Plunging to Leviathan?: Exploring the World's Political Future (Studies in Comparative Social Science)

Plunging to Leviathan? opens with a spirited overview of the stages of political evolution, then reviews scholarly attempts to predict the political future based on long-term world political trends. The most elegant of these theories suggests that we are in a millennia-long, steepening plunge toward a repressive world-state. From this angle the proliferation of nations, including democracies, in the twentieth century is simply a short-term anomaly. But might it not be instead a symptom of conquest warfare s demise as a means of political integration? Previous predictions have merely projected past patterns of change over time; Graber here accessibly presents an actual theory that specifies how critical variables are related to one another in time. According to Graber, the number of polities into which a population is divided deproliferate to whatever extent the population s density increases. Positing that the League of Nations and United Nations deserve to be taken seriously as a new postconquest mode of political evolution, Leviathan engagingly recounts and explains the dramatic discovery of evidence that the evolution of these suprastates indeed has been driven, in the theoretically expected way, by population pressure. Thus we can perceive in the political present the general shape of things to come and the possibility for a less repressive and more optimistic future.