A wonky parallel of Rome’s Third-Century Crisis and the Perma-Crisis of Western Democracy
There is a question that haunts every serious observer of contemporary Western politics, though it is rarely asked with the directness it deserves: why does it not matter who wins? Leader after leader is elected on a platform of change, governs for a term or two of visible ineffectiveness, and is replaced by another who promised something different and delivers something indistinguishable. The electorate, for its part, behaves with the bewildered persistence of someone who keeps pressing a lift button that has ceased to function, convinced that the problem is the number they pressed rather than the wiring behind the wall.
I want to suggest that this pattern has a precise historical analogue — one that is more illuminating than the usual comparisons to Weimar Germany or the fall of the Athenian democracy, because it identifies a structural cause rather than a merely circumstantial one. The analogue is the Roman Empire’s third century CE, and the mechanism that connects it to the present is the relationship between democratic form and oligarchic infrastructure that has been systematically underexplored in the mainstream commentary on Western political decline.
The Third Century in Brief
The Roman Empire after Marcus Aurelius — the “last good emperor,” as Gibbon grudgingly allowed — entered a period of almost continuous political crisis that lasted from 180 CE until the accession of Diocletian in 284 CE. In the fifty years between 235 and 284 alone, no fewer than twenty-six men claimed the imperial title. Most came to power through military force; most were removed by assassination. The Praetorian Guard — nominally the emperor’s personal bodyguard, in practice the kingmakers of the late empire — installed and deposed rulers with the casual efficiency of a board that has lost confidence in a succession of CEOs but cannot quite bring itself to examine the business model.
The conventional historiography attributes this instability to a failure of institutional design: the Roman constitution provided no orderly mechanism for imperial succession, and so the army filled the vacuum. This is true as far as it goes, which is not very far. What it omits is the structural economic reason why no emperor, however able, could stabilise the system. By the third century, the fiscal foundations of the Roman state had been hollowed out by three centuries of oligarchic misrule and accumulation. The great senatorial and equestrian families had, through the mechanisms of compound interest, pro-creditor law, and systematic evasion of taxation, converted the productive smallholder class into a dispossessed proletariat and the public land of the republic into slave-worked private estates. The silver content of the denarius — the empire’s primary monetary instrument — fell from near-purity under Augustus to approximately two per cent by the 260s CE, as successive emperors debased the currency to finance military needs that a contracting tax base could no longer sustain. In short, by the time the Praetorian Guard was cycling through emperors at the rate of one per year, there was structurally nothing that an emperor could do. The problems were systemic, and the system was controlled by the very class that would have had to bear the cost of solving them.
The Praetorian Guard did not lack loyalty or intelligence. It changed emperors because changing emperors was the only mechanism available to it within a constitutional order that precluded structural reform. Each new emperor arrived with energy and promises. Each discovered, in short order, that the promises were unfulfillable. Each was removed by soldiers who correctly perceived failure and incorrectly attributed it to the man rather than to the conditions.
The Contemporary Parallel
I now turn to the parallel, which I think is considerably more precise than its most visible exponents have acknowledged.
The Western democratic electorate of the early twenty-first century occupies, I want to argue, the structural position of the Praetorian Guard. It possesses the constitutional power to change the ruler; it exercises that power with increasing frequency; and it does so for reasons that are, individually, entirely rational — the incumbent has failed to deliver on his or her promises — without appreciating that the failure is structural rather than personal. Blair is replaced by Brown, who is replaced by Cameron, who is replaced by May, who is replaced by Johnson, who is replaced by Truss (briefly, and instructively), who is replaced by Sunak, who is replaced by Starmer. In France, Hollande gives way to Macron, who has now spent a second term demonstrating that centrist managerialism is not a solution to the problems it was elected to manage. Italy, which has had more governments since 1945 than most countries have had prime ministers, provides the reductio ad absurdum of the pattern. The United States swings between parties with the conviction of a man who, having found the left shoe uncomfortable, tries the right one and cannot understand why his foot still hurts.
The mechanism is identical to Rome’s. Each new leader arrives with a mandate for change — that, after all, is what elections are for. Each discovers that the structural conditions for change do not exist. The fiscal constraints are real: bond markets, central bank mandates, and, in the Eurozone, treaty obligations encode the equivalent of Rome’s pro-creditor property law in a form that no elected government can unilaterally revise. The wealth concentration is real: the share of national income flowing to capital rather than labour has increased in every major Western economy for four decades, replicating, in the language of financialised capitalism, the dynamic by which Roman agricultural surplus was progressively transferred from smallholder to latifundium. And the structural identity between the creditor class and the governing class is real, though it operates through lobbying and revolving doors rather than through senatorial membership — a difference of mechanism, not of substance.
