Category Archives: History

The Rise and Fall of Prussia

1 September 2026 By in Books Nonfiction, History Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Most who encounter Prussia for the first time meet it in its final incarnation: the iron‑ribbed-fisted kingdom that defeated France in 1870, unified Germany, and marched at the head of Europe’s most disciplined army. This is the Prussia of Bismarck and Moltke: bureaucratic, militarized, unmistakably German. A modern state that the 20th century spent millions of lives ensuring would disappear forever. But this was only the end of Prussian history. Its beginning reaches back centuries and is just as dramatic: a story of conquest, intrigue, and violence; of knights, kings, and popes.

The Prussia Bismarck forged in the 19th century was not the Prussia the Hohenzollerns inherited in 1525, nor the Prussia the crusading Teutonic Knights built beginning in 1226. And it certainly was not the Prussia that existed before any of them: the Prussia without a name.

Prussia is a palimpsest: three different histories written over the same land. Each layer overwrote the last, yet traces remain. Long before the Teutonic Order arrived, the region was a mosaic of Baltic tribal homelands inhabited by the peoples later called the Old Prussians. Pomesanians, Pogesanians, Warmians, Natangians, Sambians, Barts, Galindians, and Sudovians shared related languages and pagan religious practices, but never formed a unified political entity or adopted a single name for their territory. Medieval chroniclers, needing a geographic label, simply called it terra Pruthenorum: “the land of the Prussians,” an exonym derived from the people rather than any indigenous place‑name.

The peoples the Teutonic Knights fought in Prussia and Lithuania were the indigenous descendants of the ancient Balts, an Indo‑European group that had occupied the Baltic forests and coasts for two, perhaps three millennia. They were not Germanic, not migrants, and not related to the tribes Rome or Charlemagne fought. Their resistance was the last stand of Europe’s oldest surviving pagan cultures. Christianity arrived late; Lithuania remained officially pagan until the late 14th century.

Thus, long before the crusading conquest by Catholic monastic knights, “Prussia” existed only as an ethnographic zone: a patchwork of fortified settlements, sacred groves, and tribal districts loosely bound by culture and kinship, not by statehood. When the Teutonic Knights arrived in the 13th century, they conquered a land already known to Europeans as Prussia, but one that had never been a unified realm until the Order imposed its monastic state upon it.

The Order itself had begun far away. The “Order of the German House of St. Mary in Jerusalem” (Ordo domus Sanctae Mariae Theutonicorum Hierosolymitanorum) was founded in Acre, now a northern Israeli Mediterranean city, as a German Marian hospital order, caring for pilgrims and wounded crusaders. Only later did it transform into a Baltic crusading power. The Teutonic Knights were both monks and warriors: a deliberate fusion of religious vows and military service, a Crusader invention.

The Teutonic Order’s transformation into a Baltic crusading state began only after 1226, when Konrad I of Masovia, was losing the brutal border war he had initiated against the pagan Prussians. Konrad’s attempts to seize Prussian lands had failed, and the tribes repaid his aggression with devastating raids into Masovia. Unable to contain these incursions, and lacking support from his fellow Piast dukes; the first ruling dynasty of Poland, Konrad turned to the Teutonic Knights: a disciplined military‑monastic order answerable to the papacy.

Before entering Prussia in 1231, the Knights secured two crucial forms of backing. The first was the Golden Bull of Rimini (1226), in which Frederick II granted them sovereign rights over any territory they might conquer, independence from Polish control, and full imperial protection. The second was papal encouragement from Honorius III, who approved their mission but did not yet define their political status.

Konrad never intended to grant the Knights sovereignty, but the Order used imperial and papal law to turn his plea for help into the foundation of their own state. The Baltic conquest was not improvised, but the knights needed additional authority to turn their victories into sovereignty.

The decisive turn of events for the Knights came under Pope Gregory IX. In 1234, Gregory issued bulls: papal legal documents, that confirmed Frederick’s grants, declared the Prussian campaigns a full crusade, and placed the Order under direct papal protection. With this act, the Knights’ foothold became a permanent crusading dominion. Their wars were now holy wars; their conquests legally theirs; their authority recognized by both empire and papacy. The Knights could now exercise king-like authority over the Baltic lands.

Once entrenched, the Teutonic Knights spent three centuries conquering and christianizing the Baltic, importing German settlers, building cities, and waging crusades against Lithuania and Poland. Their monastic state reached its height in the 14th century, then declined after the defeat at Grunwald (1410) and the loss of western Prussia to Poland (1466). By 1500, the Knights Order‑State was a hollow, bankrupt frontier that they could no longer sustain.

In 1525, the Teutonic Order under the Grand Master, Albert of Hohenzollern dissolved its state and secularized its remaining lands creating the Duchy of Prussia. The Teutonic Knights’ Baltic lands did not revert to Polish control though. They became a semi‑autonomous Lutheran state ruled by Albert of Hohenzollern as a vassal of the Polish Crown. Poland gained overlordship, but not direct possession.

Next came the Thirty Years’ War created the conditions that made a Prussian kingdom possible. Prior to the war the Hohenzollerns’ main territory: Brandenburg, was inside the Holy Roman Empire, while the former Teutonic lands of Ducal Prussia were outside it and under Polish suzerainty. This odd dual structure only becomes politically potent because of what the Thirty Years’ War does to, and ultimately for Brandenburg.

Brandenburg was one of the most ravaged regions in the Empire during the war. Some estimates put its populations losses at 50% with concurrent economic collapse, and political paralysis of the individual fiefdoms.  Frederick William, the Great Elector, concluded that Brandenburg could not survive as an estate-dominated state. The war forced him to build a permanent army, form a centralized bureaucracy, create a centralized taxing authority, and finally destroy the political reach of the estates.

Poland, fighting Sweden in the Northern Wars, needed allies, and Frederick William: ever the opportunist, filled that need. In the Treaty of Wehlau (1657) and the Treaty of Oliva (1660), Poland granted the Hohenzollerns full sovereignty over Ducal Prussia. This sovereignty did not make Frederick William a king, but it made kingship possible.

When Frederick William died in 1688, his son Frederick III inherited a militarized Brandenburg and a sovereign Prussia. In 1701, with imperial approval, he crowned himself Frederick I, King in Prussia; a title possible only because Prussia lay outside the Holy Roman Empire. This act transformed the Hohenzollerns from mere electors into kings and marked the beginning of Prussia’s rise as a great power.

The war almost destroyed Brandenburg but, in the end, it made it stronger. Before the war it was weak and disorganized. After the war it shows the beginnings of future Prussian power.

