-and-Akkad”. This jibes perfectly with the fact that the Ubaid culture which first arose in Eridu was later found throughout the region. And given how, throughout history, the most centralized nation-states have also been the most war-thirsty, it seems very likely that the priest-kings of Eridu would not be satisfied with completely subjugating only the local population. And also seems very likely that an all-powerful central cult-state, with the ability to dragoon its young men into war, would be able to put under the yoke village after peace-loving village as it marched up the Euphrates.




The Standard of Ur


Early on in the history of the state, there was an incomplete division between the state's muscle (centered around the king in his palace and the armies he led) and its brain (centered around the priest-technocrats in their temples).  As we see in the first palaces having been spin-offs of the first temples in ancient Eridu, this may have happened in the very first state.  This specialization led to a limited degree of rivalry, but for the most part Throne and Altar worked hand-in-glove to enslave and fleece the populace.
To understand the import of this development in human history, one must understand the nature of this phenomenon called the state.

There has always been thuggery: assault, plunder, and enslavement.  But mankind has natural safeguards to defend against thuggery: including the ability to recognize justice, and the ability to join together with other decent people to implement justice.

There has always been deceit: slander, fraud, and indoctrination.  But mankind has natural safeguards to defend against deceit as well: reason, skepticism, and the senses.

However,  with the advent of the state, mankind's defenses was overwhelmed by a devastatingly effective partnership between thuggery (the Throne) and deceit (the Altar).  The state has always been a maleficent symbiosis of violent criminals (the Throne) and propagandizing/brainwashing intellectuals (the Altar).⁸  The Altar fosters the Throne through twisted sophistries which establish a false legitimacy and engineered consent to disarm our natural safeguards against thuggery. The Throne fosters the Altar through compulsory indoctrination  and through using its ill-gotten gains to directly corrupt intellectuals, all of which disarms our natural safeguards against deceit.

The Throne needs the Altar.  The ruled always outnumber the rulers, so a reign predicated on bald criminality (like a protection racket) would quickly be overthrown. To maintain its power, a regime must transmute murder into justice, tribute into taxation, and slavery into citizenship in the minds of its subjects. To do that, it needs intellectuals.

The Altar needs the Throne. Elaborate scams based on lies and manipulations (like cults) are difficult to maintain. Eventually some people begin to see through the lies and speak out. To keep its hold on its flock, an elite must be able to silence or coerce dissenters. To do that, it needs thugs.

The state put man in chains, but also under a spell. The former could not hold man without the latter.
It is highly worth mentioning that in the pre-state cultures of Mesopotamia, while there were signs of religion on a household level, there were no temples, and no signs of an official cult.⁹


The close-knit symbiosis between Throne and Altar known as "Caesaro-Papism" characterized all states throughout ancient history¹⁰, from the Egyptian Pharaohs who reigned as living incarnations of the god Horus, to the Athenian Democracy which executed Socrates for impiety, to the Roman imperial cult of Sol Invictus, to the literal Caesaro-Papism of the Byzantine Empire.

Why did the advent of the state follow so closely on the heels of the Agricultural Revolution?  Before then, there was not enough food to support both productive slaves and unproductive masters.  But the unprecedented advent of vast surpluses of food had the unfortunate side-effect of making human slavery more viable and more tempting to would-be slavers.

The First Intermediate Period is characterized by relatively free peoples (often characterized by both the conquerors and later historians as "barbarians" or "backwards peoples") being overrun by militant centralized states: northern Mesopotamian villages overrun by Sumerian armies; Beoetian villages overrun by Theban phalanxes, Gallic villages overrun by Roman legions, Saxon villages overrun by Carolingian knights.  The last great event of this kind in this period was the Norman Conquest of England, decided at the Battle of Hastings in 1066.




Norman Knights Charging an English Shield Wall (from the Bayeux Tapestry)




The Middle Freedom: From Canossa to Runnymede


The first great sundering of the historic partnership of Altar and Throne occurred 11 years after the Battle of Hastings when Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV trekked barefoot to the Castle of Canossa in Italy in a hair-shirt to beg Pope Gregory VII to lift his excommunication.¹¹  In humbling the emperor, the Pope heralded the Papal Monarchy of the High Middle Ages.




The Walk to Canossa




But this Papal Monarchy did not go on to become an empire.  The Church was powerful and independent enough to counter and limit the power of European monarchs, but not enough to become a full empire itself.  The fragmentation of power that the church imposed upon Catholic Europe emboldened nobles and clerics against kings, lesser nobles against greater nobles, and peasants and burghers against lords.  This unprecedented breakdown of Caesaro-Papism set Catholic Europe on a course widely divergent from the rest of the world.¹²  Caesaro-Papism and the despotism it made possible persisted in medieval and early modern times throughout the east, even including Orthodox Russia and Byzantium.  It is the history of political fragmentation shared by all of Catholic and post-Catholic Europe and its colonies that most distinctly sets "the west" apart from the rest of the world.
The relative freedom made possible by political decentralization led to the industrial and commercial revolution of the high middle ages¹³ which is egregiously ignored by contemporary popular history.  During the middle ages, water and wind mills peppered Europe like never before.  The increased energy thus harnessed and its automaticity had an explosive effect on productivity.  Cereals grains were processed with unprecedented efficiency.  The greater heat of medieval furnace technology initiated the true iron age, during which quality iron was available for widespread use for the first time.  There were huge improvements in agricultural technique, including in field rotation.  The medieval harness unleashed the motive power of the horse in agriculture, which dramatically increased productivity.  Scientific husbandry at monastery sheep farms led to an explosion in wool productivity.  All this happened, and much much more.

The Magna Carta, signed in 1215 in Runnymede was a check on royal power that was most characteristic of this relatively free and highly prosperous age.¹⁴




John of England signs Magna Carta




The Second Intermediate Period: From Anagni to Versailles


Unfortunately, 70 years after Runnymede, European saw the coronation of a monarch who would prove to be the herald of an age of absolute monarchy.  Philip IV of France (known as "the Fair" for his good looks) committed a wide number of atrocities (bringing on the Hundred Years War, expropriating and expelling the French Jews, expropriating and murdering the Knights Templar, imposing crippling taxes on the vitally important fairs of Champagne).¹⁵  But the most significant of these was his arrest of Pope Boniface VIII in 1303.¹⁶