The result is that the electorate, like the Praetorian Guard, is sovereign in constitutional form and impotent in structural fact. It can change the person. It cannot change the conditions that make the person’s promises impossible to fulfil. And it is, quite understandably, furious about this — increasingly so, which is why the succession of centrist managers is now being interrupted, in country after country, by figures who promise not management but rupture. Whether those figures represent a genuine challenge to oligarchic power or merely its most recent instrument is, I think, the central political question of our moment, and one that the Roman parallel illuminates rather than resolves.
The Scholarly Record
This parallel has not gone entirely unnoticed, though its most important dimensions remain insufficiently integrated in the existing literature.
Michael Hudson’s The Collapse of Antiquity (2023) makes the lineage argument — the claim that Western pro-creditor law is Rome’s direct institutional bequest rather than merely its accidental lookalike — with formidable scholarly authority. Hudson demonstrates that the Roman oligarchy’s systematic transformation of public debt into private accumulation, its suppression of every attempt at structural reform from the Gracchi onwards, and its ultimate conversion of a productive agricultural economy into a rentier system are the template from which the modern financialised West was cast. His analysis of the libertas of the Roman senatorial class — the freedom, as he puts it with characteristic directness, to foreclose on debtors, reduce them to debt bondage, and accumulate land without royal interference — maps with uncomfortable precision onto the contemporary ideology of shareholder value and creditor rights. The freedom of the powerful to exploit the powerless, in both instances, is presented as the freedom of mankind. That Rome bequeathed this legal philosophy to the West — embedding it in the Corpus Juris Civilis and transmitting it through medieval canon law and the common law tradition — is Hudson’s most important and, I think, most underappreciated contribution.
Peter Turchin’s cliodynamics programme provides a different but complementary framework. Turchin’s structural-demographic theory identifies the mechanism — elite overproduction — by which the disintegrative phase of historical cycles generates political instability. As economic growth slows and competition for elite positions intensifies, a growing class of credentialled, ambitious individuals finds that its expectations cannot be met within the existing order. This frustrated elite aspirant class, as Turchin’s models characterise it, is the most dangerous class for societal stability: it can form the nucleus of an anti-establishment counter-elite that draws energy from the discontented masses. Turchin drew this comparison explicitly between ancient Rome’s populares and the contemporary American populist right — a comparison that, whatever one thinks of its political valence, has the merit of identifying a structural rather than a personal explanation for the rise of anti-systemic politics across the Western world. His prediction, made in 2010, of heightened American political instability around 2020 has proved — shall we say — not without its vindications.
Peter Heather and John Rapley’s Why Empires Fall: Rome, America, and the Future of the West (2023) offers a third perspective, though one that I find less directly relevant to my particular hypothesis. Their argument centres on the geopolitical analogy: as Rome’s economic integration of its periphery ultimately produced centres of power that challenged and supplanted the imperial core, so the West’s economic globalisation has empowered China, India, and the global South in ways that are now reversing the hegemonic order. This is a serious argument, but it is primarily an argument about relative economic decline in the international system rather than about the internal structural pathology that I take to be the heart of your parallel.
The most directly apposite scholarly formulation I have encountered is from the political theorist Sheldon Wolin, whose concept of “managed democracy” captures the constitutional inversion with precision. Writing about the United States but with implications for all advanced Western democracies, Wolin argued that what presents itself as democracy is in practice a system in which citizens are politically uninterested and submissive — and in which elites are eager to keep them that way. The public is comforted by the visible symbols and rituals of democratic governance — regular elections, occasional communications from authorities, simulations of civic engagement — while in practice the structural conditions of policy are determined by forces that no election can reach. This is, I submit, the Praetorian condition described in modern constitutional language.
David Engels, in a 2020 paper comparing the crisis of the modern West to the fall of the Roman Republic, identifies a set of structural analogies — mass immigration, social polarisation, erosion of traditional institutions, populism, debt crisis — and reflects on the possibility of a transition from structured oligarchic governance to authoritarian rule. His analysis is more culturally conservative in its framing than I find congenial, and I think he somewhat overstates the formal analogies while understating the structural ones, but the observation that in both cases constitutional rules rapidly lose effectiveness and respect is correct and important.
The Qualifications
I have argued that the parallel is illuminating, and I stand by that claim. I would, however, be doing the reader a disservice if I allowed it to pass without registering two qualifications that I consider genuinely serious.
