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Res publica Byzantina? State formation and issues of identity in medieval east Rome
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 April 2016
Extract
It is a great pleasure and an honour to be writing for the fortieth anniversary volume of Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies. As editor of the journal for some twenty years, from 1984 until 2004, I have watched the journal grow in stature and in esteem over that period, and I am delighted to see it continuing to do so in the hands of its current editors. In the first issue I edited, I also contributed an article that attempted to reconcile some very different approaches to the history of Byzantine society and culture, or at least, to show that such different approaches were not necessarily mutually exclusive. If now rather out-of-date in its content, that article remains a useful baseline for discussing the relationship between empirical research and writing and theoretical reflection. ‘“Jargon” vs. “the facts”‘? was a comment about the confrontation that at the time appeared to exist between, very broadly speaking, those who were interested in questioning the theoretical assumptions underlying and informing their research, and those who were not interested in such debates, preferring to see them either as irrelevant or as inaccessible. In my concluding remarks, I suggested that Byzantine Studies in the mid-1980s was in the process of what T. S. Kuhn would have called a ‘paradigm shift‘, that is to say, a process through which a traditional set (or sets) of assumptions and priorities, as well as theories and approaches, is replaced by different sets of ideas. While the changes in the nature of the subject that have occurred since then have not been particularly marked, there have nevertheless been some interesting and important developments that have altered the framework within which some ways of looking at the medieval eastern Roman world are carried on. The so-called ‘linguistic turn‘, for example, pushed Byzantinists, in particular, scholars of Byzantine literature and visual culture, to grapple with various aspects of what might very broadly be termed post-modernist and post-structuralist theory. This is evident in some of the writing and publishing of the later 1980s and 1990s in particular, and in some respects has now been incorporated into our ‘ways of seeing’ the Byzantine world.2 In particular issues of intertextuality, of authorial intention, of reception, and of the relativizing of cultural interpretive possibilities (in respect of our own perspective) have become part and parcel of scholarly discourse, thus greatly enriching our discipline.3 Represented by more recent work in literary studies and art history especially, I believe this shift also facilitated a much greater degree of cross-disciplinary reading, comparative thinking, and in respect of historical context and setting, a generally more open approach to the medieval west and the Islamic world in terms of both material and method.4
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References
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27 See Scheidel, W., ‘Studying the state’, in Bang, P. F. and Scheidel, W. (eds), The Oxford Handbook of the Ancient State in the Ancient Near East and the Mediterranean (Oxford 2012) 5–57Google Scholar; Goldstone, J. and Haldon, J. F., ‘Ancient states, empires and exploitation: problems and perspectives’, in Morris, I., Scheidel, W. (eds), The Dynamics of Ancient Empires. State Power from Assyria to Byzantium (Oxford 2009) 3–29Google Scholar; also Reinhard, W., ed., Power Elites and State Building (Oxford 1996)Google Scholar; Blockmans, W., ‘Voracious states and obstructing cities. An aspect of state formation in preindustrial Europe’, Theory and Society 18 (1989) 733–55CrossRefGoogle Scholar; older literature: Claessen, H. J. M., Skalník, P., ‘The Early State: theories and hypotheses’, in Claessen, H. J. M. and Skalník, P. (eds), The Early State (The Hague 1978) 3–29CrossRefGoogle Scholar; R. Cohen, ‘State origins: a reappraisal‘, in The Early State, 31–75; together with the papers in section 3 of the same volume.
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29 Whether such divisions are expressed juridically (e.g. through a hierarchy of legally-defined statuses) is something we do not need to pursue here. ‘Class’ is not always a helpful category to employ except where clearly defined as a purely analytical economic concept, since what is important is the way in which economic classes are united or divided internally, through kinship and lineage, status groupings, political organisations, local and regional identities, ideological and religious affiliations. Because such structures cut vertically across economic divisions, any attempt to explain the politics of societies in terms of economic class position alone, regardless of the praxis-structuring ideological contexts within which people operate, will be valueless. Dominant economic classes may thus suffer politically at the hands of either the state (perhaps allied with other classes) or an alliance of normally politically and economically subordinate classes. The ‘asymmetrical’ nature of class relations in pre-industrial society is a point particularly emphasised by Mann, The Sources of Social Power, 216–223. See also by way of comparison the excellent analysis of the internal politics of Greek city-states and the rise of the Roman republic and empire of de Ste Croix, G. E. M., The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World (London 1981)Google Scholar.
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