The Collapse of the State Criminal Justice System and Rise of Private Violence and Crime: A Roman Historical Case

Abstract

Crime is a politically constructed concept. Without the dominant state, there is no crime. The essence of the political power for the dominant state is the monopoly of violence within its domain. All other private violence must be criminalized. Predation over fellow private individuals by use of violence becomes criminalized. Although the dominant state cannot completely remove private violence and criminal predation, it needs to manage them under a certain threshold for the continuation of its domination. In order to maintain the extent of atrocities under the threshold, the dominant state skillfully preserve a delicate balance between the factual mechanisms and the fictive mechanisms. When this balance is broken, both mechanisms destructively affect with each other, and collectively contribute to the rise of private violence and criminal predation. All those factors are in chain reactions and a vicious cycle of the collapse of the dominant state system is fully constituted. As a result, the dominant state system perishes and people are cast into the unknown age. The current article proposed such a proposition by examining the Roman historical case. The past historical experience of the Roman empire well supports such a proposition. Although the Roman stories seem distant timely and spatially, the lessons are indeed very current. In the beginning of the 21st century, the modern world transitions into the post-modern one. Today’s atrocities of terrorism, transnational crimes, cyber threats, and rise of violence crimes are all similar to the past Roman atrocities. A great global migrations and civil unrests tend to escalate the conflicts, hates, and violence. It seems that the modern nation-states becomes less able to effectively handles such global problems. Private violence and criminal predation today seem to rise, and become more expensive and difficult for the modern states to effectively counteract. The current article raises an argument that today’s atrocities may have a deep root and substantially challenge against the modern nation-state system.