Annotated Bibliography on the Evolution of Civilization

= This bibliography, which cannot be comprehensive due to the vastness of the topic, introduces the key thinkers and their books.

Produced by Michel Bauwens in 2024.

Forerunners East and West

Ibn Khaldun

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibn_Khaldun

Ibn Khaldun (1332 – 1406) was an Arab scholar of the 14th cy who wrote a famous non-mythological world history, the Kitāb al-ʻIbar, of which the first part, the introduction, i.e. the Al-Muqaddimah, is well known. In it, he introduced a cycle of civilization, based on a proto-sociological analysis of the dynamics of power, the Asabiyyah. His interpretation starts with the power deriving from strong kinship and religious ideology, which may cause nomadic peoples to rule settled nations, but once they are in power, their cohesion weakens and the society declines, until a new cycle replaces the weakened group by another.

The structure of the book, "Kitāb al-ʻIbar” ( "Book of Lessons, Record of Beginnings and Events in the History of the Arabs and the Berbers and Their Powerful Contemporaries") is as follows:

1. Book 1; Al-Muqaddimah ('The Introduction'), a socio-economic-geographical universal history of empires, and the best known of his works.
2. Books 2-5; World History up to the author's own time.
3. Books 6-7; Historiography of the Berbers and the Maghreb.

Khaldun, Ibn. The Muqaddimah: an introduction to history. Princeton University Press, 2015.

Ssu-Ma Ch’ien

“Ssu-ma Chien wrote the first comprehensive history of China, the 'Shih chi' meaning 'Historical Record'. Ssu-ma Chien initiated a remarkable tradition of historical writing. He organized China's history around the idea that each dynasty began with a virtuous ruler chosen by Heaven, and then by degrees lost its initial virtue until Heaven lost patience and withdrew its mandate from the last unworthy ruler."

(https://www.hyperhistory.com/online_n2/people_n2/persons2_n2/ssuma.html)

1. Watson B. (1958). Ssu-Ma Ch’ien: Grand Historian of China. 221 pp. New York: Columbia University Press.
2. Watson B. (1958). Ssu-Ma Ch’ien: Grand Historian of China. 221 pp. New York: Columbia University Press. (interpretation)

St. Augustine, Joachim de Fiore, Vico

Zoroaster was perhaps the first to introduce a vision of cosmic and human history that was not cyclical, but ‘linear’, with a beginning and an end, a vision that would influence Jewish, then Christian conceptions of time. St. Augustine was still steeped in that vision, and brought it to the West, but Joachim de Fiore, writing at the end of the 12th cy, brings a crucial ‘update’, as he divides history in 3 stages, the Age of the Father (the Old Testament), the Age of the Son (the age inaugurated by Christ), but crucially, his third age, the Age of the Holy Spirit, is a spiritual future ‘on earth’ and not in a transcendent realm. Eric Voegelin calls this the crucial step of the ‘immanentization of the eschaton’, which would introduce, after the Reformation, secular utopianism and views of history, of which Vico would be one of the first accomplished expressions. Do pay attention to the three books of Eric Voegelin about political gnosticism, in which he stresses the long-term consequences of this change in vision, i.e. the locating of hope on the earthly plane, instead of the transcendental plane.

Here is an interpretation of Joachim di Fiore’s importance by Loren Goldner, https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Joachim_di_Fiore

I have tried to give my own synthesis of the interpretations of time, here at https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Evolution_of_the_Conceptions_of_Time_Across_History

“Modernity without Restraint” is the volume that contains the three books on 'political gnosticism', by Eric Voegelin, and offers crucial insights for modern political movements: https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Modernity_without_Restraint

• The New Science. by Giambattista Vico. Yale University Press, 2020

“"The New Science is the major work of Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico. First published in 1725 and revised in 1730 and 1744, it calls for a reinterpretation of human civilization by tracing the stages of historical development shared by all societies. Almost unknown during his lifetime, the work had a profound influence on later thinkers, from Montesquieu and Marx to Joyce and Gadamer. This edition offers a fresh translation and detailed annotations which enable the reader to track Vico’s multiple allusions to other texts. The introduction situates the work firmly within a contemporary context and newly establishes Vico as a thinker of modernity." (from the publisher)

