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Weber’s ‘Die sozialen Gründe des Untergangs der antiken Kultur’

In ‘Finance, Coinage and Money from the Severans to Constan-tine’, which he published in 1975, Michael Crawford summed up the economic background of the late empire in the following terms:

‘Empire-wide, the debasement of the silver coinage brought about a move to the collection of taxes and the payment of soldiers and officials largely in kind . . . The monetary circle simply became increas-ingly meaningless. It was doubtless completely abolished in the end by Theodosius I.’¹ Crawford’s assertion illustrates an important fact: the crux of the theory of a late imperial economic decline has always been some set of postulates about the monetary history of the fourth century. Inflation and debasement symptomized the inexorable decline of monetary economy, the reversion to a more primitive stage, precursor of some medieval barbarism. The deep-rooted character of this conception, its almost axiomatic nature, is strikingly obvious in the fact that even Eduard Meyer (who, of course, was otherwise only too inclined to advocate a wholesale

‘modernization’ of the Ancient Economy) accepted the theory. For him there was a direct causal link between the monetary regression of the late empire and the evolution of that generalized compulsion which was the hallmark of late imperial political and social life.² Like his own generation and the following one, Meyer could only perceive the ‘late antique’ through classical eyes. At any rate, if the economic basis of this ‘methodological classicism’ is the theory of late imperial economic decline, the systematic rejection of its premises

1 M. Crawford, ‘Finance, Coinage and Money from the Severans to Constantine’, ANRW 2.2 (1975) 560–93, at 570 f., emphasis mine.

2 E. Meyer, ‘Die wirtschaftliche Entwicklung des Altertums’, Jahrbüchern für National ökonomie und Statistik IX, repr. in Kleine Schriften, 1² (Halle, 1924) 79–168, esp. 158.

must start with this theory and with its monetary postulates. It is obvious, however, that no inversion will be possible—one cannot supersede the pessimism of traditional historiography with some untenable optimism. The problem seems insoluble and we should perhaps begin by asking: is there a way out of this dilemma?

That way, I believe, was first outlined in the study which Gunnar Mickwitz published in 1932. Mickwitz, it has been claimed, was a Weberian. The claim is not true, however. Geld und Wirtschaft does refer to Weber at one point, but in a footnote, and that says,

‘The theory of a third century reversion to natural economy actually stems from Weber’s Römische Agrargeschichte’³ (i.e. the published version of Weber’s thesis, which Mommsen supervised). Now Mickwitz himself was totally opposed to any theory of this sort, for that or for the succeeding century. He emphatically rejected the theory that the late antique world was characterized by general-ized economic decline. Weber had been decisively influenced by Bücher, who in fact believed that the modern categories of ‘com-modity’, ‘price’, ‘wages’, ‘profits’, etc. were entirely inapplicable to the ancient world.⁴ Bücher’s construction lacked any empirical basis, but then, as he explained to Meyer, an economist was under no obligation to take history seriously, for economics was more interested in pure concepts. The ‘concept’ which Bücher devel-oped, that of the ‘closed’ ‘Household Economy’, drove a deep gulf between the ancient and modern, and made it difficult to see how ancient economic history could be studied at all. In fact, it was Weber who gave life and respectability to Bücher’s fantasies about economic evolution. Even in his last (and greatest) work, Weber described Bücher’s Entstehung der Volkswirtschaft as a ‘funda-mentally important work’.⁵ He had always taken Bücher seriously.

Bücher was aware of this and in later editions of Die Entstehung there are, diplomatically enough, references to Weber as the obvi-ous authority on the Roman world. Bücher’s influence was to prove

3 Mickwitz, Geld und Wirtschaft, 3 n. 4.

4 K. Bücher, Die Entstehung der Volkswirtschaft. Vorträge und Versuche (4th edn.;

Tübingen, 1904), 133 = 84–5 (1st edn.), ‘keine Waren, keinen Preis, keinen Güter-umlauf, keine Einkommensverteilung und demgemäss keinen Arbeitslohn, keinen Unter nehmergewinn, keinen Zins als besondere Einkommensarten’. Moreover, when Bücher says earlier in the same passage that ‘If . . . the expression capital is restricted to means of production, then it must in any case be limited to tools and implements, the so-called fixed capital. What modern theorists usually designate circulating capital is in the independent household economy merely a store of consumption goods in process of preparation’ (Industrial Evolution, tr. S. M. Wickett (London, 1901) 112), he simply forgets moneylending.

