A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History Review

Average Reviews:

(More customer reviews)Are you looking to buy A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History? Here is the right place to find the great deals. we can offer discounts of up to 90% on A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History. Check out the link below:

>> Click Here to See Compare Prices and Get the Best Offers

A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History ReviewDe Landa is deliciously weird sort of scholar: an autodidact, a committed generalist, a erudite synthesizer, and...oddly enough...an ideologue. The axe he has brought to grind here is a rigorous materialism, and he uses it to hack telos out at the root. He seeks to collapse the distinction between "natural" history and "human" history, and the result is a "history" that is almost unrecognizable as such.
He asks us to imagine the last thousand years as a seething storm of material processes. The "great men," the "human events," the wars and values and struggle are all completely absent. To the extent humans interest De Landa at all, they appear here as crowds, organizations, markets, capital and labor.
Instead, De Landa gives us a plausible (if sketchy and somewhat speculative) account of the thermodynamic, geological, chemical, and biological processes of the past 1000 years. But the genius of this book is that it is not merely the history of rocks, chemicals, and plants. Instead, De Landa has boldly abstracted the logical processes underlying the natural sciences into what he calls "engineering diagrams." He applies these diagrams to the world we know, teaching us to see city walls as sea-shell-like "accretions", society as a stratified riverbed, economies as highly complex chemical reactions, and nations as parasitic superorganisms. Above all, he helps us to see "progress" as a perspectival illusion, resulting from human-centric narrative bias. Again and again, he demonstrates that the "triumphs" of the Western world were spontaneous physical processes; reactions between elements like "biomass" "carbon" "steel" "money" "genes" "population" and "germs." These reactions become interactions, feedback takes hold and wildly complex and diverse forms emerge. These forms bifurcate, find relatively stable states and then, inevitably, collapse again. And Delanda insists that he is NOT speaking in metaphors - the same "diagrams" that lay riverbeds also build empires.
De Landa's method is problematic, controversial, and likely to turn some readers off. Since his ideas are vague, abstract, and probably untestable, many will call them unscientific. But the book is a sketch, a manifesto, a prologomenon to a new way of looking at the world. And, as such, it is extremely thought-provoking. One does not have to agree with De Landa's neo-Marxism to be stimulated when he argues that there is no "clash of civilizations," that there will never be an "end of history," and that the fundamental factor which distinguished the "West" from the "Rest" is not religion or technology but...um..."autocatalysis."
Ultimately, this is a very fun and eccletic little read that is likely to tweak your perspective more than a bit. Hayekians, especially, will be intrigued (though perhaps not persuaded) by his discussion of "anti-markets" and the VIRTUES (!) of top-down decisionmaking.
As a final note, some prior familiarity with Ilya Prigogine's work is very helpful for full enjoyment of this book. De Landa relies heavily on Prigogine's thermodynamics (the concepts, not the math), and he does a fairly poor job of introducing them. As a layperson, I found Schneider and Sagan's Into the Cool: Energy Flow, Thermodynamics, and Life a very helpful introduction.A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History OverviewFollowing in the wake of his groundbreaking War in the Age of IntelligentMachines, Manuel De Landa presents a radical synthesis of historical developmentover the last one thousand years. More than a simple expository history, A ThousandYears of Nonlinear History sketches the outlines of a renewed materialist philosophyof history in the tradition of Fernand Braudel, Gilles Deleuze, and Félix Guattari,while also engaging the critical new understanding of material processes derivedfrom the sciences of dynamics. Working against prevailing attitudes that see historyas an arena of texts, discourses, ideologies, and metaphors, De Landa traces theconcrete movements and interplays of matter and energy through human populations inthe last millennium.De Landa attacks three domains that have given shape to humansocieties: economics, biology, and linguistics. In every case, what one sees is theself-directed processes of matter and energy interacting with the whim and will ofhuman history itself to form a panoramic vision of the West free of rigid teleologyand naive notions of progress, and even more important, free of any deterministicsource of its urban, institutional, and technological forms. Rather, the source ofall concrete forms in the West's history are shown to derive from internalmorphogenetic capabilities that lie within the flow of matter-energyitself.

Want to learn more information about A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History?

>> Click Here to See All Customer Reviews & Ratings Now