By 555 A.D. Emperor Justinian I was close to reconquering most of the territories in Italy and North Africa lost 100 years earlier when the Roman empire’s western half collapsed. At the time it appeared as if this last of “Latin” Emperors would pull the astounding feat of reimposing control over an increasingly volatile Mediterranean. In the previous 200 years, Roman territories had entered into a deep state of institutional decay that included a series of “child-emperors” as well as Rome’s sacking by the Visigoths in 410, ending 800 years of security and sending Augustine to draft The City of God to defend Christianity from blame for Rome’s fall. But Justinian’s dreams were not to be. As historian Kyle Harper recounts in The Fate of Rome, a devastating plague, possibly the first ever “world pandemic,” ravaged Rome’s armies beginning in 549. By the 560s, it had wiped out Rome’s military and political leverage over rising competing Germanic states.
It would not be outrageous to say that our current social, economic, cultural, and political catastrophes resemble to some extent the late Roman empire’s. But it would not be particularly original. Hegel, for example, was an avid reader of Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire for similar reasons. From earlier on in his career, Hegel was obsessed with understanding why political institutions sometimes turn against and prey upon the communal functions they are meant to manage. The fall of the Roman empire fascinates so many because it illustrates what it means to live through “institutional decadence.” That observation occupied Hegel’s attention too, eventually becoming a driving force behind his theory of sociality as a matter of the precarious norms we hold to be authoritative.
There are historical periods defined by revolution, such as Europe and the Americas at the turn of the 19th century. And there are also those defined by profound and traumatic crisis, such as the 20th century’s disastrous world wars, economic depression, and influenza pandemic. Our age, for at least the early decades of the 21st century, appears marked by the phenomenon of institutional decadence. In broad terms, institutional decay summarizes a stalemate between loss of normative authority by institutions and inability to imagine new institutions to take their place and reverse their stagnation.
In his 1793 essay “On the Prospects for a Folk Religion” (also known as the “Tübingen Essay”), Hegel surveys the religious-institutional landscape of the time and concludes that church institutions and practices are alarmingly misaligned with the norms of German communities at large. Years later Hegel would still express the same thought, though well-anchored in his mature system: To philosophize involves diagnosing what institutions are, what about them makes them prone to decadence, and what decadence is in the first place. Hegel’s objective in the “Tübingen Essay,” though the actual subject is modern religion, is ultimately philosophical. He wants philosophy to think through how communities could be opposed to their own institutions, norms, and practices. What does it mean for social life to be stagnant and persist in such a fractured state?
Hegel’s true intention, of course, is to solve modernity’s “misère.” By understanding what decadence means, Hegel believes one can also learn what it takes to escape social malaise. On this reading, Hegel previews Nietzsche, sounding the alarm on outdated feudal practices within the already anachronistic but nonetheless alive Holy Roman Empire. For all the excitement about the Enlightenment, on-the-ground social practices mocked by Hegel as the “hands clasped together, knees bent, and heart humbled before the holy” still had no successor waiting in the wings. If Christian rituals are performed more and more out of obedience, resignation, and fear, what sort of practices would better match the actual norms governing people’s minds?
Today’s landscape is different. It is more global yet increasingly xenophobic; intensely financialized, digitized, and individually tailored, yet less fluid and flexible. At bottom, though, these challenges resemble those Hegel so neatly spelled out at the turn of the 19th century. The most alarming global health crisis of living memory has rendered undeniable the deep-seated distrust between how citizens perceive institutions, governments, capital, and the way these depict their own roles. Defying face-mask ordinances as a defense of freedom, expressing skepticism about government-run “tracing apps,” or pushing back against police violence against minorities, all betrays the anxiety that comes with institutional decay. For example, Anne Applebaum writes in the Atlantic that in the United States, Ukraine, France, or Italy, “deep informational divides separate one part of the electorate from the rest…. [w]hatever the advantages of these other bubbles, their rules render the people in them incapable of understanding or speaking with those outside of them.” Hegel wondered if we “hold our hands clasped together” from real belief or out of resignation and fear. Is trust still placed in experts, institutions, or government bodies or do most people cynically resign themselves to them or reject their authority altogether?
