Comment by inglor_cz
4 years ago
Yeah, the author sort-of deforms actual historical data to his own needs.
The Roman empire in the West was rather slow to collapse, even the fact that it survived the crisis of the third century [0] speaks more to its resilience than fragility. As late as 460, Western Roman commanders were able to subdue hostile barbarians and reattach their territories to the Empire proper [1].
The Roman empire in the East, as you notice, survived for another thousand years.
If the author wanted an example of an empire that collapsed really fast, it would be the USSR. That was indeed rather fast. In 1985, Moscow controlled not just the USSR itself, but several important European satellite states east of the Elbe, plus it held a lot of sway in the developing world. Six years later, the empire was gone. Not even Western Kremlinologists expected such a fast unraveling of the Soviet system.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crisis_of_the_Third_Century
Easy to explain. The USSR was a simplex system, the Roman empire a complex system.
he mostly explained large vs small systems, and didn't really qualify complex systems, until the very end.
a better explanation would be military vs democratic systems, the military being the simplex one, with straight hierarchies. the democracy with various complex interlinks, feedback loops and control mechanisms. Military is like a company, need to grow fast, and dies fast. commands need to spread fast.
You are spot on with the collapse of the USSR.
See https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691121178/ev...
I am not a history expert but it is interesting to hear that re: Rome, given the author's background
> Ugo Bardi is professor of physical chemistry at the University of Florence, Italy. He is a full member of the Club of Rome, an international organization dedicated to promoting a clean and prosperous world for all humankind, and the author, among other books, of The Seneca Effect (2017), Before the Collapse (2019), and The Empty Sea (2021).
The Club of Rome is not composed of specialists in Rome history though. It is a "club" that held its organizational meeting in Rome, in 1968 - hence the name.