Product Description

Any explanation of political collapse carries lessons not just for the study of ancient societies, but for the members of all complex societies in both the present and future. Dr Tainter describes nearly two dozen cases of collapse and reviews more than 2000 years of explanations. He then develops a new and far-reaching theory that accounts for collapse among diverse kinds of societies, evaluating his model and clarifying the processes of disintegration by detailed studies of the Roman, Mayan and Chacoan collapses.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #111041 in Books
• Published on: 1990-03-29
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 260 pages

Review
‘Tainter’s model accommodates all levels of complexity and all kinds of evidence. It deserves to be widely read.’ Antiquity

‘Tainter’s is an attractive and compelling thesis, of a genre which is nearly extinct among domestic historians.’ History Today

Customer Reviews

Fascinating and worryingly level headed
Essentially a book on how and why societies/empires collapse, i found this to be fascinating reading. Although it has the feel of (and most probably is!) a university textbook, i found it to be accesible and well partitioned off into various sections within the chapters, allowing me to skip the more weighty academic areas. The description of the collapse of the Roman Empire i found very instructive, as all the while I was (rather worryingly) able to clearly match certain trends to modern industrial society. He seems to have grasped the central motivations for collapse and the book is a well argued and convincing read. The last chapter, relating the collapse of past socities to that of today's globalized industrialized world, is both stunning and horrifyingly reasonable.

Archaeology with a message for today
My copy of this book is from the fourteenth printing: when an academic archaeology book has been reprinted that many times you can guess there must be something good about it.

Tainter begins by showing how many theories of social collapse explain specific events but can't explain others, and then proposes a general theory of his own; in essence it's very simple, societies grow more complex until the cost of increasing complexity exceeds the benefits, and then, absent unexpected changes that reduce the cost, they have nowhere to go but down. He backs this up with studies of various social collapses from around the world and data from modern society showing the change in cost of complexity over time.

Aside from the general theory, much of the information and argument about specific social collapses is interesting in itself, for example Tainter's suggestion that, far from being a disaster as often proposed, many Romans were actually better off after the collapse of the Roman Empire than they were in the last decades of its existence.

Anyone reading the book will see clear parallels and warnings about the fate of modern society. Tainter generally plays that down, and when he was writing the book that was probably correct; however, reading it years later it's hard not to feel that we're reaching the limits of social complexity ourselves.

The only real downside for the general reader -- and the reason I've given it four stars -- is that it is an academic book, so the style is far more dry than, say, Jared Diamond's writing on the subject; however, I found Tainter far more convincing than Diamond's 'Collapse'.

Its official bureaucracy is bad for you
This book could have been written by and ecologist because the main thrust of it suggests, without ever saying so, that it is the energy flow through systems that give them their life and when that flow is stymied or cut off then those systems die.

The modern state so says Tainter is an anomaly, throughout the several thousand years of our history the common political unit was the small, autonomous community acting independently and largely self-sufficient.
In constrast complex societies such as states have a ruling authority which monopolises sovereignty and delegates power. The ruling class tends to be professional and is largely divorced from the bonds of kinship. The elite have the power to draft labour for war or work, levy taxes and enforce law, but it must be seen to be legitimately constituted. Legitimacy is a recurrent factor in the modern study of the nature of complex societies and is pertinent to understanding their collapse.
Establishing its legitimacy is the state's on going project.
After dispatching various other theories that explain why societies collapse Tainter claims that the proper basis for understanding complex societies is an economic one. The basic premise:
1. Human societies are problem-solving organizations.
2. Sociopolitical systems require energy for their maintenance.
3. Increased complexity carries with it increased costs per capita.
4. Investment in complexity as a problem-solving response often reaches a point of declining marginal returns. An example of this last point is found in modern day medicine:
The declining productivity of medicine is due to the fact that the inexpensive
diseases and ailments were conquered first (the basic research that led to
penicillin costing no more than $20,000), so that those remaining are more
difficult and costly to resolve. And as each increasingly
expensive disease is conquered, the increment to average life expectancy becomes
ever smaller.
More worryingly he cites an example from agriculture:
To increase world food production by 34 percent (between 1951 and 1966), it took a 63% increase in money spent on tractors, a 146% increase in money spent on nitrate fertilizers, and a 300% increase in money spend on pesticides. To get another 34% would take even more money. And this is just one aspect of society this pattern says Tainter is repeated across all sections of the urban/Industrial comple.
Thus he goes onto to argue: The reasons why investment in complexity offer a declining marginal returen are a) increasing size of bureaucracies b) increasing specialisation of bureaucracies c) increasing costs of legitimising activities d) increasing taxation e)increasing costs of internal control and external defense f) the accumulative nature of organisational solutions. So basically something that many of us had guessed your basic bureaucratic nightmare.
He says of Europe that because we have been peer polities for most of our history this explains why no collapse has occurred as yet, if one country were to collapse the others would swallow it up, he says that the next collapse will be a global one as we are all interrelated now.
I would just add that the book makes very short work of what Tainter calls mystical explanations of why communities fail, terms such as `losing vigor', `loss of virtue' that some contemporaries of collapsing societies have observed are dismissed as value laden statements which need be given no credence and that I find is the only hole in the book, you cant dismiss the quality of the relationships between individuals and say this has not bearing on society because society is more than just `nuts and bolts' but social relations.