The book
Contents
Prologue: You Greeks Are Always Children
Some six centuries before Christ, an Athenian lawgiver named Solon sailed up the Nile Delta to the city of Sais. He had canceled the debts that were turning the poor farmers of Attica into slaves, given Athens a code of laws, and then left home for ten years so that no one could press him to repeal them. In the temple at Sais he set out to impress the Egyptian…
Chapter One: The Living and the Made
On the twentieth of June 1792 the people of the eastern districts of Paris marched on the Tuileries palace with a petition in their hands and pikes on their shoulders. They had chosen the day. Three years before, to the day, the deputies of the Third Estate had sworn in a tennis court at Versailles never to separate until France had a constitution. One year before, on the night of…
Chapter Two: Universal Systems Dynamics
On the second of March 1990, in Wellington, two men signed a sheet of paper that told a nation where its prices were to go. One was the Minister of Finance, David Caygill, of Prime Minister Geoffrey Palmer’s government, formed by New Zealand’s party of the left. The other was the Governor of the Reserve Bank of New Zealand, Donald Brash, an economist who would lead the National Party, the…
Chapter Three: Universal Dialectics
About five hundred years before Christ, in Ephesus, a Greek city on the coast of what is now Turkey, a man named Heraclitus carried a book into the temple of Artemis and left it there. The Ephesians had asked him to write their laws, and he had refused, because, he said, the city was already in the grip of a bad constitution. Diogenes Laertius, who gathered the lives of the…
Chapter Three A: The Person in the Pattern
In the summer of 1953 a camp opened in the hills at Middle Grove, in upstate New York, for boys of about eleven who had never met. Their parents had received a letter that described a study of leadership skills and named Yale, Union College and the Rockefeller Foundation, and the men who ran the camp were not counselors in the ordinary sense. They worked for Muzafer Sherif, a Turkish-born…
Chapter Four: Natural and Man-Made Dialectics
At noon on Saturday the twenty-first of May 2016 a small crowd gathered outside an Islamic center in downtown Houston under the banner of a Facebook group called Heart of Texas. The group had more than a quarter of a million followers, and it had summoned them to stop what it called the Islamization of Texas. At the same hour, on the same street, a second crowd gathered, summoned by…
Chapter Five: The Managed Dialectic
On the morning of Sunday the ninth of January 1905, by the Russian calendar, columns of workers set out across St Petersburg toward the Winter Palace. They carried icons, church banners and portraits of the Tsar, and many brought their wives and children. At their head walked a priest of the Orthodox Church, Father Georgy Gapon, with a petition the workers had drawn up with him. “Sovereign!” it began. “We…
Chapter Six: Rome to Venice
On a January day in the forty-ninth year before Christ, in the town of Ariminum on the Adriatic coast, Gaius Julius Caesar showed his soldiers two men dressed as slaves. They were Mark Antony and Quintus Cassius, tribunes of the Roman people. Days before, the Senate in Rome had passed its emergency decree, the order that the magistrates “should take care that the state received no injury,” and the two…
Chapter Seven: Here I Stand
On the eighteenth of April 1521, in the imperial city of Worms, a friar of the Augustinian order stood for the second day before the Emperor Charles V and the princes of the Empire. He was Martin Luther, professor of theology at Wittenberg, and he had come under a letter of safe conduct that his own prince, Frederick, Elector of Saxony, had won for him. A century earlier Jan Hus…
Chapter Eight: Salomon's House
On the nineteenth of September 1539 three of Thomas Cromwell’s commissioners rode unannounced into Glastonbury Abbey in Somerset, by its own tradition the oldest, and one of the richest, religious houses in England. Richard Layton, Richard Pollard and Thomas Moyle had come for its treasure. They searched, and found money and plate walled up in the vaults. The abbot, Richard Whiting, was an old man who with his monks had…
Chapter Nine: Prophecy as Policy
On the thirtieth of January 1649 Charles I, King of England, Scotland and Ireland, walked through the Banqueting House at Whitehall on his way to die. Over his head hung the canvases that Peter Paul Rubens had painted for him, installed in 1636 and paid for with three thousand pounds and a heavy gold chain. They glorified his father. In one, James I sits enthroned in a setting that recalls…
Chapter Ten: Novus Ordo Seclorum
In December 1775, on the Delaware River at Philadelphia, the new Continental navy hoisted its first flag over a converted merchant ship renamed the Alfred. The flag had thirteen stripes, red and white, for the thirteen colonies, and in its upper corner, where an American flag now carries its stars, it kept the British union. The colonies were at war with their king and still called themselves his subjects, and…
