Princeton (2026) h/b 432pp £30 (ISBN 9780691195827)
This is a sequel to the author’s Empires of Trust: How Rome Built—and America is Building—A New World (New York: Dutton, 2008). That work claimed that, fundamentally, neither the Roman Republic nor the United States had (or has) an innate desire to impose itself on other places. On the contrary, they sought, or seek, to promote good by fostering mutual trust. Now, nearly twenty years later, Professor Madden has turned away from imperial beginnings and intentions and addressed himself to stories of decline and fall. In the process, he has become more wide-ranging and less sanguine. The Roman Republic fell. Other republics have fallen. Before it is too late, what might the United States learn from the demise of its republican predecessors?
Simplifying the book’s argument in this way makes clear that, despite its sub-title, The Fall of Republics is not mainly a book about the ancient world. This is not because it rests on shaky evidential foundations. Although the author is not a classicist, he is to be congratulated on his citation of classical sources. As an expert on Renaissance Venice, he also makes good use of Italian sources, but his book is not really about Venice either. Madden makes clear that his point of departure was a work entitled A Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America, which John Adams (later the second President of the United States) started writing in a hurry in the last three months of 1786. Americans were about to put order into the ramshackle political arrangements which had allowed them to coordinate their revolt against Great Britain. Adams wanted to make his mark on the upcoming Constitutional Convention. Because, like everyone educated in the western tradition in the eighteenth century, he looked to the ancient world for inspiration, he wondered why Rome had fallen and how the United States could avoid a similar fate. Adams’s questions are the ones with which Professor Madden is concerned.
The book is about much more than the Roman Republic. Although the author gives it more space than the other regimes and strands of republican political thought to which he directs his attention, he spreads himself over more than two thousand years of history. The Fall of Republics is in six parts: ‘First Republics’ (Sparta and Carthage); ‘Imperial Republic’ (Rome from the late sixth to the late first century BC); ‘The Republican Thread Across the Middle Ages’ (which, despite the title, is entirely about Venice); ‘The Lessons of Fallen Republics’ (republican political thought, and some instances of republican political action, from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century AD); ‘New American Republics on the Ashes of the Old’ (the short period from the revolt of the American colonies against Great Britain in the 1770s to the framing of the Constitution of the United States in 1787); and ‘Conclusions’ (two chapters, the second and longer of which, ‘Fallen Republics and America’s Third Century’, highlights the present-mindedness of the enterprise as a whole).
Readers should look at the two concluding chapters before going back to the beginning, for only then will they grasp the extent to which Professor Madden has committed himself to the pursuit of a contemporary purpose. Although something similar can probably be said about the majority of history books (‘All history is contemporary history’ [Benedetto Croce, 1917]), the present-mindedness of The Fall of Republics takes some beating. The author has decided in advance what sort of republic is best. It is what he calls a ‘mixed-government’ republic, one in which the various assemblies and social groups offset one another and so prevent the emergence of dictators and oligarchies.
Professor Madden’s selection of republics will puzzle some readers. It allows the Venetian Republic of the late medieval and early modern period to be held up as a paragon of virtue. It rules out classical Athens but plays up Sparta. Some readers will feel that the Dutch Republic of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had a lot to recommend it; some will admire the Swiss Confederation (presumably excluded from consideration for the very reason that it is a confederation); some might even allow the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth of the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries to have been a republic (despite having kings); and then there is post-Civil-War England, which the author calls a republic despite the fact that the whole point of the restoration of the monarchy in 1660 was to put an end to a republic.
In short, the book falls between two stools. It can be read as a set of compressed accounts of the entire history of four republican regimes (Carthage, Sparta, Rome, Venice) and the foundation of a fifth (the USA). In this regard, it sometimes works well. Its 120 pages on the republican period of Roman history is a convenient summary for people who are coming to the subject for the first time. On the other hand, it is a warning to us that the ‘mixed government’ which the Founders of the United States attempted to put in place in 1787 may not last indefinitely, for mixed government came to an end in Rome in the first century BC and in other places at other times. Readers should turn to Professor Madden’s book only if their interests encompass not only a rather odd mixture of past regimes, but also the contemporary United States.
David Saunders Professor of the History of the Russian Empire, Newcastle University