The return of the venal office and tax-farmer
The French Revolution was in part a revolt against a degraded court, whose profligacy in prestige…
Political order and political decay in Australia
If there has been a single problem facing contemporary democracies, either aspiring or well established, it…
Millennial predictions: cities will wither
Paris. London. New York. Perhaps Tokyo. Never Sao Paolo. Never Mumbai. So sings the liberal cultural…
Forebodings
It is not just the Paris attacks but Lebanon, the Russian plane from Egypt and Paris…
Millennial predictions 3 – big states will continue to fragment
Fernandez-Armesto’s interest as an historian rests in his unusual observations, framed in remarkable prose and made…
Life cycles
Our culture may lie in ruins; our republics may be distressed; our economies blackjacked by rentier…
Millenial predictions: return of totalitarianisms
Fernandez-Armesto’s second prediction was that rival totalitarianisms would return. This prediction was bravely conservative or pessimistic,…
Predicting population and initiative
Fernandez-Armesto’s first projection was that the world’s population would be contained. Was this projection, made twenty…
Millennial predictions
Felipe Fernandez-Armesto at the end of his 1995 Millenium: a history of our last thousand years made…