In another Atlantic article, Sarah Zhang writes that “conspiracy theories are spreading about a COVID-19 vaccine, some of them downright outlandish. But the emphasis on speed—as in ‘Operation Warp Speed’—has also created real worries about vaccines being rushed to market …” This reaction seems predictable; after all, pandemics are unexpected crises that test everything from supply chains to mental health. But pointing this out is not particularly illuminating because it puts the cart before the horse. In Hegel’s mind, such increasing levels of anxiety, skepticism, and economic breakdown are symptoms of decadence whose source needs to be properly theorized, its “logic” put forth, and implications spelled out.
In the Philosophy of Right, Hegel considers decadence within political life or “right” (Recht). He lays most of this out in the general philosophical remarks of the preface and under the headings of abject poverty and universal history. In broad terms, Hegel holds that being a modern state, as opposed to the ancient brand of ideal city (polis), means accepting as essential to political life the probable misalignment between institutions and underlying conditions which inevitably change. Hegel’s ultimate point is that institutions must eventually enter into stages of decay for them to be brought back into alignment with current conditions under a new form. To be reformed, states must first undergo a period of acute normative loss without, for that moment, any conceivable solution.
Hegel believes that knowing which political institutions are conducive to freedom depends neither on Plato’s “eternal truths” nor on Thrasymachus’ “might is right” but on the way they are tailored to historical, economic, geographical, and social conditions. When states equate particular forms justice, say of the Greek or Roman kind, to justice “as such,” their institutions become particularly blind and inflexible to necessary and overdue changes, which tilts them towards decadence. Pace Augustine, the declining state of the Roman Empire around 400 A.D. illustrates not the immoral deviation from the “city of god” but an administration possessing little normative authority and blindsided by major migration, drastic economic reorganization, and the disastrous Justinian plague. For Hegel, as expressed in his well-known “what is rational is actual, what is actual is rational,” the point is to “comprehend” [begreifen] the ways these events throw institutions and entire states out of alignment by changing the situation to which they were engineered to respond. Thus, there is no such a thing as “the truly free state,” full stop, since all states and institutions are thought under specific conditions responding to the stakes for building sociality within them.
Hegel’s sums up his concern for institutional decay with the remark that as “a shape of life has grown old, and it cannot be rejuvenated, but only recognized, by the grey and grey of philosophy.” In connecting the robust comprehension or “assessment” of state performance to its deep dysfunction or “greyness,” Hegel accepts institutional decadence as an unavoidable component of political life. Once institutions undergo systemic failure, it becomes obvious that they (e.g., rule of law, advanced supply-chains, and communication networks) were sustainable under shifting conditions only under the unitary politics of imperial decree.
Institutional decadence is an acute intensification of misalignment, often to point of no return. Hegel holds abject poverty as an unavoidable problem societies need to monitor, since large-scale dispossession challenges liberal institutions by putting equal participation in civil society under duress. But poverty as a social question is a modern issue. Hegel comments that in modern states the citizen is a “son of civil society.” What seems like personal adversity, poverty included, is ultimately a “state challenge” due to the way it brings state institutional competency into question. Under Hegel’s view, abject poverty reveals the acute misalignment or “sickness” paralyzing political institutions and civil society. It is a sign of “onset institutional decadence” and betrays serious breakdown in the capabilities to concretize or retain modern commitments to freedom and equality. Or as Rebecca Comay writes, it is an “‘infinite injury to existence that challenges the grounding principle of the state bourgeois order.”
