All Societies Die

How to Keep Hope Alive

Samuel Cohn

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781501755903, 9781501755903
• eBook ISBN: 9781501755910
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Development Economics
• Index: Social Sciences

In All Societies Die, Samuel Cohn asks us to prepare for the inevitable. Our society is going to die. What are you going to do about it? But he also wants us to know that there's still reason for hope.

In an immersive and mesmerizing discussion Cohn considers what makes societies (throughout history) collapse. All Societies Die points us to the historical examples of the Byzantine empire, the collapse of Somalia, the rise of Middle Eastern terrorism, the rise of drug cartels in Latin America and the French Revolution to explain how societal decline has common features and themes. Cohn takes us on an easily digestible journey through history. While he unveils the past, his message to us about the present is searing.

Through his assessment of past—and current—societies, Cohn offers us a new way of looking at societal growth and decline. With a broad panorama of bloody stories, unexpected historical riches, crime waves, corruption, and disasters, he shows us that although our society will, inevitably, die at some point, there's still a lot we can do to make it better and live a little longer.

His quirky and inventive approach to an "end-of-the-world" scenario should be a warning. We're not there yet. Cohn concludes with a strategy of preserving and rebuilding so that we don't have to give a eulogy anytime soon.

SCHOLARLY REFERENCES

Chapter 1

• The dates for Rome, Byzantium, China, and Egypt are fairly standard.
• The 1492 date for the rise of the West comes from Wallerstein, Immanuel. 1980. Modern World System I: Capitalist Agriculture and the Rise of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century. New York: Academic. Wallerstein sees the discovery of the Americas and the infusion of Mexican and Peruvian silver into the European monetary supply as the sparkplug event that generated the modern growth process.
• Angus Maddison, the leading econometrician of the history of world economic growth, argues that there was dramatic growth between 1000 and 1500 in Western Europe. See Maddison, Angus. 2007. Contours of the World Economy, 1-2030 AD. New York: Oxford. Most growth curves are geometric, so the lion’s share of that growth would have occurred in the latest third of that period.
• On growth in medieval Europe in general, see Pirenne, Henri. 2014. Economic and Social History of Medieval Europe. Eastford, CT: Martino.

Chapter 2

• My basic arguments on Rome all come from Ward-Perkins, Bryan. 2005. Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization. New York: Oxford University Press.
• For an example of the rosy view of the early Middle Ages that Ward-Perkins was refuting, see Brown, Peter. 1971. World of Late Antiquity. New York: Norton.
• On the economic woes of Late Byzantium, see Laiou, Angeliki. 2008. Economic History of Byzantium. Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks.

Chapters 3 and 4

• Most of this discussion closely follows Laiou, Angeliki, and Cecile Morrisson. 2007. Byzantine Economy. New York: Cambridge University Press. The Plethon quote can be found on page 192 of this source.

Chapter 5

• Both the African and Middle Eastern map are adapted from Peel, M. C., Finlayson, B. L., and McMahon, T. A. 2007. “Updated world map of the Köppen-Geiger climate classification.” Hydrol. Earth Syst. Sci. 11: 1633–1644, https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-11-1633-2007. I express gratitude to Michael Bechthold for his preparation of these excellent maps.
• On the expansion of the semiarid, see Huang, Jianping, Mingxia Ji, Yongkun Xie, Shanshan Wang, Yongli He, and Jinjiang Ran. 2015. “Global Semi-arid Climate Change over Last Sixty Years.” Climate Dynamics 46:1131–1150; and Cherlet, M., C. Hutchinson, J. Reynolds, J. Hill, S. Sommer, and G. von Maltitz, eds. 2018. World Atlas of Desertification. Luxembourg: Publication Office of the European Union.

Chapter 6

• Theda Skocpol’s main argument about fiscal crises in the French can be found in Skocpol, Theda. 1979. States and Social Revolutions: Comparative Analysis of France, Russia and China. New York: Cambridge.
• For data on the rising cost of war, see Rasler, Karen, and William Thompson. 1989. War and Statemaking: Shaping of the Global Powers. Boston: Unwin Hyman, particularly chapter 5, 119–154.

