For roughly 30 years, young people at Western schools and universities have been given the idea of a liberal education, without the substance of historical knowledge. They have been taught isolated “modules,” not narratives, much less chronologies. They have been trained in the formulaic analysis of document excerpts, not in the key skill of reading widely and fast. They have been encouraged to feel empathy with imagined Roman centurions or Holocaust victims, not to write essays about why and how their predicaments arose. Should history be taught as a mode of contrarian augmentation, a communion with past Truth and Beauty, or just “one fucking thing after another”? Today’s 6th-formers are offered none of the above — at best, they get a handful of “fucking things” in no particular order.

The much greater power of death to cut people off in their prime not only made life seem precarious and filled it with grief. It also meant that most of the people who built the civilizations of the past were young when they made their contributions.

To be sure, there has been much talk in the wake of the global financial crisis about alternative Asian economic models. But not even the most ardent cultural relativist is recommending a return to the institutions of the Ming dynasty or the Mughals. The current debate between the proponents of free markets and those of state intervention is, at root, a debate between identifiably Western schools of thought: the followers of Adam Smith and those of John Maynard Keynes, with a few die-hard devotees of Karl Marx still plugging away.

If Western ascendancy cannot therefore be explained in the tired old terms of imperialism, was it simply — as some scholars maintain — a matter of good luck? Was it the geography or the climate of the western end of Eurasia that made the great divergence happen?

Landes made the cultural case by arguing that Western Europe led the world in developing autonomous intellectual inquiry, the scientific method of verification and the rationalization of research and its diffusion. Yet even he allowed that something more was required for that mode of operation to flourish: financial intermediaries and good government. The key, it becomes ever more apparent, lies with institutions.

Institutions are, of course, in some sense the products of culture. But, because they formalize a set of norms, institutions are often the things that keep a culture honest, determining how far it is conducive to good behavior rather than bad. To illustrate the point, the twentieth century ran a series of experiments, imposing quite different institutions on two set of Germans, two sets of Koreans and two set of Chinese. The results were very striking and the lesson crystal clear. If you take the same people, with more or less the same culture and impose communist institutions on one group and capitalist institutions on another, almost immediately there will be a divergence in the way they behave.

I know of no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves, and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise that control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform them their discretion.

  1. Competition, in that Europe itself was politically fragmented and that within each monarchy or republic there were multiple competing corporate entities.
  2. The Scientific Revolution, in that all the major seventeenth-century breakthroughs in mathematics, astronomy, physics, chemistry and biology happened in Western Europe.
  3. The rule of law and representative government, in that an optimal system of social and political order emerged in the English-speaking world, based on private property rights and the representation of property-owners in elected legislatures.
  4. Modern medicine, in that nearly all the major nineteenth- and twentieth-century breakthroughs in healthcare, including the control of tropical diseases, were made by Western Europeans and North Americans.
  5. The consumer society, in that the Industrial Revolution took place where there was both a supply of productivity-enhancing technologies and a demand for more, better and cheaper goods, beginning with cotton garments.

Rhetorical pleas to ‘save the planet’ for future generations are insufficient to overcome the conflicts over economic distribution between rich and poor countries that exist in the here and now. We love our grandchildren. But our great-great-grandchildren are harder to relate to.

If a state overextends itself strategically, it runs the risk that the potential benefits from external expansion may be outweighed by the great expense of it all. This phenomenon of ‘imperial overstretch’ is common to all great powers.

In consequence of this primary mutual hostility of human beings, civilized society is perpetually threatened with disintegration. The interest of work in common would not hold it together; instinctual passions are stronger than reasonable interests. Civilization has to use its utmost efforts in order to set limits to man’s aggressive instincts and to hold the manifestations of them in check by psychical reaction-formations.

Protestantism has the effect of liberating the acquisition of wealth from the inhibitions of traditionalist ethics; it breaks the fetters on the striving for gain not only by legalizing it, but by seeing it as directly willed by God.

The problem for the Soviet Union was simple: the US offered a far more attractive version of civilian life than the Soviets could. And this was not just because of an inherent advantage in terms of resource endowment. It was because centralized economic planning, though indispensable to success in the nuclear arms race, was wholly unsuited to the satisfaction of consumer wants. The planner is best able to devise and deliver the ultimate weapon to a single client, the state. But the planner can never hope to meet the desires of millions of individual consumers, whose tastes are in any case in a state of constant flux.

More than 34 million Soviet citizen served, 17 million Germans, 13 million Americans, 9 million loyal subjects from all over the British Empire and 7.5 million Japanese.

It was when authoritarian regimes adopted plans for industrial expansion and rearmament that unemployment came down fastest. This was when ‘socialism in one country’ (in Russia) and ‘national socialism’ (in Germany) appeared to offer solutions superior to anything available in the big Anglophone economies.

The Japan in which Hirohito grew to adulthood was a country that both admired the West for its modernity and resented it for its arrogance.

But the fact is that civilization requires slaves. The Greek were quite right there. Unless there are slaves to do the ugly, horrible, uninteresting work, culture and contemplation become almost impossible. Human slavery is wrong, insecure and demoralizing. On mechanical slavery, on the slavery of the machine, the future of the world depends.

When a man left for the colonies, his friends asked: ‘What crime must he have committed?’

The Third Estate, he argued, would inevitably be corrupted by power (and by the ‘monied interest’), unlike an aristocracy, which enjoyed the independence that private wealth confers.

During the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in …. a war … of every man against every man. Men are held to perform their duties only by ‘fear’, and therefore power must be delegated to a strong sovereign with responsibility for defense, education, legislation and justice.

To describe the atmosphere in the harem as unhealthy would be an understatement. Osman III became sultan at the age of 57, having spent the previous 51 years effectively as a prisoner in the harem. By the time he emerged, almost wholly ignorant of the realm he was supposed to rule.