Before August 2021 I knew almost nothing about Afghan history. Nor did I care.  As a country, Afghanistan seems neither interesting nor important, culturally or geopolitically.  Yes, it is famous for feverish Islamism, extreme poverty, and brutality against women; but there are plenty of such failed states to go around in the world.  Yes, it is nicknamed the “graveyard of empires”; but to most Chinese, there is nothing mysterious about burying empires in what Chairman Mao would call “boundless ocean of people’s war”.

Then, in April 2021, President Biden announced the plan to withdraw from Afghanistan by the end of August that year.  Shortly after, Taliban soldiers began to emerge from caves and tunnels. As they swept through the country with breathtaking speed, their opponents, more than 300,000 strong and trained, equipped, and paid for by NATO, simply melted away.  To be sure, Americans did not think highly of the Afghan legions procured with their money, initially predicting they could not hold off Taliban offense for more than a year.  Yet, they were still caught completely off guard when the Afghan government collapsed in Mid-August, well before the deadline of the planned withdrawal. If Americans had dreamed about a gracious if melancholy farewell from a country that they thought they had liberated and rebuilt, the dream had turned into a nightmare that will be remembered for generations to come.

Like most observers, I watched the events unfolding in Afghanistan that summer with shock, amusement, and confusion.  How could a poorly trained guerrilla force defeat a larger, better-equipped national army in just a few months? Why did not most Afghans fight harder to protect their political freedom, personal liberty, and women’s rights, the things that Americans insisted they should cherish the most? Even Biden seemed genuinely baffled at Afghans’ lack of will “to fight for their own future” despite Americans had given them “every tool they could need”.  These questions had prompted me to find answers in Afghan history.   The book I stumbled on was Games Without Rules by Tamim Ansary, an Afghan American author who was born in Kabul after WWII. Ansary covers the 250-year history of modern Afghanistan, starting from its legendary founder, Ahmad Shah Baba, and ending with the Islamic Republic in the 21^st century.   An easy and enjoyable read, the book did not just answer most of my questions, it answered them head on, as if the author knew the questions would be asked ten years later.

First, a few things that surprised me.

I once thought that Afghans have always been living under a somewhat barbarous regime similar to Taliban, and that it was Americans who incidentally liberated them from the subjection by their antiquated institutions.   I was wrong.

Taliban movement was in fact a new phenomenon that bears little resemblance with most Afghan regimes that came before it.  The reign of Abdur Rahman Khan (1880-1901) ––also known as the Iron Amir––may be a close match in terms of brutality and religious rigidity, but he is also remembered by many as the king who united Afghanistan under one flag and set her on the path toward modernization.  Like many peoples that came in contact with the West in the past two centuries, Afghans had gone through, sometimes not under their own initiatives and terms, multiple iterations of modernization projects.  Amanullah Khan (1919 -1929), who fought for and won Afghan independence from the British Empire, was a radical reformer.  Among his daring edicts was a new law meant to replace Shari’a, which guaranteed many basic human rights, including freedom of religion and women’s rights – yes, a hundred years ago, Amanullah’s code already proclaimed no girls should be denied the right to education and no women should be required to wear burqa.   However, Amanullah’s reform was way ahead of its time.  Afghans rebelled and kicked him out of the country; he ended up in Italy as a refugee, where he spent the rest of his life working as a carpenter.  After a few years of turmoil, the reign of Zahir Shah (1933 – 1973) charted a more moderate and successful trajectory, which culminated in the enactment of the 1964 constitution.   By introducing free elections, a parliament, civil and political rights and universal suffrage––and effectively banning any members of royal family to hold high-level government offices––the constitution created a modern democratic state that is, in principle, similar to the Islamic Republic of 2000s. By early 1960s, Ansary wrote,

“in the big city of Kabul, women were beginning to appear in public showing not just their faces but their arms, their legs, even cleavage. Afghan girls of the elite technocratic class were beginning to cotton to Western fashions. They were wearing miniskirts and low-cut blouses. Nightclubs were popping up, which served beer and wine and whiskey—and not just to foreigners. Afghans were drinking and making no bones about it.”

