The Collapse of Complex Societies (New Studies in Archaeology) | 
| Author: Joseph Tainter
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Category: Book
List Price: $39.99
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Avg. Customer Rating:  16 reviews
Sales Rank: 118084
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 260
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.2
Dimensions (in): 9.6 x 6.9 x 0.6
ISBN: 052138673X
Dewey Decimal Number: 930
EAN: 9780521386739
ASIN: 052138673X
Publication Date: March 30, 1990
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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.
Book Description
Twenty-four examples of societal collapse help develop a new theory to account for their breakdown. Detailed studies of the Roman, Mayan and Cacoan collapses clarify the processes of disintegration.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 11 more reviews...
 Best explanation of the rise and fall of civilization July 19, 2008
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.
If this review helps, please add your vote.
Outstanding Scholarship April 24, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
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 January 6, 2008
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
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
Utterly brilliant work of genius, joins Allott's Health of Nations August 9, 2007
16 out of 31 found this review helpful
This is an utterly brilliant stunning work of genius. It begins with a comprehensive review of what appears to be every work in English relative to the topic being considered. The author has done a phenomenal job of both dissecting and then discussed the varied authors contributing to each of the following lists explanations for prior collapse of civilizations (from page 42):
1)Depletion or cessation of a vital resource
2)The establishment of a new resource base
3)The occurrence of some insurmountable catatrosphe
4)Insufficient response to circumstance
5)Other complex societies
6)Intruders
7)Class conflict, societal contradictions, elite mismanagement or misbehavior
8)Social dysfunction
9)Mystical factors
10)Chance concatenation of events
11)Economic factors
This book is exceptionally well organized, well presented, and well spoken. The complex discussion is delivered in easy to read and absorb constructs. After a review and elegant dismissal of all of the prevailing theories, the author leads us into his approach by positing the collapse of civiliazations as resulting from the collapse of the larger systemic process for processing information to effect the increasingly complicated system of systems. In the author's words, at some point the cost of micro-managing a complex system is so high, and yields such poor returns on investment, that the natural and beneficial response of the whole is to collapse into more readily sustainable and resilience smaller parts.
I am reminded of Charles Perrow's Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies, in which he discusses how simple systems have single points of failure easy to diagnose and correct; sophisticated systems have multiple points of failure that interact in largely unforeseen ways and are very difficult to diagnose and correct; and the finally, Earth and Humanity, a system of systems so complex that "Intelligent Design" is failing us, and a natural Darwinian selection is kicking in.
For America to have 27 robust secessionist movements and a plethora of "Home Rule" regimes springing up local levels, while the Bush-Cheney regime runs the nation into bankruptcy with their elective war in Iraq that has cost half a trillion dollars that could have been better used to restore our failing infrastructure and our failed schools, tells us all we need to know: the federal government has collapsed, and the Republic as a whole is next absent draconian public engagement and mandated electoral reform prior to 2008.
The author concludes that "complexity is a problem-solving strategy" and that when it fails to solve the high-level threats or challenges, then the society collapses so that smaller and more resilient parts might be more innovative and adaptive, and hence survive better without the burden of inept "guidance" from above.
In the context of this book, the 27 secessionist movements in America are clearly what the author calls "resistance" to the now unaffordable higher costs and lower results of the federal mismanagement of the nation, best depicted by the grotesquely inept and even inhuman lack of effectiveness with respect to New Orleans and the Katrina hurricane.
There are gems throughout the work, which joins that of Philip Allott, also of Cambridge, who in his The Health of Nations: Society and Law beyond the State suggested that the Treaty of Westphalia was a huge mistake, and we should have elevated and recognized peoples instead of sovereign states, as the latter have been too easily corrupted into aided the global elite to loot every commonwealth. A few that I noted:
Military expenditures and arms races suck the health out of nations. See my review of The Domestic Bases of Grand Strategy (Cornell Studies in Security Affairs), a book in which one author discusses the consequences of allowing the military to dominate what passes for strategy in the budget, while the politicians pander to domestic interests bereft of any grasp of international reality, and the intellectuals posit solutions that have no political, military, or overall holistic integration of all the sources of national power over time and space. The books on War Is a Racket: The Anti-War Classic by America's Most Decorated General, Two Other Anti=Interventionist Tracts, and Photographs from the Horror of It and The Folly of War: American Foreign Policy, 1898-2005 are mounting in influence today.
The author notes that the physics of time and space make an extended dominance of distant cultures and places impossible when relying solely on the force of arms. I am of course reminding of Jonathan Schell's The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People as well as Derek Leebaert's The Fifty-Year Wound: How America's Cold War Victory Has Shaped Our World.
The author notes that no strategy can be considered viable that steals from the future to support the present. This observation is in perfect harmony will all that has been done by Herman Daly in Ecological Economics: Principles And Applications and Paul Hawkins in Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming, among other works.
Collapse is cultural, systemic, a collapse of process, not of any discrete event, institution, or location. The information processing becomes impossible for a complex system that does not adapt from an industrial-era model of command and control to an information era model of distributed localized resilience. I think of The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic (The American Empire Project) and The The Global Class War: How America's Bipartisan Elite Lost Our Future - and What It Will Take to Win It Back on the one hand, and the varied books on the "wealth of knowledge," wealth of networks.
Although others including myself in my US Institute of Peace paper on virtual diplomacy have expressed concern over the growing gap between people with power and people with knowledge, this author has provided us with what may well be the most erudite focused diagnosis of the coming collapse of the West, a lumbering industrial era mammoth whose small elite brain cannot compete with the sleeker Third World "tigers" that are using leap-ahead technologies to avoid our legacy of ashes.
In my view, the West can be saved only if America achieves electoral reform and restores the constitution, with a draconian reduction of federalism and the federal budget, while restoring to the states all of the powers not explicitly assigned to the three branches. Open Carry, Open Spectrum, all of the "opens" must prevail against the rule of secrecy and the use of scarcity to impoverish rather than enrich what should be "seven billion billionaires (forthcoming from Medard Gabel)."
This is a righteous book. I have loaded two images from my own earlier work (at my web site under the photo in Early Papers) and am now working on War and Peace in the Digital Era. This book here is Ref A.
 The Collapse of Complex Societies (New Studies in Archaeology) May 20, 2007
3 out of 31 found this review helpful
This is the worst book I have ever purchased on Amazon. The title is intriguing but the substance is shallow. The writing style is absolutely abysmal and it is worth noting that the editing is credited in the introduction to the author's wife, hardly unbiased. This is probably one of those required texts that accompanies some arcane college course for burned out seniors in the social sciences. Since Mom and Dad are paying the bills, the final is multiple choice, a guaranteed B or A-. It is a slick production designed and promoted by confused academics.
The topic, properly treated and written about more scientifically and less quasi scholarly, has possibilities. Although the archeological evidence is limited but steadily accumulating, the subject matter has great speculative potential. Our own society, thought by many to be deteriorating under the undo burden of religious superstition similarly parallels many of the cited civilizations in this book and as such makes the study relevant. But this point is by no means an endorsement of this book.
If you are looking for substance on this topic, either write your own book or look elsewhere.
I felt overly generous giving this product one star; it deserves some symbol representing a "black hole."
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