Decline of The Roman Empire - Theories of A Fall, Decline, Transition and Continuity

Theories of A Fall, Decline, Transition and Continuity

The various theories and explanations for the fall of the Roman Empire in the West may be very broadly classified into four schools of thought, although the classification is not without overlap:

• Decay owing to general malaise
• Monocausal decay
• Catastrophic collapse
• Transformation

The tradition positing general malaise goes back to Edward Gibbon who argued that the edifice of the Roman Empire had been built on unsound foundations to begin with. According to Gibbon, the fall was - in the final analysis - inevitable. On the other hand, Gibbon had assigned a major portion of the responsibility for the decay to the influence of Christianity, and is often, though perhaps unjustly, seen as the founding father of the school of monocausal explanation.

On the other hand, the school of catastrophic collapse holds that the fall of the Empire had not been a pre-determined event and need not be taken for granted. Rather, it was due to the combined effect of a number of adverse processes, many of them set in motion by the Migration of the Peoples, that together applied too much stress to the Empire's basically sound structure.

Finally, the transformation school challenges the whole notion of the 'fall' of the Empire, asking to distinguish between the fall into disuse of a particular political dispensation, anyway unworkable towards its end, and the fate of the Roman civilisation which under-girded the Empire. According to this school, drawing its basic premise from the Pirenne thesis, the Roman world underwent a gradual (though often violent) series of transformations, morphing into the medieval world. The historians belonging to this school often prefer to speak of Late Antiquity instead of the Fall of the Roman Empire.