Seeing Like A State is the best political book I have ever read. I have long had tendencies along these lines, but could never put them into words. Scott expresses himself beautifully and cites numerous examples.
Why do some forms of technology change so little? Is it because they have already reached an ideal form?
Spruyt’s previous book detailed the development of the sovereign state system in medieval Europe. In The World Imagined, Spruyt looks at how the sovereign state system spread across the world during the Early Modern Era. He contrasts it with other international systems: the Chinese tributary system, the Islamic Cultural Community, and the Galactic Empires of Southeast Asia.
We currently understand international relations in terms of states, which claim sovereignty within their borders and recognize other states as equal outside of their borders. During the High Middle Ages (~1000-1350), multiple different international systems developed. One of them, the sovereign territorial state, became dominant, first in Europe, then throughout the world.
Could God perform a miracle that violates physical laws? I think that this question is based on a false notion of what a physical law is. Physical laws are summaries of all observations. If something is observed that contradicts a physical law, then the law must change to accommodate the observation.
Here are some things I found interesting online last month.
In case deterministic chaos isn’t enough you, this post adds in something extra: a little bit of randomness. Rather than making things more complicated, this actually makes them smoother. If you’ve read the What is Chaos? series, you know that finding periodic orbits is important to understand chaos. The randomness allows you to determine how many periodic orbits you need to make predictions.
Abulafia has undertaken an extremely ambitious project: to write a summary of the entire history of the Mediterranean, from the first people to cross its waters all the way to today. He mostly succeeds, which makes this a very impressive book.
