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The definite strength of this book's historical analysis is the complexity it brings to "realist" historiography [in the sense of focusing on 'great powers' like the Ottomans or Poland].

Corsairs and raiders were not merely auxiliaries---they could certainly act as such, but "they often had interests and policies of their own, to which their protector-powers were sometimes forced, with great reluctance, to adapt."

Slavery was a fact of life…Its basic features – acquisition by raiding or war, public and private sales, the economic and military function, its legal status, the possibility of manumission – were the same on either side of the Christian–Muslim divide. And...that divide was constantly criss-crossed by individuals and agents of many kinds, seeking to organize an exchange or a ransom.

"Current obsessions over the question of 'free speech' ignore the real challenges...Thinking freely isn't just about having access to ideas: we need to to be able to live our ideas in the world. It's therefore time to stop trying to 'teach critical thinking' by itself and to start literally building a world where people's lives and relationships consistently enable them to think."

The book in a nutshell.

"All of us who seek to build community should admit it: communities wield a double-edged sword, in reasoning and in so much else, as they grant us belonging...Communities meet our most fundamental needs and tell us who we are...They also police you, powerfully shame you and care about who you pair up with...This immense power, driven by our profound relational motivation, can be used for ill or good."

"It is our economic system that determines how isolated we are, and that in turn determines our level of social trust."

"Sometimes the one big demand is the only way through...It is wise to be risk-averse and avoid too much meddling with systems that serve us well; it is foolish not to be willing to uproot a system that is not working well at all."

"Thinking in terms of infrastructure [helps] account for, and work around, human error, exhaustion and laziness...Infrastructure-based approaches move us away from an inaccurate and unhelpfully romantic vision of what politics is...It helps us see the structures on which power really rests.

...The privatization of infrastructure means some of us are simply cut out. It is an exclusionary political vision."

Theories of embodied cognition show that the body is the locus of thinking for much of what we do...This idea fits into theories of 'extended cognition', which show that our thinking happens not only in our brain and our body but also through the tools we use in the world around us...Even structures such as the law...We think through our bodies, yes, but also through our social structures.

"We shouldn't approach politics via an ideal theory, a theory that starts with the ideal, just outcome and then works its way backward. Too often, this means we might imagine a path to our ideal outcome that does not exist, or ignore paths toward other interesting points of progress. We have to accept and understand the world as it is now and consider realistically what we should do about it."

"We cannot defeat each other with reasons; we are simply at odds...It is not in the obvious interests of those who run large companies to pay their employees more, nor is it in the interests of landlords to lower the rent. And no amount of reasoning is going to bring about more than the most moderate of compromises. Hence the historical need to struggle for power instead, from the strike to the guillotine."

"We need to stop thinking that talking about politics is the same thing as truly engaging in it, because all the evidence suggests that simply presenting one another with ideas changes very little. Instead, doing politics means taking new actions and building relationships."

"The progress of science is not simple linear advance, each stage marking the solution of problems previously implicit or explicit in it, and in turn posing new problems. It also proceeds by the discovery of new problems, of new ways of looking at old ones, of new ways of tackling or solving old ones, of entirely new fields of enquiry, or new theoretical and practical tools of enquiry."

It is significant that the young Marx, trained in the German (i.e. primarily romantic) tradition, became a Marxist only when combined with the French socialist critique and the wholly non-romantic theory of English political economy. and it was political economy which provided the core of his mature thought.

I dunno, sounds like an epistemological break tied to a romantic/rational dialectic.

"Having no coherent theory of evolution, the anti-progressive thinkers found it hard to decide what had 'gone wrong'. Their favourite culprit was reason...The most serious intellectual effort of the anti-progressive ideology went into historical analysis and the rehabilitation of the past, the investigation of continuity as against revolution."

"What held this movement together was hunger, wretchedness, hatred and hope. And what defeated it, in Chartist Britain as on the revolutionary continent of 1848, was that the poor were hungry, numerous and desperate enough to rise, but lacked the organization and maturity which could have made their rebellion more than a momentary danger to the social order."

"It is no accident that the least skilled, least educated, least organized and therefore least hopeful of the poor, then as later, were the most apathetic."

Obviously Blanqui should've just voted harder!

The complex of economic, administrative, ideological and power-considerations which tended to impose a minimum size of territory and population on the modern unit of government, and make us vaguely uneasy at the thought of, say, UN membership for Liechtenstein, did not yet apply to any extent.

Then, the Napoleonic Wars brought "general rationalization of the European political map."

Enjoying it more than "The Age of Extremes". Solid work, considering how many books have covered this time in Europe before and since.

But for the solid middle class Frenchman who stood behind The Terror, it was neither pathological nor apocalyptic, but first and foremost the only effective method of preserving their country.

In most subsequent bourgeois revolutions [after the French] the moderate liberals were to pull back, or transfer into the conservative camp, at a very early stage. Indeed in the nineteenth century we increasingly find (most notably in Germany) that they became unwilling to begin revolution at all, for fear of its incalculable consequences, preferring a compromise with king and aristocracy.