Goliath’s Curse: The History and Future of Societal Collapse
By Luke Kemp
Page I bailed on: 60
Verdict: This made me think a bit of my response to Peter Turchin’s End Times, being a work of Big History that tries to come up with a master thesis of how and why things fall apart, with the help of “some new terminology and lots of numbers.” But I think Turchin was probably on to something more. I just couldn’t get on board with what Kemp was saying here, beginning with his choice to label all the societies he was discussing as “Goliaths.” A glossary at the back defines a Goliath as “a collection of interconnected hierarchies in which some individuals dominate others to control energy and labour.” A Goliath is not just a state or a civilization, but a mosaic of dominance hierarchies “organized primarily through authority and violence.” So Goliath = Leviathan? Given that the first chapter tears down “Hobbes’s delusion” (that the state of nature is nasty, brutish, and short) I don’t know if Kemp would go that far. But I couldn’t be sure. Goliath just seems like a really poor attempt at branding to me, and it continues with such concepts as Goliath evolution, Goliath fuel, and Goliath traps.
Language aside, I had a sense that Kemp maybe had a decent, if overly broad, argument to put forward that might have worked for a magazine article or podcast but that I just didn’t feel up to spending 500 pages with.
Alex Good 