Through continued careful diplomacy and opportunistic events, the Hohenzollerns transformed this peripheral duchy into a sovereign kingdom by 1701 and then into the dominant German power on into the early 20th century. Under the Hohenzollerns, Prussia became synonymous with disciplined governance, military efficiency, and relentless state-building.

In the 19th century, Otto von Bismarck completed the Prussian project. Using war, diplomacy, and political manipulation, he unified the German states under Prussian leadership, culminating in the proclamation of the German Empire in 1871. By then, “Prussia” had evolved from an ethnographic Baltic region into the engine of German nationhood; a transformation spanning six centuries and three radically different political worlds.

By the end of the First World War, the Prussian monarchy had collapsed. Between 1933 and 1935, the Nazi regime dismantled what remained of Prussia’s federal institutions, absorbing its administration into the centralized Reich. After Germany’s defeat in 1945, the Allies governed the country through the Allied Control Council. In February 1947, Allied Control Council Law No. 46 formally abolished the State of Prussia, declaring it a historical bearer of German militarism and dissolving its remaining administrative structures. Thus ended a political entity whose origins lay in Baltic tribal homelands, whose rise was forged by crusading monks and Hohenzollern kings, and whose legacy shaped the fate of Europe for centuries.

Post note:

The first half of the book: History of Prussia is one dimensional and exceptionally incomplete (2 Stars). The Franco-Prussian War is told with enough concise precision to make reading this book worthwhile (3 Stars).

Radom Thoughts in Search of a Narrative

27 July 2026 By in History Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Wood is evolution’s most durable invention. The material that made height, permanence, and stability possible. When trees rose, the world changed: ecosystems and climates steadied, and the conditions for complex life expanded. Long before humans appeared, wood was already shaping the stage we would inherit. Without trees, life would be harsher; without wood, civilization would never have found its footing.

Trees emerged more than 385 million years ago and have since diversified into over 73,000 known species and, by some estimates, roughly three trillion individuals. They anchor ecosystems, feed and shelter life, and help regulate the planet’s climate. Yet they resist definition. “Tree” is not a single lineage but a recurring evolutionary strategy; the decision to rise above other plants by building height, structure, and longevity.

At its broadest definition, a tree is simply a perennial plant with a trunk and branching leaves. This inclusive definition sweeps in tree ferns, palms, bananas, and other tall monocots. Stricter definitions insist on woody tissue and secondary growth, limiting “trees” to the gymnosperms and angiosperms: conifers and hardwoods. Still other definitions narrow the term to plants capable of producing lumber or exceeding a certain height. The ambiguity is not really a flaw but more a clue to their diversity: trees are not defined by their ancestry but by their form.

The adaptation that gave trees their decisive advantage was the evolution of secondary xylem, or true wood. A ring of vascular tissue: the cambium, laid down successive layers of lignified support, allowing trunks to resist gravity and wind. With wood, plants could grow taller, capture more sunlight, and outcompete the low canopy. Height became an advantage and a renewable resource.

The earliest trees we know of belong to the tree ferns and the enigmatic cladoxylopsids of the Devonian, around 385 million years ago. Gymnosperms followed roughly around 319 million years ago, dominating vast forests through the Carboniferous and Permian. Flowering trees or the angiosperms: appeared in the Cretaceous and began overtaking conifers during the Tertiary, reshaping forests into the forms we recognize today.

When the first true trees appeared, they did so on a planet whose landmasses were slowly converging into a single supercontinent. By the Late Carboniferous and Permian, nearly all terrestrial surfaces were fused into Pangaea, a world with vast continental interiors far from the moderating influence of the sea. This geography shaped the evolution and distribution of early forests. The interior of Pangaea was marked by extreme seasonality; scorching summers, frigid winters, and long dry intervals, conditions that favored drought‑tolerant, cold‑resistant, and fire‑adapted trees. Conifers, cycads, ginkgos, and seed ferns thrived in these demanding environments, their anatomies tuned to stress: thick bark, needle‑like leaves, deep roots, and wood optimized for survival rather than speed.

Moisture was scarce far from the coasts, and tropical humidity was confined to narrow belts along the supercontinent’s margins. As a result, Pangaea’s forests were not lush, sprawling jungles but mosaics of hardy gymnosperms, polar forests capable of enduring months of darkness, and southern Gondwanan expanses dominated by Glossopteris and other cool‑climate flora. The supercontinent constrained tree evolution; it rewarded survival over diversity.

The breakup of Pangaea at the dawn of the Mesozoic transformed this picture. As rifting began in the Triassic and accelerated through the Jurassic, new coastlines formed, shallow seas flooded continental margins, and maritime climates replaced interior aridity. Continents drifted into new latitudes, expanding tropical belts and creating humid monsoon zones. The fragmentation of land produced ecological variety: islands, peninsulas, archipelagos, and isolated basins; each a laboratory for evolutionary experimentation.

These changes opened ecological space that flowering plants would later exploit. Angiosperms appear in the Early Cretaceous, but their explosive rise depends on the world created by Pangaea’s dissolution: warm, wet climates; diverse habitats; and the proliferation of pollinators and seed dispersers. As Gondwana itself broke apart, its daughter continents carried distinct floras with them. South America developed Araucaria and Nothofagus forests; Australia evolved eucalypts and casuarinas; Africa retained ancient podocarps; India drifted northward into the tropics and became a crucible for angiosperm radiation. Even Antarctica, then forested, hosted conifers and southern beeches before drifting into its deep freeze.

In short, Pangaea’s existence limited the diversity of trees by imposing climatic extremes and ecological uniformity. Its breakup liberated them. The Mesozoic world became a patchwork of climates and landscapes, and trees responded with an evolutionary flowering that reshaped the planet’s forests into the forms we recognize today.

Moving into the Tertiary repeated glacial–interglacial cycles, intensifying from late Miocene cooling through the Pliocene and into the full Quaternary ice‑age regime, drove major contractions, expansions, and reorganizations of Earth’s forests. Cooling, drying, lower atmospheric CO₂, advancing ice sheets, falling sea levels, and shifting precipitation patterns forced forests to migrate, fragment, and reassemble again and again.

Long-term Cenozoic cooling accelerated in the late Miocene (~7–5 Ma), just as early hominins were beginning to appear. Subtropical and mid‑latitude regions dried as the hydrological cycle weakened. Closed-canopy forests contracted; grasslands and savannas expanded across Africa, Asia, North America, and South America. Fire regimes intensified under more seasonal climates, helping convert woodlands into open grassy biomes. Rainforests retreated from many subtropical regions, setting the stage for the more extreme oscillations to come.