Chapter Eleven: The Red Cap
On the twentieth of June 1792 a crowd of several thousand Parisians broke into the Tuileries palace and filled the king’s apartments for hours. They came with pikes and petitions, shouting against the king’s veto. Louis XVI stood in a window recess with a few guards and faced them. A man held out a red woolen cap on the end of a pike. The king took it, put it on…
Chapter Twelve: The Society of the Elect
In February 1870 a man of fifty-one, already the most famous writer on art in England, rose in Oxford to give his first lecture as the university’s first Slade Professor of Fine Art. The chair had been endowed by a collector’s bequest; Oxford had never had one before. The crowd was larger than the room booked for it, and the lecture moved to the Sheldonian Theatre. John Ruskin had been…
Chapter Thirteen: Empire's Two Hands
In June 1839, on the beach at Humen near Canton, the Chinese imperial commissioner Lin Zexu had trenches dug, filled with water, salt and lime, and fed into them, for twenty-three days, more than twenty thousand chests of opium seized from British merchants. When the drug had dissolved, his men opened the sluices and let the tide carry it out to sea. Before he began, Lin composed a prayer to…
Chapter Fourteen: The Fall of the Crowns
On the afternoon of 9 April 1917 a train pulled out of Zurich carrying thirty-two Russian exiles and their luggage. The leader of the party was a short, bald man of forty-six, a writer of pamphlets who had spent most of the war in a rented room above a shoemaker’s shop in the Spiegelgasse, reading in the public library and quarreling with other socialists. In January he had told a…
Chapter Fifteen: The Paper War
On 2 September 1914, a month into the war, some two dozen of the most famous writers in Britain were invited to an office building at Buckingham Gate in London. The building was Wellington House, the headquarters of the National Insurance Commission, and the man who had asked them there was a Liberal cabinet minister named Charles Masterman. Around the table sat Arthur Conan Doyle, H. G. Wells, Thomas Hardy…
Chapter Sixteen: Both Sides
On 20 October 1942, ten months after Germany declared war on the United States, the Alien Property Custodian in Washington, Leo Crowley, signed Vesting Order No. 248. It seized every share of a small private bank in lower Manhattan, the Union Banking Corporation, which kept its offices at 39 Broadway. The order named the shareholders of record: E. Roland Harriman, Prescott Bush, Knight Woolley, Ellery Sedgwick James and Harold Pennington…
Chapter Seventeen: Forged in Crises
On the morning of 9 August 1941 a British battleship came out of the fog into Placentia Bay, on the coast of Newfoundland. HMS Prince of Wales had carried Winston Churchill across an ocean full of U-boats. At anchor lay the American cruiser Augusta, and on her deck, steadied by one of his sons, stood Franklin Roosevelt. The next day was a Sunday. Under the great guns of the British…
Chapter Eighteen: Sect Made into Territory
On the first day of September 1920 a French general with one empty sleeve stood on the steps of a pine-shaded residence in Beirut and announced a country. Henri Gouraud had lost his right arm at Gallipoli; now, as High Commissioner of the Levant, he raised the other hand over a crowd and proclaimed the State of Greater Lebanon. Beside him stood the Maronite Patriarch and the Sunni Mufti of…
Chapter Nineteen: From Geneva to Riverside
On Sunday, 12 October 1958, the President of the United States stood on Riverside Drive in upper Manhattan with a trowel in his hand. Dwight Eisenhower, baptized a Presbyterian five years earlier, laid the cornerstone of a plain limestone office block at 475 Riverside Drive. It would gather the National Council of Churches and the mission boards of the main Protestant denominations under one roof. New Yorkers called it “the…
Chapter Twenty: The Manufacture of Consent
In 1913 the General Education Board, the fund John D. Rockefeller had set up eleven years earlier to promote and shape American education, printed the first of its Occasional Papers. It was called The Country School of To-Morrow, and its author was Frederick T. Gates, the Baptist minister who managed Rockefeller’s giving. Under the heading “A Vision of the Remedy,” Gates let himself dream on paper. “In our dream,” he…
Chapter Twenty-A: The Ladder from Below
On 20 March 1962, in a lecture hall at the University of California at Berkeley, the novelist Aldous Huxley described what he called “the ultimate revolution.” Earlier revolutions, he said, had changed the conditions around men: their governments, their property, their churches. The final revolution would act “directly on the mind-body” of the people themselves, by methods that would “get people actually to love their servitude.” He named the methods…
Chapter Twenty-One: The Cold War
The last chapter ended at a hot spring on the California coast, where the Esalen Institute’s exchange program carried Boris Yeltsin across the line between the two great powers in September 1989. Thirty years earlier the two powers had already met in a kitchen.
