Hi Robert,
Thank you again for sharing the thinkers who have shaped your perspective. We’ve spent some time considering how their work relates to our own framework, and there are certainly many valuable connections.
Perhaps we should begin by clarifying our ambition. We are deliberately painting with broad brushstrokes. Our aim is not to provide a comprehensive explanation of every historical development, but to identify a relatively small number of underlying generative mechanisms that help explain the long-term evolution of civilizations.
We are particularly interested in how technological constellations become bound to specific forms of social and political organization, creating what we call technopolitical configurations. Some configurations develop decisive advantages in their capacity to mobilize resources, organize production, exercise power, and compete with others.
Once such a configuration emerges somewhere, it can fundamentally alter the conditions under which older configurations reproduce themselves. Those unable to adapt may eventually lose their capacity for independent reproduction. Adaptation itself may require institutional and social transformations incompatible with the older configuration’s continued independence.
This is the historical dynamic we seek to capture through our Inclusion and Social Transformation Imperatives, situated within a broader coevolutionary process involving technology, material conditions, institutions, power, and consciousness. Our Integration Imperative adds another dimension: the dependencies created by these transformations can also generate new social actors and possibilities for emancipation.
With that background, here is how we currently understand the contributions of the six thinkers you mentioned.
Peter Pogany
Pogany offers valuable insights into thermodynamics, systemic instability, and transitions between historical orders. His work may help illuminate the turbulent periods during which established arrangements lose their capacity to reproduce themselves and new forms of organization struggle to emerge.
However, we already approach historical transformation through the interaction of technological possibilities, material and thermodynamic constraints, and changing institutional arrangements. Pogany may therefore enrich our understanding of the dynamics of transition without necessarily identifying a fundamentally different generative mechanism.
In particular, our framework allows for existing technopolitical configurations to undermine their own conditions of reproduction, even without the prior emergence of a superior technological cluster. A successor may arise through a different organization of existing technologies or through an entirely new technological constellation.
Peter Turchin
Turchin’s work on elite overproduction, inequality, state capacity, and political instability provides important explanations of why particular societies become internally vulnerable.
We would interpret many of these processes as historically specific cases in which a society fails to maintain or develop the institutional and social organization required by changing conditions.
In other words, they can be understood within what we call the Social Transformation Imperative. Societies that cannot manage these pressures may lose their capacity to compete with, or maintain their independence from, better-adapted configurations.
Turchin helps explain particular pathways to instability, but does not appear to require a change to the broader mechanism through which technopolitical configurations are selected, reproduced, and transformed.
Luke Kemp
Kemp’s work is especially interesting because of his attention to the material conditions that make concentrated power and durable systems of domination possible.
We see his contribution primarily as helping explain where and under what conditions particular technopolitical configurations can emerge and become successful.
Our framework asks a somewhat different question: what technological and organizational developments generate new configurations with decisive advantages, and how does their emergence subsequently transform the conditions of reproduction for other societies?
Kemp’s emphasis on resources, coercion, and the possibility of escaping domination can help specify the circumstances in which a configuration becomes viable. But these conditions do not, by themselves, explain the broader generative mechanism through which new technological clusters and forms of social organization become historically transformative.
We therefore see his work as a potentially valuable specification of the conditions under which our mechanisms operate, rather than an alternative to those mechanisms.
Ian Morris
Morris provides a remarkable comparative perspective on long-term changes in energy use, military capacity, social organization, and information technology.
These are precisely the kinds of interacting dimensions our framework seeks to bring together.
His work could therefore provide historical material for examining particular transformations, although we would not assume that his quantitative indicators are necessarily the best way to test our hypotheses.
More importantly, identifying and comparing dimensions of social development is not quite the same as explaining the generative mechanisms through which one technopolitical configuration displaces or transforms another.
We see Morris primarily as a valuable source of comparative historical analysis rather than a reason to revise our framework’s fundamental architecture.
