Sublime

every authoritative

Indeed, one could judge how egalitarian a society really was by exactly this: whether those ostensibly in positions of authority are merely conduits for redistribution, or able to use their positions to accumulate riches. The latter seems most likely in aristocratic societies that add another element: war and plunder. After all, just about anyone w

Or, si le libéralisme et le communisme sont désormais discrédités, peut-être les humains doivent-ils abandonner l’idée même d’un seul récit global ? Tous ces récits généraux, même le communisme, n’étaient-ils pas, somme toute, le produit de l’impérialisme occidental ? Pourquoi les villageois vietnamiens auraient-ils foi dans les cogitations d’un Al

Mark Elvin has cautioned that late imperial China witnessed almost the entire spectrum of practices towards nature, from reverential approaches to an anthropocosmic order unified by qi cosmic flows to large-scale engineering schemes on land and water. By the late imperial period, the toll taken by massive hydraulic projects, deforestation and inten

Convivial tools rule out certain levels of power, compulsion, and programming, which are precisely those features that now tend to make all governments look more or less alike.

any attempt to control the system from a fixed viewpoint outside is a misaligned intervention that will fail.

The overgrowth of tools threatens persons in ways which are profoundly new, though they are also analogous to traditional forms of nuisance and tort. These threats are of a new kind, because their perpetrators and victims are the same people: both operators and clients of inexorably destructive tools. Though some people may cash in on the game at f

Contrary to earlier assumptions, hunters and gatherers—even today in the marginal refugia they inhabit—are nothing like the famished, one-day-away-from-starvation desperados of folklore. Hunters and gathers have, in fact, never looked so good—in terms of their diet, their health, and their leisure. Agriculturalists, on the contrary, have never look