5 Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, ed. G. Roth and C. Wittich, 2 vols. (University of California, 1978) 1.114–15.

a catastrophic limitation on Weber’s ability to distil an accurate picture of the Roman economic background. Weber’s most coherent exposition was undoubtedly the Freiburg lecture of 1896, the essay entitled ‘Die sozialen Gründe des Untergangs der antiken Kultur’, and though Weber modified some of his emphases later, he never abandoned the essential argument propounded there. In the fol-lowing summary, I have isolated the propositions which I think are crucial to his argument (abstracting from the numerous subsidiary channels the essay drives into) and indicated these by numerals in square brackets.⁶

In Weber’s topography of classical culture, the countryside is a merely latent background, a reservoir of natural economy behind the pure forms of ancient life, the great cities of the Mediterranean which were the active centres of its cultural and economic evolu-tion.⁷ So Weber refers to ‘die Naturalwirtschaft der barbarischen Bauern des Binnenlandes’ (p. 292), and supposes that the reasser-tion of this world, suppressed by urban economy, will only come with the decline of antiquity. This image strikes him as so obvi-ous that it functions, in some sense, as his only axiom. Classical civilization was urban, coastal, and slave-based. Weber thus argues, [1] ‘the organisation of slave labour forms the indispensable basis (Unterbau) of Roman society’ (p. 296). The generalization is mas-sive, unqualified. [2] Because rural estates are the essential form of wealth in this society, the basis of all other economic activity, the great agricultural establishments of the late republic and early empire are supreme models for the study of this type of organization (p. 296). In the economy of these estates, high-value crops (vines, olives, etc.) displaced arable production to soils of inferior quality.

Production of foodgrains was generally unprofitable, Weber claims,

6 G. E. M. de Ste. Croix, The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World (London, 1981) 85 calls the ‘Soziale Gründe’ Weber’s ‘best piece of historical writing’. D. Vera,

‘Forme e funzioni della rendita fondiaria nella tarda antichità’, in SRIT 1, 373–4 refers to Weber’s ‘celebrated essay on the fall of ancient civilisation’ and says he accepts its theses for the western part of the empire. Mazzarino has a sympathetic but balanced review in La fine del mondo antico (Milan, 1959) 147–61. The best English translation of the essay is C. Mackauer’s in The Journal of General Education 5 (Oct. 1950) 75–88.

7 For recent discussions of Weber’s work on antiquity, see E. Lo Cascio, ‘Appunti zu Weber “teorico” dell’economia greco-romana’, Fenomenologia e società 5 (1982) 123–44, and ‘Weber e il “capitalismo antico” ’, in M. Losito and P. Schiera, Max Weber e le scienze sociali del suo tempo (Bologna, 1988) 401–21; L. Capogrossi Colognesi, Economie antiche e capitalismo moderno. La sfida di Max Weber (Rome and Bari, 1990), especially interesting; and J. Love, Antiquity and Capitalism: Max Weber and the Sociological Foundations of Roman Civilization (London and New York, 1991). Momigliano dis-cussed Weber repeatedly in various essays, notably, ‘Max Weber and Eduard Meyer:

Apropos of City and Country in Antiquity’, in Sesto Contributo alla Storia degli Studi Classici e del Mondo Antico, 2 vols. (Rome, 1980) 1.285–93, and ‘After Gibbon’s Decline and Fall’, ibid. 1.265–84.

besides, slave labour was psychologically unsuitable for these types of cultivation.⁸ This entailed a differentiation of the forms of organ-ization which governed the two sorts of production: landowners would lease out the arable but produce the high-value crops on a centralized basis. Now, it is this ‘centralized’ production which interests Weber. So, [3] ‘The estate establishment is of a plantation-type (Der Gutsbetrieb ist plantagenartig) and the estate workers are slaves (und die Gutsarbeiter sind Sklaven)’ (p. 297). [4] The inter-nal life of this plantation-like estate is organized on the model of a barracks (p. 297), with labour subjected to a rigid military discipline (p. 298: ‘Die Arbeit ist streng militärisch diszipliniert’). This is the decisive feature of work organization in Roman land ownership.

