“I have seen the future, and it works”. That was what Lincoln Steffens wrote in a letter to Maria Howe in 1919 with respect to Vladimir Lenin’s Soviet Union. Which societies are thought to “work”, and how does that influence the power and authority such societies have, and the global leadership they can exercise?

Key Insights:

* We need to have another podcast on emerging great-power competition in a time of increasing global authoritarianism

* Great powers remain great powers not just through economic and military strength, but by projecting an image that they are the wave of the future that others find attractive, or at least irresistible

* If Europe is a great power over the next two generations, it will be because of the great power status of fear—because fear of what unstable and inconsistent America, China, India, and perhaps Russia might try to bully it to do if it does not present a united front.

* The rise and fall of great powers is much more bizarre and contingent and subtle than historians see it in retrospect

* Hexapodia!

References:

* David Abernethy: The Dynamics of Global Dominance: European Overseas Empires, 1415-1980 <https://books.google.com/?id=ennqNS1EOuMC>

* Peter Falk & al.(1971): Columbo <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HsDERFDo0k4>

* Justin Kaplan: Lincoln Steffens: A Biography <https://archive.org/details/lincolnsteffensb0000kapl_d7v2>

* Jacob T. Levy: Who’s Afraid of Judith Shklar? <https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/07/16/whos-afraid-of-judith-shklar-liberalism/>

* William Powell, Myrna Loy, W.S. Van Dyke, Hunt Stromberg, & al. (1934): The Thin Man <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bSThEEeFYeU>

* Judith Shklar: The Liberalism of Fear <https://philpapers.org/archive/SHKTLO.pdf>

* Noah Smith: What Kind of Economy Leads to National Power? <https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/what-kind-of-economy-leads-to-national>

* C.V. Wedgewood: William the Silent <https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.220594>

+, of course:

* Vernor Vinge: A Fire Upon the Deep <https://books.google.com/books?id=fCCWWgZ7d6UC>

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