Adams’ chosen time-span begins and ends with the same arc of the cycle: the collapse of the Roman Empire and the threatened collapse of Western Civilization. Without subscribing to the inevitability structure inherent in cyclical theories of history, one nevertheless reads Adams’ description of societal fragmentation in Rome with a certain feeling of déjá-vu: the accelerating centralisation of money and agriculture; the dependence of status on wealth; the impoverishment of the small farmer; and especially the migration of the poor to the big cities.
If you substitute the growth of automation for the influx of foreign slaves, the points of similarity with modern America are particularly striking. Both slaves and machines provide a cheap, depersonalized energy source, whose productivity enriches the entrepreneur rather than the worker who has been displaced. Adams had no illusions about the relationship between law and justice:
''. . . as {the usurer} fed on insolvency and controlled legislation, the laws were as ingeniously contrived for creating debt, as for making it profitable when contracted. . . As the capitalists owned the courts and administered justice, they had the means at hand of ruining any plebeian whose property was tempting.''
Nor was Adams’ perception of the nature of law confined to ancient Rome. He was able to see, clearer than his contemporaries, that it is no mere coincidence, nor a lex naturae, that the modern legal system is concerned mostly with the protection of property rights:
''Abstract justice is, of course, impossible. Law is merely the expression of the will of the strongest for the time being, and therefore laws have no fixity, but shift from generation to generation. As competition sharpens . . . religious ritual is supplanted by civil codes for the enforcement of contracts and the protection of the creditor class. The more society consolidates, the more legislation is controlled by the wealthy, and at length the representatives of the moneyed class acquire that absolute power once wielded by the Roman proconsul, and now exercised by the modern magistrate.''
Thus the modern legal system is infinitely subtle, and its enforcing officers equally efficient, in punishing those forms of theft which are not practiced by the ruling class; but robbery in the market-place is governed by primitive controls which lag far behind the sophisticated mechanisms which company lawyers contrive to circumvent them. One measure of a society is the problems it chooses to solve.
Rome’s ruling class was unable to restrain its rapacity, even in its own ultimate interest. Adams saw what liberals are rarely willing to admit—namely, that a system based on corrupt practice cannot be saved merely by tinkering with it.
'The Economics of Human Energy' in Brooks Adams, Ezra Pound, and Robert Theobald - by John Whiting, London University
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- Gratias, Amatorem Veritatis.
