Sublime

David Stasavage calls “early democracy,” resembling the councils and assemblies of hereditary chiefdoms.

From this point on, the core dynamics of the Subject Story were largely set: protection, division, subjugation, conquest, patronage, duty; in a word, paternalism. We can recognise them from the Roman Empire to the British to the rise of Hitler, right through to the looming resurgence of the Subject Story in the form of the strongman leaders of the

That was Walter Lippmann’s point of view, for example, to mention probably the dean of American journalists—he referred to the population as a “bewildered herd”: we have to protect ourselves from “the rage and trampling of the bewildered herd.” And the way you do it, Lippmann said, is by what he called the “manufacture of consent”—if you don’t do i

Joseph Tainter has pointed out in his valuable book, The Collapse of Complex Societies,

Here I should also acknowledge my debt to anarchist writers (Kropotkin, Bakunin, Malatesta, Proudhon) who consistently emphasize the role of mutuality as opposed to imperative, hierarchical coordination in the creation of social order. Their understanding of the term “mutuality” covers some, but not all, of the same ground that I mean to cover with

Tiberius Gracchus