Jared Diamond
Diamond’s work highlights the importance of geography, ecological constraints, resource availability, and the different ways societies respond to environmental pressures.
These factors are clearly important, but they already have a place within our broader account of the interaction between material conditions, technological possibilities, and social organization.
Geography and ecology influence which technological constellations are possible, where they can emerge, and how successfully particular societies can reproduce themselves.
They also help explain why similar organizational forms may have very different outcomes in different environments.
Diamond therefore contributes important historical conditions and examples, but we do not currently see his work as identifying a generative mechanism that lies outside our existing framework.
Kojin Karatani
Karatani is perhaps the most interesting theoretical interlocutor of the six.
His shift from modes of production to modes of exchange, and particularly his analysis of the mutually reinforcing relationships between capital, nation, and state, offers a powerful account of how social orders reproduce themselves.
We think this can substantially enrich our understanding of the institutional and relational structures through which technopolitical configurations are sustained.
However, our framework attempts to explain something that seems less systematically developed in Karatani’s approach: how changing technological constellations, material constraints, warfare, and competitive pressures generate transformations in the social and political organization of civilizations.
His modes of exchange illuminate important structures of reproduction and domination, but they do not seem to explain, with the same specificity, why a particular historical configuration loses its capacity for independent reproduction and why another becomes competitively superior.
His conception of Mode D also raises important questions about the possibility of transcending existing forms of domination. These questions connect with our Integration Imperative, although we approach the emergence of emancipatory possibilities through changing social dependencies, collective organization, and the reflexive capacities generated within historical transformations.
We therefore see considerable potential for dialogue with Karatani, but not yet a compelling reason to replace our underlying explanatory architecture.
Our broader point
We certainly do not mean that these thinkers have nothing fundamental to teach us. Nor do we assume that identifying a broad generative mechanism amounts to having explained every historical case in which it might operate.
Our distinction is between a framework intended to identify the main engines of long-term historical transformation and more specialized theories that explain the conditions, variations, and consequences of those transformations.
A broad framework is useful only if it can accommodate historical complexity without explaining everything away. It must remain open to evidence that its proposed mechanisms are insufficient.
Perhaps we can summarize the distinction we are trying to make in three points.
First, we see an important difference between explaining where and under what conditions a new technopolitical configuration can emerge (Kemp, and to some extent Diamond), why a particular configuration becomes unstable or fails (Turchin), how a transition between configurations may unfold (Pogany), and identifying the underlying generative mechanisms driving long-term historical transformation, which is the primary ambition of our framework.
Second, we want to emphasize that technology alone is not the driving mechanism. What matters is the binding between technological possibilities and forms of social and political organization (drawing partly on Lewis Mumford’s work), operating under particular material and competitive conditions. It is this relationship that can produce historically decisive advantages and transformations. Our approach is therefore not one of technological determinism, but of coevolution between technology, institutions, power, and social relations.
Third, we would not want to underestimate Kemp’s contribution. His analysis of resource control, coercive power, and the ability—or inability—to exit a system helps explain not only where systems of domination can emerge, but also how they reproduce themselves. These are genuine causal mechanisms. Our point is simply that, at least as we currently understand them, they can be situated within our broader explanatory framework rather than requiring a fundamental revision of it.
So our intention is not to dismiss the explanatory value of these thinkers, but to distinguish between mechanisms operating at different levels of historical analysis. We are deliberately painting with broad brushstrokes, while recognizing that the finer details are essential for understanding particular historical cases.
We would be very interested to hear whether you see something fundamental that our framework still fails to capture.
So perhaps the most interesting question for our continued discussion is this:
Do you see any generative mechanism in these thinkers that cannot be adequately understood through the coevolution of technological constellations, material conditions, competition, institutional transformation, and changing social relations?
If so, we would be genuinely interested in exploring it. That would help us determine whether our framework needs a fundamental revision, rather than simply greater historical detail.
Warmly,
Leif and colleagues