Vico’s stages are explained here: The stages explained at https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Giambattista_Vico%27s_Stages_in_World_History

19th Cy: The century of systematic ‘progress’

It could be said, following the interpretation of Loren Goldner, that the Renaissance thinkers were still ‘cosmo-biological’, i.e. equally interested in the interior/cultural evolution of humanity, and as it related to their religious and spiritual cultures, i.e. they saw an animated, organistic universe, and the materialist mechanistic approach. Goethe was a late representative of that approach, before it sundered in two. Indeed, later on, that would split into the more consistently materialistic and mechanistic approaches that had been started by Descartes and Newton, and the counter-reaction of German Idealism and Romanticism. But both tendencies, which had started splitting in the Enlightenment, were very much influenced by narratives of progress, a temporal succession of ever more perfected cultural stages, of which their own age was the culmination.

Hegel’s evolution of Absolute Spirit, explained in the Philosophy of History for example, may be seen as the prime representative of the primarily spiritual understanding of human evolution, and Marx, his pupil, as the prime example of the opposite ‘materialist’ interpretation,, with Das Kapital and his other books also implicitly pointing to such an interpretation of world history. Auguste Comte’s A Positive Philosophy could be seen in the same light. The debates about ultimate causation will continue in the 20th cy, but take on a different form, with those stressing ‘immaterial’ causation dividing in culturalist and spiritualist positions, and Marxism evolving into neo-materialist approaches. The end of the 20th cy. Saw the emergence of the Big History approach, an academically validated synthesis of the evolution of matter (the cosmos), life (the Earth), and human culture (civilizations).

The 20th Cy: Culturalist vs. Materialist Approaches

20th Cy: Spengler and its reactions, a new beginning

The 20th century would see the continuation of the clear split between the culturalist interpretation of human history, in reaction to the bombshell that was Spengler’s Decline of the West; while later on, following Fernand Braudel, we will see a flowering of the materialist ‘neo-Marxist’ interpretations, led by the world-systems analysis school that was launched by Immanuel Wallerstein. By the end of the century we would see the emergence of more integrative attempts, for example under the name of Big History, an effort to align cosmic-physical, biological, and technocultural forms of evolution.

Spengler and the Decline of the West

• Spengler, Oswald. The Decline of the West. Oxford University Press, 1991.

Spengler's book is dense, but also very rewarding; his command of cultural facts is astounding. His originality is to look at civilizations as living organisms, they are born, mature, wither and die. No one civilization is like any other, they have a distinct 'soul', something original they bring to the world; and, according to Spengler, they do not learn from each other, there is no progress or evolution; just different responses to life, rooted in particular landscapes and ecosystems. Once civilizations lose their spiritual roots and become universal and rational, they also die. Spengler invites us to reject the ancient-medieval-modern scheme, and if civilizations can be compared, it is not chronologically, but at the same relative period in their evolution. I.e. the 'winter' time of Europe, needs to be compared to the winter time of China, which occurred in different millenia. Spengler's book, The Decline of the West, is considered by many to be the most important book of the 20th century, and sparked a conversation that is continuing to this day. Toynbee, Quigley, Campbell and Gebser, among many others, reacted specifically to Spengler. His thesis is quite deterministic, and sobering for individuals, the best we can do is to live 'according to the possibilities of our epoch'.

Key theses from Spengler:

• Each civilization goes through the same cycle, of approximately one thousand years, of growth and decline, working out the development of a prime symbol, representing their metaphysical orientation towards the cosmos

• There is no civilizational evolution and no significant learning from one civilization to another; each cycle starts anew

• Comparisons can be made from one civilization to another, in the same phase of their cycles, i.e. similar processes and signs of decline can be found in the different civilizations

• Distinguishes the first 500 years as dynamic and decentralized ‘culture’ era (spring and summer), vs replicative Civilization (imperial) era (fall and winter)

• Hypothesizes that each civilization has a Prime Symbol, a specific answer to human social tragedy

• Proposes an evolution of civilization from caste system (warriors and priests), via monarchy (third estate), to democracy (fourth estate), culminating in Caesarism, new religiosity and collapse

Many historians and theoreticians of society felt prompted to react to the theses put forward by Oswald Spengler. Here is a review of the more important ones.