Chapters 7 and 8

• The basic argument presented here comes from Mohamoud, Abdullah. 2006. State Collapse and Post-conflict Development in Africa: Case of Somalia (1960–2001). Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press. This is an utterly extraordinary book and I cannot recommend it highly enough to readers interested in African affairs.
• The GDP statistics are from the Angus Maddison dataset. “Maddison Project Database.” Groningen Growth and Development Centre. https://www.rug.nl/ggdc/historicaldevelopment/maddison/. 2018.
• The fatality statistics are from Mohamoud 2006, 16.
• The piracy statistics are from Daniels, Christopher. 2012. Somali Piracy and Terrorism in the Horn of Africa. Plymouth, UK: Scarecrow.
• On the size of the refugee population, see Mohamoud 2006, 123–126.
• On what little of the Somali economy survived after the crash, see Little, Peter. 2003. Somalia: Economy without State. Oxford: International African Institute in conjunction with Indiana University Press.
• On piracy as a defensive reaction against international threats, see Weldemichael, Awet Tewelde. 2019. Piracy in Somalia: Violence and Development in the Horn of Africa. New York: Cambridge University Press.
• On the international response to Somali piracy, see Daniels 2012, chapter 4.
• On the extent of contemporary violence, see the 2020 Human Rights Watch Report on Somalia. https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2020/country-chapters/somalia.

Chapter 10

• For a well-argued, popular view of societal fall due to environmental catastrophes, see Diamond, Jared. 2005. Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. New York: Penguin.
• This is also the source for the first three ecological collapses listed in the table.
• On Mesopotamia, see Jacobsen, Thorkild and Robert Adams. 1958. “Salt and Silt in Ancient Mesopotamian Agriculture.” Science 128: 1251–1258.
• Within social science, such models are referred to as “treadmill of production” models. A good review of treadmill of production models and their alternatives can be found in Givens, Jennifer, Brett Clark, and Andrew Jorgenson. “Strengthening the Ties between Environmental Sociology and the Sociology of Development.” In Handbook of the Sociology of Development, edited by Gregory Hooks, 69–94. Berkeley: University of California Press.
• Famous statements of the treadmill of production model include Foster, John Bellamy, Brett Clark, and Richard York. 2010. Ecological Rift. New York: Monthly Review; and Schnaiberg, Allan. 1980. Environment. New York: Oxford University Press.
• For a review of the evidence on global warming, see NASA’s website on the issue. https://climate.nasa.gov/evidence/.
• For a discussion of the causes and effects of population growth, see Weeks, John. 2015. Population: An Introduction to Concepts and Issues. Boston: Cengage. Chapter 2 contains a discussion of global population projections and why growth continues to occur. Chapter 11 discusses the ecological consequences of population growth.
• For another treatment of ecological consequences of population growth, see Brown, Lester, Gary Gardner, and Brian Halweil. 1999. Beyond Malthus: Nineteen Dimensions of the Population Challenge. New York: Norton.
• On Mesopotamia, see Weiss, H., A. Courty, W. Wetterstrom, F. Guichard, L. Senior, R. Meadow, and A. Curnow. 1993. “Genesis and Collapse of Third Millennium North Mesopotamian Civilization.” Science 261 (5124): 995–1004.
• On ecological modernization, see Mol, Arthur. 2001. Globalization and Environmental Reform. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
• For the related literature on sustainable development, see Elliot, Jennifer. 2013. Introduction to Sustainable Development. New York: Routledge.

Chapter 11

• There are many moral crisis books. Among them are the following: Gibbon, Edward. 2020. The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Lambertville, NJ. Maven Books; Spengler, Oswald. 2006. Decline of the West. New York: Vintage; Black, Jim Nelson. 1994. When Nations Die: Ten Warning Signs of a Culture in Crisis. Caro...

Table of contents

• The Reality of Societal Death
• Tempting False Steps
• Thinking Big about Thinking Big
• What Would Be Lost
• The Seeds of Trouble
• The Hidden Source of Strength
• Crime, Corruption and Violence
• Triggers of Destruction
• The Circle of Societal Death
• Changing the Culture, Changing the World
• Appendix
• Scholarly References