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# Murray Leinster's thesis on forts and cultural decline and historical counterexamples
- URL: https://theparnassian.com/en/kultura-stroit-forty-kogda-ona-na-puti-vniz/
- Published: 2025-09-04T18:34:46.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-02T18:38:25.000Z
- Author: Alexandr Radayev
- Tags: Books, Observations, Society

> A culture builds forts when it is on the way down. When it is on the rise, it builds fleets and fights for trade, for growth and for the spread of its own civilisation. When it builds forts, it is already on the defensive, static, waiting to be conquered. Forts always mean decline

A handsome phrase from the American science-fiction writer Murray Leinster, though it holds true only for certain historical situations. Active expansion is not always a sign of flourishing, and the building of fortifications does not always betoken decline. Trade and expansion are possible even with mighty systems of fortification, as in the Dutch Republic of the seventeenth century, while the creation of fleets may be a sign not of growing grandeur but of imminent danger, as with Britain on the eve of the Napoleonic Wars.

Moreover, the appearance of new weapons or changes on the geopolitical map may make forts a temporary necessity rather than a mark of weakness. The Maginot Line and the Siegfried Line by no means speak of the decline of France and Germany; they were merely a reaction to new tactics of war, however unsuccessful.

And of course it is hard to agree that defence and caution are necessarily bound up with weakness. Japan in the sakoku period deliberately chose to limit its external expansion for the sake of internal stability, and this did not lead to its inevitable conquest.

After all, China in the heyday of the Ming dynasty built and strengthened the Great Wall, and the Roman Empire built forts at the very peak of its power, to say nothing of the medieval European castles, which became symbols and instruments of political centralisation and growth.

But to the ruins of the forts of Constantinople the quotation fits perfectly well