As the culmination of an intense power struggle between the King and the Pope (particularly over the king's desire to tax the clergy), Boniface excommunicated Philip.  Philip responded by sending two thousand mercenaries to the Papal palace at Anagni.  The mercenaries plundered the palace, and captured the Pope, nearly murdering him.  Although rescued by locals, the Pope developed a fever shortly after this incident, and died.  Within a few years, the Papacy was relocated to Avignon, a French-dominated territory, and was relegated to slavishly generating moral authority for the French crown by rubber stamping its  atrocities.  Just as the humiliation of a monarch at the hands of a Pope at Canossa signaled the beginning of an age of relative freedom and prosperity, so did the humiliation of a Pope at the hands of a monarch at Anagni ring that age's death knell.¹⁷




Sciarra Colonna Slapping Boniface VIII




Philip the Fair was followed by many European monarchs who continued to bully, fleece, and manipulate the Church, thereby vastly increasing their power over the rest of society.  Caesaro-Papism was back; Throne and Altar were reunited.  In the 14th century, the Avignon Popes continued to serve as puppets of the French Crown.  But even after the Papacy returned to Rome, the Church was a fundamentally different institution.  In country after country, it was either driven out by the Protestant Reformation, which many monarchs embraced and promoted as a movement which gave them more power (also, many of the Reformation's spiritual leaders, including Martin Luther, believed not in religious freedom, but in the crown acting as head of the national church¹⁸), or subjugated.  In the 15th century, the Inquisition, a department of the Church, served slavishly as a bloody tool of the Spanish Crown.  In the 16th century, Henry VIII drove the Catholic Church out of France to expropriate its wealth and set up his own state church.  In the 17th century, cardinals served as veritable viziers for the French Crown.  The procession toward absolute monarchy culminated in the "Sun King": Louis XIV of France who completely subjugated the French nobility and clergy and who brought nothing but impoverishment, war, and repression to his people  Monarchs throughout this age used their newly untrammeled power to engorge themselves, via taxes and corveys, on the surpluses made possible by the advances of the High Middle Ages.  After the centuries of phenomenal economic growth called the High Middle Ages, the 14th century was a time of retrogression, and the 15th and 16th centuries were times of relative stagnation.¹⁹


The New Freedom: From Munster to Manchester
However, the march of absolute monarchy would not go unchecked.  Europe had already tasted the fruits of freedom, the seeds of which were deeply sown, especially in the towns.  In the 17th century, the Dutch burghers revolted against the despotic Spanish Crown.  Decades of struggle paid off when, in 1648 the Treaty of Munster was ratified, establishing the independence of the liberal states of the Low Countries.²⁰




Citizens of Amsterdam celebrating the Peace of Münster




This was followed by the English Civil War.  This revolution and the conflicts following it dramatically weakened the English state, which made possible the Industrial Revolution in that country.²¹  An Age of Revolution followed which was largely a series of attempts in other western nations to copy the success of the English experiment.  Free trade and property rights were shown to be the key to prosperity.  In country after country, revolution or the threat of revolution paved the way for economic liberalization (especially the abolition of serfdom), which paved the way for industrialization, which paved to the way for greater increases in human prosperity than had ever been known.²²  The apogee of the liberal tradition in Europe was perhaps the career of Richard Cobden.²³  Cobden was a leader of the Anti-Corn Law League, which was formed in Manchester, and which succeeded in repealing the last great vestige of the protectionism of the previous epoch.  As an MP later in life, Cobden also negotiated a sweeping free trade treaty with France.  The heroic activism of Richard Cobden made food and countless other goods more affordable for countless of his fellow humans.  More than any ruler with "the Great" attached to his name, Cobden was truly a benefactor of mankind.




Richard Cobden




It was during this epoch, that America was "conceived in liberty".  While certainly flawed, the American republic held a deep strain of liberalism, which was for the most part ascendant throughout its first hundred years of existence.  This strain can be seen running through such American groups as the libertarian religious non-conformists of the colonial period (led by Roger Williams, Anne Hutchinson and Samuel Gorton)²⁴, the Anti-Federalists (led by Patrick Henry)²⁵, the Republicans of the late 18th century (led by Thomas Jefferson)²⁶, the "Old Republicans" of the early 19th century (led by John Randolph)²⁷, and the Democrats of the middle 19th century (led by Andrew Jackson and Martin van Buren²⁸.  However, this strain was indelibly corrupted by the abhorrent practice of slavery.

The Third Intermediate Period: From Berlin to Manhatten


Unfortunately liberalism was not the only current in the revolutionary movement.  The success of liberalism in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries was largely due to the fact that its ends happened to temporarily coincide with the ends of another movement: the bourgeoning democratic movement.  From the late 17th century onward, power in European society moved inexorably, but gradually, from the few to the many.  At first this was a highly liberal trend, because it involved destroying the state-fostered privileges of the few and unshackling the many.  This occurred primarily when power was expanded to the middle classes, whose main interest was the protection of property rights.  But as power expanded further to the proletariat, the populist trend continued beyond liberalism, and moved into shackling the few and establishing state-sponsored privileges for the many.

The subjugation of liberalism to democracy could be seen in France in the Jacobin Terror of the First Republic²⁹, the "National Workshops" of the Second Republic³⁰ and in the Paris Commune³¹.  The logical culmination of this trend was reached in the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 in Russia³².  The "dictatorship of the proletariat" in communist Russia led to calamitous famine and widespread murder.³³
The man who most skillfully harnessed the rising tide of people power was Otto von Bismarck, Chancellor of Prussia and, later, of the German Empire.³⁴  Initially considered by reformers to be a chief enemy of the people, he became a populist darling when his despotic policies of taxation, conscription, and state schooling led to startling military victories against Austria and France.  Bismarck also introduced enormous "social insurance" schemes.  Thus did Bismarck draw the German people into trading their freedom for booty and the dole, and in so doing, invented the modern warfare/welfare state.  Bismarck welded together Prussia and the confederate German states into a single, militant, nationalistic, paternalistic, populist super-state which would, in the 20th century, twice try to overrun all of Europe.  The German state was a portent of how the rest of Europe would eventually "modernize."  Bismarck's "success" greatly impressed the Englishman Lloyd George, who would later bring Prussian welfare statism to England.³⁵


This age also saw a resurgence of Caesaro-Papism.  Even in this age of democracy and science, Throne and Altar were alive and well.  Only it was certain collectives of people (the majority, the proletariat, the Arian race, etc.) which was enthroned at the expense of others.  And instead of subverting faith, intellectuals subverted "scientific" doctrines in order to weave apologia for their state patrons.  For example, the "high priest" of economics in imperial Prussia was Gustav von Schmoller at the University of Berlin, which was boasted to be "the intellectual bodyguard of the House of Hohenzollern".  Schmoller's Historical School of economics rejected the laws of classical economics because obeying them put too many trammels on the state.³⁶




