Book Reviews

Roosevelt had had previous incar nations in the age when Gaius Gracchus was championing the Ever Normal Granary and when Augustus Caesar was going strong on the public works that changed Rome from a city of brick to a city of marble. If the New Deal (with its own modern version of "bread and circuses") hoped to succeed, it would have to do better than Rome. The problem was to build a society which, in Mr. Haskell's words, would provide "reasonable incentives for the free rise of a general staff of competent man agers whose ranks are always open to fresh recruits." Writing in 1938, Haskell sounded a dubious note. Who and what would come after Wallace, Tugwell and Company? Albert Jay Nock was more def inite. He delighted in pointing out that all the panaceas had been 637 638 THE FREEMAN October tried by the Romans and all had failed. Nero clipped the Roman coins, but inflation solved nothing.

Diocletian tried unsuccessfully to fix prices. "Empire," in the form of extracting treasure from con quered provinces, ran out when the "movables" had an been :re moved, leaving only the slaves. The dependence on slave labor ulti mately took its own toll by under cutting the free peasantry, who turned up in Rome to live on the dole. Antisocial Solutions Dero Saunders, a bright editor of Fortune Magazine whose avoca tion was dabbling in the history of antiquity, pushed the New Deal comparisons in the edition of Mommsen's History of Rome which he prepared with John H. Collins, a classical student. Mommsen's main "lesson," as passed along by Saunders, was that Robin Hood methods of solving the "social problem" end by tearing society apart, the result being anarchy that finds its Draconian cure in dictatorship. Witonski's "lessons" are a bit more subtle than those advanced by Haskell, Nock, Dero Saunders and other Roman buffs of the past g:eneration. Eschewing the "eco nomic interpretation," Witonski identifies Rome not only with the decline and fall of a temporal empire but also with the rise of Christianity. He holds, with the late Frank Meyer (to whom he dedicates Gibbon for Moderns), that Roman law and Christian eth ics have combined to create the concept of the "West," which, though it is now under seige, is still alive and kicking against the efforts of the new barbarian "counterculture" to undermine it.

The Fall of Constantinople Gibbon, a man of the Eighteenth Century "enlightenment," was a °free thinker with a Deist preju dice against any religious speci ficity. He was inclined to blame the Christians for sapping the morals of the old pagan society, which had its many household gods. Even so, if the conversion of the Emperor Constantine had been able to keep the Turks forever at bay before Constantinople, Gibbon would have held Christianity in the same af fection that Voltaire cynically mainta.ined for the God whom "necessity" demanded. The "fall" of the Roman Empire bemoaned by Gibbon was material; it came because the empire, after the An tonines, could not longer fend off the barbarians from the North and the Moslems from the East. When Mohammed II took Con stantinople, it was the end for Gibbon. His descriptions of the ultimate failure of pomp and pow1974 GIBBON FOR MODERNS 639 er are marvelously evocative, and one never tires of the balanced rhythms of the Eighteenth Cen tury style. As for Gibbon's dis paragement of the moral preten sions of the Crusades, it is good for our souls that we be reminded of the often non-Christian beha vior of the defenders of the West ern chivalric order. For pragmatic reasons, Gibbon had to accept the Crusades as good: after all, they gave Constantinople a "breather"

of some three centuries which it might not otherwise have had. Witonski raises points that are merely implicit in Gibbon. The "breather" of the Crusades al lowed the West, as the inheritor of Roman civilization, to develop the nation-State. Rome, in a sense, was pushed into the North by the spread of Islam, which, as Henri Pirenne has pointed out, turned the Mediterranean for a period in to a Moslem lake. The "barbari ans" from the Gothic North took over enough of the Latin culture to sustain "Rome" as part of Charlemagne's Frankish Empire. Latinity persisted in Spanish, French and even Rhineland Ger man customs. The Moors took Spain, but Gallic Latinity was saved by the Pyrenees. And the big comeback which,with the Cru sades, was to retake the Mediter ranean for the "West" was pow ered by such northern "Romans" as Robert, Duke of Normandy, and Richard the Lion Hearted of Eng land, along with ex-barbarians who had come within the civilizing in fluence of contact with both Rome and Christi ani ty after they had invaded Lombardy and the Italian peninsula.

The West Again Under Seige So "Rome" never actually died. It survived in Constantinople until 1453, and it revived in the West when the Moslems were pushed back in the Mediterranean. All of which points to a "lesson" that Peter Witonski does not unduly stress, partly because he wrote his introduction to Gibbon for M od erns before the Arab-Israeli Yom Kippur War. The "West" is under seige again from the East, with the Soviets threatening a complete takeover in the Balkans (a second "fall of Constantinople" ?) when Yugoslavia's Tito dies. Elsewhere the Soviets have cleverly arranged to create the turmoil that resulted last Fall in the Arab oil embargo, which hit at all the Western Euro pean states that have inherited the Roman and Christian traditions. The Mediterranean could become a part-Islamic "lake" if Henry Kissinger's diplomacy, which is directed toward driving a perma nent wedge between the Russians and the Arabs, should fail.

If the West would save itself 640 THE FREEMAN October once more, it needs a new Henri Pirenne and a new Edward Gibbon to point to the consequences of los ing the Mediterranean to collabo rating Communist and Arab ji hads. Western Europe consists of small and vulnerable peninsulas (Iberia, Italy, Scandinavia) joined to a shrunken trunk (France, the low countries, West Germany, Switzerland). Loss of the Mediterranean would effectively out flank the European West. If this should ever happen, a new Gibbon would be required to write a real "decline and fall." The stakes are big, as the late Frank Meyer and his disciple Peter Wit onski have tried to bring home to a world that has read all too little of Edward Gibbon. HANDSOME BLUE LEATHERLEX FREEMAN BINDERS $2.50 each ORDER FROM: THE FOUNDATION FOR ECONOMIC EDUCATION IRVINGTON-aN-HUDSON, NEW YORK 10533 the Freeman VOL. 24, NO. 11 • NOVEMBER 1974 The Blindness of Macro-economics Charles R. LaDow 643 A call to exchange the welfare state for the personal liberty guaranteed in the Constitution.