Arnold Toynbee and the Study of History

• Toynbee, Arnold. A study of history. A new ed, Weathervane Books : distributed by Crown Publishers, 1979.

Arnold Toynbee was a British historian, and took several decades to write a monumental Study of History, challenging the ‘determinism’ of Spengler, and positing a complexification over time of human civilizations, which do learn from each other. Toynbee’s book is also available in a 2-volume abridged version and in a single volume. His method is to describe a continuing process of ‘challenges and response’. These responses are only successful in their ascending periods.

Key theses from Toynbee:

Generations of civilizations succeed each other, and there is evolution and collective learning over time; each civilization is characterized by

• A dominant creative minority that originates the civilizational form, and becomes authoritarian when it loses its legitimacy in the period of decline

• The internal proletariat loses confidence in the decline period and builds its own counter institutions

• The external proletariat ends up invading the civilization in its moments of decline

Transition periods, at least for the previous transitional period, are therefore characterized by a specific process:

1) establishment of a ‘universal state’ which dominates the whole territorial expanse of that particular civilization at the end of its dynamic phase;

2) as the universal state declines, it creates a internal ‘proletarian’ reaction, which leads to the establishment of universal churches;

3) the external proletariat, i.e. the ‘barbarian’ tribes start invading the civilizational territory, they are obliged to come to terms with the universal churches, thereby establishing the contours of the next civilizational phase.

Carrol Quigley and the Evolution of Civilizations

• Quigley, Carroll. The evolution of civilizations: an introduction to historical analysis. 2d ed, Liberty Press, 1979.

Carrol Quigley is an American reaction to the challenge of Oswald Spengler’s thesis of decline. He describes the evolution of civilizations as going through seven similar phases. Crucially however, he leaves a lot of space for human agency. For example, in the Age of Expansion, if societies can reinvent a new instrument of expansion, the civilization can reset itself for a sizeable period.

Key theses of Quigley:

Amongst Quigley’s key concepts are the instruments of expansion. These instruments are the particular institutions that allow a civilization to extract surplus for its own development, but they tend to become self-preserving over time, at the expense of their societies.

The further development of these civilizations therefore depends on the invention of new instruments of expansion, which if successful, guarantee its future. This is clearly a non-deterministic answer to Spengler.

The stages are:

1) Gestation

2) Mixture

3) Expansion

4) Age of Conflict

5) Universal Empire

6) Decay

7) Invasion

The culturalist reaction to Spengler: Campbell, Gebser, Borkenau, Thompson, Sorokin

If Toynbee and Quigley offered ‘historical’ responses, then the following authors focused on the importance of specifically cultural evolution as keys to understanding world history, in particular introducing the idea of the evolution of human mentalities and ‘forms of awareness’ over time.

Joseph Campbell and the Evolution of World Mythology

• Campbell, Joseph. The masks of God. Arkana, 1991.

Joseph Campbell’s four-volume series rehabilitates the importance of the evolution of mythology, which parallels the evolution of societies and civilizations as they evolve into more complex arrangements, up to reaching the ethical evolution represented by the Axial Age, which represents the dawn of the world religions, necessary for keeping civilizations together through commonly believed narratives. Mythology is not just something that lies in our past, but also a kind of 'collective intelligence' that structures our unconscious. We cannot understand life and society, if we do not understand its underlying mythological basis.

He distinguishes:

1. The Way of the Animal Powers—the myths of Paleolithic hunter-gatherers which focus on shamanism and animal totems.
2. The Way of the Seeded Earth—the myths of Neolithic, agrarian cultures which focus upon a mother goddess and associated fertility rites.
3. The Way of the Celestial Lights—the myths of Bronze Age city-states with pantheons of gods ruling from the heavens, led by a masculine god-king.
4. The Way of Man—religion and philosophy as it developed after the Axial Age (c. 6th century BCE), in which the mythic imagery of previous eras was made consciously metaphorical, reinterpreted as referring to psycho-spiritual, not literal-historical, matters.