Once Northern Hemisphere ice sheets became prominent (~2.6 Ma onward), 40–100 kyr cycles produced repeated, large-amplitude swings. Ice sheets covered vast areas of North America, Europe, and Asia, pushing forests southward or into isolated pockets. Continuous temperate and mixed forests vanished from high and mid‑latitudes. Boreal forests shifted far south; spruce‑ and pine‑dominated vegetation reached into what is now the southeastern United States. Across Europe and Siberia, treeless steppe, tundra, and parkland expanded.

Tropical forests fragmented under cooler, drier conditions, lower CO₂, and increased fire, breaking into mosaics of forest, woodland, and grassland.

During interglacials, including the present Holocene, ice retreated, temperatures rose, and forests surged northward and upslope. Boreal forests reclaimed high latitudes; temperate deciduous forests recolonized mid‑latitudes; tropical forests coalesced again. Migration rates were rapid, often several to more than ten kilometers per century, limited only by seed dispersal, soil development, and competition. Some regions experienced temporary prairie or oak‑savanna expansions during warmer, drier intervals.

Forests survived glacial extremes in southern peninsulas, unglaciated corridors, lower‑latitude pockets, and moisture‑retaining microhabitats. Repeated isolation caused population bottlenecks, genetic differentiation, and later mixing during recolonization. Some warm‑temperate taxa disappeared entirely from Europe and North America, unable to migrate past barriers such as the Mediterranean. Tropical forests experienced range contractions and population declines. Modern boreal, temperate, and tropical forest distributions still reflect post‑glacial recolonization from these refugia.

In short, the Miocene–Pleistocene cycles transformed the extensive forests of the mid‑Miocene into oscillating biomes: forests compressed southward during glacials, fragmented into refugia, and expanded again during interglacials. These rhythms left permanent marks on species ranges, diversity, and genetic structure.

At the dawn of agriculture, forests covered nearly six billion hectares (14.8 billion acres); more than half of Earth’s habitable land. It was into this heavily forested world that humanity began its long, transformative relationship with wood: a relationship that would shape every early society. Wood is the first material we mastered, the first technology we shaped, and the foundation on which every early human society stood. Humanity entered a world dominated by trees, and from the first fields onward, civilization grew by cutting, shaping, burning, and building with wood.

To understand how agriculture transformed our relationship with wood, we must first look at the simpler relationship that came before it.

Long before humans shaped wood, we burned it. Fire is humanity’s oldest tool, and wood its earliest fuel. Hominins were using fire at least a million years ago, but this relationship was simple: gather fallen branches, feed the flames, survive the night. Fire changed our bodies, our diets, and our social lives; but it did not yet bind us to trees in any transformative way. Wood was energy, not yet material.

Around ten thousand years ago, as the last ice sheets retreated and the Holocene stabilized, humans began to cultivate plants and settle permanently. We entered a world dominated by trees, and the first civilizing acts of agriculture was to cut them down.

The earliest farmers cleared forests not with axes but with fire. They burned woodland to open fields, enrich soil with ash, and drive away animals. What had once been a scattered, opportunistic use of wood became systematic. Forests that had expanded northward during the interglacial now faced a new force of contraction: human need for open land and wood.

With agriculture came human roots. Settlements required structures; structures required timber. Tools needed handles; fields needed fences; granaries needed beams. Wood became the backbone of early technology: the material for digging sticks, hoes, plows, and irrigation troughs. Fire remained essential, but now it served new purposes; firing pottery, hardening wooden points, and later smelting metal. Wood was no longer simply fuel; it was infrastructure of civilization.

Agriculture also created scarcity. As villages grew into towns, and towns into early cities, the demand for wood intensified. Forests that had survived ice ages, droughts, and tectonic shifts now faced continuous clearing. Coppicing, managed woodland, and selective cutting emerged as early forms of forestry. Humanity began to understand that wood was both renewable and exhaustible; a resource that required care even as it was consumed.

This is the true beginning of the Age of Wood: not in the canopy with proto‑hominins, but in the fields of the first farmers. Fire made us human; agriculture made us dependent on wood. From this point forward, the story of civilization is inseparable from the story of forests. How we cut them, shaped them, burned them, used them to build, and eventually learned how to manage them.

The Age of Wood is an energetic and imaginative book. Ennos writes with a biologist’s curiosity, a craftsman’s affection for materials, and a genuine sense of wonder at the role wood has played in human civilization. His pages are full of lively observations; how wood burns, how it bends, how it shapes tools, shelters, ships, and societies. There is real enthusiasm in his writing, and real pleasure in following his mind as it leaps from one wooden artifact to another.

Yet enthusiasm is not structure, and curiosity is not chronology. Ennos’s book flutters from topic to topic without ever quite putting down roots. It gestures toward the deep history of wood, but it never begins at the beginning: with trees themselves. What a tree is, when trees arose, and how they came to dominate the terrestrial world are questions that remain largely unasked in his narrative. The result is a book full of interesting moments but lacking the foundational story that would give those moments coherence.

This essay attempts to supply that missing foundation. Before one can tell the story of wood and civilization, one must understand the story of trees: their evolutionary invention of wood, their rise on a changing planet, their spread across continents, their contraction and expansion under ice and climate, and the world they created by the time humans first began to cut them down. Only with that deeper history in view does humanity’s relationship with wood become clear; not a series of disconnected anecdotes, but a long, symbiotic entanglement between a species and a material that shaped its destiny.

Ennos chose to present wood as a sequence of bullet points, each interesting but only loosely connected. The deeper story is richer: wood as an evolutionary breakthrough, forests as planetary architects, and humanity as the inheritor of a world built by trees. The Age of Wood could have been a more enlightening treatment of this relationship, but its foundation was never laid. Hopefully this essay provides that foundation.

Graphic: Stave Church, Minot, ND, USA.  Source: The Age of Wood by Roland Ennos. 2020.

Power Corrupts

24 March 2026 By in Books Nonfiction, History Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Publius Cornelius Tacitus (c. 56–120 AD), Roman historian, orator, and statesman, was born into a wealthy equestrian family and rose through the imperial system during the Flavian dynasty (Emperors Vespasian, Titus, and Domitian). He began his public career under Vespasian, receiving the latus clavus that marked him for the senatorial track, and entered the Senate itself as quaestor under Titus. His advancement continued under Domitian, whose autocratic rule left a deep imprint on his political philosophy and the cynical tone of his future writings. Tacitus became praetor in 88, suffect consul in 97 under Nerva, and ultimately proconsul of Asia in 112–113 under Trajan; one of the most prestigious governorships available to a senator.

