Thematic Approaches on Civilizational History

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Directory 2: Thematic Approaches on Civilizational History

Thread 7: The P2P/Commons View

See also our two structured bibliographies:

Books, read and recommended:

  • Beyond Civilization: The World's Four Great Streams of Civilization: Their Achievements, Their Differences and Their Future. Keith Chandler. Rivendell Publishing Company, 1992
  • How the Irish Saved Civilization. The Untold Story of Ireland's Heroic Role from the Fall of Rome to the Rise of Medieval Europe. by Thomas Cahill. Bantam-Doubleday-Dell, 1995


Thread 8: Single Volume Treatments

  • Rushton Coulborn. The Origin of Civilized Societies. (1959)
  • The Fate of Empires. John Bagot Glubb
  • The Human Web: A Bird's-Eye View of World History. by J. R. McNeill (Author, Georgetown University), William H McNeill. Norton', 2003 [4]: a history of the formation of the cosmopolitan web, the communication's technologies that allow increasing interaction and integration of human communities up to the planetary scale.
  • Melko, M. (1969). The Nature of Civilizations. Boston, Mass: Porter Sargent
  • Civilizations and Historical Patterns. An Approach to the Comparative Study of History. Neagu Djuvara. Humanitas, 1975 (1st ed. in French) [5]: "In the shadow of the major civilization, before it disappeared in its turn, how many other cultures have perished without a trace?"

Thread 9: Understanding the Dark Side

Here we will discuss authors such as Rene Girard and Georges Bataille, and others such as 'Traditionalist' authors, who reject modernity as such.

The authors

Georges Bataille


Alexander Bard

[6]; contemporary exponent of a 'Dark Renaissance', mostly Nietzschean.


Alexander Dugin


Julius Evola

Traditionalist author.


Rene Girard


Rene Guenon


Heiner Muhlmann:


Thread 10: Civilizational Conflict and Collapse

TBD: Huntington, Tainter, Coker, etc ..


Thread 11: Other Important Authors


Critical Theory Approaches


Specific Thematic Approaches Related to World-Systems Analysis

Ecological World History

The Great Simplification= "that the long trajectory of human societies that solve problems by adding more energy will reverse this century. More energy allows for more complexity, less energy implies a simplification of processes, lifestyles and expectations". (Nate Hagens [9])

""Our findings showed that from about 12,000 BCE, the planet went through a warming trend causing extreme climate changes all across the globe. It disrupted primal societies and their ways of life and successively displaced ancient pastoral and agrarian communities. The warming trend intensified rapidly quickening the rise and fall of ancient civilizations at the core centers. The tumultuous social and ecological ethos of the pre-axial times became conducive for the formation of world-denying motifs that became the bedrock of all post-axial religions and philosophies. This, in a nutshell, is the thesis of Green History of Religion."


This crucial book details the 'Pulsation of the Commons in ancient China, medieval Japan, and Post-Roman Europe.


  1. World Ecological Degradation,
  2. The Recurring Dark Ages, and
  3. Ecological Futures

Sing Chew surveys 5,000 years of human history and finds a distinctive, recurring pattern: Civilizations that amass vast wealth do so by exhausting their environment."


Ian Morris' Thermodynamic Histories
  • Book: The Measure of Civilization: How Social Development Decides the Fate of Nations. By Ian Morris. Princeton University Press, 2013. [11]

"Morris’s index breaks social development into four traits—energy capture per capita, organization, information technology, and war-making capacity—and he uses archaeological, historical, and current government data to quantify patterns. Morris reveals that for 90 percent of the time since the last ice age, the world’s most advanced region has been at the western end of Eurasia, but contrary to what many historians once believed, there were roughly 1,200 years—from about 550 to 1750 CE—when an East Asian region was more advanced. Only in the late eighteenth century CE, when northwest Europeans tapped into the energy trapped in fossil fuels, did the West leap ahead."


[12]

"Presents a provocative alternative: human culture gradually evolves towards whatever system of organisation allows a society to harvest the most energy, and we then conclude that system is the most virtuous one. Egalitarian values helped hunter-gatherers hunt and gather effectively. Once farming was developed, hierarchy proved to be the social structure that produced the most grain (and best repelled nomadic raiders). And in the modern era, democracy and individuality have proven to be more productive ways to collect and exploit fossil fuels. On this theory, it’s technology that drives moral values much more than moral philosophy." [13]

Economic World History

  • Book: The Destiny of Civilization. Michael Hudson. [14]: “There are essentially two types of society: mixed economies with public checks and balances, and oligarchies that dismantle and privatize the state, taking over its monetary and credit system, the land and basic infrastructure to enrich themselves but choking the economy, not helping it grow.”
  • Book: The Measure of Civilization: How Social Development Decides the Fate of Nations. By Ian Morris. Princeton University Press, 2013. [15] : " Morris’s index breaks social development into four traits—energy capture per capita, organization, information technology, and war-making capacity — and he uses archaeological, historical, and current government data to quantify patterns."


