75 years ago, the sociologist Erving Goffman published his classic book, The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life. Eschewing the analysis of institutions (but acutely aware of their existence), Goffman turned his attention to the analysis of face-to-face conduct, to what he called the dramaturgy of everyday life—the endless role-playing, often across steep gradations of inequality, that enabled social life to play out. As Goffman emphasized, the roles we play—and we play many—are not just matters of efficiency, but are deeply anchored in morality. “Society is organized on the principle that any individual who possesses certain social characteristics has a moral right to expect that others will value and treat him in an appropriate way.” When acting within a socially expected script, an individual “exerts a moral demand upon others” (13). The failure to conform to these demands—for decent treatment, for a modicum of respect, or for a due amount of deference or personal space—breaks the social order, producing dissonance, embarrassment, and at times consequences.
Peter Van Nuffelen’s project is Goffman-esque. Dissatisfied with approaches to power that emphasize the role of legislation, bureaucracy, and taxation, Van Nuffelen attempts to center moments of individual interaction, especially between the elites of late antiquity and the people they claimed to govern. “Ultimately,” he writes, “a society is made up of numerous social interactions between individuals, and it is through such interactions that political decisions are enacted or resisted” (3). At the core of these numerous interactions, he argues, sat a concern for virtue, and especially for the virtue of justice. By looking at privileged moments of face-to-face interaction between unequal people (emperors figure prominently but not exclusively), we can understand subjects’ expectations of leadership and see how they make claims upon their rulers to act justly and virtuously. We can similarly see how rulers operated within constraints that were co-produced by subjects, obeying (at times) their demands for justice. At the level of method, Van Nuffelen thus proposes that we move from the interactions themselves outward, that is, from the micro- to the macro-social. I shall return to this idea.
Van Nuffelen builds his argument by drawing attention to four distinct behaviors: petitions, parrhesia, intercession in verdicts, and riots. A petition, he argues, was essentially a personal interaction: optimally delivered in a face-to-face setting, it was an appeal to a person rather than an abstract principle. It was similarly an appeal that depended on recognition of a power imbalance: to make the request was, in the first place, an act of submission. But such requests were also attempts to induce the recipient to instantiate justice. Parrhesia worked similarly: to speak freely to a powerful person was an attempt at improving the virtues of the powerful. It was a risky act, because the person speaking freely had to demonstrate his own virtue first—otherwise such frank speech might be interpreted as mere insolence. It is thus not surprising that the men who risked such frankness were often publicly accepted as virtuous: bishops, philosophers, etc.
From the behavior of individual petitioners or parrhesiasts we move to groups and crowds. A crowd could have its own personhood and demonstrate its own morality. It might lean on this to interfere extrajudicially in the case of a verdict it disapproved of. Such, it appears, was the case among the people of Antioch, who took pleasure in interrupting criminal sentences, either snatching people from the hands of the executioners themselves or creating a substantial enough ruckus that emperors were forced to intervene and offer clemency. Riots operated according to a similar logic. Rather than operating as responses to external stimuli, riots were of a deeply moral character, and might shift, over the course of the disturbance, between acts of violence and collective acclamation. Elites were obligated to engage the rioters, to be physically present amongst them, and to demonstrate their sense of justice by speaking to the crowd. Ideals, of course, were often far from practice, and in reality it takes great courage to engage a riotous crowd; unsurprisingly, elites failed more often than they succeeded, preferring to quell crowds with violence.
The final chapter of the book turns to the question of the emperors and the nature of imperial power in Late Antiquity. “What picture,” Van Nuffelen asks, “of the Late Roman emperor and his exercise of power emerges if we consider him to perform a virtue-based social role?” (103) I must admit that I find this question odd. What Van Nuffelen seems be pushing back against is a narrowly “constitutional” or “legalistic” view of emperors—that is, of emperors as all-powerful legislators able to force their will upon a vast Mediterranean empire, dependent only upon a few rites for their initial position. But does anyone really believe such a thing? Alternatively, Van Nuffelen might be suggesting that emperors were constrained by the everyday moral expectations of emperors—a vast etiquette, historically produced, that mandated that emperors act in particular ways at particular times, treating some people collegially, showing compassion for others, and punishing the genuinely rotten. But does anyone really not believe such a thing?
At the end of the day, what made an emperor an emperor—and what made a powerful person a powerful person—was recognition by others in a social role. On this point, Van Nuffelen is fully persuasive. But in the effort to push back against what he deems privileged categories of analysis of the Late Antique state—the bureaucracies, legislation, and taxation that he flagged as dominating the discussion at least since the work of A.H.M. Jones—Van Nuffelen underestimates the importance of institutions. Social interactions are not a free-for-all, a world of radical improvisation. They pattern. We might take the case of petitions as an example. If petitions really were purely personal, then very little could ever have gotten done through petitioning, for to constantly say “yes” would mean, by implication, that the person being complained against would necessarily be told “no.” Accordingly, a vast apparatus of fixes was developed to avoid putting the recipient of petitions in the position of standing between squabbling parties and wasting time that might be better spent doing other things that emperors and elites enjoyed doing (war, drinking, gossiping, fighting with bishops, etc.). Petitions could be refused, albeit at the cost of demonstrating that one’s “justice” was a hollow thing. But more often they were kicked down the bureaucratic chain: “I have often heard our Caesar”—in this case Antoninus Pius—“saying that with this rescript, ‘You may approach him who is in charge of your province,’ no necessity is imposed on a proconsul, his legate, or a praeses that he hear the case, but rather that he should make his own decision about whether to hear the case himself or to assign a judge” (Dig. 1.18.8). This was a terrific dodge—and a bureaucratic and institutional one.
Because institutional mechanisms are both attempts to instantiate (certain) moral ideals and to mediate between ideals and daily practices, they remain an important part of the story of how imperial power worked in Late Antiquity. There may indeed have been an account of how power operated that was shared by the inhabitants of the empire: that power was personal, that direct appeals to emperors could unjam long-festering cases, that the people had a right to collectively confront their rulers. This was ultimately a myth. This is not to say that mythology is unimportant (quite the opposite). But the myth existed in tension with apparatuses that were staffed by people whose job was precisely to keep emperors and others from having to reinvent the business of government on a case-by-case basis and to keep it in line with the virtues.
As such, the focus on the micro, while undoubtedly important, makes it hard to generalize beyond the level of mythology or even exemplarity to understand how power actually operated. It also entails the risk that the argument will collapse upon itself, because the micro is not somehow analytically prior, but is something already conditioned by the institutions that staged these interactions in the first place. That is to say, it cannot be the case that a society is just “numerous social interactions between individuals”—it is that, of course, but it is also a set of historical patterns, a set of mythical archetypes, a set of recurring material constraints, and a set of deep assumptions that procedure X is just the way “we” do Y. To speak of institutions is to describe these deep grooves in the social landscape through which power is channeled.
It was not for nothing that, after publication of The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life, Goffman next turned his attention to institutions—in this case, “total institutions” (Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates, 1961). Here the lesson was about the vast structures of control that patterned the ways that institutions operated—how material conditions were controlled to obtain obedience, how incentives operated to induce compliance, and how those living within such institutions were made to conform even while grumbling. The total institution, he insisted, was merely the limit case; all institutions share characteristics that condition the scripts that we feel we improvise and produce the “values” that we feel emerge from ourselves of our own collective volition. To understand the interaction between these various planes—the micro, the governmental, and the institutional—will remain a challenge going forward.