Tacitus’s praenomen has long been debated. Sidonius Apollinaris calls him Gaius, but the principal manuscript tradition gives Publius, now the generally accepted form. The name itself was common in the Republic and famously borne by Publius Valerius Publicola, one of Rome’s early founders. When Hamilton, Madison, and Jay adopted “Publius” as their shared pseudonym for the Federalist Papers, they invoked that republican lineage. The choice was not meant to evoke Tacitus directly, yet the intellectual affinity is unmistakable: the founders read Tacitus closely, admired his moral rigor, and shared his preoccupation with how republics decay into autocracy. Tacitus lays bare the psychology of power and the corrosion of institutions, the hard, universal truth that power corrupts. The Federalist authors attempted to design constitutional structures resistant to precisely those dangers.

Understanding Tacitus’s background clarifies why these themes resonated so strongly. The equestrian order into which he was born had evolved far from its early republican role as a cavalry class. By the first century it had become, in the Roman class hierarchy, a wealthy administrative elite just below the Senate, supplying imperial procurators, financial officers, and provincial administrators; the managerial backbone of the empire. His family’s standing enabled him to enter the cursus honorum under the Flavians: Vespasian (69–79), Titus (79–81), and Domitian (81–96). As a young man he moved from the preparatory rank of the latus clavus into the Senate proper as quaestor, then advanced through praetorship, priesthood, and consulship before receiving the proconsulship of Asia.

Tacitus’s entire political formation occurred under the tutelage of emperors, but it was the republican aristocracy of old that he idealized. He rose because of the imperial system and later turned cynical because of its corrupt morality. The bitterness, irony, and forensic detail of his Histories and Annals emerge from those hard lessons learned at the feet of emperors and from years spent inside the senatorial class.

Your first encounter with Tacitus’s writings is usually one of frustration bordering on bewilderment. Context is sparse, dates are assumed, and linear narrative is treated as optional. To understand him, you must stop reading him as a dry; and his Annals can be dry, dispassionate chronicler of the recent past and start seeing him as a man writing under the weight of hard lessons learned, and sometimes personally endured. His Annals and Histories are not balanced accounts of the early empire; they are the literary equivalent of a post‑mortem. He writes as someone convinced that Rome’s better days were behind it. Everything in his style follows from that conviction: the selective focus, the moral compression, the absence of counterarguments, the uneven chronology, the disproportionate attention to monstrous emperors, and the silence around Rome’s achievements. Like many modern historians, he is heavy on interpretation and opinion, weighted toward failures and abuses, and nearly silent on the empire’s prosperity, engineering feats, or legal innovations such as due process and justice.

Tacitus’s narrative imbalance is not an accident; it is his purpose. In Annals he states, “I write without anger or partiality, for these are feelings I have long put aside… My purpose is to relate… without either bitterness or servility.” He writes for a narrow audience: senators of his own generation, who already knew the timeline, the emperors, the scandals, and the public record. They did not need dates or context; they needed a non‑imperial interpretation. They needed someone to explain how a state that once prided itself on civic virtue and shared governance had become a place where fear, flattery, and corruption were the normal conditions of political life. Tacitus assumes his readers know the “what.” He believed his task was to show them the “why.” That is why the Annals sometimes feel like diary fragments in their immediacy: Tacitus is relying on the imperially sanctioned record while quietly correcting it, without exposing himself to the charge of attacking the regime’s memory. The Histories, written earlier, have a different texture, closer to tragic prose than diary. Tacitus lived through the events they describe; his memory is fresher, his indignation sharper. To him, the Histories were tragedy, and the Annals the farce that served as prologue.

He gives inordinate space to Caligula, Nero, and Vitellius and so little to the emperors who governed competently. The monsters reveal the system’s truth. In Annals he justifies this center of gravity: “Under Tiberius, all was secrecy and suspicion… Nero, who defiled himself by every cruelty and shame.” In Histories he elaborates: “Vitellius… a man who could not rule himself, much less the empire.” Tacitus chooses emperors who embody the moral recidivism he wants to expose. The decent rulers obscure it. He is not interested in balance because balance would dilute his narrative. He is not trying to persuade, only to write a history before the sanitized version takes root. His Rome is a place where power has become addictive, where institutions have rotted from within, where citizens have withdrawn into resignation, and where the machinery of the state grows even as trust declines. That is the world he wants his readers to confront.

This is why Tacitus feels so contemporary. Modern societies that lose confidence in their institutions often follow the same arc he describes. A negative narrative, whether born from war, scandal, abuse of power, or cultural disillusionment, does not only describe the past but also the present. When people internalize a story of corruption or decline, they become less willing to participate, less confident in self‑government, and more susceptible to the quiet expansion of bureaucratic power. Distrust does not produce resistance; it produces apathy. And apathy creates a vacuum. And vacuums are always filled by those willing to seize power. Tacitus watched this happen in Rome: a population that despised the emperors but feared instability more. He expands on this in Histories: “We witness the worst crimes not by the wicked but by the weak.” And again: “The desire for safety is the greatest of dangers.” Citizens gave up freedom for safety and eventually had neither.

Does Tacitus matter today? Probably not because his emperors resemble modern leaders, but because the psychological and structural patterns he describes are universal. When society’s dominant narrative becomes one of failure, corruption, or moral exhaustion, the political consequences tend to run in one direction: more centralization, more administrative power, more resignation, and less freedom. Tacitus is not relevant because he predicted our world; he is relevant because he understood how people behave when they no longer trust their own institutions. His works endure because they capture a recurring human pattern: once power becomes the default solution to fear, it grows, and once it grows, it rarely shrinks except through collapse or death.

The question his writing leaves us with is not whether Rome fell, but whether any society can recover its confidence once it has embraced safety for freedom. In Annals he states, “The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws.” This is Tacitus’s worldview in a single stroke: power expands as virtue contracts and freedom fades. In Histories he expands on this thought: “No one has ever wished for power to preserve the liberty of others.” A sentiment the Federalist Papers and the Constitution itself tried to address and avoid. The founders recognized, as Tacitus had before them, that only the restraint of power preserves the liberty it always threatens to consume.

Source: Tacitus: Annals and Histories, 2009, multiple translators. Graphic: Tacitus, Vienna. 2009 Photo by Pe-Jo. Public Domain.