History of the Commons

  • Commons, Markets and Associations in the European Middle Ages. JEAN-FRANÇOIS DRAPERI. Associations in the Medieval West. From the emergence of the commons to the supremacy of markets. Le fait associatif dans l’Occident médiéval. De l’émergence des communs à la suprématie des marchés. Le Bord de l'Eau, [16]: "Associations dominate the economy of the central Middle Ages: monasteries, parishes, guilds, brotherhoods, communes, found the renaissance of the 12th century. Acting on the medieval associative fact invites us to pose the hypothesis that associations and the social economy are not an invention of contemporary society, but rather a discovery. The social economy was not born in reaction to capitalism, but the capitalist economy was born from the transformation of trade associations and the seizure of power by merchants and bankers over the commons and communes in the 13th and 14th centuries."


History of Gender and Power

  • Sex and Power in History: How the Difference Between the Sexes Has Shaped Our Destinies. Amaury de Riencourt; traces the changing historic roles of women, especially Western women. He reaches back to remote sources to explain—and suggest solutions to—the current predicament of the sexes. When some three of four thousand years ago men revolted against the myth of the Great Earth Goddess and set up dominant male gods, it was a psychological event of the first magnitude. This shift to the masculine principle, claims de Riencourt, marked the beginning of history proper and led to the male-oriented societies of Greece and Rome."


History of Media and Interconnective Webs

Authors

Articles


Books
  • Empire and Communications. By Harold Innis. Dundun, 2007 (1950). [17]:" a sweeping historical survey of how communications media influence the rise and fall of empires "


"A cohesive, single-author world history built around the webs of interaction that stitched together regions and over time, the globe. .. McNeill uses connective webs—along which trade, religious beliefs, technologies, pathogens, and much else traveled—to organize details and keep the big picture in view."


  • The Alphabet vs. the Goddess: The Conflict Between Word and Image. by Leonard Shlain: "when a critical mass of people within a society acquire literacy, especially alphabet literacy, left hemispheric modes of thought are reinforced at the expense of right hemispheric ones, which manifests as a decline in the status of images, women's rights, and goddess worship..."


  • Eisenstein, Elizabeth L. (1983). The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Religious History

"Until around 1500 B.C., it was generally believed that once the world had been set in order by the gods, it was in essence immutable. However, it was always a troubled world. By means of flood and drought, famine and plague, defeat in war, and death itself, demonic forces threatened and impaired it. Various combat myths told how a divine warrior kept the forces of chaos at bay and enabled the world to survive. Sometime between 1500 and 1200 B.C., the Iranian prophet Zoroaster broke from that static yet anxious world-view."


"This fascinating book explores the millenarianism that flourished in western Europe between the eleventh and sixteenth centuries. Covering the full range of revolutionary and anarchic sects and movements in medieval Europe, Cohn demonstrates how prophecies of a final struggle between the hosts of Christ and Antichrist melded with the rootless poor's desire to improve their own material conditions, resulting in a flourishing of millenarian fantasies. The only overall study of medieval millenarian movements, The Pursuit of the Millennium offers an excellent interpretation of how, again and again, in situations of anxiety and unrest, traditional beliefs come to serve as vehicles for social aspirations and animosities."


War

Specific Books on the Theme of the Evolution of Consciousness Through Time

List of readings inspired by John David Ebert. Ebert has organized these recommended readings in 2 pairs: Steiner and Aurobindo focus directly on the spiritual aspects; Neumann and Gebser on the psychological; and de Chardin and Arthur Young, on the physical/scientific plane.


Intro:

[20]: ; strongly recommended book-length attempt at comparison of the evolutionary narratives of Rudolf Steiner, Jean Gebser, and Ken Wilber.


The authors:

(they are treated more fully in other sections of the bibliography; this is a short specialized list)

Rudolf Steiner


Sri Aurobindo


Eric Neumann


Jean Gebser


Pierre Teilhard de Chardin


Arthur Young

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