Bismarck (center, in white) looks on as Wilhelm I is proclaimed German Emperor




In America during the same generation, Abraham Lincoln, in the War Between the States obliterated political decentralization and began the American shift from laissez-faire to corporatism.³⁷  This marked the shift in ascendency from liberalism to the statist strain in American political thought represented by the colonial Puritans (led by such men as Cotton Mather)³⁸, the Federalists of the late 18th century (led by Alexander Hamilton)³⁹, the "spoils system" Republicans of the early 19th century (led by John Quincy Adams)⁴⁰, the Whigs of the middle 19th century (led by Henry Clay)⁴¹, and the Republicans of the late 19th century (led by Lincoln himself)⁴².  The laissez-faire industrial, monetary, and trade policies of the America's first century began to give way to corporatism, aka state capitalism (subsidies for business, government intervention in money, and high tariffs and taxes).⁴³  American corporatism further flowered in the regulation and "trust-busting" (really trust-fostering) of the Progressive Era.⁴⁴  The most pernicious state-fostered trust of them all, a cartel of big banks given state power known as the Federal Reserve System, was established in 1913.⁴⁵  In the 1920s, the Fed blew up the greatest peace-time economic bubble in history.  The Federal government's response to the bursting of this bubble led to the Great Depression, the deepest and longest-lasting in American history.⁴⁶  This crisis provided an excuse for the outright confiscation of the American citezenry's gold supply and the nigh-complete cartelization of American industry by Franklin D. Roosevelt.⁴⁷  Under FDR, with the New Deal, America also jumped on the Bismarckian welfare state bandwagon which by then had already rolled across all of Europe.⁴⁸


Overweening corporatism also impelled America into imperialism, beginning with the Spanish American War.  This war began a century of corporatist-imperialist American wars (the two World Wars and all the American interventions in the Cold War) which flouted the Washingtonian principle of non-intervention and led hundreds of thousands of young men to their deaths, and many more to debase themselves in murdering others.  American imperial policies abroad led inexorably to a crisis of freedom at home, culminating in the policies following 9/11.  This crisis of freedom has been compounded by a Second Great Depression generated by massive fiscal and monetary "bailouts" following the bursting of a massive economic bubble blown up by the Fed.  This crisis of freedom is where we find ourselves today.




George W. Bush on the rubble of the World Trade Center




Future Freedom: From Ron Paul to Distant Futurity?


Will there be a Future Freedom?  Might even Ron Paul herald a 7th epoch which will rise as the failures of statism become too intolerable to bear any longer?  If he can bring down the Fed with his heroic actions in Congress and on the public stage, it would be a damn good start.  It might sound doubtful, but as many 19th century tyrants could attest, revolution can sweep across a continent like a prairie fire.  So the 21st century heirs of John Lilburne, Lysander Spooner, Frederic Bastiat, Richard Cobden, Ludwig von Mises, and Murray Rothbard should never stop striving.




Ron Paul

---

Sources

• History Begins at Sumer by Samuel Noah Kramer
• Ancient Iraq by Georges Roux
• Penguin Atlas of Ancient History by Colin McEvedy
• Penguin Atlas of Medieval History by Colin McEvedy
• Penguin Atlas of Modern History by Colin McEvedy
• Penguin Atlas of Recent History by Colin McEvedy
• Penguin Historical Atlas of Ancient Egypt by Bill Manley
• A History of the Middle Ages by Crane Brinton, John Christopher, and Robert Wolff
• Charlemagne: From the Hammer to the Cross by Richard Winston
• How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization by Thomas Woods
• The Medieval Machine by Jean Gimpel
• Medieval Feudalism by Carl Stephenson
• The Crusades by Richard A. Newhall
• A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century by Barbara Tuchman
• The Italian Renaissance by J.H. Plumb
• The Reformation by George L. Mosse
• Rise, Fall, and Renaissance of Classical Liberalism by Ralph Raico
• The Age of Louis XIV by Laurence Bradford Packard
• Europe Under the Old Regime by Albert Sorel
• A History of Britain by Simon Schama
• Conceived in Liberty by Murray N. Rothbard
• The Enlightened Despots by Geoffrey Bruun
• The French Revolution by Leo Gershoy
• How Capitalism Saved America by Thomas DiLorenzo
• Modern and Contemporary European History by J. Salwyn Schapiro
• Europe Since 1815 by Mitchell Garrett and James Godfrey
• John Adams by David McCullough
• Thomas Jefferson and His Time by Dumas Malone
• Andrew Jackson: His Life and Times by H.W. Brand
• Rethinking Churchill by Ralph Raico
• World War I As Fulfillment by Murray N. Rothbard
• The Case Against the Fed by Murray N. Rothbard
• The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Great Depression and the New Deal by Robert P. Murphy
• The Ethics of Liberty by Murray N. Rothbard

---

Notes

¹Rothbard, Conceived..., Volume 1
¹Manley
¹Kramer
⁴ Roux
⁵Roux
⁶Roux
⁷ Reconstruction of Eridu, http://babel.massart.edu/~tkelley/v5.0/eridu/. This is an excellent HTML model of the archaeological site. I highly recommend taking this stratigraphic “tour” of Eridu. For more information see this excerpt from the Cambridge Ancient History (on Google Books).
⁸Rothbard, Ethics...
⁹Roux
¹⁰Rothbard, Conceived..., Volume 1
¹¹Brinton et al
¹²Rothbard, Conceived..., Volume 1
¹³Gimpel
¹⁴Brinton et al
¹⁵Tuchman
¹⁶Brinton et al
¹⁷One should not read religious bias in this historical interpretation. Suffice it to say that this author is not himself Catholic.
¹⁸Rothbard
¹⁹Rothbard, Conceived... Volume 1
²⁰Raico, The Rise...
²¹Rothbard, Conceived... Volume 1
²²Schapiro
²³Schapiro
²⁴Rothbard, Conceived...
²⁵Rothbard, Conceived...
²⁶Malone
²⁷Malone
²⁸Brand
²⁹Gershoy
³¹Garret & Godfrey
³²Schapiro
³³Garret & Godfrey
³⁴Garret & Godfrey
³⁵Raico, Rethinking...
³⁶Rothbard, Ethics...
³⁷DiLorenzo
³⁸Rothbard, Conceived...
³⁹DiLorenzo
⁴⁰Malone
⁴¹Brand
⁴²DiLorenzo
⁴³DiLorenzo
⁴⁴Rothbard, World War I...
⁴⁵Rothbard, The Case...
⁴⁶Murphy
⁴⁷Murphy
⁴⁸Murphy

On State Propagandists

One sub-set of the mandarin is the state propagandist.