The Lost Boys

24 August 2025 By in History, History, Philosophy, Philosophy Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

The end of the Peloponnesian War in 404 BC marked the end of Athens’ Golden Age. Most historians agree that the halcyon days of Athens were behind her.  Some however, such as Victor Davis Hanson in his multi-genre meditations, A War Like No Other, a discourse on military history, cultural decay, and philosophical framing, offers a more nuanced view suggesting that Athens was still capable of greatness, but the lights were dimming.

During the following six decades, after the war, Athens rebuilt. Its navy reached new heights. Its long walls were rebuilt within a decade. Aristophanes retained his satirical edge even if it was a bit more reflective. Agriculture returned in force. Even Sparta reconciled with Athens or vice versa, recognizing once again that the true enemy was Persia.

Athens brought back its material greatness, but its soul was lost. What ended the Golden Age of Athens wasn’t crumbled walls or sunken ships. It was the loss of lives that took the memory, the virtuosity of greatness with it. With them generational continuity, civic pride, and a religious belief in the polis vanished. The meaning, truth, and myth of Athenian exceptionalism died with their passing. The architects of how to lead a successful, purpose driven civilization had disappeared, mostly through death by war or state but also by plague.

Victor Davis Hanson, in his A War Like No Other lists many of the lives lost to and during the war that took much of Athens’ exceptionalism with them to their graves. Below is a partial listing of Hanson’s more complete rendering with some presumptuous additions.

Alcibiades was an overtly ambitious Athenian strategist; brilliant, erratic, and ultimately treasonous. He championed the disastrous Sicilian expedition, Athens greatest defeat. Over the course of the war, he defected multiple times: serving Athens, then Sparta, then Persia, before returning to Athens. He was assassinated in Phrygia around 404 BC while under Persian protection, by, many beleive, the instigation of the Spartan general Lysander.

Euripides though he did not fight in the war exposed its brutality and hypocrisy in his plays such as The Trojan Woman and Helen. The people were not sufficiently appreciative of his war opinions or plays, winning only four firsts at Dionysia compared to 24 and 13 for Sophocles and Aeschylus, respectively. Disillusioned, he went into self-imposed exile in Macedonia and died there around 406 BC by circumstances unknown.

The execution of the Generals of Arginusae remains a legendary example of Athenian arbitrary retribution; proof that a city obsessed with ritualized honor could nullify military genius, and its future, in a single stroke. The naval Battle of Arginusae, fought in 406 BC, east of the Greek island of Lesbos, was the last major Athenian victory over the Spartans in the Peloponnesian War. Athenian command of the battle was split between 8 generals: Aristocrates, Aristogenes, Dimedon, Erasinides, Lysias, Pericles the Younger (son of Pericles), Protomachus, and Thrasyllus. After their victory over the Spartan fleet a storm prevented the Athenians from recovering the survivors, and the dead, from their sunken ships. Of the six generals that returned to Athens all were executed for their negligence. Protomachus and Aristogenes, likely knowing their fate, chose not to return and went into exile.

Pericles, the flesh and blood representation of Athens’ greatness was the statesman and general who led the city-state during its golden age. He died of the plague in 429 BC during the war’s early years, taking with him the vision of democratic governance and Athens’ exceptionalism. His 3 legitimate sons all died during the war. His two oldest boys likely died of the plague around 429 BC and Pericles the Younger was executed for his part in the Battle of Arginusae.

Socrates, the world’s greatest philosopher (yes greater than Plato or Aristotle) fought bravely in the war, but he was directly linked to the traitor Alcibiades. He was tried and killed in 399 BC for subverting the youth and not giving the gods their due. That was all pretense. Athens desired to wash their collective hands of the war and Socrates was a very visible reminder of that. He became a ritual scapegoat swept up into the collective expurgation of the war’s memory.

Sophocles, already a man of many years by the beginning of the war, died in 406 BC at the age of 90 or 91, a few years before Athens’ final collapse. His tragedies embodied the ethical and civic pressures of a society unraveling. With the deaths of Aeschylus in 456 BC, Euripides in 406 BC, and Sophocles soon after, the golden age of Greek tragedy came to a close.

Thucydides, author of the scholarly standard for the Peloponnesian War, was exiled after ‘allowing’ the Spartans to capture Amphipolis, He survived the war, and the plague, but never returned to Athens. His History ends in mid-sentence for the period up to 411 BC. He lived till 400 BC, and no one really knows why he didn’t finish his account of the war. Xenophon picked up where Thucydides left off and finished up the war in his first two books of Hellenica which he composed somewhere in the 380s BC.

The Peloponnesian War ended Athens’ greatest days. The men who kept its lights bright were gone. Its material greatness returned, glowing briefly, but its civic greatness, its soul, slowly dimmed. It was a candle in the wind of time that would be rekindled elsewhere. The world would fondly remember its glory, but Athens had lost its spark.

Source: A War Like No Other by Victor Davis Hanson, 2005. Graphic: Alcibiades Being Taught by Socrates, Francois-Andre Vincent, 1776. Musee Fabre, France. Public Domain.

The Sum of All Fears–Real and Imagined

17 August 2025 By in History, Philosophy, Philosophy Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

The Peloponnesian War, fought over 27 years (431-404 BC), cost the ancient Greek world nearly everything. War deaths alone approached 8-10 percent of their population: up to 200,000 deaths from battle and plague. The conflict engulfed nearly all of Greece, from the mainland to the Aegean islands, Asia Minor and Sicily. Though Sparta and its allies, in the end, claimed a tactical victory, the war left Greece as a shadow of its former self.

The Golden Age of Athens came to an end. Athenian democracy was replaced, briefly, by the Thirty Tyrants. Sparta, unwilling to jettison its insular oligarchy, failed to adapt to imperial governance, naval power, or diplomatic nuance. Within a generation Sparta was a relic of history.  First challenged by former allies in the Corinthian War, then shattered by Thebes, which stripped the martial city-state of its aura of invincibility along with its helot slave labor base: the economic foundation of Sparta. Another generation later, Macedon under Philip II and Alexander the Great finished off Greek dominance of the Mediterranean. After Alexander’s death in 323 BC, Rome gradually absorbed all the fractured pieces. Proving again, building an empire is easier than keeping one.

Thucydides, heir to the world’s first historian: Herodotus, reduced the origins of the Peloponnesian War to a primal emotion: fear. In Book I of his History of the Peloponnesian War he writes: “The growth of the power of Athens, and the alarm which this inspired in Sparta, made war inevitable.” Athens had violated trade terms under the Megarian Decree with a minor Spartan ally but that was pretext, not cause. Sparta did not go to war over market access. It went to war over fear. Fear of what Athens had become and a future that armies and treaties may not contain.

