Beyond States: Powers, Peoples and Global Order

by Anthony Pagden

Today, the majority of the peoples of the planet live in nation-states, based upon the idea, if never the reality, of a single people, a single culture, a single rule of law and a single source of sovereign authority. But will they continue to do so in the future? 

None of the major challenges that confront humanity today – from climate change to disease, from terrorism to mass migration – can be handled effectively by single nation-states, no matter how powerful. The world is no longer made up only of states but also of an ever-increasing multitude of interstate networks and organizations which recognize no borders. We are beginning to be able to imagine the very real possibility of a new global civil society. But what political form should this take?

By examining the history of the evolution of human society from the world’s first empires to today’s world of interstate networks, this book argues that there now exists the possibility of the emergence of a new political form, a global ‘federation of federations’, that will bring the species closer to the possibility of a more harmonious, equitable and secure future.

Genres: Politics, Audiobook

224 pages, Hardcover

Published December 23, 2024

About the author

Anthony Pagden was educated in Santiago (Chile), London, Barcelona and Oxford and holds a B.A.. M.A. and D.Phil. from the University of Oxford. He has been a free-lance translator and a publisher in Paris a Fellow of Merton College, Oxford, Senior Research Fellow of the Warburg Institute (London), Professor of History at the European University Institute (Florence), University Reader in Intellectual History and Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge and the Harry C. Black Professor of History at Johns Hopkins. He joined UCLA in the Fall of 2002. His research has concentrated on the relationship between the peoples of Europe and its overseas settlements and those of the non-European world from the Atlantic to the Pacific. He is primarily interested in the political theory of empire, in how the West sought to explain to itself how and why it had come to dominate so much of the world, and in the present consequences of the erosion of that domination. His research has led to an interest in the formation of the modern concept of Europe and most recently in the roots of the conflict between the ‘West’ and the (predominantly Muslim) ‘East’. He has also written on the history of law, and on the ideological sources of the independence movements in Spanish-America, and is currently completing a book on cosmopolitanism and the Enlightenment . He has written or edited some fifteen books, the most recent of which are, Lords of all the World. Ideologies of Empire in Britain, France and Spain (1995), Peoples and Empires (2001), La Ilustración y sus enemigos (2002), Worlds at War, The 2500 year struggle between East and West (2008), and, as editor, The Idea of Europe from Antiquity to the European Union (2002). – all of which have been translated into several European and Asian languages. He is a regular contributor to the Times Literary Supplement, and The London Review of Books, and has written for The New Republic, The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, Il Sole 24 Ore (Milan), El Mundo (Spain), El Pais, (Spain) and La Nueva Provincia (Argentina).

He teaches classes in the history of political thought from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, in the theory of international relations, and seminars on imperialism and nationalism and on the theory of racism and ethnicity since antiquity.

Reviews

[Arathy · Rating 4 out of 5]

i don't know who the target audience for this book is but i enjoyed it so much- i absolutely was the audience! it's an excellent/accessible book about the history of empires, states, and federations- and what it all was intended to be and what it turned out to be. i wish i had read the print/ebook because i want to dig deeper into some of this material.

thanks to netgalley and the publisher for an ARC.

[Álvaro · Rating 4 out of 5]

Análisis muy completo y con buenas referencias a grandes autores.

[John · Rating 3 out of 5]

--spends so much time quoting philosophers of the past that he often forgets he's supposed to use his book to say something new

[Dale · Rating 3 out of 5]

Author starts off with an explanation of nations and states, moving into empires and compares these models to today’s governments. Ends with some pretty interesting suggestions for future government models.