So, how did Afghanistan descend from this lovely modern democracy to Taliban’s Islamic Emirate? Well, it had much to do with geopolitics.

Contrary to my naïve preconception, Afghanistan has been enormously important to the struggles of great powers, especially those between Russia and the West. In the 19^th century, the Russians attempted to reach the Indian Ocean from the central Asia. Determined to protect their enormous trade interests in the region from Russian interferences, the British took Afghanistan as their protectorate by force.  If the objective was to stop Russians, the British succeeded.  However, their control of the country had always been fragile and treacherous.  According to Ansary, they had “won jurisdiction of every patch of Afghan territory their guns could cover—but not one inch more”. Eventually, after countless lives on both sides lost to violence and a world war that permanently weakened Europe, the British granted independence to Afghans. However, the domination of great power politics did not fade away. Instead, it morphed into a form that had briefly become a benefactor, when Russians and Americans, in their attempt to recruit Afghans to fight for their causes in the Cold War, offered extravagant aid packages.  In 1950s and 1960s, the two superpowers “constructed over twelve hundred miles of superb paved roads through some of the planet’s most difficult terrain”, which connected “all of Afghanistan’s major cities”. Unfortunately, this relatively peaceful and prosperous era was interrupted by the rise of the communist movement in the late 1960s.   Social unrest ensued, followed by three coup d’etat in the 1970s.  From the upheavals a deeply unpopular communist regime emerged in 1978, whose internal strife soon killed its pro-Soviet leader, Nur Mohammed Taraki, and forced his slayer and successor, Hafizullah Amin, to consider jumping ship to the Americans. The Soviet Union intervened, plunging into a 10-year war from which she would never recover.  Like the British in the 19^th century, Russians soon discovered that their war machine could easily crash the Afghan army and state but not the Afghan people.  Frustrated by the tenacious opposition led by Mujahideen (Islam Jihadists), the Russians resorted to a scorched earth policy that aimed at depopulating rural Afghanistan. Their grotesque tactics did little to win the war but unleashed a humanitarian catastrophe of epic proportion.   According to Ansary, a million Afghans were killed and six million displaced in 1985 alone.

An entire generation of Afghan boys would grow up in the refugee camps and receive education in religious madrassas (schools).  Having suffered through the worst childhood on earth, they were “allowed to imagine that it might be their destiny to establish the community that would save the world”.   From the schools of these refugee camps would rise the loyal followers of Mullah Omar, the founder of the “student movement”, or Taliban (literally means students in Arab).   Under Omar’s leadership, Taliban would win a bloody civil war in 1990s, only to be dethroned a few years later in the wake of America’s anti-terrorist crusade.

The rest is history.

Let me get back to the questions that drew me to this book in the first place. Why didn’t the Afghan people fight harder for their freedom? The short answer is there were two Afghan peoples: westernized urban elites and common folks from the countryside. The “Afghan people” often spoken of in the western media might only refer to the former.  While the elites considered Taliban an archenemy, the masses did not see Taliban’s moral and religious imperatives conflict with theirs.  While the elites were supposedly in charge, they have never gained full control of the other Afghanistan.  Most importantly, when push comes to shove, they had no idea how to “fight the fight and win the war”.

Why is Afghanistan so deeply divided?  As a collection of tribes and ethnic groups that loosely coalesced around an Islamic culture over a tough terrain, Afghanistan is an inherently weak state. This made it very hard for anyone, even the most powerful country in the world, to penetrate through the layers of physical and cultural barriers that historically separate urban centers from rural communities. Without a strong state, most Afghans naturally turned to tribal and religious authorities for such basic state services as security, law enforcement and education. Ansary likened ruling Afghanistan through a puppet government to swinging a pot by grasping its handle: the foreign powers thought they could swing the pot however they wanted; yet, because the handle was never firmly attached to the pot, they often ended up shattering the pot while holding nothing but a useless handle.