War and fear go together like flame to fuse. Sparta went to war not for fear of a foe, Sparta knew no such people. It was not fear of an unknown warrior, nor fear of battlefields yet to be choregraphed, but fear of an idea: democracy maintained and backed by Athenian power. And perhaps, more hauntingly precise, fear of itself. Not that it feared it was weak but of what it may become. They feared no sword or spear, their discipline reigned supreme against flesh and blood. Yet no formation, no stratagem, no tactic of war could bring down a simple Athenian belief: the rule of the many, an idea anathema, heretical even, to the Spartan way of life.

So, they marched to war, not to defeat an idea but to silence the source. Not to avenge past aggression but to stop a future annexation. They won battles, small and large. They razed cities. But they only destroyed men. The idea survived. It survived in fragments, bits here, bits there, across time and memory. What it did kill, though, was the spirit of Athens, the Golden Age of Athens. But the idea that was Athens lived on across space and time: chiseled into republics that rose from its ashes and ruins.

The radiance of Athens dimmed to shadow. Socrates became inconvenient. Theater became therapy; a palliative smothering of a cultural surrender. And so, civilization moved to Rome.

Source: A War Like No Other by Victor Davis Hanson, 2005. History of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides, Translated by Richard Crawley, 2021. Graphic: Syracuse vs Athens Naval Battle. CoPilot.

Phalanx: Discipline in Geometry

11 August 2025 By in History, History Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Near the ancient Sumerian city of Girsu, mid-way between present-day Bagdad and Kuwait City, stood a battle marker; the Stele of Vultures, now housed in the Louvre. It commemorates Lagash’s 3rd millennium BC victory over Umma. The stele derives its name from the monument’s carved vultures flying away with the heads of the dead.  It also depicts soldiers of Lagash marching in a dense, shield to shield formation, holding spears chest high and horizontal, led by their ruler: Eannatum, who commissioned the stele in 2460 BC. The importance of the stele, though, is that it is the first visual depiction of the use of a phalanx in a battle. It is believed that the phalanx as a military tactic is much older.

The phalanx was more than a combat formation, it was a battlefield philosophy enshrining discipline and courage over strength, unity of the team over the individual. A dense, rectangular wall of men, generally 8 deep stretching across the battlefield to protect against flanking maneuvers. Each man wore heavy armor of leather and bronze: helmet, cuirass, greaves, armed with a spear and a short sword. But the breakthrough that brought the phalanx great renown was the apsis, a round shield invented for the Greek hoplite in the 8th or 7th century BC. With its dual grip, a forearm strap and central handhold, it allowed the infantryman precise control of his shield, helping create an impenetrable barrier of bronze and bone against the oncoming enemy’s spears and swords. It transformed the phalanx from an offensive wall of attack to an added defensive engine of defiance.

The phalanx only succeeded in cohesion. When courage and discipline held, the formation with the apsis as its core defense was practically unbeatable on confined terrain. It overcame the enemy with a seamless, tight mass executing a relentless forward march into the belly of the opposing beast. But it was only as strong as its weakest link. Once discipline faltered and cohesion broke, the formation collapsed, and the opposing army ran it to ground. Victory belonged not to brute force, but to the combined strength of the military unit. Teams won, individuals lost.

From late 8th century BC onward, Greek phalanxes were manned by hoplites: citizen soldiers, generally landowners and farmers. Emerging in Sparta or Argos, possibly imported from Sumeria or born of parallel discovery in Greece, phalanx battles initially were confined, blunt, and deadly affairs. They devolved into fierce pushing masses of brawn, bone, and metal until one side broke. Heavy casualties occurred when the enemy lines broke and soldiers fled Helter skelter in shock and chaos, pursued by the victors for plunder, unless they were restrained by honor.

The phalanx became the standard that destroyed the mighty Persian armies at Marathon and Thermopylae early in the 5th century BC. At Marathon in 490 BC 10,000 Athenians and 1000 Plataeans stretched out their formation to match the breadth of 26,000 Persians, filling the Marathon plain and denying the armies any room for flanking movements.

The Greeks stacked their wings with additional rows of hoplites and thinned them progressively toward the center creating a convex crescent. The Greek wings advance faster than the center generating a pincer movement that collapsed on the Persian center. When the dust settled 192 Athenians and 11 Plataeans were lost while the Persian losses were approximated at 6400.

In the 19th century, Napoleon, possibly improvising on phalanx encircling tactics developed at Marathon, would invert his attacking army with a concave formation consisting of a strong center and weaker wings. His strategy being to split the enemies’ center with strength and attack their divided ranks on the flanks. The tactic worked until Wellington at Waterloo.

At Marathon, unity triumphed with geometric discipline. At Thermopylae the formation bought time and ended with a sacrifice that concluded Persian hubris.

During the second Persian invasion in 480 BC, Darius’s son Xerxes with 120,000-300,000 men attacked a contingent of 7000 Greeks at Thermopylae. The Greeks held back the Persian advance like a cork in a bottle, using a rotating phalanx of roughly 200 men to defend a narrow pass for two days, until betrayal by Ephialtes exposed their flank and they were destroyed in a inescapable Persian barrage of arrows. Greek losses were estimated at 4000 men including Leonidas’ 300 Spartans and 2000-4000 Persians (beginning and ending estimates for manpower strength vary widely).

The Greeks defiant stand at Thermopylae allowed the Greek navy to regroup at Salamis where they won a decisive victory against the Persian navy. A year later the Greeks at Plataea crushed the Persians quest for a Hellenic satrapy.

The Phalanx endured for another century, including use in the Peloponnesian War, where it remained lethal but of limited use. Then came Epaminondas at Leuctra in 371 BC, transforming the phalanx into a machine that erased Sparta’s mighty reputation. Typically, each army’s phalanx strength was concentrated on their right wing so that the strongest part of a force always faced off against the weaker wing of the opposition. What Epaminondas did was say nuts to that.

He reversed the order and created an oblique formation, more triangular than rectangular with his strongest troops on the left wing. His left wing was stacked 50 deep while keeping his center and right wings thin. His 50-deep was aimed directly at Sparta’s best under the command of King Cleombrotus (in those days officers and kings were in the front rows of the phalanx). As the phalanxes began to attack Epaminondas kept his right-wing stationery creating an asymmetrical front. The left wing easily broke through Sparta’s right wing, killing Cleombrotus and collapsing their superior flank. At that point Epaminondas’s wing pivoted inward creating an enveloping arc around the remaining parts of Sparta’s phalanx effectively ending the Spartan myth of invincibility.