The slave workforce leads an existence deprived of family life. The crucial consequence of this is the inability of the workforce to repro-duce itself. With high levels of exploitability [5] this entails a rapid absolute consumption of labour power and the crucial need for a slave market as the ‘indispensable presupposition of slave barracks geared to market production’ (p. 298). And here, significantly, Weber adds, ‘We thus come to a turning-point in the evolution of ancient civilisation’ (p. 299). That is to say, the great problem of the decline of Roman power is already looming on Weber’s horizon. So let me halt the summary at this point and return to the image Weber has developed.

Weber’s notion that the type of work discipline which character-ized the Roman estate was specifically determined by its use of slave labour, I think, misconstrues the logic of Roman estate organiza-tion. Tight control over the execution of jobs and maximal super-vision of the workforce were more general principles of Roman work organization and implied a type of discipline which extended to all sections of the labour force, including hired labour.⁹ But by reconstruing the underlying logic of this managerialism in the more specific guise of a logic peculiar to the deployment of slave labour,

8 See W. Scheidel, ‘Grain Cultivation in the Villa Economy of Roman Italy’, in J. Carlsen (ed.), Land Use in the Roman Empire (Rome, 1994) 159ff. for a rebuttal of this argument, and M. S. Spurr, Arable Cultivation in Roman Italy c.200 BC–c.AD 100 (JRS Monographs No. 3, 1986) 133–40, on ‘slave-staffed arable estates’.

9 Columella, RR 3.13.11–13 wanted tighter controls through sample checks and the use of measuring devices; for one of these, which local farmers called ciconia, he produced a design modification that would enable landowners to argue their case for a better quality of trenching. In Columella’s example the contractor seems to have no latitude in determining the way the job is done; the method is predetermined and the work (based on contract labour) tightly supervised. Cf. Columella, RR 2.4.3 (plough-ing), Palladius, Opus agricult. 2.3.2 (plough(plough-ing), 2.10.4 (hoe(plough-ing), and Carlo Poni’s fundamental work on Bologna in the 18th cent., Gli aratri e l’economia agraria nel bolognese dal XVII al XIX secolo (Bologna, 1963), for the struggle over ploughing.

Weber was able to posit a form of enterprise which never actually existed. He called this type of organisation ‘plantation-like’ and throughout his life referred repeatedly to ‘the Roman plantation’.

It is important to realize, however, that Weber was discussing a purely imaginary entity, since there is no evidence to show that any form of large-scale enterprise even approximately resembled the plantations of early modern mercantilism. The physical concentra-tion of large groups of unfree workers into common producconcentra-tion sites does not, of course, add up to a ‘plantation’.

Weber’s assumptions about foodgrains as a subsistence economy are also hard to reconcile with the systematic landowner opposi-tion to price controls (vilitas). The size of the marketable surplus in foodgrains is an area of total obscurity, but a simple example illustrates the point. We know from the ‘Cadastre d’Aphroditô’

published recently by Gascou and MacCoull that the arable area of Aphrodito c.525 was 5,200 arouras.¹⁰ Since much of this land was

£nudroß, that is, without irrigation equipment and dependent solely on the flood, it would not be unrealistic to estimate average arable productivity at, say, not more than 10 artabas to the aroura.¹¹ With the usual rate of deduction for seed, this would yield a total net out-put of 46,800 artabas. Now at this date Aphrodito’s cash payments (by way of taxes) were 352¼ solidi.¹² If the whole of this amount were met from wheat sales and the entire arable area was sown to wheat, then at the average price levels of this foodgrain (say, 12 artabas to the solidus) Aphrodito would have to sell 9 per cent of its wheat stock. That would be the level of its ‘gross marketed surplus’.

