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governments still harass, expel, and attempt to exterminate minority groups in the name of the nation-state ideal, and sovereignty still gives them carte blanche to do so

insistence on the nation-state as the only legitimate and legal actor on the world stage leaves substate groups vulnerable to exploitation, attack, and shady dealing

the issue isn’t limited to the Kurds. In the news this week are Rohingya refugees stuck between two countries that don’t want them, Uighurs forced into detention camps, and Catalan protests for independence. History offers even more parallels, from the United States repeatedly breaking treaties with Native Americans to World War II, in which the United States was willing to go to war to protect the territorial integrity of France along with the people in it but was not willing to accept refugees fleeing the Holocaust. The nation-state system is designed to protect itself and its members, rather than people

nonstate groups are at a particular disadvantage. Though they may hold de facto territory, they don’t hold it legally; they have no international rights to a military or to self-defense. They have no seat in international or supranational organizations, leaving them outside global decision-making and with no recourse in attempting to hold states accountable for their actions. Their leaders are not accorded head of state status, and they have no official diplomats. Since even the most generous autonomy statutes don’t confer the protections of statehood, separatist groups are often willing to risk high losses to win independence, fueling conflicts

Substate groups are not the only example that the system is failing. Nonstate actors from terrorist groups to multinational corporations have increasing impacts on global politics, and traditional geopolitical theory does not do a great job of dealing with them. Even for bilateral issues, the nation-state is not always the most useful unit of analysis.

States remain reluctant to break the collective agreement on the legitimacy of sovereignty. They are similarly reticent about adding more states to their exclusive club, in part because it might suggest to dissidents within their own area that renegotiation of borders is possible

it remains difficult to garner international recognition for a new state. That leaves mediators attempting to convince vulnerable groups to settle for something less, in the face of all evidence that a recognized state is their best chance for security and self-determination.

While interstate conflicts have fallen over the past 50 years, intrastate fighting has soared. These wars disrupt trade and world politics, weaken countries, and raise uncertainty in neighboring states. On the other hand, states have proved themselves adept at using substate actors to further their own interests within foreign countries while evading responsibility for it, from the United States arming the Contras in Nicaragua to Sudan and Chad supporting each other’s rebel movements.

Russian elites attempted to tip the scales of U.S. leadership in order to win more modern spoils: unfettered soft power in their region, access to trade, and, notably, the ability to infringe on other countries’ sovereignty without consequences.

the United States—and other nation-states—has little or no control over multinational corporations, with their complex legal structures and tenuous ties to geography

we need to recognize both the rights of substate groups and the legal responsibilities of extrastate entities and create mechanisms in the international system to include them in the halls of power

AGRA, initiated in 2006, heralded a new campaign to bring the kind of input-intensive agriculture to Africa that had failed to take hold on the continent when the first Green Revolution swept through much of Asia and Latin America in the 1960s and 1970s.

AGRA worked with governments to speed the development of high-yield commercial seeds designed for Africa’s wide range of soils and climates and to facilitate the delivery to farmers of those seeds and the inorganic fertilizers that would make them grow.

Many warned that it was seeking to impose Western technologies inappropriate for the continent’s soils, farmers and food systems. Some decried the lack of consultation with African farmers on the nature of the interventions.9 Others pointed out the serious flaws in the first Green Revolution: water supplies depleted and contaminated with chemical runoff; farmers indebted due to high input costs while yields declined after their initial increases; and the loss of crop and diet diversity as Green Revolution crops took over the countryside

African farm groups like the Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa (AFSA) also warned of the loss of food sovereignty, the ability of communities and nations to freely choose how they wanted to feed themselves, as large commercial firms could come to dominate local markets backed by new government policies designed to ensure market access.

Evidence would suggest that the main beneficiaries are likely not the poorest or most food-insecure farmers but rather a growing number of medium-scale farmers who have access to more land and are already integrated into commercial networks. Only a fraction of such farmers come up from the ranks of smallholders; many are new investors in farming from urban elites. One study showed that a tiny fraction of smallholders is likely to become commercial farmers.18

These data suggest that Green Revolution programs have not produced a productivity boom through intensification but rather an extensification onto new lands. The promotion of extensification is a serious contradiction for Green Revolution proponents. The explicit goal of “sustainable intensification” is to minimize pressure on land and water resources while limiting further greenhouse gas emissions. To the extent Green Revolution programs are encouraging extensification, they are at odds with national and donor government commitments to mitigate climate change. Depending on individual countries’ land endowments, extensification can be a serious problem. Rwanda, for example, is densely populated and does not have vast tracts of uncultivated arable land.