The innate weakness of the Afghan state was further reinforced by the powerful legacy of Islam and the recurrent interventions by the West.  Unfortunately, the Islam and the West have long been at odds with each other, and the animosity had only grown stronger in the past century.  As a result, the head of the Afghan state faces a constant dilemma.  On the one hand, as they need the support of the West––money, permission, or both––to secure power and to modernize the country, they must subscribe, or at least pay lip service, to Western values.   On the other hand, they could not afford to alienate the masses who remain loyal to traditional values, or risk being thrown out of the palace like Amanullah.  The balance between the two acts is so delicate that few could make it work, not for a long time anyway.  As a result, modernization in Afghanistan, because it is “foreign” in name and in essence, had actually widened the cultural and wealth chasm between the elites who welcomed the western influences and the masses who continued to resist them.  Any attempt by a foreign power to correct course by direct intervention, regardless of methods or intention, only serves to pour fuel on the fire.

Seen from this light, the Bush plan to rebuild Afghanistan after the 2001 invasion was doomed from the beginning.   On display in that 20-year nation building project, largely funded by American taxpayers, is not so much America’s idealism as her arrogance and ignorance of history.  Biden was right to cut the loss as soon as he could.   In the end, Ansary told us Afghanistan would probably do okay, regardless of who was in charge, if only other countries are willing to leave her alone.   Let’s see if the world will heed his advice this time.

I learned about R.G. Collingwood and his famous book from a Chinese podcaster who quoted Collingwood as saying, “All history is the history of thought” (in Chinese, 一切历史都是思想史). Struck by the profoundness of the quote, I decided to dig deeper.  Collingwood is known as the most underrated philosopher in history, a reputation largely earned by “The Idea of History”. The book was published posthumously after his premature death in 1943, at age of 53.

By “all history is the history of thought”, Collingwood means history can only exist in the re-enactment of the past in a historian’s mind. The past events are over, cease to exist, and hence cannot be perceived and studied as a real, actual object. Thus, history is knowable only by thinking, and the proper object of history is thought itself: “not things thought about, but the act of thinking itself”.   It follows, I believe, there is no such a thing as the true past, or the real history.  History is idealistic in nature.  Seen in this light, the translation—“一切历史都是思想史” —is misleading. The quote should rather read, “一切历史都是思考史“。

Collingwood believes that a historian must go beyond the materials inherited from authorities.  Otherwise, he is a mere “copy-and-paste” historian. Collingwood goes so far as suggesting history, like novel, is the work of imagination, and in this regard, they do not differ.  The historian must tell a coherent and believable story in which the actions of his characters are justified by circumstances, motives, and psychology.  I suppose Collingwood’s novelistic historian is in sharp contrast with most Chinese historians, who actually praised and cherished the copy-and-paste tradition, sticking to Confucian’s famous precept: 述而不作（pass on the wisdom of the sages without adding anything new to it）.

Collingwood argues the purpose of history is to inform the present, by revealing “what man has done and thus what man is”.  Reconstructing the past is always done to know the present and to tell us what to do in the present.  Moreover, the past and the present are the same object in different phases and therefore inseparable: we come to know the present naturally by studying the past, because the past is part of the present.

Collingwood believes all history is biased because everyone approaches history with their own biases. Indeed, if it were not for these biases, nobody would write history in the first place.   He does say a good historian must take no sides and “rejoices in nothing but the truth”, but how much of history is written by good historians?

Finally, Collingwood harshly criticized the “scientific” theories of universal history, i.e., the idea that the progress of human history is governed by some universal law.  Chinese students of my generation can attest this is exactly what we had learned in history classes.  According to Collingwood, the value of these theories “was exactly nil”, and, if they have been accepted by so many, it is only because they have “become the orthodoxy of a religious community”.  He claims only two types of people were still writing universal history at his time: the dishonest attempting to “spread their opinions by specious falsehoods”, and the ignorant naïvely writing down everything they know without “suspecting that they know it all wrong”.