However, P. Cairo Masp. 67002 shows that by c.567 Aphrodito was paying more than 1,017 solidi in taxes¹³ so that the marketed surplus would have had to be 26 per cent. In fact, since some of the arable area was sown to other crops which were not mainly sold, the actual level would have been substantially higher, perhaps close to a third, at any rate within the range usually cited for villages in India today.¹⁴

10 P. Freer Aphrod., col. ix 294, cf. J. Gascou and L. MacCoull, ‘Le cadastre d’Aphroditô’, Travaux et Mémoires 10 (1987) 103–58, at 118.

11 Cf. D. J. Crawford, Kerkeosiris: An Egyptian Village in the Ptolemaic Period (Cambridge, 1971) 126, 10 artabas as the average yield of wheat. In the Khi†a†

al-Maqrîzî cited the normal range of variation (for wheat) as 2–20 ardabs per feddan,

‘suivant les terres’, Description historique et topographique de l’Égypte, 290.

12 P. Flor. 297 iv verso.

13 See R. Rémondon, ‘P.Hamb. 56 et P.Lond. 1419 (notes sur les finances d’Aphrodito du VI^e siècle au VIII^e)’, CE 40 (1965) 401–30, at 428.

14 The classic study by D. R. Gadgil and V. R. Gadgil, A Survey of Farm Business in Wai Taluka (Poona, 1940) 92, Table 20, calculated a marketed surplus of 30.6 per cent but on crop production as a whole and largely due to money crops such as groundnut

To transform the fluctuations of the slave market into a dynamic determining the evolution of the empire, Weber supposes that as the supply sources dried up, Roman landowners were confronted by a chronic shortage of labour. (He ignores the fact that the Medi-terranean economy was characterized by persistently high levels of underemployment and that free workers were always available.) At any rate, [6] landowners made a fundamental response to the problem they faced—one which produced profound changes in the morphology of the lower orders. Where they still utilized slave labour, those workforces were progressively disintegrated by their settlement on the land as separate households, forming a com-mon mass of dependants with the former coloni, as the latter were increasingly transformed from tenants into employees (pp. 300 f.).

With these sweeping changes in the organization of estates, the latent “feudalism” of the late empire simply asserted itself more openly.¹⁵ For [7] it proved quite impossible to sustain existing levels of market production with the new kind of dependent labour force, since—and now a crucial assumption—production for exchange presupposed slave barracks bound by rigid discipline (p. 303: ‘Für die Absatzproduktion war die disziplinierte Sklaven-kaserne Vorbedingung’). Weber did not explain why he thought so and was of course not unaware that east of the Elbe the ‘second serfdom’ had coexisted with consistently high levels of market activity. At any rate, once the restructuring of estates made mar-ket production impossible, this shattered the fragile structures of exchange which lay superimposed on the latent background of natural economy (‘die naturalwirtschaftliche Unterlage’). Thus Weber derives the renewed dominance of natural economy from changes in the organization of the estate, through some causal link which he leaves unexplained. The mentality of the estates is purely autarchic now, their economic policy one of isolationism. As Weber says, ‘The large estates cut themselves off from the urban mar-ket’ (p. 304: Die grossen Güter lösen sich vom Markte der Stadt).

Finally, [8] since the exchange basis of the late imperial economy was drastically curtailed, the financial system of the late empire, Weber argues, was forced back into the mould of Naturalwirtschaft.

For the lack of private capital development and the dwindling capacity of landowners to meet cash payments undermined the

and turmeric. Nadkarni, EPW xv, March 1980 (Review of Agriculture) 13–24 calculates 37.2 per cent for wheat, 24.4 per cent for millet. Olsen has comparable figures in her thesis of 1984.

