Civilisational Complexity and Elite Decay

Responding to Julien Freund’s piece in the previous issue of International Political Anthropology, this paper asks: Can decadence be a legitimate concept in the analysis of societies? If so, how do we conceptualise it? While Freund talks of European civilisation as decadent, I will focus on the decay of elites, something which can occur repeatedly in the history of individual civilisations. An elite can be considered decadent when it no longer possesses qualities which enable it to act cohesively in response to challenges and secure the allegiance or acceptance of those outside it. Elite decay is largely a function of social complexity: as complexity advances, the circumstances of managing and profiting from it tend to produce among members of the elite characteristics such as nihilistic individualism, cultural amnesia and over-sophistication, risk aversion, rigidity and entitlement, which render them increasingly incapable of providing leadership. In this case the elite will either be replaced en masse by members of a different social group – from lower down in the social scale, or outside the society altogether – or the society will ‘collapse’, that is, revert to a less-complex, more localised mode of existence.