History shows that societies collapse whenleaders undermine social contracts16 October 2020

The ruins of the Roman Forum, once a site of arepresentational government. Credit: Linda Nicholas,Field Museum

All good things must come to an end. Whethersocieties are ruled by ruthless dictators or morewell-meaning representatives, they fall apart intime, with different degrees of severity. In a newpaper, anthropologists examined a broad, globalsample of 30 pre-modern societies. They foundthat when "good" governments—ones that providedgoods and services for their people and did notstarkly concentrate wealth and power—fell apart,they broke down more intensely than collapsingdespotic regimes. And the researchers found acommon thread in the collapse of goodgovernments: leaders who undermined and brokefrom upholding core societal principles, morals,and ideals.

"Pre-modern states were not that different frommodern ones. Some pre-modern states had goodgovernance and weren't that different from whatwe see in some democratic countries today," saysGary Feinman, the MacArthur curator of

anthropology at Chicago's Field Museum and one ofthe authors of a new study in Frontiers in PoliticalScience. "The states that had good governance,although they may have been able to sustainthemselves slightly longer than autocratic-run ones,tended to collapse more thoroughly, moreseverely."

"We noted the potential for failure caused by aninternal factor that might have been manageable ifproperly anticipated," says Richard Blanton, aprofessor emeritus of anthropology at PurdueUniversity and the study's lead author. "We refer toan inexplicable failure of the principal leadership touphold values and norms that had long guided theactions of previous leaders, followed by asubsequent loss of citizen confidence in theleadership and government and collapse."

In their study, Blanton, Feinman, and theircolleagues took an in-depth look at thegovernments of four societies: the Roman Empire,China's Ming Dynasty, India's Mughal Empire, andthe Venetian Republic. These societies flourishedhundreds (or in ancient Rome's case, thousands) ofyears ago, and they had comparatively moreequitable distributions of power and wealth thanmany of the other cases examined, although theylooked different from what we consider "goodgovernments" today as they did not have popularelections.

"There were basically no electoral democraciesbefore modern times, so if you want to comparegood governance in the present with goodgovernance in the past, you can't really measure itby the role of elections, so important incontemporary democracies. You have to come upwith some other yardsticks, and the core features ofthe good governance concept serve as a suitablemeasure of that," says Feinman. "They didn't haveelections, but they had other checks and balanceson the concentration of personal power and wealthby a few individuals. They all had means to

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enhance social well-being, provision goods andservices beyond just a narrow few, and means forcommoners to express their voices."

In societies that meet the academic definition of"good governance," the government meets theneeds of the people, in large part because thegovernment depends on those people for the taxesand resources that keep the state afloat. "Thesesystems depended heavily on the local populationfor a good chunk of their resources. Even if youdon't have elections, the government has to be atleast somewhat responsive to the local population,because that's what funds the government,"explains Feinman. "There are often checks on boththe power and the economic selfishness of leaders,so they can't hoard all the wealth."

An engraving by Giambattista Brustolon showing theGreat Council of Venice. Credit: Giambattista Brustolon,Creative Commons

Societies with good governance tend to last a bitlonger than autocratic governments that keeppower concentrated to one person or small group.But the flip side of that coin is that when a "good"government collapses, things tend to be harder forthe citizens, because they'd come to rely on theinfrastructure of that government in their day-to-daylife. "With good governance, you haveinfrastructures for communication andbureaucracies to collect taxes, sustain services,

and distribute public goods. You have an economythat jointly sustains the people and funds thegovernment," says Feinman. "And so socialnetworks and institutions become highly connected,economically, socially, and politically. Whereas if anautocratic regime collapses, you might see adifferent leader or you might see a different capital,but it doesn't permeate all the way down intopeople's lives, as such rulers generally monopolizeresources and fund their regimes in ways lessdependent on local production or broad-basedtaxation."

The researchers also examined a common factor inthe collapse of societies with good governance:leaders who abandoned the society's foundingprinciples and ignored their roles as moral guidesfor their people. "In a good governance society, amoral leader is one who upholds the core principlesand ethos and creeds and values of the overallsociety," says Feinman. "Most societies have somekind of social contract, whether that's written out ornot, and if you have a leader who breaks thoseprinciples, then people lose trust, diminish theirwillingness to pay taxes, move away, or take othersteps that undercut the fiscal health of the polity."

This pattern of amoral leaders destabilizing theirsocieties goes way back—the paper uses theRoman Empire as an example. The Romanemperor Commodus inherited a state witheconomic and military instability, and he didn't riseto the occasion; instead, he was more interested inperforming as a gladiator and identifying himselfwith Hercules. He was eventually assassinated,and the empire descended into a period of crisisand corruption. These patterns can be seen today,as corrupt or inept leaders threaten the coreprinciples and, hence, the stability of the placesthey govern. Mounting inequality, concentration ofpolitical power, evasion of taxation, hollowing out ofbureaucratic institutions, diminishment ofinfrastructure, and declining public services are allevidenced in democratic nations today.

"What I see around me feels like what I'veobserved in studying the deep histories of otherworld regions, and now I'm living it in my own life,"says Feinman. "It's sort of like Groundhog Day forarchaeologists and historians."

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"Our findings provide insights that should be ofvalue in the present, most notably that societies,even ones that are well governed, prosperous, andhighly regarded by most citizens, are fragile humanconstructs that can fail," says Blanton. "In the caseswe address, calamity could very likely have beenavoided, yet, citizens and state-builders too willinglyassumed that their leadership will feel an obligationto do as expected for the benefit of society. Giventhe failure to anticipate, the kinds of institutionalguardrails required to minimize the consequencesof moral failure were inadequate."

But, notes Feinman, learning about what led tosocieties collapsing in the past can help us makebetter choices now: "History has a chance to tell ussomething. That doesn't mean it's going to repeatexactly, but it tends to rhyme. And so that meansthere are lessons in these situations."

Provided by Field MuseumAPA citation: History shows that societies collapse when leaders undermine social contracts (2020,October 16) retrieved 29 January 2022 from https://phys.org/news/2020-10-history-societies-collapse-leaders-undermine.html

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