Ultimately, for us moderns, as Nietzsche often says, no political community ever eliminates the unfortunate odds of at one point or another undergoing acute loss of authority without apparent solution. Consider Hegel’s remarks about nations whose institutions are now outdated:
From this point onwards, the previous nation has lost its absolute interest, and although it will also positively absorb the higher principle and incorporate it in its own development, it will react to it as to an extraneous element rather than with immanent vitality and vigor. It will perhaps lose its independence, or it may survive or eke out its existence as a particular state or group of states and struggle on in a contingent manner with all kinds of internal experiments and external conflicts.
The last part is Hegel’s account of states living through institutional decay. The passages reminds us that when states are “superseded” by “higher principles,” such superseded communities do not vanish in history. They operate instead as decadent, normatively powerless political communities. As Hegel highlights at the end, normatively weak states are particularly vulnerable—to external colonization, to the appeal of authoritarianism, and to devastating natural catastrophes.
That, ultimately, is what institutional decadence means: that state institutions by definition can find themselves outflanked by unpredictable circumstances when their imagination runs short and their normative hold is endangered. Decadence is a crisis of imagination. In the social sphere it is connected to institutions and whole states acting as if they embody freedom or justice as such, not interpretations adapted to their times. Institutional decadence is a risk any state undergoes as it finds out what norms and priorities have “social grip.” Nothing guarantees, though, that states will not for a time drag on as zombie states, deprived of authority and lacking in imagination.
In his devastating assessment “How the Pandemic Defeated America,” Atlantic writer Ed Yong sums up the US COVID-19 response in the following devastating lines: “The COVID‑19 debacle has also touched—and implicated—nearly every other facet of American society: its shortsighted leadership, its disregard for expertise, its racial inequities, its social-media culture, and its fealty to a dangerous strain of individualism.” The pandemic is an extraordinary public health emergency. But it is not responsible for the institutional corrosion that has long enveloped US public health institutions. The novel coronavirus did not write racism into police departments, labor, and health-care policy. It did not build up an economic system of low-paid but “essential” workers and high-paid “inessential” and predominantly white jobs. If for Hegel institutional decadence is a double crisis of imagination and authority, then failure to mobilize government agencies, university experts, and medical suppliers during an emergency of vast proportions is testament to the country’s degree of decadence. Health policy experts in the United States, the United Kingdom, even Sweden, did not heed advice from the South Korean experience on the significance of face masks and rapid testing. They obsessed over sophisticated models for “herd immunity” and testing accuracy, scientific important issues but not quite appropriate as components against a cataclysmic and fast-advancing health crisis.
Retreating to theoretical questions away from public policy, medical experts’ overconfidence, the belief that the United States could flex its technological muscle against the virus, or that internal antagonisms fade as an external enemy crops up, this is all too similar to the institutional decadence that thwarted Justinian’s reconquest campaign. The plague, the loss of lands in the west, the rise of powerful Germanic states, were all “accidents” that “happened” to Rome, an otherwise bold, technologically and military dominant state. But on Hegel’s interpretation, this myopic vision would add up today to the catastrophic failure to draw the right conclusions: that the pandemic further strangulates already-frail authority and deepens institutional decadence. Besides the untold devastation, the COVID-19 story will show whether liberalism has time to forestall, perhaps even reverse, its decadence. Or if the “grotesque” image of a new authoritarianism on the rise is a glimpse of the future laying just ahead. Rome’s traumatic sacking, too, seemed unimaginable.
Photo: President Donald J. Trump, joined by Vice President Mike Pence and members of the White House Coronavirus Task Force, takes questions from the press at a coronavirus update briefing Saturday, March 14, 2020, in the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room of the White House. (Official White House Photo by Shealah Craighead, via Wikimedia Commons)
Omar Quiñonez
Omar Quiñonez is Postdoctoral Fellow in the Mudd Center for Ethics at Washington and Lee University. He specializes in nineteenth-century philosophy and continental philosophy. Topics of interest are physical deformation, natural decay, and cultural decadence. He is currently working on a book project on deformation in Hegel’s philosophy of nature.