Epaminondas tactics shortened battles with fewer casualties. His innovations proved that properly trained and equipped citizen soldiers could defeat professional warriors while instilling a new civic honor through restraint and discipline. His oblique formation allowed landowners and farmers to settle their disputes, usually in a few hours or less, with minimal loss, and return to their farms in time for the harvest. Epaminondas not only brought asymmetrical tactics to the battlefield but shattered claims of superiority by employing the unexpected.

As the Golden Age of Athens and western civilization’s Greek center waned and Roman hegemony rose, the phalanx evolved again. The Greek phalanx gave way to the Roman manipular system, a staggered checkerboard pattern, enabling units to rotate, reinforce, or retreat as needed. It was a needed refinement and improvement to the phalanx, more effectual on open plains and less susceptible to calvary and arrows.

Then came Hannibal to Cannae in 216 BC. During the 2nd Punic War, he upended the war cart of tactics once again and ruthlessly exploited Rome’s refinements.

Hannibal’s improvisations of the phalanx maneuvering tactics, but not the actual formation, showed that he had studied Marathon. Instead of a convex line with strong wings and a weak center he developed a concave line with strong wings and weak center. He allowed the center to fall back, which the Romans unwittingly obliged by surging into Hannibal’s weak center. With the Romans committed Hannibal’s deception encircled them with precision and brutal lethality. The Romans were annihilated on the field losing somewhere between 50,000-70,000 killed and another 10,000 captured. Hannibal lost 6000-8000 men (again estimates vary). Then came the 3rd Punic War.

The phalanx began as a wall of spears and shields, a bulwark of bronze and bone. Its stunning victories echo through history’s scholarly halls and hallowed plains of death and destruction. Yet its Achilles’ heel, vulnerable flanks, precise terrain requirements proved incompatible to horses and gunpowder.

Still its legacy of discipline and unity endure. Born of necessity, refined through rigor, and studied for centuries, the phalanx stands as a testament Aristotle’s enduring insight, slightly abridged but still profound, ‘The whole is greater than the parts.’ And perhaps the Roman’s said it best: ‘E pluribus unum’, ‘out of many, one.’

Source: A War Like No Other by Victor Davis Hanson, 2005. Et al. Graphic: Stele of Vultures.

Drunken Monkey Hypothesis–Good Times, Bad Times

5 July 2025 By in History, History, Philosophy, Science, Science, Uncategorized, Wine Tags: , , Leave a comment

In 2004, biologist Robert Dudley of UC Berkeley proposed the Drunken Monkey Hypothesis, a theory suggesting that our attraction to alcohol is not a cultural accident but an evolutionary inheritance. According to Dudley, our primate ancestors evolved a taste for ethanol (grain alcohol) because it signaled ripe, energy-rich, fermenting fruit, a valuable resource in dense tropical forests. Those who could tolerate small amounts of naturally occurring ethanol had a foraging advantage, and thus a caloric advantage. Over time, this preference was passed down the evolutionary tree to us.

But alcohol’s effects have always been double-edged: mildly advantageous in small doses, dangerous in excess. What changed wasn’t the molecule, it was our ability to concentrate, store, and culturally amplify its effects. Good times, bad times…

Dudley argues that this trait was “natural and adaptive,” but only because we didn’t die from it as easily as other species. Ethanol is a toxin, and its effects, loss of inhibition, impaired judgment, and aggression, are as ancient as they are dangerous. What may have once helped a shy, dorky monkey approach a mate or summon the courage to defend his troop with uncharacteristic boldness now fuels everything from awkward first dates, daring athletic feats, bar fights, and the kind of stunts or mindless elocutions no sober mind would attempt.

Interestingly, alcohol affects most animals differently. Some life forms can handle large concentrations of ethanol without impairment, such as Oriental hornets, which are just naturally nasty, no chemical enhancements needed, and yeasts, which produce alcohol from sugars. Others, like elephants, become particularly belligerent when consuming fermented fruit. Bears have been known to steal beer from campsites, party hard, and pass out. A 2022 study of black-handed spider monkeys in Panama found that they actively seek out and consume fermented fruit with ethanol levels of 1–2%. But for most animals, plants, and bacteria, alcohol is toxic and often lethal.

Roughly 100 million years ago in the Cretaceous, flowering plants evolved to produce sugar-rich fruits, nectars, and saps, highly prized by primates, fruit bats, birds, and microbes. Yeasts evolved to ferment these sugars into ethanol as a defensive strategy: by converting sugars into alcohol, they created a chemical wasteland that discouraged other organisms from sharing in the feast.

Fermented fruits can contain 10–400% more calories than their fresh counterparts. Plums (used in Slivovitz brandy) show some of the highest increases. For grapes, fermentation can boost calorie content by 20–30%, depending on original sugar levels. These sugar levels are influenced by climate, warm, dry growing seasons with abundant sun and little rainfall produce sweeter grapes, which in turn yield more potent wines. This is one reason why Mediterranean regions have long been ideal for viticulture and winemaking, from ancient Phoenicia to modern-day Tuscany, Rioja, and Napa.

The story of alcohol is as ancient as civilization itself. The earliest known fermented beverage dates to 7000 BC in Jiahu, China, a mixture of rice, honey, and fruit. True grape wine appears around 6000 BC in the Caucasus region (modern-day Georgia), where post-glacial soils proved ideal for vine cultivation. Chemical residues in Egyptian burial urns and Canaanite amphorae prove that fermentation stayed with civilization as time marched on.

Yet for all its sacred and secular symbolism, Jesus turning water into wine, wine sanctifying Jewish weddings, or simply easing the awkwardness of a first date, alcohol has always walked a fine line between celebration and bedlam. It is a substance that amplifies human behavior, for better or worse. Professor Dudley argues that our attraction to the alcohol buzz is evolutionary: first as a reward for seeking out high-calorie fruit and modulating fear in risky situations, but it eventually became a dopamine high that developed as an end in itself.

Source: The Drunken Monkey by Robert Dudley, 2014.

Decline Post Bretton Woods

18 April 2025 By in History Tags: , , , , , , Leave a comment

Bretton Woods, a monetary system established during World War II, sought to stabilize the global economy by making the US dollar the central currency for international trade. Other currencies were pegged to the dollar, which foreign governments could convert into gold bullion at a fixed rate. This framework functioned effectively for decades, however, by the late 1960s, inflationary pressures stemming from the Vietnam War and the domestic spending initiatives of the “guns and butter” era, coupled with a growing accumulation of US dollars in foreign accounts, strained the system’s stability. In 1971, the United States suspended the dollar’s gold convertibility, effectively collapsing the Bretton Woods framework and transitioning to a market-based system of freely floating exchange rates, setting the stage for the dollar’s decline.