15 Weber, ‘Soziale Gründe’, 303: ‘Die Entwicklung der feudalen Gesellschaft lag in der Luft schon des spätrömischen Reiches.’

state’s ability to sustain any other sort of financial system (p. 306).

Weber concludes: ‘The disintegration of the empire was the necessary political result of the gradual disappearance of market exchange and the progressive rise of natural economy. Basically, it only signified the collapse of an administrative apparatus and monetary-political superstructure less and less adapted to the sub-structure of natural economy’ (p. 308).

Weber’s ‘Soziale Gründe’ is a more compact, cohesive account of Roman economic development than the corresponding sections of his Agrarverhältnisse. But the cohesion is achieved at the cost of considerable abstraction—he almost never cites sources, general-izes massively, and generates causal connections which are rarely self-evident. Above all, Weber’s picture of the late antique estate economy is seriously flawed by his presumption of the dominance of Naturalwirtschaft, and for this I can find no explanation other than, perhaps, a certain ignorance. Three years later, another of Mommsen’s pupils, Ulrich Wilcken, would produce his massive Griechische Ostraka, subtitled ‘An essay on ancient economic history’. The picture Wilcken assembled through patient but seminal labour on the ostraca and papyri could not have had less in common with Weber’s general account. Above all, Wilcken had no illusions, as Weber seems to have done, about the significance of monetary economy in the main periods of Hellenistic and Roman history. For example, even as he conceded the dogma of a fourth century dominated by its reversion to Naturalwirtschaft (under Meyer’s influence, and Meyer’s presumption can be traced back to a misunderstanding of Mommsen),¹⁶ he could write, ‘It is of some relevance to the stability of money economy that even in this century of government bankruptcy and shocking debasement of currency [he means the third], people generally continued to make their payments in money.’¹⁷ The interval between Weber’s essay and Wilcken’s work is so narrow that the defects of the former can hardly be explained away by the imperatives of ‘German abstract thought’. Indeed, in the revised and extended version of the Agrarverhältnisse which he published in 1909, Weber had an ideal opportunity to modify some of his positions, but he reaffirmed his underlying notion that the basis of ancient economy was the Naturalwirtschaft of the hinterlands.¹⁸ ‘The expansion of large

16 Meyer, ‘Wirtschaftliche Entwicklung’, 158 cited Mommsen, Geschichte des römischen Münzwesens (Berlin, 1860) 827ff. for the strange idea that in the crisis of the third cen-tury ‘das Geld wieder zur Ware wird’.

17 U. Wilcken, Griechische Ostraka aus Aegypten und Nubien, 2 vols. (Leipzig, 1899) 1.680 n. 1.

18 Weber, ‘Agrarverhältnisse im Altertum’ (3rd edn.), in Gesammelte Aufsätze, 273,

holdings progressed further,’ he wrote, ‘and with it their gradual but simultaneous cutting loose from the market’ (p. 272).

Thus Mickwitz was surely right to ignore Weber’s essay almost totally, except for the passing reference which ascribed the dogma of the reversion to Naturalwirtschaft to Weber himself. Let me return for a moment to Weber’s conception of a late imperial Privatwirtschaft which progressively reverts to the autarchic iso-lation of the closed ‘household’ economy. One fact should be immediately obvious. Clearly, Weber knew next to nothing about the monetary history of the empire. It is significant, for example, that inflation is nowhere mentioned. He has no notion of the levels of liquidity and wealth in the late empire, and no idea of the close

Thus Mickwitz was surely right to ignore Weber’s essay almost totally, except for the passing reference which ascribed the dogma of the reversion to Naturalwirtschaft to Weber himself. Let me return for a moment to Weber’s conception of a late imperial Privatwirtschaft which progressively reverts to the autarchic iso-lation of the closed ‘household’ economy. One fact should be immediately obvious. Clearly, Weber knew next to nothing about the monetary history of the empire. It is significant, for example, that inflation is nowhere mentioned. He has no notion of the levels of liquidity and wealth in the late empire, and no idea of the close