Key theses from Campbell:

Phases of societal organization correspond to phases in mythological development

Jean Gebser and the Ever-Present Origin

• Gebser, Jean. The Ever-Present Origin. Ohio University Press, 2020.

Jean Gebser is a Swiss cultural historian. His book delineates an evolution of ‘states of consciousness’, fundamental ways of seeing and interpreting the world, that also correspond to different stages of complexity in the organization of society. Gebser stresses this is not an ‘evolution’, but a series of transformations and transvaluations of human culture.

Key theses of Jean Gebser:

• Gebser identified five structures of consciousness (archaic, magic, mythical, mental-rational, and integral-arational) ; each structure has an efficient and deficient phase. The issues of the deficient phase prepare the way for its replacement. The current civilization is marked by the deficient phase of rationality.

• Gebser identified the creation of a new structure of consciousness amongst the artistic and scientific pioneers of the beginning of the 20th cy. He believes this form to be integrative, i.e. capable of using the previous forms as appropriate.

Erich Neumann on the evolution of mythology and forms of consciousness

• Neumann, Erich. The origins and history of consciousness. Princeton University Press, 2014.

This book reviews the evolution of mythology as an expression of the evolution of human consciousness. It is a landmark book originating in the Jungian tradition.

William Irwin Thompson on Artifacts and Texts in the Evolution of Consciousness

• Thompson, William Irwin. Coming into being: artifacts and texts in the evolution of consciousness. 1st ed, St. Martin’s Press, 1996

Inspired by Gebser’s cultural analysis, Thompson focuses on the analysis of cultural artifacts such as Gilgamesh, the Iliad and others, classifying them in an interesting way:

1. Works that announce a ‘coming’ cultural period, whose characteristics can be read in the transitional text, for example in Gilgamesh, the male skygod fights the female earth deity, but cannot yet completely defeat it
2. Works that exemplify a particular cultural stage, i.e. the Iliad as an expression of the heroic age
3. Works that appear to show the completion of a period, thereby implicitly announcing its obsoleteness, f.e. Dante’s Divine Comedy as the perfection of medieval Christianity

Key theses:

• We are presently moving to an ‘age of Planetization’

• Offers a detailed historical periodization which originally includes the dark ages of each period

• Integrates modes of production, types of media and technology, forms of polity, and ties them to culture and cultural artefacts that express them

Pitirim Sorokin on the three sociocultural supersystems

• Sorokin, Pitirim. Social and Cultural Dynamics. Vol. I to IV. A Study of Change in Major Systems of Art, Truth, Ethics, Law, and Social Relationships. Routledge, 1937.

Extremely well documented historical comparison of civilizational cultures, in four volumes:

1. v. 1. Fluctuation of forms of art.--
2. v. 2. Fluctuation of systems of truth, ethics, and law.--
3. v. 3. FLuctuation of social relationships, war, and revolution.--
4. v. 4. Basic problems, principles, and methods

Key theses:

• Human cultures move from ‘sensate’ dominated cultures, i.e. materialistic periods where only the truth of the senses are accepted as truth, to ‘idealistic’ cultures, for which reality is immaterial and spiritual.

• Western dominated world civilization was Sensate, for over 600 years, but is dying, and will transition to an Ideationist, or possibly Idealistic Era.

• There exists the potential for integrative models that are not dominated by the extreme polarities, this is the Idealistic Model.

Borkenau on the spiral of Living and Dying

• Borkenau, Franz. End and beginning: on the generations of cultures and the origins of the West. Columbia University Press, 1981

For Borkenau, what is crucial to identify a culture is how its treats death and dying, and he sees a spiral sequence in this, as regards the development of high cultures:

“Here is a schematic of Borkenau’s model that is worth keeping in mind for purposes of clarifying his theory as he elaborates it in the course of the essay:

Primitive Societies: “Death Denial” (paranoid)

1. Egypt & Mesopotamia: “Death Transcendance” (immortality affirmed; world denied)

Intermezzo: Dark Age c. 1200 BC (Sea Peoples)