One of the negative consequences of the Green Revolution focus on maize and other commodity crops is the declining importance of nutritious and climate-resilient crops like millet and sorghum, which have been key components in healthy diets. These are rarely supported by African governments or AGRA; meanwhile, input subsidies and supports for maize and other favored crops provide incentives for farmers to decrease the cultivation of their own crop varieties

Cassava, a key staple in Nigeria, Mozambique, Uganda, Tanzania and many other AGRA countries, saw a 6% decline in yields. Overall, roots and tubers, which include nutritious crops such as sweet potatoes, experienced a 7% decline in yields. Groundnuts, another critical staple source of protein in many countries, saw an alarming 23% drop in yields.

The Staple Crop Index shows that Rwanda’s apparent success in maize has come at the expense of more comprehensive food crop productivity.

The total number of undernourished in AGRA’s 13 countries has increased from 100.5 million to 131.3 million, a 30% increase, from before AGRA to 2018. Only Ethiopia, Ghana and Mali report a significant decline in the absolute number of chronically hungry residents

Only one country, Ethiopia, shows anything resembling the combination of yield growth and hunger reduction Green Revolution proponents promised, with a 73% increase in productivity and a 29% decrease in the number of hungry. Note, however, that neither of these is on track to meet AGRA’s goal of doubling productivity (100% increase) and halving the number of hungry (which would be a 50% decrease). Ghana is the only other AGRA country that shows decent productivity growth with some decrease in hunger. Malawi achieved relatively strong yield growth but only a small reduction in undernourishment.

AGRA seems to be feeding Africa’s worrisome trend toward locking in path dependency on input-intensive agriculture, much to the detriment of smallholder farmers

Unlike industrial-scale farmers in developed countries, their path has not yet been determined; there remain opportunities to chart paths different from the high-input agriculture model promoted by AGRA.

Agroecology is one of the systems giving farmers the kinds of innovation they need, farming with nature to promote the soil-building practices that Green Revolution practices often undermine. Building on farmers’ knowledge of local conditions and food cultures, multiple food crops are grown in the same field. Compost, manure and biofertilizers — not fossil-fuel-based fertilizer — are used to nourish fields. Biological pest control decreases pesticide use. Researchers work with farmers to improve the productivity of their seeds rather than replacing them with commercial varieties farmers need to buy every year and douse with fertilizer to make them grow.25 AFSA has documented the effectiveness of agroecology, now widely promoted among its member organizations as a key step toward food sovereignty.26 Such initiatives also achieve productivity increases more impressive than those achieved by Green Revolution programs. One University of Essex study surveyed nearly 300 large ecological agriculture projects across more than 50 poor countries and documented an average 79% increase in productivity with decreasing costs and rising incomes.27 Such results far surpass those of the Green Revolution.

It is time for international donors and African governments to change course, to shift their agricultural development funding toward the kinds of low-input sustainable farming that many small-scale farmers in Africa are pioneering under the banner of agroecology. With substantial support, like that provided to Green Revolution programs, agroecology can be Africa’s food future

As sources of information proliferated, long-standing sources of authority (monarchy, aristocracy, and the established Church) feared losing power and turned reactionary. At the same time, the longer-term transformations on which these social and cultural innovations were built—the growth of European overseas empires and the emergence of settler colonialism, massive silver exports from South and Central America, the trans-Atlantic slave trade—continued, and in ever more brutal forms. More than 6 million Africans were sold into slavery in the 18th century—a time that some still call the “Age of Enlightenment.”

Today, as in the 1790s, an old order is ending in convulsions. Even before the coronavirus prompted flight cancellations and entry bans, climate activists were rightly telling us to change our modes and patterns of travel. Even before nonessential businesses were shut by government orders, online shopping and same-day deliveries were rapidly remaking retail commerce, while environmental concerns and anti-consumerism were revolutionizing the fashion industry.

real revolutions are the ones that nobody sees coming

The men and women who made the French Revolution—a revolution which, in a few short and hectic years, decriminalized heresy, blasphemy, and witchcraft; replaced one of the oldest European monarchies with a republic based on universal male suffrage; introduced no-fault divorce and easy adoption; embraced the ideal of formal equality before the law; and, for a short time at least, defined employment, education, and subsistence as basic human rights—had no model to follow, no plans, no platform agreed upon in advance. As the UCLA historian Lynn A. Hunt has argued, they made it up as they went along. Yet for more than two centuries, elements of their improvised politics have been revolution’s signature features: a declared sovereignty, devised symbols, an anthem, war. At the junction Americans face today, however, we need to imitate not the outcome of the French revolution but the energy, creativity, and optimism of the French revolutionaries.

