Writing soon after Darwin, the editor of The Economist asks how nations form and progress. He argues that early societies needed a hard ‘cake of custom’ and the discipline of conflict to survive, and that the great step forward came with government by discussion, which loosened custom and let new ideas win. His remarks on races and ‘savages’ are those of 1872.
A classic of Victorian political thought and an early attempt to bring evolution into social science. Download the free EPUB.