2. Judaic & Greek Societies: “Death Acceptance” (immortality deemphasized, world affirmed)

Intermezzo: Dark Age c. 400 AD (Germanic Barbarians)

3. Christianity: “Death Transcendance” (immortality affirmed; world affirmed)

4. Post-Renaissance: “Death Acceptance” or “Death Embracing” (immortality denied, completely; world affirmed; soul abolished)

Thus, cultures of the first generation are in resonance with cultures of the third; while cultures of the second generation are in resonance with those of the fourth. Borkenau is careful to stress, though, that this resonance is not a mere repetition, but rather a higher development on the turn of the spiral. Christianity is no mere regression to the Egyptian emphasis on immortality, for it adds a complex dimension of ethics due to its inheritance and synthesis of the Judaic and Hellenic worldviews. The Renaissance, likewise, does not just retrieve Hellenism, but rather picks it up and develops it into a civilization of the machine that takes the annihilation of the Afterlife and the disintegration of the personality to a new level of complexity.”

(https://cultural-discourse.com/on-death-civilization/ )

World-Systems Analysis: The ‘materialist’ response

Fernand Braudel and the Origins of Capitalism

• Braudel, Fernand. Civilization and Capitalism, 15th-18th Century. University of California Press, 1992

Braudel would launch a very influential ‘French’ historical school, that of the ‘Annales’, that focuses on the material substrates of human history. In this trilogy considered to be a classic, he focuses on the evolution from ‘premodernity’ to modern capitalist Europe, ending with the change towards planetary perspectives of mature capitalism.

Immanuel Wallerstein and the school of World-Systems Analysis

• The Modern World System: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World Economy in the Sixteenth Century . Immanuel Wallerstein. Academic Press, 1974-1980

vol. 1: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century; (1974);

vol. 2: Mercantilism and the Consolidation of the European World-Economy, 1600-1750, (1980).

vol. 3: The Second Era of Great Expansion of the Capitalist World-Economy, 1730s-1840s. (1989)

Classic on the emergence of global capitalism as a world-system, representing western geopolitical supremacy, and originating from the capitalization of agriculture. Introduced very important vocabulary for analysts of the world system, such as core-periphery relations etc..

David Wilkinson on Central Civilization

• Wilkinson, David. ‘World-Economic Theories and Problems: Quigley vs. Wallerstein vs Central Civilization’. Journal of World-Systems Research, augustus 1996, pp. 506–74.

Key theses:

• From the moment of the struggle between the Sumerian and Egyptian civilizational empires 5,000 years ago, there has been one central civilization of interconnected cities in Eurasia and North Africa, a system which later expanded worldwide

• That core interconnected network of cities never completely collapsed

• There is a clear upward sweep in the size of cities and empires over time

Peter Turchin, George Modelski and Joshua Goldstein on Long Cycles

• Modelski, George. Long Cycles in World Politics. Seattle: University of Washington Press. 1987. Pp. 244.

• Goldstein, Joshua. Long Cycles. Prosperity and War in the Modern Age, New Haven-Londres, Yale University Press, 1988, 433 p.

• Turchin, Peter, en Sergey A. Nefedov. Secular Cycles. Princeton University Press, 2011

• McCoy, Alfred. To Govern the Globe: World Orders and Catastrophic Change. Haymarket Books, 2021.

Peter Turchin reviews the ebb and flow of agricultural empires over time, identifying a ‘secular cycle’ with ascending and descending phases for each civilization. Modelski provides a review of the emergence and growth of global hegemonic power, starting with the failed attempts of the Mongols, followed by the successive western hegemons. Goldstein compares the 60-year Kondratieff economic cycles, the 150-year ‘hegemonic cycle’ influencing the fortunes of world empires, and the dating of wars in that cycle. McCoy analyzes hegemony as a necessary mixture of ‘power’ and ‘principle’ and reviews each successive hegemony since the Iberian age. He includes a chapter discussing the emergence of China as the new hegemon, and the challenge for global governance of dealing with climate change.