In hindsight a revolution may look like a single event, but they are never experienced that way. Instead they are extended periods in which the routines of normal life are dislocated and existing rituals lose their meaning. They are deeply unsettling, but they are also periods of great creativity.

the language of populism suits the authoritarian perfectly: for who can be against the will of the people?

The United States Political Violence (USPV) database records numerous riots around elections during the mid-19th century. In April 1855, for example, hundreds of nativists “invaded” a German area of Cincinnati, Ohio, and destroyed more than a thousand ballots. Subsequent fighting led to two deaths. In August of that year, nativist Protestants attacked German and Irish neighborhoods in Louisville, Kentucky, killing at least 20. In Baltimore, election violence became routine in the 1850s, with 30 dead and 350 wounded in the 1856 election alone

The bloodiest efforts came in the repression of Black people. The USPV lists nearly 70 incidents of political riots and assassinations in the decade after the formal cessation of hostilities, mostly in the South but including riots in Philadelphia and Indianapolis

Widespread political violence around elections only really ended when the federal government conceded that the South would be run by whites. Even then, anti-government violence took place.

Flattering coding rules used to produce datasets make it too easy to dismiss any aberration when a look at the historical record keeps turning up aberration after injustice after atrocity. Historians, scholars of Black history, and political scientists specializing in race and ethnic politics have long been sharply critical of the idea that that concepts like democracy, sovereignty, or the rule of law can be as bluntly coded as standard datasets long did.

American democracy did not penetrate to state level until the 1960s. Nearly a quarter of the states denied voting rights to Blacks—who made up a majority in some of those states before the Great Migration—from the late 19th until the mid-20th century

The Center for Systemic Peace’s widely used Polity scores, for instance, give the United States between a +8 and +10 from 1809 to 2016—a stable, indeed maximally scoring, democracy. That period includes the Civil War, when the losing side launched a violent conflict rather than accept the election results.

Despite the abolition of slavery, the imposition of Jim Crow meant that neither Congress nor the presidency were elected by fully democratic, or even representative, means

Consider Max Weber’s workhorse definition of the state: the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory. By that definition, large swathes of the United States approached failed-state status for much of the 19th and early 20th centuries

just as today, there were voices even at elite institutions counseling patience and unity. An 1898 Yale Law Journal article defended lynching as a natural outcome of Reconstruction having given the ballot to former slaves too early, and urged “education,” not federal intervention, as the cure. Woodrow Wilson, a leading historian and political scientist long before he became president of the United States, defended the Ku Klux Klan and white terrorism as “aroused by the mere instinct of self-preservation.” Such efforts eventually paid off in helping to efface such atrocities from textbooks even as monuments—and popular culture—embraced Lost Cause nostalgia for the Confederacy.

Revisiting the United States as a partial or flawed democracy means confronting much of the history that celebrants of the liberal world order claim as a series of triumphs for democracy

social scientists have lately become more skeptical of the conventional verities of progress. The V-Dem Institute in Sweden has compiled indices of democracy that are more sensitive to conditions like racial segregation. They show the United States as substantially less democratic than other countries, like the United Kingdom or Sweden, for most of the 20th century. Political scientists investigate topics that once attracted little attention, like the relationship between American political violence and social transformation, how national economic integration led to the decline of lynching, or how the “carceral state” (more than 2 million people are held in U.S. prisons or jails) degrades U.S. democracy today.

In the immediate aftermath of the storming of the Capitol, reporters and others turned to the British seizure of the Capitol building in 1814 as the closest analogue. Turning to foreign invasion rather than domestic precedents, however, says a lot. It suggests that people do not know the domestic precedents even exist, and it reinforces the notion that American political violence is “unthinkable.” (Even describing the 1814 incident as “foreign” is complex. The burning of Washington in 1814 was carried out by a British force that included marines previously enslaved by Americans—and motivated by hatred of the slavery system.)

it’s time to think more openly—and less defensively—about the totality of U.S. political history and behavior at home and abroad

Meloni now faces a dilemma. She could double down on the nationalistic, far-right ethos of her party, galvanizing her loyal base, or she could broaden her political horizon, slowly turning Brothers of Italy into a big-tent party hosting conservatives of different persuasions.

