All Societies Die: How to Keep Hope Alive by Samuel Cohn

Abstract

This ambitious, concise book makes the critical argument that the world is exhibiting many of the signs of terminal illness that have preceded the collapse of nation-states, empires, and civilizations. Along the way, Cohn examines an impressive and eclectic range of heterogenous social phenomena—state collapse in Somalia, the rise of drug cartels in Colombia, and the decline of corporate taxation in the United States—and historical episodes (in Roman Palestine, Byzantium, and the French Revolution). The book will inevitably draw comparisons with other recent classics about the decay of “democracy” or the decline of great powers.1The book’s structure is as unconventional as it is engaging. Cohn prefers chapter sizes of three to five pages; each of his fifty-seven short chapters offers a historical anecdote, analytical observation/assertion, or related research finding. In the final third of the book, the previous elements are combined into a twelve-point circular diagram that reveals a reinforcing cycle of institutional and environmental degradation, fiscal erosion, corruption, delegitimization, violence, and collapse. The four primary triggers that initiate the cycle are environmental degradation, landlessness, long-wave economic decline, and a downturn in female status. Curiously, even though the individual components draw from various historical examples, Cohn does not allow readers to use his historical material to assess how far along we are on our path to eventual “societal death.” An appendix that explains and defends the book’s freewheeling comparisons between different types of polities—empires, nation-states, civilizations, and world systems—might have been better placed as a preface or framing chapter.Any grand, sweeping argument inevitably makes a host of stylistic assumptions and omissions. But a few of Cohn’s asides are gratuitous and/or mistaken. For example, Cohn terms Azerbaijan as a “peaceful Muslim country,” despite its renewal of conflict with Armenia in 2021 (15). Nor is Morocco at peace, given its decades-long protracted conflict with the Polisario Front over Western Sahara. Cohn’s short overview of the European colonial interaction with the Global South misses the opportunity to outline recent cross-disciplinary research about different institutional legacies and webs of economic entanglement. Perhaps most frustrating is that despite some of Cohn’s majestical synthesis, the main diagram treats the component processes and phenomena as purely internal or external to the political units, rather than mapping their evolving transnational architectures. For example, Cohn treats bribery as a domestic issue, even privileging civil-service reform as the preferred institutional cure, but strangely for a globally oriented book, he omits any discussion of how ruling kleptocrats have looted their countries in Africa, Latin America, Eurasia, and Asia with the assistance of Western lawyers, accountants, shell-company providers, and banks. Kleptocracy has degraded institutional capacity and accountability in countries like Venezuela, Azerbaijan, Angola, Russia, and Equatorial Guinea more than have debt-cycles and the repatriation of profits by multinational companies.Many of the book’s recommendations that are otherwise laudable tend to focus excessively on messaging and demonstrating commitment as opposed to overcoming entrenched interests and institutional barriers. Meeting the challenge of our impending demise by “changing the culture” and proselytizing a renewed commitment to “societal survival” seems merely to underline the urgent micro- and macro-problems that Cohn identifies.