Shrink thinking: are countries really like people?
source link: https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/nations-people-upheaval-niall-ferguson/
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One of the oldest ideas in Western political thought is the analogy between the individual human and the body politic – think only of Abraham Bosse’s justly celebrated frontispiece for Hobbes’s Leviathan. A giant crowned figure towers over the landscape, his torso and arms made up of over 300 men. Few historians think about states in this way today. But few historians have had even a tenth of the impact on the popular understanding of history that has been achieved by the polymath Jared Diamond, whose Guns, Germs and Steel (1997) has outsold most, if not all, history books published since. If Diamond now ventures to revive the idea that nations are individuals writ large, we should all pay attention. “Nations undergo national crises, which … may or may not get resolved successfully through national changes”, he writes. “There is a large body of research and anecdotal information, built…
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