She even wrote an open-hearted memoir titled I Am Giorgia, designed to reach out to people beyond her base by sharing her personal story. The book sold more than 100,000 copies, a remarkable figure for a book written by a politician

an unmet demand for a center-right coalition that could host both moderates and proponents of what Brothers of Italy’s most traditional supporters refer to as destra sociale, or “social right.”

“I don’t see what elements may support the definition of Brothers of Italy as a far-right party,” Meloni told Foreign Policy, “we are a member of the European Conservatives and Reformists Party, which I am currently president of, which is the family of the European and Western conservatives, joined by more than 40 parties in several countries, spanning from the Likud in Israel to the Tories in the U.K. and the GOP in the U.S.”

“Unfortunately, the mainstream culture is oversimplifying, depicting anyone who talks about fatherland, family, sanctity of life, Christian and classical civilization as a dangerous extremist in order to deny his or her free speech rights. We’ve seen this in the U.S., with the demonization of Trump, who’s been canceled on social media, and we are increasingly seeing the same attitude toward conservative movements in Europe,” Meloni told Foreign Policy.

“We’ve been presented as the new face of the old post-fascist forces, but when we founded the party in 2012 the whole idea was to break with the past and build a new, post-ideological force predicated on the defense of the national interest. It’s safe to say we’re now a Gaullist party more than a far-right one,”

Brothers of Italy has been careful to distance itself from neofascist organizations and extremist groups, but sometimes the two dimensions touch each other. Last January, for instance, Meloni observed, as she does every year, the anniversary of the killings of three members of the Italian Social Movement in Rome in 1978, an event that was also commemorated by hundreds of militants making the fascist salute in the area where the massacre took place. The rally was not organized nor supported by Brothers of Italy, but the neofascist activists and the party share a common heritage that may blur the line between the suit-and-tie heirs of the social right and outright fascist apologists

In 2019, some local leaders of Brothers of Italy in the Marche region organized a dinner party to celebrate the anniversary of Benito Mussolini’s March on Rome in 1922, and the symbol of the party appeared next to the portrait of Italy’s dictator and other fascist memorabilia. The party formally disavowed the event

Dog whistles are also common in Brothers of Italy’s communication style. The party promoted a campaign against the billionaire philanthropist George Soros, who had allegedly funded a center-left party in Italy. The claim was, “Keep the money of the usurers,” a reference to one of the most indelible antisemitic tropes. The term “usurer” is still used in the party’s rhetoric to describe international bankers, Eurocrats, and foreign powers of all sorts attempting to erode Italy’s sovereignty

“The problem is that Italy never went through a serious process of elaboration of its fascist past. Many Italians still believe fascism wasn’t altogether evil and the country never really developed a culture of rights and political pluralism,”

Unlike Germany, which got into a process known as “Vergangenheitsbewältigung,” or “overcoming the past,” involving culture, education, and public debates grappling with the idea of collective culpability during the Nazi regime, Italy never had such a debate

“We strongly believe in the project of the European Conservatives and Reformists Party,” said Carlo Fidanza, a member of the European Parliament who’s in charge of Brothers of Italy’s foreign affairs portfolio. “Our goal is to enlarge the house of the European conservatives, not to tear it down and rebuild it from scratch.” When Fidanza says enlargement, what he really means is Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban

At the European level, Meloni is confronted with a dilemma similar to the one she’s facing in Rome; she would need to decide whether to move to the center, sticking to the more moderate conservatives, or to join the broad far-right coalition that is tempting her traditional allies

Now that the Republican Party is embroiled in a fight between Trump loyalists and traditional party members, Meloni is keeping an eye on the situation, secretly hoping that what will come out when the dust settles is a “Trumpist GOP, without Trump,” as one Brothers of Italy official put it.

postcolonial states across the Arab and Muslim world, all the way to Asia, Africa and Latin America have lost their raisons d'etre and therefore their legitimacy.

More specific patterns of regional histories need to be taken into account before we turn to more global trends.  

Within what historians call the longue duree frame of reference, the success of counter-revolutionary forces in derailing these uprisings is but a temporary bump. The fundamental, structural causes of the Arab (and other world) revolutions remain the same and will outlast the temporary reactionary stratagems designed to disrupt them.