To someone growing up in China where historical materialism is treated as the one and only truth, Collingwood’s idea seems like heresy at first glance.  However, the more I read, the more I agree with him.  Since much of the book was compiled from lecture notes, the experience is close to taking a philosophy course: not exactly fun but worth the effort.

I have heard and read about John Stuart Mill many times before but have never read him. Known as the most influential English-speaking philosopher of the nineteenth century, he still has many followers and admirers in the new millennium, even in some intellectual circles in mainland China. For example, Xiang Luo (罗翔) – the famed Chinese law professor who had gained an incredibly strong following on Internet because of his lucid and witty analysis of contemporary legal matters – is evidently a Mill’s fan.   I was reluctant to read Mill, or for that matter any philosophers who lived two centuries ago, as I wasn’t sure I could understand, much less enjoy, their writings.  However, after reading a blog by Luo that passionately praises On Liberty, I decided to at least give it a try.  I’m glad I did.

One of the most important works on political philosophy, On Liberty explains what constitutes liberty, why society must guarantee it, and how to resolve the conflict between liberty and order. Mill’s central argument is that a civilized community should not exercise power over its members against their will except for the purpose of preventing harm to others.  In his own words,

“The only freedom which deserves the name, is that of pursuing our own good in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs, or impede their efforts to obtain it”.

This doctrine, known as the harm principle, bestows each person a virtual sphere, whose boundary may be described by the adage, “my right to swing my fist ends where your nose begins”.  The individual is sovereign over themselves within this sphere, which Mill divides into three compartments: (i) the liberty of conscience, including thought, feeling, opinion and sentiment on all subjects, (ii) the liberty of planning one’s own life according to one’s tastes and character; and (iii) the liberty of uniting with other consenting individuals.

Per the harm principle, the US government seems to overstep its authority by outlawing prostitution, gambling, and drug use.   The government may consider these activities immoral and dangerous, even decidedly harmful to a person who engages in them, but still the person should only be warned of the danger, not forbidden from exposing themselves to it.  In fact, Mill thinks even commercializing such activities – say working as a pimp or selling drugs for a profit – may fall into the realm of individual liberty, so long as those activities themselves are admissible (under the harm principle, they surely are).

It should be noted that harm is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for interference.  Any competition for a scarce resource – admission to Ivy League colleges, election to political offices, tickets to Taylor Swift’s concert, to name a few – necessarily produces winners reaping benefits at the expense of losers. Do the winners thus harm losers, materially and/or psychologically?  Mill asserts such a claim would be valid only if the winner has employed “fraud or treachery, and force”.   Nor harm to others must be caused by actions.  A person can be held accountable for the harm attributed to their inaction, too, though compulsion against such offense must be more carefully exercised.  A somewhat surprising example given by Mill is parents failing to provide their children with the “ordinary chance of a desirable existence”. That is, the failure at parenting is not just a family tragedy, but a crime against the children and society. In fact, Mill has gone so far as suggesting couples who cannot show they have the means of raising children properly should be denied the right to marriage, effectively denying them the liberty to unite with others.

Mill would probably be called a free speech absolutist if he lived today. Expression of any opinion by any fringe group, in his mind, must be tolerated and protected, no questions asked.  To drive home this point, he writes,

“If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind.”

Mill does not believe being offended by another person’s conduct or speech is an injury that warrants redress.  To him, the feeling of a person for their own opinion carries much more weight than the feeling of another who finds their holding it hurtful or offensive. If hate speech was a thing back then, Mill would be inclined to protect it too. He would be dumbfounded upon learning that Larry Summers, the former president of Harvard University, was forced to resign simply because he offered a seemingly innocent explanation of women’s underrepresentation in science and engineering.  The only qualification to the freedom of speech Mill would agree is that it must not incite violence.  For example, “an opinion that corn-dealers are starvers of the poor… may justly incur punishment when delivered orally to an excited mob assembled before the house of a corn-dealer”.   This example seems to fit well with the speech that Donald Trump gave to the mob that gathered in front of White House on January 6^th, 2021 –– whether Trump was intended to stop a proceeding of US congress by force or not, the mere presence of a mob that could heed his words means the speech has violated the harm principle.