The earliest surviving instance of state propaganda also happens to be the earliest well-documented piece of history: the inscribed cylinders which document the border struggles between the rival Sumerian city-states Lagash and Umma between ca. 2450 and 2300 BC.  The cylinders invoke the support of the gods for Lagash's cause.

This post to be extended...

The Throne/Altar Principle

The Throne/Altar Principle is a sub-set of the Magistrate/Mandarin Principle.  The latter principle states:

The state is a maleficent symbiosis of enslaving brigands (magistrates) and corrupt intellectuals (mandarins).  Throughout history magistrates have used mandarins to manufacture consent (through propaganda and indoctrination) and administer resources (technocracy).  In exchange the mandarins get to share with the magistrates the power, prestige, and pelf of statecraft.

The Throne/Altar Principle simply states that mandarins are often clerics (priests).  Clerics are distinguished from other mandarins in that they fulfill their role in manufacturing consent primarily via superstition.  The manner in which clerics "administer resources" as technocrats and "share with magistrates the power, prestige, and pelf of statecraft" is often distinct from other mandarins, in that they are tied up with the rituals and traditions of cult.

Stolen wealth administered by clerics will often be stored as temple finery which the clerics themselves enjoy and which can be used for trade in times of need.

The earliest recorded incident of this is in perhaps the "war of nerves" conducted by Enmerkar, ruler of the Sumerian city-state of Erech (Uruk), against Aratta, an Elamite city-state in what is now Iran.  Enmerkar demanded that the people of Aratta use its own mineral wealth and labor to construct shrines and temples at Erech, and proclaimed that this was commandment from Innana, an important goddess.

The God's Proxy Principle

States throughout history have covered their criminal acts with a veneer of false legitimacy by claiming to be divine agents.

The earliest recorded incident of this is in perhaps the "war of nerves" conducted by Enmerkar, ruler of the Sumerian city-state of Erech (Uruk), against Aratta, an Elamite city-state in what is now Iran.  Enmerkar demanded that the people of Aratta use its own mineral wealth and labor to construct shrines and temples at Erech, and proclaimed that this was commandment from Innana, an important goddess.

This post is to be extended...

The Magistrate/Mandarin Principle

This is the first of a series of posts called "Principles of Man".

I will continually return to each post in this series adding more evidence for its importance from history.

The state is a maleficent symbiosis of enslaving brigands (magistrates) and corrupt intellectuals (mandarins).  Throughout history magistrates have used mandarins to manufacture consent (through propaganda and indoctrination) and administer resources (technocracy).  In exchange the mandarins get to share with the magistrates the power, prestige, and pelf of statecraft.

Types of Mandarins

The Scribe

Especially before the advent of widespread literacy, the professional scribe was a highly important agent of the state.  Ancient scribes were perhaps the first technocrats.  Their chief role was to keep accurate records of resources, subjects, and the resources of subjects.

The first professional scribes arose in the place where writing itself first arose: ancient Sumer.  Moreover, the first Sumerian scribes worked for the state: that is, either in the palace or the temple.

To be continued...

On Private Education

Education is a good.  Like any good, demand for it stimulates supply.

Sumer

In ancient Sumer, where writing was first invented, being a scribe was a high-paying and prestigious job.  This was largely because

 

1. demand for scribes was high, since their services (especially record-keeping) were of such benefit to the sate, and
2. the engorged super-states of Sumer had tremendous purchasing power.  

 

So in Sumer, a demand arose among parents for scribe-training services for their children.  The first private schools in the world arose in Sumer (tuition-supported "tablet-houses") to meet this demand.

To be continued...

The 19th-Century Bernanke

There is something disarming about a technocrat.  While it is easy to dismiss elected officials as blustering panderers, there is something comforting in the image of the specialist civil servant toiling away with industry and equanimity.  Poring over statistics like a Hellenic priest scientifically examining entrails, and carefully allocating resources like an Egyptian vizier, the technocrat seems benign, yet crucially important, and above the fray.

This is certainly the image that has been cultivated by Federal Reserve Chairmen.  One remembers Alan Greenspan with his prominent brain case and thick glasses uttering technical jargon just arcane enough to assure the markets that all was well with the "Greenspan put".  And we are regularly presented with Ben Bernanke the bearded sage comfortingly citing statistics that show how government remedies are working their way through the economy (however egregiously wrong he may be).

This aura surrounding technocracy has grown especially since the civil service "reform" of the late 19th century.  But technocrats have been striving for it for much longer.

This striving can be seen distinctly in the person of Nicholas Biddle (1786-1844), one of the more interesting characters in United States history.

 

Nicholas Biddle

 Starting in 1822, Biddle was the president of the American central bank that preceded the Fed: the Second Bank of the United States.  Biddle was initially reluctant to take the job.  A scion of a high society Philadelphia family, Biddle had no stomach for the indecorum of politics.  He ultimately accepted the position, however, stating that the Bank was, "of vital importance to the finances of the government and an object of great interest to the community..."

His disdain for competitive democracy (in his words "the violence of party") and his esteem for the Bank merged into a fervent belief that the Bank should always be above politics.  He implemented that belief as policy in his tenure as Bank president.  He proudly declared,

"There is no one principle better understood by every officer in the Bank than that he must abstain from politics.  The course of the Bank is very clear and straight on that point.  We believe that the prosperity of the Bank and its usefulness to the country depend on its being entirely free from the control of the officers of the Government, a control fatal to every bank which it ever influenced.  In order to preserve that independence it must never connect itself with any administration- and never become a partizan of any set of politicians."

In the 20th and 21st centuries, Federal Reserve chairmen carried on this tradition of jealously guarding the Fed's independence.  Witness Ben Bernanke's recent warnings that the Federal Reserve Transparency Act would politicize the Fed.

As we shall see, in practice Biddle, like Bernanke, was not against politics per se; so long as it was conducted in an unpublicized, "gentlemanly" manner.

The political climate during the early years of Biddle's tenure seemed to perfectly suit his temperament and attitude toward governmental institutions.  In an interview with the Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville, who was in Philadelphia conducting research for his book Democracy in America, Biddle explained how American politics had been tamed and a placid consensus had emerged in recent years.

For a long time we were divided between Federalists and Republicans.  Those two parties were very like what you have in Europe; they had political doctrines to which interests and emotions were attached.  They fought bitterly until the Federalist party, always short in numbers, was completely crushed by its adversary.  Tired of their vanquished position, the Federalists ended up by giving up their own cause.  They either merged in the successful party or rallied, under other names, about questions of detail.  But the party standard has really been knocked down for good and all.  [...]  Since then there have been people who support the administration and people who attack it; people who extol a measure and people who abuse it.  But there are no parties properly so called, opposed one to the other and adopting a contrary political faith.  The fact is that there are not two practicable ways of governing this people now, and political emotions have scope only over the details of this administration and not over its principles.