Since the demise of Bretton Woods, the US dollar has lost approximately 85% of its purchasing power due to inflation, a monetary phenomenon driven by increases in the money supply. Free trade has exacerbated US economics, including the loss of 6.8 million manufacturing jobs between 1979, the peak of manufacturing employment, and 2019. Many of these jobs shifted to China after its entry into the World Trade Organization in 2001. Middle-class wages have stagnated, remaining at an average of $40,000 per year (adjusted for inflation) since 1970, while housing costs have tripled to $400,000. Meanwhile, the rising costs of child-rearing, $310,000 per child in 2023, have contributed to a declining fertility rate, which has fallen from 2.5 to 1.6 children per woman.

China’s role in US economic decline is significant with a trade deficit of $263 billion in goods and services for 2024 alone. Chinese tariffs protect key industries such as steel and electronics, leaving US manufacturing unable to compete. Federal Reserve policies, including a 40% increase in the M2 money supply since 2020, have inflated asset prices like homes and stocks but failed to meaningfully raise middle-class wages. Wealth inequality has intensified, with the top 1% controlling 40% of the nation’s wealth while Middle America’s share continues to shrink. Trade deficits reached $1.2 trillion in 2024.

Trump’s tariffs can be seen as a reaction to these trade imbalances and loss of domestic manufacturing. Additionally, new measures are seeking to rewrite regulatory and fiscal policies, to address these global inequalities. By 2030, projections suggest 2 million new jobs could be created, including 200,000 to 300,000 directly tied to tariffs, with blue-collar median wages rising to around $60,000. A stronger dollar, inflation below 2%, and a revived manufacturing base could potentially revive the American middle-class, making families more optimistic about the future. Continuing on the same trajectory as the past 50 years risks further erosion of the American dream.

Real Not Real

14 April 2025 By in Art, Biography, History, History Tags: , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

“Have no fear of perfection; you’ll never reach it.” – Dali.

Salvador Dalí was the entertaining, surrealist voice of the masses. His dreamlike spectacle of melting clocks and flamboyant persona captivated popular culture, injecting eccentric brushstrokes into the lives of the disengaged and disinterested. Dalí spoke directly to the public’s fascination with dreams and absurdity, transforming art into a theatrical experience and a giggly poke at the eminent egos on high altars.

Dalí was a 20th-century Spanish artist who drew from influences such as Renaissance art, Impressionism, and Cubism, but by his mid-twenties, he had fully embraced Surrealism. He spent most of his life in Spain, with notable excursions to Paris during the 1920s and 1930s and to the United States during the World War II years. In 1934, he married the love of his life, Gala. Without her, Dalí might never have achieved his fame. She was not just his muse but also his agent and model. A true partner in both his art and life. Together, they rode a rollercoaster of passion and creativity, thrills and dales, until her death in 1982.

Dalí had strong opinions on art, famously critiquing abstract art as “inconsequential.” He once said, “We are all hungry and thirsty for concrete images. Abstract art will have been good for one thing: to restore its exact virginity to figurative art.” He painted images that were real and with context that bordered on the not real, the surreal. For those who believed that modern abstract art had no life, no beauty, no appeal, he provided a bridge back to a coherent emotional foundation with a dreamlike veneer. Incorporating spirituality and innovative perspectives into his dreams and visions of life.

The Persistence of Memory (1931) is Dalí’s most recognizable and famous painting, but his 1951 work Christ of Saint John of the Cross is arguably his most autobiographical and accessible piece. A painting dripping with meaning and perspective, Dalí claimed it came to him in a dream inspired by Saint John of the Cross’s 16th-century sketch of Christ’s crucifixion. The perspective is indirectly informed by Saint John’s vision, while the boat and figures at the bottom reflect influences from La Nain and Velázquez. The triangular shape created by Christ’s body and the cross represents the Holy Trinity, while Christ’s head, a circular nucleus, signifies unity and eternity: “the universe, the Christ!” Dalí ties himself personally to the crucifixion by placing Port Lligat, his home, in the background. He considered this painting a singular and unique piece of existence, one he likely could never reproduce because the part of him that went into the painting was gone forever.That part is shared with his viewers, offering a glimpse into Christ’s pain, Dalí’s anguish, and his compassion: an emotional complexity that transcends mortal comprehension.

Source: Salvador Dali by Robert Descharnes, 1984. Graphic: Christ of Saint John of the Cross, Dali, 1951. Low Res. Copyright Glasgow Corporation.

Divine Right to Rule–Not

13 April 2025 By in History, Philosophy, Politics Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

Sir Robert Filmer, a mostly forgotten 17th century political theorist, claimed that kings ruled absolutely by divine right, a power he believed was first bestowed upon Adam.

In his First Treatise of Government, John Locke thoroughly shredded and debunked this theory of divine rights of monarchs to do as they pleased. Locke with extensive use of scripture and deductive reasoning demonstrated that ‘jus divinum’ or the divine right to rule led only to tyranny: one master and slavery for the rest, effectively undermining the natural rights of individuals and a just society.

Filmer, active during the late 16th to mid-17th century, argued that the government should resemble a family where the king acts as the divinely appointed patriarch. He erroneously based his theory on the Old Testament and God’s instructions to Adam and Noah. He used patriarchal authority as a metaphor to justify absolute monarchy, arguing that kings can govern without human interference or control. Filmer also despised democracies, viewing monarchies, as did Hobbes, as the only legitimate form of government. He saw democracies as incompatible with God’s will and the natural order.

Locke easily, although in a meticulous, verbose style, attacked and defeated Filmer’s thesis from multiple fronts. Locke starts by accepting a father’s authority over his children, but, in his view, this authority is also shared with the mother, and it certainly does not extend to grandchildren or kings. Locke also refutes Filmer’s assertion that God gave Adam absolute power not only over land and beast but also man. Locke states that God did not give Adam authority over man for if he had, it would mean that all below the king were ultimately slaves. Filmer further states that there should be one king, the rightful heir to Adam. Locke argues that there is no way to resolve who that heir is or how that could be determined. Locke finishes his argument by asserting that since the heir to Adam will be forever hidden, political authority should be based on consent and respect for natural rights, rather than divine inheritance: a logical precursor to his Second Treatise of Government, where Locke profoundly shaped modern political thought by advocating for consent-based governance.

Source: First Treatise of Government by John Locke, 1689. Graphic: John Locke by Godfrey Kneller 1697.  Public Domain.