Product Description

Political disintegration is a persistent feature of world history. The Collapse of Complex Societies, though written by an archaeologist, will therefore strike a chord throughout the social sciences. Any explanation of societal collapse carries lessons not just for the study of ancient societies, but for the members of all such 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: #140172 in Books
• Published on: 1990-03-30
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 260 pages

Review
"While the theoretical part of the book is quite remarkable and based on exceptional erudition, I also found the accumulation of the supporting data to be interesting reading . . . The merit of the book is that it is interesting. It modifies some of our views about early states and their collapse mainly by using data. It also shows how archaeology in alliance with social sciences opens the way for a comparative analysis of change in political and other cultural institutions." European Cultural Heritage

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

"This is a lucid and stimulating book. Tainter does provide a framework for organizing and evaluating the evidence of collapse. One of the strengths of his framework is the broadness of its terms of reference...Tainter's model accomodates all levels of complexity and all kinds of evidence, from fiscal policy to the acquisition of raw materials. It deserves to be widely read." Antiquity

"Tainter has provided copious grist for the intellectual mill in this remarkable piece of scholarship. The breadth of its coverage is given order by a model that qualifies, I believe, as one of the covering laws archaeologists have sought. In addition, Old World and New World scholars alike can profit from a reading of this book." P. Nick Kardulias, American Journal of Archaeology

"The Collapse of Complex Societies contains much useful historical and archeological information on empires that have abruptly disappeared." James B. Rule, SUNY, Stony Brook, in Population and Environment

"The book is thought-provoking, engaging, and often witty, and well illustrates the relevancy of classical antiquity to contemporary concerns." Classical World

Customer Reviews

Best explanation of the rise and fall of civilization
What I found interesting about Joseph Tainter's treatise on civilizations is his application of economic theory to explain how they collapse. After a methodical review the two basic theories of why civilizations develop in the first place, the integration theory and the conflict theory, he launches into why he thinks economics is useful: marginal returns. In simple terms, societies are machines for solving social problems.

This fundamental concept exists whether you subscribe to the integration theory or the conflict theory. Screw drivers exist because hammers weren't enough. Power drills were eventually developed and so on. Societies created such things as cash because lugging things around to exchange slowed commerce. Eventually, monetary policies developed to both explain transactions and allow regulation and taxation. Taxation pays for society.

Here is where the two theories on civilization diverge. Integration theory proposes that societies become more complex because of a growth in people's wants and needs. Conflict theory says that societies exist because an upper class wants to control the output of society to further their own comfort and avarice. Personally, I agree with Tainter that neither theory works, although many societies I've read about, including our own can lean in one of these directions or another. Tainter agrees that economic theory cannot explain everything. After all, society and people have a rational and irrational half. For example, he explains how the taxation of citizens in the later Roman Empire became so unbearable that citizens frequently welcomed invading barbarians; miners in one central European province went over to the barbarians en-mass. Meanwhile, the rich in Rome fled to the countryside to avoid being conscripted into a failing series of governments. Peasants were encouraged to migrate to the cities, where they became a burden, because Roman governments deprived them of even subsistence --- all went to taxes.

Getting back to Tainter's approach with economic theory, he supports this theory very well. There are figures showing the declining returns on increased investments in agriculture, medicine, education, pollution control, nutrition and scientific research. Taken as a whole it is very impressive.

Unfortunately, I think the author relied too much on Rome as an example. Perhaps it was one he was extensively familiar or just a well-documented example. There are several examples of societies that have moderated their behavior and survived, at least long enough to be taken over by the current, predominant western culture: e.g., Japan. Faced with resource problems since the beginning they showed a remarkable ability to adapt without the widespread famines that seemed to plague the Chinese.

As for the current crisis that western civilization is experiencing now, Tainter provides a few clues but no concrete predictions. He believes that the civilization will adapt and survive. I believe that instead it will break down. Some countries will be abandoned to their fate while others, such as India and the European Union will strive to exist as separate entities long after the collapse of the United States and China. Tainter believes, while providing a few historical examples as proof, that societies existing together, like the European Union, cannot collapse because they are bonded together in competition. I, however, feel that as collapse becomes inevitable, worrying about what your neighbors will do becomes less important than worrying about your own survival.

Eventually, we in the US will climb out of the whole created by our demise but generations to come will wonder at our foolishness.

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Outstanding Scholarship
This is well researched and well written overview of complex societies, describing their strengths and weaknesses. As the author states "This is a work of archeology and history, but more basically of social theory." It investigates societies as complex adaptive systems.