In other words, under the new consensus, there was no need for debate.  It was simply a matter of civil servants like Biddle himself dutifully implementing wise policy.

Tocqueville didn't completely buy Biddle's story.  As H.W. Brands wrote, "perhaps because his own experience of aristocracy was deeper than Biddle's, Tocqueville detected a continuing struggle between the few and the many in America."  Tocqueville believed that "aristocratic [and] democratic passions" were always present, and "though they may slip out of sight there, they are, as it were, the nerve and soul of the matter."

 

Alexis de Tocqueville

Tocqueville was right, and the democratic passions he spoke of found their embodiment in the person of Andrew Jackson, who became President of the United States in the 7th year of Biddle's tenure.  In many ways, Jackson was Biddle's opposite.  While Biddle was the quintessential apolitical civil servant, Jackson was a volatile populist who considered himself the champion of democracy.  Jackson hated the prevalent political atmosphere as much as Biddle loved it.  Where Biddle saw consensus and benign paternalism, Jackson saw an entrenched establishment ridden with corruption.  He had first-hand experience with the cozy, back-scratching ways of the Republican political monopoly throughout his public career, and especially during his first, failed attempt at the presidency in 1824.  Of the three chief candidates of that election, Jackson was clearly the most popular.  But there was an electoral deadlock, so the race had to be decided by the House of Representatives.  Through a backroom quid pro quo with rival candidate Henry Clay, John Quincy Adams ended up winning the House vote and, as a result, the presidency.

Andrew Jackson

So Jackson came into office, after finally defeating Adams in 1828, with a large chip on his shoulder against the Republican establishment.  He also had a distinct disliking for Biddle's Bank in particular.  Despite the contrary characterizations of later historians, Jackson, who was not only a soldier but a lawyer too, was a studious and thoughtful, if intemperate, man; and he was an ardent hard-money advocate.  His monetary opinions were informed by contemporary hard money theorists and his own readings concerning the South Sea Bubble of 1720.  He rightly blamed the Bank for the Panic of 1819 and had been a leader in the fight against inconvertible paper money in Tennessee.

Jackson displayed his disregard for the Bank moderately in his first annual message:

"Both the constitutionality and the expediency of the law creating this bank are well questioned by a large portion of our fellow citizens, and it must be admitted by all that it has failed in the great end of establishing an uniform and sound currency."

Biddle responded to Jackson's remarks with patronizing nonchalance.

"They should be treated as the honest though erroneous notions of one who intends well."

In a later meeting, Jackson warned Biddle that he thought the Bank was unconstitutional.  Yet Biddle continued to not take the President seriously.  He characterized Jackson's position as a mere idiosyncrasy.

"As such it is far less dangerous because if the people know that this is not an opinion which they must necessarily adopt as a portion of their party creed-- but an opinion of the President alone, a very honest opinion though a very erroneous one-- then the question will be decided on its own merits."

Biddle's attitude continued even after Jackson's "erroneous opinion" of the Bank showed itself to be persistent.

"In respect of General Jackson and Mr. Van Buren [Jackson's Vice President]", I have not the slightest fear of either of them, or both of them. ...I think we can defend the institution from much stronger enemies than they are.

Biddle's patronizing dismissiveness toward Jackson was a gross underestimation.  Jackson was as tough as they came.  He fought in the War for Independence as an adolescent and bore a scar on his face from a sabre blow he received for refusing to clean a British officer's boots.  His body was riddled with the scars of a lifetime of duels, brawls, and battles.  He also had the people on his side.  He was considered the hero of the Battle of New Orleans who rescued the honor of the new nation toward the end of the War of 1812.  And he was swept into office in a wave of popular anger at the corrupt political establishment.  All in all, he was not a man to be taken lightly.

Jackson being struck with a sabre by a British officer

The Bank's charter was not up for renewal until after Jackson's first term.  Biddle initially liked it that way, because, in keeping with his desire to shelter the bank from politics, he did not want its renewal to be an election issue.  He figured that even if Jackson were re-elected, as a second-term president, he would likely be less popular and thus less of a threat.  The scheming Henry Clay, then a Congressman, who cared more about becoming president himself than preserving the Bank, wanted Biddle to apply for an early renewal of the charter.  Jackson was so popular that Clay needed a potentially explosive issue like the Bank's rechartering to stir the pot, or else the President would glide into an easy re-election.  Of course this would put the Bank more at risk, but he convinced his benefactor Biddle (Biddle had used his Bank position to help Clay in his chronic debt problems) that an early renewal would be a sure thing.  He wrote to Biddle from Washington,

"Have you come to any decision about an application to Congress at this session for the renewal of your charter?  The friends of the Bank here, with whom I have conversed, seem to expect the application to be made."  [...]  My own belief is that if now called upon, [President Jackson] would not negative the bill; but that if he should be re-elected the event might and probably would be different."

Henry Clay

Thus did Clay manipulate Biddle into fatefully applying for an early renewal.  Biddle wrote to Congress in 1832,

"We have determined on applying to the present Congress for a renewal of the charter"

And he couldn't help but slip in a remark insisting that this decision had nothing to do with tawdry politics...

"Neither I nor any of my associates have anything whatever to do with the President or his election.  I know nothing about it and care nothing about it."

Despite such repeated proclamations, Biddle didn't mind writing propaganda articles promoting the Bank and bribing newspaper editors to run them.  Biddle wrote to one such editor, "...if you will cause the articles I have indicated and others which I may prepare to be inserted in the newspaper in question, I will at once pay to you one thousand dollars."  Now, this was public money that he was offering.  Of course, he insisted, there is "nothing in this communication which [he] should care to conceal."  Nonetheless, he requested that the editor return the letter, "as it might be misconstrued."

This was exactly the discrete, gentlemanly corruption that Jackson abhorred.

The Bank's most vocal supporter in Congress was Daniel Webster.  Even though Webster had staunchly opposed the bank's original charter, he discovered the merits of the Bank, quite coincidentally, when he found himself on its payroll.  At the peak of the renewal controversy, in which Webster was playing a leading role, Webster wrote to Biddle,

"I believe my retainer has not been renewed or refreshed as usual.  If it be wished that my relation to the Bank should be continued, it may be well to send me the usual retainers."

Daniel Webster

The renewal bill passed both houses of Congress, but was vetoed by Jackson.  But Clay's machinations backfired.  The Bank veto proved to be a fillip for Jackson's popularity, and he went on to win a landslide re-election.

