Sublime

what we now regard as states turn out not to be a constant of history at all; not the result of a long evolutionary process that began in the Bronze Age, but rather a confluence of three political forms – sovereignty, administration and charismatic competition – that have different origins. Modern states are simply one way in which the three princi

World War II sounded the death knell of European empires. A process of European colonization that began in the early 1500s rapidly unraveled after 1945. The European powers were exhausted by war, heavily indebted, and without the legitimacy in the colonies to maintain their rule. Local independence movements either convinced the imperial power to w

When we take an active interest in matters of doubtful relevance at moments that are chosen by tyrants, oligarchs and spooks, we participate in the demolition of our own political order.

The distinction between fixed and circulating capital becomes permanently blurred.

We live in an era of wealth and overabundance, but how bleak it is. There is “neither art nor philosophy,” Fukuyama says. All that’s left is the “perpetual caretaking of the museum of human history.”

The ultimate question of human history, as we’ll see, is not our equal access to material resources (land, calories, means of production), much though these things are obviously important, but our equal capacity to contribute to decisions about how to live together.

The walls split humanity itself into two fundamentally distinct groups: hunter-gatherers and settlers. Hunting and gathering might have remained the majority mode of life across the world until as recently as the 1600s, but those who pursued it have never held the pen of history; it was those inside the walls who would dictate the terms.

it may be better to call the last 70,000 years the Anthropocene epoch: the epoch of humanity. For during these millennia Homo sapiens became the single most important agent of change in the global ecology.5