Anthony Kaldellis: recommendation

Transcript context

…And you draw this distinction between rhetoric and action, what the authorities say and what they actually do. So when you say persona in the modern times, some of that could be reframed as propaganda- … for example. And propaganda implies that the rhetoric, that there’s a big gap between the rhetoric and the action. And one of the things you said you took away from reading Machiavelli is that we should judge people not by what they say, but by what they do. So how much of the Roman Empire’s government of what they espoused was merely rhetoric, and how much was true in how they acted? Yes. This is a key lesson I took from reading Machiavelli, and I found this a very insightful way of thinking about politics, and I would recommend that anybody kind of practice this way of looking at the world, right? People and states and, you know, powerful people can say anything they want to. At the end of the day what matters is what they actually do. And this doesn’t mean that what they say is irrelevant, even if it’s discordant with what they do. But nevertheless in the case of the East Roman state, my research suggests that the emperors and the authorities were generally sincere in what they said. In other words, I have found that they generally did what they said they were going to do overall. Not perfectly, obviously. And of course, these are human beings we’re talking about. The, right, the human societies, there was a lot of, you know, corruption, and you name it. Abuse— … of course. Of course there is. But overall, I think that there was a sufficient level of understanding that the emperors are in fact doing this, and they were actually incentivized to do this. We can talk about how. Because they were also in a pretty vulnerable situation too, so they needed their subjects to be relatively content on this front. Isn’t this surprising to you? So, you know, from the outsider point of view, Roman emperors, even in the East Roman Empire, technically have a lot of power. You can even say in some cases absolute power, and yet they seem to be awfully worried … … To make everybody in the empire happy. What explains that? Like what, what explains the small gap between rhetoric and action in the East Roman Empire?…

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