[Enlightenment culture was the result of a] “fortuitous blend of pervasive political splintering and overarching cultural integration [that] created a veritable marketplace of ideas. Polycentrism opened up space for cultural innovation by reducing ‘coercion bias’, the ability of powerful incumbents to suppress innovation and heterodoxy. Whereas monopolistic systems tend to preserve the status quo, a fragmented political ecology is less likely to impose this outcome.”
“Rather than by serving as an active driver of competitive innovation, the European state system facilitated ideational change by preventing conservative forces from consistently coordinating resistance to and suppression of innovation. That insight dates back at least to David Hume, who observed in 1742 that ‘the divisions into small states are favorable to learning, by stopping the progress of authority as well as that of power.’”
“Productive fragmentation deepened in the sixteenth century – whereas post-Roman Europe had always been politically fractured, the Reformation became a novel means of undermining the Catholic Church’s transnational capacity to quell dissent. As a result, ’the power of authorities in charge of defending the orthodoxy was increasingly constrained by their inability to coordinate their actions across different political entities.’ This lack of efficacy should not be mistaken for growing tolerance: at first, and indeed for some time, secular and clerical leaders were hamstrung solely by their inability to fully implement reactionary responses.” (@473-474)
“The Roman empire made modern development possible by going away and never coming back. This rupture ushered in enduring polycentrism both within and between states that sustained development-friendly institutional arrangements, encouraged overseas exploration and expansion, and allowed a culture of innovation and bourgeois values to take hold. As I have repeatedly sought to show, the persistence or return of quasi-monopolistic empire would have been antithetical to any and all of these trends.” (@593)
…
“What, then, were the root causes of the onset of modernity? Two circumstances, one exceedingly remote and the other far less so, were critical for European fragmentation and polycentrism. From the late Cretaceous onward, the collision between the African and the Eurasian tectonic plates caused the Alpine orogeny, a process that formed the Carpathians and Alps and raised them ever higher. Without the former, Transylvania would not have appeared and the great Eurasian steppe would extend to Vienna; and without the Alps, it might stretch even farther west. Tens of millions of years later, mounted warriors might have pushed state formation in a different direction, toward serial empire.”
“In actual history, at roughly the time when such influences would have made themselves felt, Germanic warriors in the Iberian peninsula, Gaul, Italy and Germany gained control over their means of subsistence and lordly autonomy undermined central state power. Had taxation and centralized governance been sustained, the odds of imperial restoration would have been improved, and a rerun of the Roman experience might no longer have been impossible.”
“A third factor arguably contributed as well, albeit in a more ambiguous way: the perseverance of the followers of an obscure Jewish prophet in building up a far-flung network that evolved into a hierarchical and fairly cohesive transnational organization. Its presence simultaneously contributed to and helped offset post-Roman fragmentation “….
“In the end, competitive fracture may well have mattered more – or rather, even more – than residual cultural unity: the unanswerable question is whether the former, on its own, would have been enough. Rome’s unreversed demise was an indispensable precondition of modernity. But when it comes to explaining this breakthrough, does it really matter that its empire ever existed at all?” @526-527)