Sphinx

The most interesting aspect of Donald Engels’ 1990 book Roman Corinth: an alternative model for the classical city, and the reason why it’s still worth reading (at least in parts), is not its account of archaeological work at Corinth (very useful then, now outdated), nor its substantive attempt at disproving the ‘consumer city’ model (which, if I recall correctly, included the argument that if the non-producers were in a minority it couldn’t be a consumer city), but his excursus into a historicising intellectual history: Engels sets M.I. Finley’s approach to the economy of antiquity in a wider context of suspicion of modernity and capitalist values, a climate of thought whose most prominent exemplars were Pol Pot and the Sendero Luminoso. Guilt by association, at however many removes; forget the common assertion that all the ideals of communism are irrevocably tainted by the crimes of Stalin’s regime (see recent discussion over on Crooked Timber), in this discourse any deviation whatsoever from the wholehearted celebration of industry and the market leads directly to mass murder. In retrospect, one is simply surprised that he didn’t chuck in the Manson Family and Altamont for good measure.

But there is a loose connection to a serious point: Engels’ posited connection may be implausible and over the top in the terms in which it’s presented, but it is clearly not unreasonable to situate Finley’s ideas within a broad tradition of the critique of modernity and capitalism, and a belief that alternative systems of socio-economic organisation and thought can not only exist but even have value – a line of thought that does indeed share certain roots, most obviously a reading of Marx, with some violent revolutionary movements. Engels’ polemical, ad hominem attack is very silly, but it shouldn’t distract us from the fact that ideas in ancient economic history, as in any history, are not actually formed in a vacuum, or shaped only by the evidence. Context matters.

I had forgotten, until I revisited it recently for a paper I’ve just finished for the publication of a Berlin conference on the ancient economy, that the introduction to The Cambridge Economic History of the Greco-Roman World (eds. Scheidel, Morris & Saller, 2007) includes a brief gesture in this direction: the focus of historians like Finley and A.H.M. Jones on the ‘structure’ of the ancient economy (which tends to imply limits on growth and development) is associated with scepticism about free markets and a tendency towards statism in the decades after WWII (n.b. this appears to be seen as a bad thing), just as the focus of historians like Meyer and Rostovtzeff at the beginning of the century on ‘performance’ can be associated with the dramatic ‘first globalization’ of the world economy in that period.

The agenda of the CEHGRW thus appears like a Hegelian synthesis, uniting structure and performance (though with a definite emphasis on the latter, to compensate for the excesses of the Finleyite period). To be fair, the editors do acknowledge the possibility that this approach may also be partly inspired by the wider context in this later period as well, with the dramatic transformations of the second period of globalisation, especially post-1989, giving new impetus to the study of growth and development within the globalised societies of classical antiquity (especially Rome).

Of course, from the present perspective things can look rather different; after the 2007-8 economic crash, we might be rather more sceptical of the cheer-leading for globalisation, rather more inclined to recognise the limitations of the market, the role of risk and uncertainty and the complexity of human behaviour – and so minded to question not only the assumptions of neoliberal economics but also their influence on the dominant approach in contemporary ancient economic history, the New Institutional Economics. What are the key themes of much current work? Emphasis on quantification and performance, as if historically variable structures don’t particularly matter. Suspicion of the state and insistence on the dominant role of the free market. Denigration of culture, rejection of any model of human behaviour besides that of rational maximisation of utility. Institutions interpreted solely in terms of their economic function. Neglect of themes like inequality and the control of capital. It all looks a little neoliberal to me…

Just as Finley was not actually a sleeper agent for Maoist revolution, so Scheidel, Morris, Saller et al. are not actually paid-up lackeys of the IMF and the Bilderberg Group (well, most of them aren’t, anyway). It’s rather that, in retrospect, many such ideas appear more ‘of their time’ than was necessarily apparent at the time. The decline of interest in the ancient economy as a theme in the 1980s, with most historians moving on to ‘sexier’ topics in social and cultural history, could be read through the analysis of the rise of postmodernism offered by writers like David Harvey and Frederic Jameson, as a reaction to the failures and defeat of the Left in the 1970s and to developments in late capitalism. This left the field open for a resurgence of narrowly economic, ‘optimistic’ interpretations in the 1990s, presenting themselves as the necessary alternative to a decayed, unproductive orthodoxy; alternative approaches were discredited through their association with the perceived failure of the earlier debates to get anywhere. Now, while ‘zombie’ ideas continue for the moment to dominate both mainstream economic discourse and mainstream ancient economic history, perhaps we can hope for a resurgence of interest in such alternative perspectives…