Chapter Twenty-One A: The Eastern Pathway
On the morning of 12 October 1911 a Chinese doctor on a fundraising tour of the American West sat down to breakfast in the restaurant of the Brown Palace Hotel in Denver. A coded telegram from his comrade Huang Xing had reached him the night before, and he had not been able to decipher it. Now he opened the Rocky Mountain News and read that soldiers in the city of…
Chapter Twenty-Two: The Rods Gathered
On 7 February 1992, in the provincial government house of Limburg on the river Maas, in the Dutch town of Maastricht, the foreign and finance ministers of twelve European states sat at a long table and signed a treaty. The town had begun as a Roman river crossing, and its name still remembers it: the crossing of the Maas, Traiectum ad Mosam. The document the ministers signed created something that…
Chapter Twenty-Three: The Fasces
On 22 September 2024 the delegates of the member states of the United Nations sat in the General Assembly hall in New York, under the gold emblem of the world held in a wreath of olive leaves, and took up a document called the Pact for the Future. Two others were attached to it: a Global Digital Compact, which set shared principles for the data, networks and artificial intelligence of…
Chapter Twenty-Three A: The Prison Without Walls
On 8 September 1892 a Boston magazine for children, The Youth’s Companion, printed a short pledge for the schoolchildren of America to recite on Columbus Day, as part of a national celebration of the four hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s landing. Its author was a member of the magazine’s staff named Francis Bellamy, a Baptist minister who had been forced from his Boston pulpit the year before for preaching against the…
Chapter Twenty-Four: True, Half-True
In 1513, out of office and exiled to his farm outside Florence, Niccolò Machiavelli wrote a short book of advice for a prince. In its eighteenth chapter he set out the two ways of contending in the world. “You must know, then, that there are two methods of fighting, the one by law, the other by force: the first method is that of men, the second of beasts; but as…
Chapter Twenty-Five: The Panopticon in Your Pocket
It is a little after three in the morning, and the phone on the nightstand lights up: a sale, a headline, a reminder set and forgotten. Its owner turns it face down and goes back to sleep. The phone does not sleep. All night it has done what its makers built it to do. It has talked to the towers around the house, and each tower has logged the strength…
Chapter Twenty-Five A: The Gatekeeper
In 1947 the psychologist Kurt Lewin, whose research group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology had just founded the journal Human Relations together with the Tavistock Institute in London, published an article on how food reaches a family’s table. He observed that every item passes through channels, and that at certain points in each channel someone decides what goes through and what does not. He called the person at that…
Chapter Twenty-Six: In Plain Sight
On the evening of Friday 12 September 2008 the heads of the largest banks on Wall Street were called to a stone building on Liberty Street in lower Manhattan, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, and told to come back in the morning. They came back on Saturday, and again on Sunday. Upstairs, the Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Paulson, and the president of the New York Fed, Timothy…
Chapter Twenty-Seven: The Present Turn
On 2 September 2026, in the seventh month of a war in the Persian Gulf, the President of the United States posted a question on his own social network: “Now that we have it under U.S.A. control, should we change the name Hormuz Strait to TRUMP STRAIT???” Three weeks later, on 26 September, Qatari and Omani mediators carried him an offer from Tehran to reopen the strait and restart nuclear…
Chapter Twenty-Seven A: The Common Enemy
In 1991 the Council of the Club of Rome published a report under the names of its president, Alexander King, and its secretary-general, Bertrand Schneider. They called it The First Global Revolution. In a chapter on the vacuum the end of the Cold War had left, the authors asked a plain question: “Can we live without enemies?” They answered that the nations had long been held together by an adversary…
Chapter Twenty-Eight: Many Centers, One System
On 29 June 1970 a private club met in Bern, the quiet federal capital of a country that has no single ruler. It had about seventy-five members drawn from many countries, and its guest that day described them precisely: they were “not in governmental decision-making positions.” They were industrialists, scientists and senior civil servants, and they had come to talk about the whole world. The Club of Rome had a…
Chapter Twenty-Nine: The Island Revisited
The book began on an island. An old priest in the temple at Sais told Solon of Atlantis, ten kings each sovereign in his own land, all bound by a law inscribed on a pillar of orichalcum, meeting at set intervals to judge one another by it. Plato drew the ideal city ruled by guardians and philosopher-kings. Francis Bacon drew Bensalem, the hidden island whose real government was Salomon’s House…
Chapter Thirty: Dialectical Sanctification
In the year 390 the people of Thessalonica rioted and killed the commander of the imperial garrison. The emperor Theodosius, the ruler who had made Christianity the faith of the Roman state, answered with a massacre: the people were gathered in the circus, and the soldiers killed thousands of them. The bishop of Milan, Ambrose, wrote to the emperor in his own hand. He would not, he wrote, offer the…
Chapter Thirty-One: What No Plan Can Build
Francis Bacon died on 9 April 1626, of a chill that followed, in John Aubrey’s account, an experiment in stuffing a hen with snow to see whether cold would preserve the meat. Among his papers his chaplain, William Rawley, found an unfinished story, and soon after he printed it at the back of a book of natural history, Sylva Sylvarum, under the title New Atlantis. The tale runs to the…
Afterword: Past the Gatekeeper
This book is the author’s work from its first page to its last. He conceived its argument: that the revolution is polarization, that polarization made permanent as government is dynamic republicanism, and that five centuries of that revolution have carried the Christian order of Europe toward one republic of mankind dispersed into regions. He named its terms: the living and the made, the natural and the man-made dialectic, the three…