Mill had more than a healthy dose of skepticism about democracy.  He appears to suggest self-government is an illusion because there is no such a thing as “the government of each by himself”, but only the government “of each by all the rest”. The will of the people spoken of, similarly, is the will of the majority, not the will of everyone.  Mill is wary of society hindering the development of individuality by compelling its members to adopt its own ideas and practices as the rule of conduct.  This tyranny of the majority, he contends, can be more oppressive than an actual tyrant, because “it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself.”

At times Mill sounds like a staunch elitist.  Deriding the mass as “collective mediocrity”, he warns us the danger of allowing the mass to take their opinions from “men much like themselves, addressing them or speaking in their name, on the spur of the moment, through the newspapers”.  Instead, to rise above mediocrity, the mass must be “guided by the counsels and influence of a more highly gifted and instructed One or Few”.  Exactly who these geniuses are Mill did not specify.  I don’t think he meant elected officials, since no elected official in a democracy, including the president of the US, could ever hope to achieve this level of potency.

Liberty is not a natural right, according to Mill. He made it clear the people who are incapable “free and equal discussions” have no use for it. These “barbarians”, as Mill calls them, should consider themselves lucky if they can find a competent despot – “an Akbar or a Charlemagne” – to be their ruler.  Instead, Mill justifies liberty by its utility. Freedom of speech is indispensable because it guarantees “the opportunity of exchanging error for truth”.   Even if an opinion is wrong, we would gain, by giving it a fair hearing, a better understanding of truth “produced by its collision with error”.   As Mill puts it eloquently,

“he who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that.”

Moreover, liberty fosters individuality, which is instrumental to human progress.  A civilization becomes stationary, Mill asserts, the moment it ceases to possess individuality. He argues the emphasis on conformity at the expense of individuality is the main reason why China fell so behind the West at the time of his writing (twenty years after the first Opium War).   China enjoyed “a particularly good set of customs” from early on, thanks to the talent and wisdom of a few “sages and philosophers”.  Yet, her attempt to “impress the best wisdom upon every mind in the community” backfired because it ended up imposing the same maxims and rules on everyone’s thoughts and conduct, thereby eradicating individuality.  Remarkably, Mill’s analysis still rings true in today’s China.  Growing up in 1970s and 1980s, I remember being taught that the best I can do for the nation is to become a “revolutionary screw” (革命的螺丝钉).   The word “revolutionary” might have been slowly phased out since then, but the metaphor has not. China still sees her citizens as standard parts on a well-oiled machine: indistinguishable and insignificant as individuals, but harmonious and powerful put together – or so she hopes.  In the past two centuries, China had tried to reinvent herself but insisted to do it her own way for so many times that Albert Einstein might think she was insane, as in “doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results”.  Will she succeed this time around?  I don’t know, but I will leave you with one of my favorite quotes from On Liberty (the emphasis is mine):

“A State which dwarfs its men, in order that they may be more docile instruments in its hands even for beneficial purposes, will find that with small men no great thing can really be accomplished”.

World Order is about the philosophy of international relations.  Kissinger argues that any stable system of world order needs both legitimacy, which is a belief about what constitutes a just order, and power, which is what holds the order together to keep peace.  In this view, power and legitimacy are interdependent: power is unsustainable without legitimacy, and legitimacy cannot maintain order without power.   The key is how to strike the right balance. Using this theoretical framework, Kissinger analyzes how the power-legitimacy equilibrium played out in four systems of historic world order.

The bedrock of world order before 1945 was the so-called “Westphalian system”, named after the Treaties of Westphalia, which ended the Thirty Years War in 1648.   The war was largely fought to settle the legitimacy of Church’s monopoly over individuals’ spiritual relationship with God, and yet, its sheer destruction had convinced Europeans to never again center world order on moral authority.  Instead, the focus was shifted entirely to the allocation and balance of power with value-neutral rules, such as mutual respect for the sovereignty of states and noninterference in domestic affairs of other states. It goes without saying that these rules only apply to the states wielding enough power to tilt the order off balance.