Biddle knew that a major follow-up to Jackson's victory could conceivably be to remove the Treasury's deposits from the Bank.  This would be a crippling blow, because, unlike the Fed, the Bank's money-creation power was limited by the gold standard.

But even after his first defeat, Biddle's swaggering confidence continued.

"They will not dare to remove them," Biddle told Webster, "If the deposits are withdrawn, it will be a declaration of war which cannot be recalled."

But Jackson knew that Biddle had already been conducting a surreptitious war.  His attorney general Roger Taney presented to Jackson evidence that Biddle and the bank had deliberately manipulated the money supply just before the renewal bill was to be deliberated over.  Taney asked rhetorically,

"Can any impartial and unprejudiced mind doubt the motive?  Was it not to compel  the people to continue its monopoly and privileges, not on account of the benefits conferred by it, but to escape from the suffering which the [Bank] had the power to inflict?"

Taney also provided evidence of Biddle's corruption of the press.

Provoked by Biddle's appalling machinations, Jackson prepared to remove the federal deposits from the Bank.  Treasury Secretary William Duane balked at the idea, warning Jackson that Biddle might retaliate by creating a financial panic.  The idea that the bank could have the power to do such a thing only strengthened Jackson's resolve to end it.  He announced his final decision to withdraw the funds to his cabinet.  In his address, he remarked,

"The Bank has by degrees obtained almost entire dominion over the circulating medium, and with it, power to increase or diminish  the price of property and to levy taxes on the people in the shape of premiums and interest to an amount only limited by the quantity of paper currency it is enabled to issue."

In this speech Jackson demonstrated a recognition of how central bank money manipulation can impose and inflation tax and create housing bubbles; if only there was such awareness among the members of today's elected officials.

So the reader can know that the appalling nature of Biddle's response to Jackson's decision isn't only an Austrian take on the incident, the following four quotations are excerpts from Andrew Jackson: His Life and Times by the mainstream historian H.W. Brands.

The decision, when it came, didn't surprise Biddle.  His spies had informed him of the debates within the administration...  He considered a preemptive strike by buying off vulnerable members of the administration and Congress.  

He planned to do so by offering them Bank positions.

"In half an hour," he boasted to an intimate, "I can remove all the constitutional scruples in the District of Columbia.  Half a dozen presidencies"--of bank branches--"a dozen cashierships, fifty clerkships, a hundred directorships, to worthy friends who have no character and no money."  But he held back, not quite believing that Jackson would really go through with removal.

With such a writhing multitude of sinecures at Biddle's disposal, it is no wonder Jackson called the Bank a "hydra of corruption".

Jackson vs. the Bank Hydra

...Biddle launched a counterattack.  He called in loans, tightened credit, and otherwise reduced the bank's financial exposure.  [...]To compliment his fiscal tightening, Biddle went ahead with his bribery, offering lucrative positions to Jackson loyalists if they would abandon the president and join the bank. [...]  

The attack on the money supply had an immediate effect, starting in the nation's financial capital.  [...]  The financial panic spread from New York across the country.  Banks collapsed in Washington and Philadelphia while a Boston paper described conditions there as "absolutely frightful."  But Biddle maintained his choke hold on the money supply.  "

Biddle's Machiavellian arrogance reached a crest in his response to the crisis he generated.

My own view of the matter is simply this... The projectives of this last assault on the Bank regret and are alarmed by it.  But the ties of party allegiance can only be broken by the actual conviction of existing distress in the community.  Nothing but the evidence of suffering abroad"-- that is, in the country as a whole-- "will produce any effect in Congress... This worthy President thinks that because he has scalped Indians and imprisoned judges, he is to have his way with the Bank.  He is mistaken..."

As is well known to readers familiar with Austrian Business Cycle Theory, Biddle's contraction of  money substitutes that were pyramided on top of the specie supply was actually a good thing; it only brought on the necessary correction that, if postponed further, would have eventually been even worse.  But obviously his motivations for the action were deplorable, as well as highly telling regarding the attitude of central bankers.

Jackson was beset by petitioners suffering from the panic and legislators challenging the constitutionality of his action.

He told his Vice President, "The Bank, Mr. Van Buren, is trying to kill me.  But I will kill it."

Jackson was vindicated in standing his ground.  Within months, the correction was over, economic growth resumed, and Biddle's power was broken.

 

Jackson Flourishing his "Removal Notice" and bringing down Biddle's Bank

In 1836, the Bank's charter expired.  It limped on for five more years as a non-Federal bank before finally going bankrupt.  Four years after that, Biddle died at age 58.

Like Ben Bernanke today, Nicholas Biddle cultivated the veneer of a benign civil servant seated serenely above the political fray.  In reality, he, also like Bernanke, was up to his neck in the backroom game of power.  And when Biddle's bureaucratic cradle was rocked, he quickly morphed into a Machiavellian monster.  Keep that in mind as Ben Bernanke gets progressively cornered by Ron Paul and the End the Fed movement.  When you hear about the Federal Reserve Transparency Act getting stalled in committee, think of Daniel Webster, bought and paid for with central bank money.  When you read Fed apologia in the New York Times, The Economist, and the Wall Street Journal denouncing the "reckless populism" of the Act, think of the newspaper editors in Biddle's pocket .  Most of all, when you see Ben Bernanke on television, "respectfully" insisting upon the Fed's independence, and "gently" warning of the economic consequences of any restrictions upon it, think of Nicholas Biddle, an outwardly mild-mannered fellow who would wreck a whole nation's prosperity in order to cling to power.

Libertarian historian Lord Acton said, "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely."  And the corrupt banking magnate Mayer Amschel Rothschild said, "Give me control of a nation's money and I care not who makes the laws."  Those two dictums, taken as dual premises, lead inexorably to the conclusion that men like Biddle and Bernanke should always be challenged with eternal vigilance by all people who would be free.

Note: All quotations regarding Biddle and his times are from the secondary source Andrew Jackson: His Life and Times by H.W. Brands (2005)

The Ontological Counterrevolution: Parmenides, the First Extreme Rationalist

This post is one in a series on the Epistemology and Worldview Throughout History

Previously in this series: The Ontological Revolution: The Proto-Skepticism of Heraclitus.

As discussed in the previous post in this series, Heraclitus introduced ontology into the world of philosophy, threatening to upend the cosmological systems of his Milesian predecessors.  Not only did philosophers not know how things came to be, he seemed to say, they did not even know what it meant to be, because being was a matter of flux.