Key theses:

The cyclic nature of societal development in ascending and descending cycles is well documented, both for agricultural and industrial societies The succession of hegemons, and their attending world orders, are interrupted by ‘big wars’ and chaotic transitions.

The outliers: Polany, Karatani, Pogany, and Mark Whitaker

• Karatani, Kōjin. The Structure of World History: From Modes of Production to Modes of Exchange. Duke University Press, 2014.

• Pogany, Peter. Rethinking the World. iUniverse,.

• Polanyi, Karl. The Great Transformation. 1944.

• Whitaker, Mark. Ecological Revolutions: The Political Origins of Environmental Degradation and the Environmental Origins of Axial Religions. Lambert Academic Pub., 2009.

Karl Polanyi’s Great Transformation outlines the lib-lab cycles within capitalism, around the key issue of the ‘freedom’ vs ‘embeddedness’’ of the market within the social goals of the society, leading to an ebb and flow of the role of the state vis a vis the market. Kojin Karatani moves towards a new historical materialism by focusing on the associated cultures of ‘modes of exchange’, rather than ‘mode of production’. He outlines the succession of dominant modes of exchange over time. Peter Pogany is the first to offer a synthesis between the materialist succession of productive world orders, based on thermodynamic limits, and the associated changes in cultural mentalities that have been previously identified by Jean Gebser. He focuses on the changes in the different global systems under capitalist logics, and on the chaotic transitions that mark the origin of the changes. He has a detailed analysis on the characteristics of the emerging next stage of the world system. Mark Whitaker discloses the ebb and flow of jurisdictional alliances and commons-based institutions and practices in the ascending and descending phases of various historical societies (ancient China, medieval Japan, and Post-Roman Europe), and specifically on the associations between popular forces and spiritual reform movements, and how these play a role in these various transitions.

Key theses:

• There are no smooth transitions, but relatively stable complex adaptive systems that transform through chaotic transitions

• The productive communities that suffer from civilizational overshoot have an active role in these changes

• Human civilization is thermodynamically determined and associated with changes in the forms of human awareness

The Cosmists: holistic interpretations?

In this section, we mention the authors that link human historical evolution specifically to transcendent factors.

"In his book Transcendence and History: The Search for Ultimacy from Ancient Societies to Postmodernity, Glenn Hughes has explored this problem in depth. Following Voegelin’s insights into the human desire for transcendence, he succeeds in demonstrating, through a thorough analysis of myths, poetry, and art from many historical periods and cultures, that there is a basic human relationship to a trans-finite, trans-spatial, and trans-temporal realm of meaning, which cultures express and symbolize in phenotypically different ways. He argues, “Human fulfillment entails the willing embrace and development of our relationship to the eternal and imperishable ground of existence.” Anything less than this willingness to participate in the transcendent mystery of the cosmos will be ultimately unsatisfying for human beings" .

- Michael Colebrook [1]

West: Teilhard de Chardin: Through the Noosphere towards the Omega Point

• De Chardin, Pierre Teilhard. The Phenomenon of Man. Harper Perennial, 2008.

• Swimme, Brian, en Thomas Berry. The Universe Story from the Primordial Flaring Forth to the Ecozoic Era. [Repr.], ISSR, 2010.

Teilhard de Chardin was a Jesuit and paleontologist who was perhaps the first to link natural and human evolution to a Christian understanding of the cosmos. He saw natural evolution creating ever more complex arrangements: first, ‘dead’ matter alone (galactic history), the geosphere (earth history); then, life emerges and creates the biosphere, the coexistence of all plants and animals (gaia); finally, human beings create the sphere of interconnected culture, the noosphere (from human culture to the universe story). Christ is the mediating factor which vitalizes and sacralizes matter and will eventually unify all realms, but humanity’s role is to bring living nature and consciousness throughout the universe, eventually reaching a transfigured universe: the Omega point.

Thomas Berry is a more contemporary Catholic thinker who has continued the work of De Chardin and synthesized the narrative of cosmic and human history, collaborating with Brian Swinne on the Universe Story.

East: Aurobindo and Sarkar

• Aurobindo. The Human Cycle. 2. ed., 6. impr, Sri Aurobindo Ashram, 1992.