One of the most useful lists describes that Collapse is manifest in such things as:

* A lower degree of stratification and differentiation
* Less economic and occupational specialization, of individuals, groups, and territories
* Less centralized control; that is, less regulation and integration of diverse economic and political groups by elites
* Less behavioral control and regimentation
* Less investment in the epiphenomena of complexity, those elements that define the concept of "civilization": monumental architecture, artistic and literary achievements, and the like
* Less flow of information between individuals, between political and economic groups, and between a center and its periphery
* Less sharing, trading, and redistribution of resources
* Less overall coordination and organization of individuals and groups
* A smaller territory integrated within a single political unit.

This is not a simple book to read. To really understand the message you need to read the whole book and not key sections.

To Understand "Collapse," One Must Know the Causes of Success
Professor Tainter has written a useful review of many Nations' declines, blaming the increased complexity of successful societies as a ballooning burden on productivity that brings on the Fall. Like most historical surveys of this type,the author provides a scholarly review of many competing theories and an overview of the major issues facing successful nations throughout history. However, this book's conclusions, like most theories explaining the cycles of history, deals with the symptoms of decline, and fails to get to the underlying heart of the matter. Of course by their very nature all large successful societies become more and more complex, but the complexity itself is not the problem. Indeed, the extraordinary complexity of the computer and internet age may be what saves this nation from decline.

No theory of history's failures can be comprehensive unless correlated with the cause of history's successes. Many writers have argued that individuals make the difference: the creative hard working citizenry, if given the freedom to exercise their genius, will solve all shortages and move a nation forward. There have been only a handful of societies that achieved widespread freedom and prosperity for their people--Phoenicia, Greece, Rome, Florence and Venice, Holland and eventually England, France and America. Most of the billions of people in the hundreds of other nations throughout history have lived under oppressive rulers and in hunger and poverty. The common denominator for the few successful cases is that their national and theological cultures empowered the common people and allowed them room to operate. For an exposition on this theory see COMMON GENIUS: Guts, Grit, and Common Sense: How Ordinary People Create Prosperous Societies and How Intellectuals Make Them Collapse

Except for these few free successful enclaves, the isolated stepping stones that led to America's overwhelming affluence, everywhere else in the world, for the past few millennia, the ordinary people were held down, restricted, subdued. Now, if that is the case, collapse and declines must come when the populace of a nation lose their freedom and motivation to contribute in a coperative way for their own benefit. Any reduction in marginal returms on investments, which Tainter's theory blames for collapse, only arise because the elites of the land burden the citizenry with excessive regulations and inordinate taxation, or weaken their motivation by excessive federal hand-outs. Young vibrant societies have usually been free of these classes of people that come in and burden prosperous nations--after the heavy lifting has been done!

These burdens are a form of "complexity" but they are not the actual cause of decline. Complex labor saving devices and medical and scientific breakthroughs do not hurt, because they empower the citizenry to be more productive. All one has to do to evaluate what helps vs what hurts is to ask, Does this new complexity free the people to be more productive or less productive? Thus the author is close to the answer, but avoids going the next step to the fundamental underlying cause of success and failure.

The basic difficulty faced in explaining why societies Collapse is that the concept of Social Complexity by itself is too vague to be useful. The author is right in arguing that a bloated class of administrators not involved in production, and excessive central governing structures, creates inefficiencies and lowers the marginal rate of return on investments. Reviewer Robert Steele is quite correct in calling for a downsizing of government and restoring states rights over many issues. Reviewer Allen Hundley asks the key question: Can we have an advanced society immune to complexity's dangers. The answer may be to allow the complex technical, scientific and industrial communities the freedom to solve the tangible problems we face and keep the nonproductive "experts" out of their way. If the common people create progress, as Wayne Te Brake argues in "Shaping History," then it is only necessary to keep them free of excessive government complexity. The IRS Code is a good example--the complexity of this monstrosity costs the American people billions of dollars of wasted money. The complexity of the internet, if it allows a grass roots demand for tax simplification, could on the other hand increase marginal rates of return for all. Thus, it is necessary to separate helpful complexity from destructive complexity to preserve the nations unprecedented success and avoid decline.

A final point is that "sudden collapses" are rare--invasion by the Huns, meteor strikes, the plague. The problem facing America is the slow gradual decline brought on by those favoring an expanded and suffocating big government that is designed to replace the citizenry's creative self-reliance with dependency on centralized cures that rarely work. The complex theories of these Platonic elites, that want to create niches ruling the rest of us from "on top," are the only type of complexities that we don't need! Bill Greene