If the Westphalian system is all about power, the Islamic order is all about legitimacy.  Islam divides the world into the land of believers and the land of infidels.  Islamists consider themselves permanently and automatically at war with the world inhabited by unbelievers, and Jihad—the mission of expanding Islam faith through struggles—the only way to bring peace to all humanity.  They reject any other form of legitimacy because only Islam can offer the true form of freedom, the “freedom from governance by other men and man-made doctrines”. This feverish commitment to religious imperatives inevitably denies the reality of power dynamics, often with grave consequences. Kissinger noted how it has, for example, “turned coexistence with Israel from an acceptance of reality” into an irreconcilable conflict with their own legitimacy for many Arab governments.

Like Islamism, Confucianism refuses to recognize any sovereigns as legitimate unless they are subordinate to the Chinese emperor, who supposedly rules everything “beneath the sky” with the Mandate of Heaven.   There are two important differences, however. First, the Mandate of Heaven is not sanctioned by God, but hinges on the ruler’s willingness and ability to provide good material life to the ruled. Second, China seeks respect, not conversion by force.  Instead, the “barbarians” are given a rung on her ladder of tributary, according to proximity to Chinese culture. Therefore, as Kissinger observed, there is no need “to order a world it considered already ordered, or best ordered by the cultivation of morality internally”.    To a certain extent, the current regime in China still sees the world the same way: it claims legitimacy from ever-increasing standard of living for its people, and it seeks to dominate not necessarily by physical force but by its achievements and conduct.  On paper, China has adopted the Westphalian system since 1949, as evidenced by her commitment to the five principles of peaceful co-existence.   That, however, is a practical accommodation to reality, not a reflection of Chinese ideal.  Chairman Xi’s vision of China Dream, vague as it may sound to a foreigner, precisely expresses a national nostalgia for that glorious past, real, and imagined, in which Chinese can pretend the world orbits around them for eternity.  That said, I think the threat of that vision to world peace has always been exaggerated in the West.  The image of an expansionist and missionary China is largely a mirage created from—depending on your propensity for cynicism—either a misunderstanding of or a disagreement with her preferred form of world order.

It would surprise no one that Kissinger thinks Americanism is our best shot at creating an optimal world order, though he made it clear there is still room for improvement.  As the cliché goes, America started with an idea.   That idea, I think, is as much about liberty and democracy, as about the American insight of world order.  Americans like to think they always place “principles” before “selfish interests” when it comes to world affairs. They are not only exceptional in this regard, but also destined to bring the vision to humanity.  As Thomas Jefferson put it, “it is impossible not to be sensible that we are acting for all mankind”.   Until Woodrow Wilson, however, America refrained from imposing her order on others. Instead, she contented herself with an exemplary role, as “the shining city on a hill”.  Ronald Reagan loved to talk about the shinning city, and his depiction of it is simply too good to pass over:

“…in my mind, it was a tall proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, wind swept, God blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace—a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity, and if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors, and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here. That’s how I saw it, and see it still.”

To the extent this metaphor advocates leading by example rather than conquest, it bears a resemblance to how China sees her role in the world.  It was under Wilson’s watch that America began to embark on the mission to remake the world in her own image.   To Wilson, democracy was the source of legitimacy because it is both the best form of governance and the sole guarantee for permanent peace.  Thus, only by spreading democracy far and wide can humanity hope to resolve conflicts, achieve the equality of all nations, and maintain world peace and universal harmony.  This vision, Ironically, is not that different from Islamism, in terms of the end goal (world peace), the claim to an absolute moral truth and the pledge to convert “unbelievers”.  To be sure, America does not openly threaten to wage wars against unbelievers, opting instead to pressure tactics and sabotage campaigns.  Yet, she frequently found herself at war with them, not always supported by an airtight casus belli fully consistent with her “principles”.  Therefore, while in theory America dismisses any calculations of the Westphalian style balance of power as immoral and dangerous, in practice she always reserves for herself the right to embrace such a calculation on an ad hoc basis. Kissinger apparently thinks this ambivalence is a feature, not a bug, of Americanism, as he writes,

“America’s moral aspirations need to be combined with an approach that takes into account the strategic element of policy in terms the American people can support and sustain through multiple political cycles.”

