Thematic Approaches on Civilizational History

Directory 2: Thematic Approaches on Civilizational History

Thread 7: The P2P/Commons View

See also our two structured bibliographies:

• What You Should Read To Understand the Commons

• Sources of P2P Theory

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

• The Structure of World History: From Modes of Production to Modes of Exchange. by Kojin Karatani. Duke University Press, 2014 [1]

• Karl Polanyi. The Great Transformation. (1944)

• Jean Gebser. The Ever-Present Origin.

• Ecological Revolution: The Political Origins of Environmental Degradation and the Environmental Origins of Axial Religions; China, Japan, Europe. by Mark D. Whitaker

• R. I. Moore. The First European Revolution, c. 970-1215. Oxford and New York: Blackwell Publishers, 2000

• Rethinking the World. By Peter Pogany. [2]

• Lawrence Taub. The Spiritual Imperative: Sex, Age, and Caste Move the Future. [3]

• 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

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

• Book: The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy.

Alexander Bard

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

• Books:
  • 1) The Netocrats, with Jan Söderqvist (2000);
  • 2) The Global Empire, with Jan Söderqvist (2002)
  • 3) The Body Machines, with Jan Söderqvist (2009) ;
  • 4) Syntheism – Creating God in the Internet Age, with Jan Söderqvist (2014)
  • 5) Digital Libido - Sex, power and violence in the network society, with Jan Söderqvist (2018)
  • The Futurica Trilogy, with Jan Söderqvist (2012), contains books 1 to 3 above
• Videos:
  • 1) Alexander Bard on the Digital Class Struggle in the 21st Century ;
  • 2) Alexander Bard on Syntheism and the Paths Ahead for Spirituality in the 21st Century

Alexander Dugin

• Intro: Is There Really a Noomachian Struggle? Michel Bauwens
• Context: Discourse of Civilization in the Works of Russia’s New Eurasianists
• Videos:
  • Michael Millerman on Alexander Dugin's Fourth Political Theory
  • Introduction To Noomachia by Paideuma TV
• Book: Noomakhia; a multi-volume comparison of multiple world cultures

Julius Evola

Traditionalist author.

• Book: Revolt Against the Modern World. Politics, Religion, and Social Order in the Kali Yuga. By Julius Evola. Inner Traditions (Simon & Schuster)

Rene Girard

• Intro: Rene Girard: Violence and Mimesis: excellent one-volume introduction [6] ; full-text
• Books:
  • Violence and the Sacred
  • Things Hidden Since the Foundations of the World

Rene Guenon

• Video: John David Ebert on Rene Guenon
• Book: The Crisis of the Modern World

Heiner Muhlmann:

• Intro: John David Ebert on Heiner Muhlmann's Maximal Stress Cooperation Theory
• Books:
  • 1) The Nature of Cultures ;
  • 2) Maximal Stress Cooperation

Thread 10: Civilizational Conflict and Collapse

TBD: Huntington, Tainter, Coker, etc ..

Thread 11: Other Important Authors

• Owen Barfield
  • Intro: Evolution of Consciousness as Articulated by Owen Barfield
  • Book: Saving the Appearances
• Henri Bergson
  • John David Ebert on Henri Bergson's Creative Evolution
  • Intro: Henri Bergson's Creative Evolution
  • Book: Creative Evolution
• Keith Chandler
  • Book: Beyond Civilization: compares four civilizational spheres, and predicts a post-civilizational social order;
• Herman Dooyeweerd
  • Intro: Religious Ground Motives Behind Human Thought
  • Book: Roots of Western Culture
  • Book: In the Twilight of Western Thought
• Norbert Elias
  • Book: The Civilizing Process. Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations. Revised edition. Oxford: Blackwell, 2000 (Vol.II. State Formation and Civilization, Oxford: Blackwell, 1982)
• Edward Gibbon
  • Intro: Edward Gibbon's Theory on the Rise and Fall of Empires: "Edward Gibbon famously advanced (the first of his six-volume history of Rome appeared in 1776) a two-part explanation for the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. The Latin West succumbed, he contended, to the spread from within of an increasingly intolerant monotheism, namely Christianity, and it failed, in the end, to repulse the barbarian invasions of the Goths, Vandals, and Huns. The Greco East, on the other hand, was assailed from without by barbarian Arabs and later, from without by the barbarian Turks who had converted to another monotheism, Islam. Thus, both halves of the Roman Empire were destroyed by barbarism and monotheism."
• Ivan Illich
  • Intro: Ivan Illich on the Transition Towards an Age of Systems
  • Bio: David Cayley: 'Ivan Illich: An Intellectual Journey': a magisterial synthesis and interpretation of his late friend and colleague
  • Podcast: David Cayley on Why Ivan Illich Still Matters
• Karl Jaspers:
  • John David Ebert on Karl Jaspers's The Origin and Goal of History
  • Book: The Origins and Goal of History
  • Update: From the Axial Age to the Moral Revolution: John Stuart-Glennie, Karl Jaspers, and a New Understanding of the Idea by Eugene Halton (2014)
• Carl Jung
  • John David Ebert on Carl Jung
• Marshall McLuhan
  • Videos: John David Ebert on Marshall McLuhan ; John David Ebert on Marshall McLuhan's Culture Without Literacy
  • Books:
    • Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man
    • The Gutenberg Galaxy: understanding the revolution of the printing press
  • Co-Authored Books:
    • Marshall and Eric McLuhan. Laws of Media: The New Science (a rewrite of Understanding Media)
    • Marshall and Eric McLuhan. Media and Formal Cause
    • Edmund Carpenter and Marshall McLuhan. The New Languages
  • Articles: McLuhan's Phases of Media History ; Marshall McLuhan's Tetrad of Media Effects
  • Discussion: Integrating Jean Gebser and Marshall McLuhan
• Lewis Mumford
  • Introduction: Pioneers of Ecological Humanism
  • Book: Technics and Civilization
  • Bibliography: "My maturest interpretation of the archaeological and historic evidence will be found in three successive books: The City in History, 1960, Technics and Human Development, 1967, and The Pentagon of Power, 1970." [7]
• Camille Paglia
  • John David Ebert on Camille Paglia's Sexual Personae
• Jordan Peterson
  • John David Ebert on Jordan Peterson's Maps of Meaning
• Friedrich Schelling:
  • John David Ebert on Schelling's Ages of the World
• Peter Sloterdijk
  • John David Ebert on Peter Sloterdijk's Spheres
  • Book: Spheres
• Wolfgang Smith
  • Books:
  • Cosmos and Transcendence;
  • Ancient Wisdom and Modern Misconceptions: critiques of 'scientistic' beliefs
  • Vertical Ascent: introduction to the 'three-partite Cosmos'
• Leo Strauss
  • Intro: Leo Strauss on the Contemporary Crisis in Western Civilization
• A.N. Whitehead
  • Book: Adventures of Ideas
• Ken Wilber
  • Intro: John David Ebert on Ken Wilber's Up From Eden
  • Book: Up from Eden
  • Details: Wilber's Research Methodology

Critical Theory Approaches

• Adorno, T. W., and Max Horkheimer
  • Dialectic of Enlightenment