David Frum

Decline makes sense when we talk about individual creatures.

After a certain point in our lives, we were all on the path of decline leading to extinction.

And he introduced, he brought concepts from the idea of art and science, the idea of decadence into history in a way that biologized the development of societies.

And this is an idea that in our time can lead to some pretty sinister consequences

complexes this hunt for decline and decadence as a way and this this desire to reaffirm society by somehow purging us of the things that make us freer and give individual life more scope again not blaming gibbon for that but these are ideas that through gibbon have haunted the discussion of political science and economic development and historical development

I think as we return to this mighty work from 250 years ago, there's a lot to benefit from, including above all the extraordinary labor that went into producing this giant work that is still so fascinating to read, still so eminently quotable in a literary style that resonates to this very day.

But the reason the Roman Empire declined and fell was not because the Romans were virtuous at one time and less virtuous at the other.

They were met with concrete problems in the here and now.

Problems of climate change, problems of plague, problems of the faster military development of their neighbors.

The Romans started with a big organizational advantage over the less organized societies on their borders.

As the Romans developed, as the world developed, those neighbors caught up and equalized the military balance, and the Romans were not up to the task.

The Romans also developed problems of succession.

They couldn't provide orderly ways that didn't involve coups and assassinations and civil wars of making sure that executive power flowed in continuous ways through bureaucratic systems.

Partly that was because of the material primitiveness of the time.

Partly that was because...

on just the scale of distance on which they had to work.

But partly that was an institutional failure that was inherent in the way they organized the world and that we can learn some lessons from.

The world is always old and always new.

Human beings age, but societies don't.

And if there's a lesson to be learned from the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, it's to think less about decline and fall and think more about how do we preserve and maintain the success of the society that modern day people have, Americans and people in other democracies.