Defiance of abusive state powers and their foreign backers - think of the junta in Egypt and their US and Israeli supporters, or Bashar al-Assad and his Russian and Iranian enablers - cannot be suppressed by yet another abusive total state. The statism at the heart of old-fashioned total revolutions - that one good state will follow one bad state - has long since lost its relevance and legitimacy. What we are witnessing today is the sustained synergy of delayed defiance, open-ended revolutions, and public happiness that in its revolutionary potential is far more enduring than the false promises a total state can deliver.

The naked brutality of state powers in suppressing the transnational uprisings were clear indications of their absolute and final loss of legitimacy.

In its global configuration, that "democratic" spectacle has resulted in the murderous Hindu fanaticism in India ("the largest democracy in the world") and the corrupt and ludicrous reality show of Donald Trump in the US ("the oldest democracy in the world") or else in the boring banality of Brexit in the United Kingdom. The world has nothing to learn from these failed historical experiments with democracy. The world must - and in the unfolding Arab revolutions - will witness a whole different take on nations exercising their democratic will. Delayed defiance will systematically and consistently strengthen this national will to sovereignty and in equal measures weaken the murderous apparatus of total states which have now degenerated into nothing more than killing machines.

waging a destructive war on the British system of government

This government is not simply un-conservative. It is an explicit repudiation of everything that it means to be a Conservative.

When I was political correspondent at The Spectator magazine under Boris Johnson’s editorship at the start of this century, we mercilessly analysed and exposed the constitutional vandalism of Labour’s Prime Minister Tony Blair. Now Johnson, counselled by his amoral, dangerous ‘senior adviser’ Dominic Cummings, has been doing exactly the same.

Cummings and Johnson are both creatures of big money – a point persistently missed by Britain’s client political press.

When his role came under threat in the early days of the Vote Leave campaign, Cummings boasted: “The donors are going to see them off.” Cummings is often framed as master of the dark arts. Dark money is more apt.The inside word is that big donors, some of whom have profited from Brexit instability, will soon be elevated to the Lords

Big cheques from obscure private sources are an important part of the explanation of how the Johnson clique seized control of the Tory party late last July.

What do these rich and unaccountable people want in return for this munificence? Nobody in Fleet Street asks. Britain’s supposedly independent and fearless press don’t want to ask, let alone know.

consistently place the end before the means – which means neglect of due process; readiness to mislead; and Leninist obsession with ideological rectitude. In particular, political lying has reached epidemic proportions in the few short months since Johnson and Cummings entered Downing Street.

We Conservatives are careful students of history. We know that men and women are frail, imperfect, corruptible and sometimes capable of great evil. That explains why we have always paid such attention to the importance of institutions which, as Burke explained, embody wisdoms and truths which are beyond the comprehension of individual minds.

Michael Oakeshott, the greatest Conservative thinker of the twentieth century, noted that there was no Conservative ideology. Instead, there is a Conservative disposition which “understands it to be the business of government not to inflame passion and give it new objects to feed on, but to inject into the activities of already passionate men an ingredient of moderation; to restrain, to deflate, to pacify and to reconcile”.

Brexit has mutated from a virtuous and even admirable attempt to reassert British sovereignty into a brutal assault on everything we stand for.

there is no way that I can as a lifelong Conservative vote for Boris Johnson’s revolutionary clique this week. Decent, middle-of-the-road Conservatives have no choice but to oppose this unremitting war on everything the party has fought to save and protect over the last 200 years. History will judge us accordingly.

The formal justification for the raid was based on a decree issued on Sept. 3, 2019. It authorizes the government to assume control of local plants and seeds and to regulate their production and sales.

Turkey’s first lady Emine Erdogan, a passionate advocate of herbal and organic food products, introduced the so-called “Ata Tohum” or “Ancestral Seed” project that envisages “agriculture as the key to our national sovereignty.” The scheme is aimed at collecting and storing genetically unmodified seeds from local farmers and to reproduce and plant them so as to grow “fully indigenous” aliments.

Ata Tohum is thought to be the brainchild of Ibrahim Adnan Saracoglu, an Austrian-trained biochemist.  He is among Erdogan’s ever expanding legion of advisers. The 71-year old has written academic tracts about how broccoli consumption can prevent prostatitis. He was with the first lady at the Sept. 5 Ata Tohum event.

The professor railed against assorted Westerners who had plundered Anatolia’s botanical wealth and carried it back home.