• Prabhat Rainjan Sarkar (1967) Human Society, Ananda Marga Publications

Aurobindo studied in the West, briefly participated in the independence struggle to liberate India from the British Empire, but then turned to a life of spiritual study and practice, attempting to accord the insights of evolutionary theory of Western science with the insights of the Hindu tradition. He is the founder of the influential spiritual community Auroville, in Pondicherry, India.

Sarkar offers an original interpretation of world history based on the Hindu caste system that has been influential in India and it became the ideology of a mass movement at some point. Today, it exists as ‘PROUT’ on the international level.

Neo-Integrative worldviews: introducing ‘epistemes’, mentalities and ways of viewing

For a good overview, see:

• The rise of Neo-Integrative Worldviews. Towards a rational spirituality for the coming planetary civilization? By Roland Benedikter and Markus Molz. pdf

Ken Wilber’s Integral Theory

• Wilber, Ken. 1) Up from Eden: a transpersonal view of human evolution. 1st Quest ed, The Theosophical Pub. House, 1996; 2) A Theory of Everything. Shambala, 2000.

Ken Wilber is famous for his AQAL model (All Quadrants, All Levels), which inter-relates four aspects of reality: the subjective (the individual-interior), the objective (the individual as exterior, body in space), the inter-subjective (collective culture) and the inter-objective (social and economic systems). The correlation of these aspects of reality facilitate a non-reductionist interpretation of human history, which he offers in Up from Eden, an evolutionary account of humanity, which correlates material history to the evolution of the human forms of awareness, carefully distinguishing, for each civilizational era, the ‘average human mentality’ from the minority showing the potential for higher levels of integration who are already modelling the future societal forms.

21th Cy: Merging big history and cosmic history

Big History is a new field that aims to merge cosmic history, life history , and human history, into one integrated narrative that is scientifically validated, and can create meaning and hope.

For an introduction to the emergence of this field, see:

• Rodrigue, Barry H. 2022. “Big History—A Study of All Existence: Part 1: A World Connected.” Journal of Big History 5 (1): 1-47.DOI | [2]: "This is a brief overview of the field of big history and my personal reflection on its significance."

• Christian, David. Maps of time: an introduction to big history. University of California Press, 2004" Tells the story as a series of telescoping time periods, each representing a new threshold of complexity.

• McNeill, John Robert. The webs of humankind: a world history. First edition, W. W. Norton & Company, 2021.

Not part of the ‘big history’ line stricto sensu, but important in its focus on human interconnectivity as the driver of history and planetarisation.

• Swimme, Brian, en Thomas Berry. The universe story: from the primordial flaring forth to the ecozoic era--a celebration of the unfolding of the cosmos. 1st ed, HarperSan Francisco, 1992.: Stresses the integral role of humanity in the unfolding of the cosmos.

Controversies: Civilizational Competition and Ecological Collapse

• Tainter, Joseph A. The collapse of complex societies. 23. print, Cambridge Univ. Press, 2011.

• Huntington, Samuel P. The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. Simon & Schuster, 2003

• Diamond, Jared M. 1) Guns, germs, and steel: the fates of human societies. 20th Anniversary edition, Norton, 2017; 2) Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive. Penguin, 2011; 3) Upheaval: How Nations Cope with Crisis and Change, Allen Lane, 2019.

• Coker, Christopher. The rise of the civilizational state. Polity, 2019.

Joseph Tainter interprets culture and civilization as depending on energy and the ‘cost of complexity’, explaining collapse as a result of the inevitable rise of the cost of complexity for growing civilizations. This work boosted the subsequent study of collapse. Jared Diamond’s Collapse looks at particular case studies of environmental collapse, while Upheaval focuses on political crises of modern nations and the results for democratic governance. Huntington famously focuses on the millenial competition between civilizational spheres and how this expresses itself in current geopolitical crises. Christopher Coker describes the attempts to go beyond the formerly hegemonic ‘liberal internationalist’ order, and sees a new type of post-Westphalian state emerging, where the state represents a civilizational sphere. The new regimes in Russian, China, Iran as well as the attempts to recreate a Islamic Caliphate, represent this new category.