Just as the purposeless universe of the Milesians may have disturbed Pythagoras, so perhaps did the unstable and unknowable universe of Heraclitus trouble another brilliant thinker: Parmenides of Elea.  Parmenides responded by not only denying Heraclitus's doctrine of flux, but by going all the way to the opposite extreme.  He insisted that nothing EVER changed: that change is an illusion.  He attempted to prove this remarkable assertion by turning ontology, the study of being qua being, back upon the changing world of Heraclitus.  His argument for this went something like this:

1. Thinking requires an object.  When one thinks, he must think about something.
2. Therefore, one cannot think about nothing.
3. To think about a thing not being is to think of nothing.
4. Therefore, one cannot think about a thing not being.
5. Change implies a thing once was not, or is no longer.
6. Therefore, one cannot think about change.
7. Therfore, one cannot speak of change
8. Therefore, natural philosophy is nonsense.

What is exceedingly remarkable about this line of thought is not just its use of ontology, but its use of extreme rationalism. Vernon J. Bourke thought of rationalism as a school of thought "in which the criterion of the truth is not sensory but intellectual and deductive"¹. Perhaps inspired by the deductive geometric research going on at the time, Parmenides attempted to apply what Aristotle would later call the "syllogism" (deductions) to concerns that go far beyond abstract shapes.  He attempted a "demonstration", Aristotle's term for a syllogism which said something about the real world.  And here, at the dawn of rationalism, we have a paradigmatic instance of the tendency of rationalists to arrive via deduction at conclusions that wildly affront common sense.  The rigorous nature of deduction supposedly gives them licence to do so.  Parmenides offered a stark contrast to the observational (empiricist) methods of the Milesians and Heraclitus.  His distrust of the senses and reliance on pure ratiocination, however contentious-seeming the conclusions may be, can be seen in the following quote, which he ascribes to the goddess who puportedly showed him the "way of truth":

But do restrain your thought from this path of inquiry, and do not let habit, born from much experience, compel you along this path, to guide your sightless eye and ringing ear and tongue. But judge by reason the highly contentious disproof that I have spoken.

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¹Bourke, Vernon J. (1962), "Rationalism", p. 263 in Runes (1962).

Vain Intellectuals and Wise Workers

All professions have a tendency toward self-importance. So it should be no surprise that historians have a distinct bias towards eras in which their own forerunners (ancient chroniclers and historians) were existent and employed. Thus, societies without chroniclers are termed “dark ages”. Of course these ages are dark, as in “obscure”, since we necessarily know little about them. But too often, this “darkness” is also given a decidedly judgmental connotation. To many historians, an absence of their own kind must signal social despair and economic desolation. However great the recent dividends of literacy, however, for most of history, literacy has actually been largely a tool for elite domination. It was the literate classes who lorded it over the non-literate classes, using the written language as a class barrier and a tool for greater efficiency in their criminal statecraft.

Another bias of historians is one which they share with all “academics”: one favoring the non-practical studies over the practical. Thus, mankind only really achieved “glory” in the world of thought when they began to contemplate the stars as did the ancient Babylonians or tried to discover laws of nature as did the ancient Greeks. Never mind that the Babylonian priest monitoring constellations did so fed by grain forcefully extracted from a hard-laboring serf. And never mind that the fruits of the astronomer’s labor never resulted in any actual increased prosperity for ancient man. The careful thinking and experimentation of the working man who improved his tools and techniques, thereby increasing his prosperity, is the realm of “science” which did, by far, the most good for mankind; i.e. the woman who figured out a better way of stiching a grain pouch, or the man who judged, based on profit-loss calculations, what was the best price for his wares.

According to these biases, the oppressive regimes of Chinese emperors are glorified because glorious philosophers staffed their mandarinates. The economic stagnation of the Roman Empire is seen as a glorious time of order when the literate classes held their rightful place at the top of the heap. And the amazing industrial revolution of the medieval era which resulted in a tremendous increase in the standard of living, is falsely seen as a dark time of superstition and squalor, since the only deep thinkers of the age (priests and monks) were humiliatingly cloistered.

The cogitations of the learned classes throughout history have been largely vain or pernicious. It is the hard-thinking of the common man trying to improve things for himself and his family (which, in aggregate ends up improving things for everybody) that should be honored.

Cradle of the State

The state was likely born out of a cult. The former would not have been supportable with the latter. Further, it is unlikely that the latter would last long without evolving into the former. Thus it is reasonable to believe that both would have originated in the same place. In my post “Between the rivers, before the state“, I argued that archaeology shows that mankind in the near east lived in a prosperous, agricultural, anarchic society, until a new culture, dominated by priest-kings, arose and spread from the south. Where did this “Ubaid” culture start and how? It seems likely that that culture, and the very ideas of cult and state first arose in Eridu. My evidence for this claim is as follows.

Evidence from Literature 
The “Eridu Genesis”, found in a tablet dating from the 18th century BC, calls Eridu “firstling of the cities”. And the Sumerian king list states:

After the kingship descended from heaven, the kingship was in Eridug. In Eridug, Alulim became king

It is uncontroversial that the first “city-states” arose in Sumer. And here we find a Sumerian text pointing to Eridu as the first Sumerian city-state. And here, in the words “kingship descended from heaven” we have an indication of false legitimacy fostered by religion being used to establish a worldly power.

Alulim is considered the first king of Eridu. But there is a yet more important figure in the city’s foundation story: the mysterious character of Adapa. According to ancient tablets, the legendary figure of Adapa was:

the wise man of Eridu, Ea had created him as chief among men, A wise man whose command none should oppose, The prudent, the most wise among the Anunnaki was he, Blameless, of clean hands, anointed, observer of the divine statutes

Each city in Mesopotamia had its chief deity. The city’s temple for that god was considered to be its home, and the priests of that temple were its servants. Eridu, throughout its history, was considered by all of Mesopotamia to be the home of Enki (known to the Semites as Ea) the god of fresh waters and fertile land. According to the above passage, the first god of the firstling of cities chose Adapa as his chief priest. 

Furthermore, Adapa is often associated with the mythic character Oannes, who according to the later Babylonian scholar Berossus:

taught (the people of Mesopotamia) to build towers and temples; and to establish laws;

If this myth has any basis in cultural memory, then perhaps Adapa was a real person who introduced a cult to the area now known as Eridu. As the new cult’s chief priest, it is easy to imagine this ancient Jim Jones amassing power. 

Evidence from Archaeology Eridu is the oldest Sumerian city known to archaeologists. And it is the first place in which evidence of the “Ubaid” culture is found. In fact, the early phase of the Ubaid period is known as “Eridu”.