“Seeds” he intoned, “are the foundation of our national security.”

a “classic nationalist move to dig deeper and deeper into the past for justification of the [nationalist] policies that you are currently putting in place.”

parallels with the founder of modern Turkey, Kemal Ataturk, who “connected Turkish civilization back to the Phrygians and the Hittites” as part of his nation-building project.

“You have these genetic ties to the land through these seeds as proof that our civilization belongs here and has been here since time immemorial. To want to have these [seeds] in the first place is part of the nationalist framework.”

The ultimate fate of the British Institute’s seeds remains a mystery. It’s just as unclear what practical purpose they will serve.

“the archaeology seeds are essentially charcoal, dead and inert.” As for the modern reference collection “we are talking about stuff that was collected 25 to 50 years ago and is not going to be able to germinate.”

“But in order to get genomic information you only need one or two grains, not the whole collection. What [Turkish authorities] have done is they’ve removed this research resource from the wider Turkish and international community of researchers. It was a nice, small research facility, open to anyone who wanted to use it. Now it’s all gone,”

Early farming embodied what Graeber and Wengrow call “the ecology of freedom”: the freedom to move in and out of farming, to avoid getting trapped by its demands or endangered by the ecological fragility that it entails.

The authors write their chapters on cities against the idea that large populations need layers of bureaucracy to govern them—that scale leads inevitably to political inequality. Many early cities, places with thousands of people, show no sign of centralized administration: no palaces, no communal storage facilities, no evident distinctions of rank or wealth. This is the case with what may be the earliest cities of all, Ukrainian sites like Taljanky, which were discovered only in the 1970s and which date from as early as roughly 4100 B.C., hundreds of years before Uruk, the oldest known city in Mesopotamia. Even in that “land of kings,” urbanism antedated monarchy by centuries. And even after kings arose, “popular councils and citizen assemblies,” Graeber and Wengrow write, “were stable features of government,” with real power and autonomy. Despite what we like to believe, democratic institutions did not begin just once, millennia later, in Athens.

the authors’ most compelling instance of urban egalitarianism is undoubtedly Teotihuacan, a Mesoamerican city that rivaled imperial Rome, its contemporary, for size and magnificence. After sliding toward authoritarianism, its people abruptly changed course, abandoning monument-building and human sacrifice for the construction of high-quality public housing. “Many citizens,” the authors write, “enjoyed a standard of living that is rarely achieved across such a wide sector of urban society in any period of urban history, including our own.”

What is the state? the authors ask. Not a single stable package that’s persisted all the way from pharaonic Egypt to today, but a shifting combination of, as they enumerate them, the three elementary forms of domination: control of violence (sovereignty), control of information (bureaucracy), and personal charisma (manifested, for example, in electoral politics). Some states have displayed just two, some only one—which means the union of all three, as in the modern state, is not inevitable (and may indeed, with the rise of planetary bureaucracies like the World Trade Organization, be already decomposing). More to the point, the state itself may not be inevitable. For most of the past 5,000 years, the authors write, kingdoms and empires were “exceptional islands of political hierarchy, surrounded by much larger territories whose inhabitants … systematically avoided fixed, overarching systems of authority.”

does civilization rather mean “mutual aid, social co-operation, civic activism, hospitality [and] simply caring for others”?

The Dawn of Everything is framed by an account of what the authors call the “indigenous critique.” In a remarkable chapter, they describe the encounter between early French arrivals in North America, primarily Jesuit missionaries, and a series of Native intellectuals—individuals who had inherited a long tradition of political conflict and debate and who had thought deeply and spoke incisively on such matters as “generosity, sociability, material wealth, crime, punishment and liberty.”The Indigenous critique, as articulated by these figures in conversation with their French interlocutors, amounted to a wholesale condemnation of French—and, by extension, European—society: its incessant competition, its paucity of kindness and mutual care, its religious dogmatism and irrationalism, and most of all, its horrific inequality and lack of freedom.

making the case that the conventional account of human history as a saga of material progress was developed in reaction to the Indigenous critique in order to salvage the honor of the West. We’re richer, went the logic, so we’re better. The authors ask us to rethink what better might actually mean.

“How did we get stuck?” the authors ask—stuck, that is, in a world of “war, greed, exploitation [and] systematic indifference to others’ suffering”? It’s a pretty good question. “If something did go terribly wrong in human history,” they write, “then perhaps it began to go wrong precisely when people started losing that freedom to imagine and enact other forms of social existence.” It isn’t clear to me how many possibilities are left us now, in a world of polities whose populations number in the tens or hundreds of millions. But stuck we certainly are.