Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Following in the wake of his groundbreaking work War in the Age of Intelligent Machines , Manuel De Landa presents a brilliant, radical synthesis of historical development of the last thousand years. A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History sketches the outlines of a renewed materialist philosophy of history in the tradition of Fernand Braudel, Gilles Deleuze, and Félix Guattari, while engaging -- in an entirely unprecedented manner -- the critical new understanding of material processes derived from the sciences of dynamics. Working against prevailing attitudes that see history merely as the arena of texts, discourses, ideologies, and metaphors, De Landa traces the concrete movements and interplays of matter and energy through human populations in the last millennium. The result is an entirely novel approach to the study of human societies and their always mobile, semi-stable forms, cities, economies, technologies, and languages.

De Landa attacks three domains that have given shape to human societies: economics, biology, and linguistics. In each case, De Landa discloses the self-directed processes of matter and energy interacting with the whim and will of human history itself to form a panoramic vision of the West free of rigid teleology and naive notions of progress and, even more important, free of any deterministic source for its urban, institutional, and technological forms. The source of all concrete forms in the West's history, rather, is shown to derive from internal morphogenetic capabilities that lie within the flow of matter--energy itself.

A Swerve Edition.

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CHOICE Review

De Landa advances the philosophical argument that all structures in nature--physical, biological, and social--are the result of specific historical processes. Consequently, history must figure in such accounts, just as time does in physics or evolutionary progress in biology. The author claims that "the move away from energetic equilibrium and linear causality has reinjected the natural sciences with historical concerns. This book is an exploration of the possibilities that might be opened to philosophical reflection by a similar move in the social sciences in general and history in particular," and considers the possibility of writing "nonlinear and nonequilibrium history" by studying three areas of development in the West over roughly a 1000-year period. The author describes Western history as a series of "pidginizations, creolizations, and standardizations in the flow of norms; isolations, contacts, and institutionalizations in the flow of memes; domestications, feralizations, and hybridizations in the flow of genes; and intensifications, accelerations, and decelerations in the flows of energy and materials." This book offers a unique approach to the history of civilization over the past thousand years, although it will confuse and befuddle rather than enlighten all but the most sympathetic and attentive readers. Graduates; faculty. J. W. Dauben; CUNY Herbert H. Lehman College