The archaelogical site of Eridu reveals that a series of successively larger temples was built on the same spot, starting with a simple, tiny one-room building, and ending with a vast sprawling proto-ziqqurat.¹ This is the first instance in the archaeological record in which any kind of heavy centralization of power is evidenced by a few buildings being dramatically larger than the rest. And one can see that centralization of power growing as each successive temple is built with ever greater opulence, while the surrounding buildings stay humble.

The temples of Eridu are numbered such that the most recently built temple is numbered 1, and older temples are successively numbered higher.

Temple 17, the earliest discovered temple on the site (and most probably in the world), is a small square building (no more than 4 meters square) with a simple, small square pedestal inside. This is possibly the site of the first ever “offerings” to Enki (or to any god for that matter), with ovens outside for baking the offerings.

Temple 16 is a larger reconstruction of 17, with two pedestals, one surrounded by ash. The construction is of higher quality than preceding temples, with plaster bricks. Pottery was found outside, as well as an oven.

By the time we reach Temple 11, Enki’s home has grown to be 15 meters long. And now it is raised on a platform (to suitably represent the superiority of the god and his servants), with a 1 meter ramp leading up from a lower level (there are signs that the platform was extended at some point). It has a large central chamber, a sanctuary conjoined with an offering room, and a private room for the priest(s).

Temple 10 has a yet larger podium, and the platform is extended by a further 8 meters.

Temple 9 has thicker walls, a large door before the altar, and a bench (perhaps for votive statues). This arrangement is very similar to level 13 of the archaeological site, Gawra.

Temple 8 is greatly enlarged (21 x 12 m). It has even thicker walls, false doorways behind the altar, and the remains of fish offerings. This is particularly interesting as Berossus depicts Oannes as wearing a mantle which looked like the head of a fish.

Temple 7 has a special priests-only entrance to the altar-end of the sanctuary.

Temple 6 also has a bench for votive statues.

At some point, a separate palace is constructed one kilometer north of the temple site. This palace site, the earliest known in the world, also undergoes a series of upgrades through the ages. However, most of the palace levels were not archaeologically recoverable. Level 2 is the most complete. It bears resemblances to palaces in the city-state and later holy site of Kish. It is distinguished from temples in the absence of altars and the presence of gates, chambers, courtyards, guard’s rooms, and living quarters.

Perhaps this palace, and palaces in general, developed as a residence for top priests, who evolved into kings. Alternately, perhaps the priests gave some local uneducated ruffian command of the army, so they would not themselves need to get in harms way. This “general” acquired a power-base of allegiance of his own among the soldiers, and evolved into a king, then demanding his own lavish quarters.

Did Adapa come into Eridu, convince a small fishing village that he had the ear of the god Enki, translate that influence into great wealth for himself and his temple, pass on his position to his sons, and thus create the first temple-state? We will never know with certainty exactly what happened. But what hardly admits of doubt is that

1. according to both literary and archaeological evidence, Eridu really was the “firstling of cities”,
2. Eridu is the earliest archaeological instance of acute centralization of power and pelf (as indicated by its buildings),
3. Eridu’s centralization of power and pelf fell upon the first great cult (as indicated by the fact that the earliest great buildings were also the earliest great temples),
4. in this firstling of cities, the cult antedated the secular state (since its temples andedated the palaces), and
5. the first great cult gave rise to the first ever secular state (it is too much of a coincidence that the first great temples arose in the same exact place as the first palaces).

Eridu’s place on the King’s List also indicates that it was something of an empire. The King’s List is known to have only included kings whose cities reigned over (or were at least hegemonic over) the entire region of “Sumer-and-Akkad”. This jibes perfectly with the fact that the Ubaid culture which first arose in Eridu was later found throughout the region. And given how, throughout history, the most centralized nation-states have also been the most war-thirsty, it seems very likely that the priest-kings of Eridu would not be satisfied with completely subjugating only the local population. And also seems very likely that an all-powerful central cult-state, with the ability to dragoon its young men into war, would be able to put under the yoke village after peace-loving village as it marched up the Euphrates.

People tend to implicitly assume that the state has always been with us, and thus it is somehow a natural fact of life. This assumption is greatly assisted by the fact that, even though agriculture pre-dates the state, the state predates writing and written history. Writing itself played a key role in ratcheting up the power of the state. I will discuss that role in my next post.

¹ Reconstruction of Eridu, http://babel.massart.edu/~tkelley/v5.0/eridu/. This is an excellent HTML model of the archaeological site. I highly recommend taking this stratigraphic “tour” of Eridu. For more information see this excerpt from the Cambridge Ancient History (on Google Books).

The Racket and the Cult

As I argued in my post The Sword and the Lie, the state is a symbiosis of violent criminals (the sword) and propagandizing intellectuals (the lie).

The sword needs the lie. Rulers always outnumber the ruled, so a reign predicated on bald criminality (like a protection racket) would shortly be overthrown. To maintain its power, a regime must transmute murder into justice, tribute into taxation, and slavery into citizenship in the minds of its subjects. To do that, it needs intellectuals.

The lie needs the sword. Elaborate scams based on lies and manipulations (like cults) are difficult to maintain. Eventually some people begin to see through the lies and speak out. To keep its hold on its flock, an elite must be able to silence or coerce dissenters. To do that, it needs thugs.

So which came first in the original state, the racket or the cult? And how did the first-comer bring its partner into the scheme?

Let us consider the sword preceding the lie. Thomas Paine speculated that:

“It could have been no difficult thing in the early and solitary ages of the world, while the chief employment of men was that of attending flocks and herds, for a banditti of ruffians to overrun a country, and lay it under contribution. Their power being thus established, the chief of the band contrived to lose the name of robber in that of monarch; and hence the origin of monarchy and kings.”¹

But how exactly could the bandit chief have established such false legitimacy? The easiest thing to do what have been to brainwash the children. While the banditti’s first “subjects” would never forget the criminal basis of their subjugation, the malleable minds of their children could be molded to accept just about anything. And as keeping brains sufficiently washed became a bigger part of the enterprise, some of the bandits may have come to specialize in it. Thus, through division of labor, might the sword have begotten the lie.

How, then, might the lie have given rise to the sword? That question is easier to answer, because we’ve seen this happen in our own age. After the cult leader Jim Jones had acquired enough influence over his flock and managed to lead it into isolation from the rest of the world, it was quite easy for him to arm his most loyal supporters and thus gain coercive control over the rest. One can imagine a similar development happening in antiquity.

In fact, as I will argue in my next post, I believe just such a development was indeed the origin of the very first state in the world.

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¹ Thomas Paine, excerpted from Liberty and the Great Libertarians, edited by Charles T. Sprading