In other words, the art of practicing Americanism is to find that delicate balance between power and legitimacy, which is probably best illustrated in the famous (or infamous) American doctrine of strategic ambiguity on defending Taiwan.   The danger, however, is that Americanism can be seen as opportunistic, if not hypocritical.  The lack of transparency and consistency has and will continue to enable America’s enemies to argue that she is, after all, no better than the value-neutral, power-centric imperialism that she purports to displace, and that her professed love for human rights, democracy and peace is but national interests under a fancy new dress.

If you are into geopolitics, you may find this book a real treat.  In essence it is a condensed world history, viewed through the lens of world order and filled with interesting details, anecdotes, and quotes that I truly enjoyed. Kissinger had turned 90 when the book was published in 2014, but he remained a cool-headed, clear-eyed, and elegant writer.   Perhaps more importantly, he was still the passionate believer and defender of Americanism, who refused to say anything negative at all about any of the twelve postwar presidents of the United States.  This lack of self-reflection is somewhat disappointing but understandable given Kissinger was far from an impartial analyst of America’s world order.

“Capital in the 21^st Century” explains how the distribution of income and wealth (or capital) evolves according to the laws that govern economic growth, rate of saving, and returns on capital.  Picketty argues quite convincingly the reproduction of capital tends to outpace that of the economic output (GDP).   Once set in motion, therefore, capitalism inevitably concentrates wealth, creating a self-reinforcing spiral that ends with appallingly unequal distribution of wealth.  By Picketty’s estimation, the accumulation of wealth in the developed countries has by 2010s returned to a level that the world has not seen since the eve of the World War I.  As a shocking symptom of this extreme inequality, the bottom 50% of population collectively own close to nothing everywhere, including Sweden!  If this process is to continue indefinitely, he warns, “the past will devour the future” and we will return to a society of “rentiers dominant over those who own nothing but their labor”.

It is tempting to reject out of hand Picketty’s thesis as Marxism dressed in a new costume, and his laser focus on inequality a dangerous rhetoric tacitly inciting class warfare.  Such an interpretation would be unfair, however.  His main argument against capital concentration, I think, is not a moral one.  Rather, the concern is concentrating so much capital in so few hands may be socially destabilizing. Moreover, as the stock of capital continues to grow relative to GDP, the returns on capital may eventually converge to the rate of economic growth, at which point capitalists must reinvest all income from capital in order to merely preserve “their social status relative to the average for the society”. This last point, known as the golden rule, seems to me an ultimate manifestation of involution (内卷).

How do we avoid such apocalypse then?  Picketty’s innovation is a tax directly levied on capital, including all financial assets such as (unsold) stocks and bonds.   As utopian as it might sound, the idea has gained traction in mainstream politics lately.  The Democratic Party in the US, for example, recently proposed a “billionaire tax” to pay for Biden’s ambitious social spending programs.  Conceptually, the billionaire tax is exactly a tax on capital, though it limits the taxation base literally to “billionaires”. While this proposal died quickly, I suspect similar attempts will resurface in the future, if only as a novel revenue source for desperate governments.

Picketty is an articulate and persuasive writer, and “Capital” is absolutely worth reading.  As a side note, I found his open refusal to recognize economics as a science remarkable and laudable.  My jaw almost dropped when I read “the discipline of economics has yet to get over its childish passion for mathematics”. With that kind of candidness, I am sure the book did not win Picketty many friends in his profession; but whether you agree with him or not, you must admit to “tell it as it is” in such a dramatic fashion requires conviction, courage, and integrity.