Sublime

Unreasonable distributions of wealth have always turned their fire on reason.

Populism gives life to Michel Foucault’s celebrated reversal of the Clausewitz dictum: Politics is the pursuit of war by other means.

The shift away from the medieval paradigm helped prepare people to think in “modern” terms about cause and effect, rather than in terms of symbolic linkages and allegoric personification.

Indeed, Foucault regarded our conception of “man” – that is, the liberal humanist vision of the individual as the possessor of certain inalienable natural rights – as a very recent invention.

The balance of powers has become unhinged.

the study of megapolitics. In two previous volumes, Blood in the Streets and The Great Reckoning, we argued that the most important causes of change are not to be found in political manifestos or in the pronouncements of dead economists, but in the hidden factors that alter the boundaries where power is exercised. Often, subtle changes in climate,

Governors and governed

Polybius on the politics of Rome

One thing that will quickly become clear is that the prevalent ‘big picture’ of history – shared by modern-day followers of Hobbes and Rousseau alike – has almost nothing to do with the facts. But to begin making sense of the new information that’s now before our eyes, it is not enough to compile and sift vast quantities of data. A conceptual shift