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Written by Henry Adams

Published: 29 January 2013

Mark Mazower's Governing the World: The History of an Idea was published last fall to glowing reviews; the Financial Times named it one of its Best Books of 2012, Paul Kennedy called it "original and valuable," Fritz Stern called it "prodigious" and "indispensable" as well as "dramatic" and "novel," Alan Brinkley called it "brilliant," and Adam Zamoyski called it "fascinating" and "truly illuminating."  --  Writing in the London Review of Books, Rodric Braithwaite was inclined to agree, calling Governing the World "elegant, perceptive, stimulating, and erudite."[1]  --  But how sad that Braithwaite chose to devote his review to a discussion of E.U. politics, and a pedestrian one at that (surely a former ambassador can do better than this!) instead of discussing Mazower's book.  --  The notion that the gathering crises (financial, economic, energetic, demographic, climatic) besetting humanity have made the problem of world governance more urgent seems altogether beyond Braithwaite's ken.  --  More perspicacious, despite having a century less of human experience to contemplate, was H.G. Wells in concluding The Outline of History in 1920:  --  "One cannot foretell the surprises or disappointments the future has in store.  --  Before this chapter of the World State can begin fairly in our histories, other chapters as yet unsuspected may still need to be written, as long and as full of conflict as our account of the growth and rivalries of the Great Powers.  --  There may be tragic economic struggles, grim grapplings of race with race and class with class.  --  It may be that 'private enterprise' will refuse to learn the lesson of service without some quite catastrophic revolution, and that a phase of confiscation and amateurish socialistic government lies before us.  --  We do not know; we cannot tell.  --  These are unnecessary disasters, but they may be unavoidable disasters.  --  Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.  --  Against the unifying effort of Christendom and against the unifying influence of the mechanical revolution, catastrophe won -- at least to the extent of achieving the Great War.  --  We cannot tell yet how much of the winnings of catastrophe still remain to be gathered in.  --  New falsities may arise and hold men in some unrighteous and fated scheme of order for a time, before they collapse amidst the misery and slaughter of generations.  --  Yet, clumsily or smoothly, the world, it seems, progresses and will progress.  --  In this *Outline [of History]*, in our account of palaeolithic men, we have borrowed a description from Mr. Worthington Smith of the very highest life in the world some fifty thousand years ago.  --  It was a bestial life.  --  We have sketched, too, the gathering for a human sacrifice, some fifteen thousand years ago.  --  That scene again is almost incredibly cruel to a modern civilized reader.  --  Yet it is not more than five hundred years ago since the great empire of the Aztecs still believed that it could live only by the shedding of blood.  --  Every year in Mexico hundreds of human victims died in this fashion: the body was bent like a bow over the curved stone of sacrifice, the breast was slashed open with a knife of obsidian, and the priest tore out the beating heart of the still living victim.  --  The day may be close at hand when we shall no longer tear out the hearts of men, even for the sake of our national gods.  --  Let the reader but refer to the earlier time charts we have given in this history, and he will see the true measure and transitoriness of all the conflicts, deprivations, and miseries of this present period of painful and yet hopeful change." ...

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