Sublime

The boundaries of empire

they did, with terrifying impunity. Above all during these decades, social priorities in America and much of the world seemed to shift in the same direction: from the individual to the group; from private rights to public results; from discovering ideals to championing them; from attacking institutions to founding them; from customizing down to sca

Succession

In our view, the key to understanding how societies evolve is to understand factors that determine the costs and rewards of employing violence. Every human society, from the hunting band to the empire, has been informed by the interactions of megapolitical factors that set the prevailing version of the “laws of nature.”

The story of the great divergence between Europe and Asia is the great drama of the nineteenth-century world economy. This is the period when the world fell into the hands of the North Atlantic powers, first Britain and the other European empires, and then in the twentieth century the United States, especially after World War II. Only with the rapi

Rather than standing athwart history yelling “stop,” as the postwar conservative William F. Buckley urged, or questioning the whole system of constant growth and military one-upsmanship that drove such roiling change, they formulated a model of human nature consistent with it.

Power worship blurs political judgement because it leads, almost unavoidably, to the belief that present trends will continue. Whoever is winning at the moment will always seem to be invincible. If the Japanese have conquered south Asia, then they will keep south Asia for ever, if the Germans have captured Tobruk, they will infallibly capture Cairo

Conquest and consequences

Jamesonian view of capitalism’s