The first is that the contemporary Western electorate is, in one crucial respect, not like the Praetorian Guard: it is formally sovereign in a way that the Guard never was, and it occasionally exercises that sovereignty in ways that are genuinely disruptive to oligarchic interests. The Brexit vote is the most conspicuous recent example — a popular decision taken against the express wishes of virtually every major institutional interest in British public life. Whether Brexit constitutes a genuine exercise of popular sovereignty, an oligarchic manipulation of popular discontent, or — and I suspect this is closer to the truth — something messily intermediate between the two is a question I have the good sense not to settle here. The point is that the formal mechanism of popular sovereignty occasionally produces outcomes that the oligarchic structure cannot entirely absorb or predict, which has no precise parallel in the Praetorian succession. The Praetorian Guard never elected a Gracchus. Western electorates, intermittently, do — and the system must accommodate, co-opt, or defeat them rather than simply clubbing them to death in the Forum. That this accommodation so regularly succeeds is consistent with the hypothesis, but the mechanism is more complex.
The second qualification concerns the fiscal dimension of the parallel. The third-century crisis was not merely a crisis of political succession; it was a crisis of monetary and fiscal collapse — the denarius debased to two per cent silver, inflation destroying what remained of the productive middle classes, tax revenues contracting in the self-reinforcing spiral that my own account of Rome’s fall documents in some detail. The contemporary Western analogue would be not merely political cycling but outright monetary disintegration. That disintegration has not yet arrived. The fiat money system — which is, as I have argued elsewhere in the context of this larger work, precisely the institutional innovation that Rome lacked, the restoration of something like monetary sovereignty to the state — provides a buffer that the third-century emperors entirely lacked. A US president or a UK chancellor can, in the last resort, instruct the central bank to create the money necessary to fund public expenditure in a way that no Roman emperor could manufacture silver. Whether this buffer is unlimited, and whether the political conditions for using it can be assembled against oligarchic resistance, is a different and harder question. But it means that we are not, on this timeline, obviously in the 260s CE. Whether we are closer to 180 or to 235 — the moment at which the crisis became acute rather than merely structural — I find genuinely difficult to determine, and I would be suspicious of anyone who claimed otherwise with confidence.
Conclusion
The parallel between Rome’s third-century perma-crisis and the contemporary crisis of Western democratic governance is real, structurally grounded, and more precise than its most visible advocates have appreciated. It is not, at its core, a story about the decline of individual political leadership — though the decline is real enough. It is a story about what happens when the structural conditions for effective governance are systematically destroyed by the class that controls the constitutional machinery. The Roman oligarchy, having converted the republic into an instrument for its own enrichment and having suppressed every attempt at structural reform with lethal efficiency, produced an empire that could cycle through emperors without limit because no emperor could solve the problems that the oligarchy’s own behaviour had created.
The Western democratic oligarchy — operating through financial markets, institutional frameworks, and the ideological inheritance of Roman pro-creditor law rather than through the Senate and the legions — has produced something structurally similar: a political system that cycles through leaders without limit because no leader can solve the problems that the oligarchy’s own behaviour has created. The electorate, playing the role of the Praetorian Guard, changes the emperor with increasing frequency and increasing frustration. Each new emperor promises something different. The wiring behind the wall remains untouched.
This is not a counsel of despair — or rather, it need not be. The Byzantine example, which I have examined in some detail in the companion chapter to this discussion, demonstrates that the Roman trajectory was a choice rather than an inevitability: emperors who commanded sufficient political will to override oligarchic property claims produced periods of exceptional stability. The institutional will to reverse oligarchic accumulation was the difference between a civilisation that lasted seven centuries and one that lasted twenty. The question for the contemporary West is not whether such a will could exist. It is whether the democratic form, which the Roman world entirely lacked, might yet prove to be the mechanism through which it is assembled.
One is tempted to conclude that the evidence suggests it cannot. On this occasion, I shall resist the temptation — not from optimism, but because the question has not yet been answered. History, as the third century demonstrates with bleak consistency, is capable of providing answers that no one who commissioned the question had any reason to want.
Bibliography
Michael Hudson, The Collapse of Antiquity: Greece and Rome as Civilization’s Oligarchic Turning Point (ISLET-Verlag, 2023)
https://michael-hudson.com/tag/the-collapse-of-antiquity/
Peter Heather and John Rapley, Why Empires Fall: Rome, America, and the Future of the West (Yale University Press, 2023)
https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300280081/why-empires-fall/
Sheldon S. Wolin, Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism (Princeton University Press, 2008)
https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691145891/democracy-incorporated
Peter Turchin, End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites and the Path of Political Disintegration (Penguin Press, 2023)
https://peterturchin.com/end-times/
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https://peterturchin.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/Turchin_JPR2012.pdf
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