A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History (Zone Books / Swerve Editions) [Hardcover]

Manuel De Landa (Author)

Book Description

Series: Swerve Editions | Publication Date: November 15, 1997

Following in the wake of "War in the Age of Intelligent Machines", Manuel De Landa presents a synthesis of historical development over the last one thousand years. The work sketches the outlines of a renewed materialist philosophy of history in the tradition of Fernand Braudel, Gilles Deleuze, and Felix Guattari, while also engaging the critical new understanding of material processes derived from the sciences of dynamics. Working against prevailing attitudes that see history as an 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 a study of human societies and their mobile, semistable forms: cities, economies, technologies, and languages. De Landa attacks three domains that have given shape to human societies: economics, biology, and linguistics. In every case, what one sees is 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 free of any deterministic source of its urban, institutional, and technological forms. Rather, the source of all concrete forms in the West's history are shown to derive from internal morphogenetic capabilities that lie within the flow of matter-energy itself.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Forcefully challenges habituated understandings of'history., 'urban' and 'economics'." Christopher Hight, AA Files

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

About the Author

Manuel De Landa is the author of War in the Age of Intelligent Machines.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: Zone Books; 1St Edition edition (November 15, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0942299310
• ISBN-13: 978-0942299311
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (17 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,013,802 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

44 of 44 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Prolegomena to any futurist sociophysics, January 1, 2008

By 

The Dilettante "Dilly!" - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History (Paperback)

De Landa is deliciously weird sort of scholar: an autodidact, a committed generalist, a erudite synthesizer, and...oddly enough...an ideologue. The axe he has brought to grind here is a rigorous materialism, and he uses it to hack telos out at the root. He seeks to collapse the distinction between "natural" history and "human" history, and the result is a "history" that is almost unrecognizable as such.

He asks us to imagine the last thousand years as a seething storm of material processes. The "great men," the "human events," the wars and values and struggle are all completely absent. To the extent humans interest De Landa at all, they appear here as crowds, organizations, markets, capital and labor.

Instead, De Landa gives us a plausible (if sketchy and somewhat speculative) account of the thermodynamic, geological, chemical, and biological processes of the past 1000 years. But the genius of this book is that it is not merely the history of rocks, chemicals, and plants. Instead, De Landa has boldly abstracted the logical processes underlying the natural sciences into what he calls "engineering diagrams." He applies these diagrams to the world we know, teaching us to see city walls as sea-shell-like "accretions", society as a stratified riverbed, economies as highly complex chemical reactions, and nations as parasitic superorganisms. Above all, he helps us to see "progress" as a perspectival illusion, resulting from human-centric narrative bias. Again and again, he demonstrates that the "triumphs" of the Western world were spontaneous physical processes; reactions between elements like "biomass" "carbon" "steel" "money" "genes" "population" and "germs." These reactions become interactions, feedback takes hold and wildly complex and diverse forms emerge. These forms bifurcate, find relatively stable states and then, inevitably, collapse again. And Delanda insists that he is NOT speaking in metaphors - the same "diagrams" that lay riverbeds also build empires.

De Landa's method is problematic, controversial, and likely to turn some readers off. Since his ideas are vague, abstract, and probably untestable, many will call them unscientific. But the book is a sketch, a manifesto, a prologomenon to a new way of looking at the world. And, as such, it is extremely thought-provoking. One does not have to agree with De Landa's neo-Marxism to be stimulated when he argues that there is no "clash of civilizations," that there will never be an "end of history," and that the fundamental factor which distinguished the "West" from the "Rest" is not religion or technology but...um..."autocatalysis."

Ultimately, this is a very fun and eccletic little read that is likely to tweak your perspective more than a bit. Hayekians, especially, will be intrigued (though perhaps not persuaded) by his discussion of "anti-markets" and the VIRTUES (!) of top-down decisionmaking.

As a final note, some prior familiarity with Ilya Prigogine's work is very helpful for full enjoyment of this book. De Landa relies heavily on Prigogine's thermodynamics (the concepts, not the math), and he does a fairly poor job of introducing them. As a layperson, I found Schneider and Sagan's Into the Cool: Energy Flow, Thermodynamics, and Life a very helpful introduction.

60 of 65 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars T.S. Kuhn would have been pleased., October 29, 2001

By 

Luis Reyes - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History (Paperback)

Application of non-linearity to problems in the Natural (hard) Sciences is not a new concept, and it has long been known that the omission of these terms is what prevents most models from aquiring the complexity we see in real life. De Landa chronicles the development in this area as applied to Biology, a couple of branches in Physics and the Social Sciences, and links all his subjects in such an extraordinary way that the book is itself a meshwork, in the purest sense of Deleuze and Guattari. The historical tidbits are themselves amusing and informative, and thus make the reading quite enjoyable. This is just as well an exposition of the history of nonlinearity as it is a presentation of nonlinearity as culmination of any and all ongoing natural processes.
The book's greatest strength is the presentation of unusual concepts in a strangely clear and persuasive way. In fact, if you have picked Deleuze and Guattari's books and have discarded them as pseudophilosophical bull, as I once erroneuosly did, give them a go again after De Landa; you will be surprised.
Read it, and one day you may brag that you were well aware of the conceptual revolution that shook Science as a whole as the 21st Century began, well before it was fully on its way.

28 of 30 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A really good book....., October 25, 2000

By 

J. Michael Showalter (Nashville, TN United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History (Zone Books / Swerve Editions) (Hardcover)

De Landa's take on history is that it is a product of complexity and self-organization much more than we are prone to believe; in this book, he expands on and explodes from those of his (also) brilliant "War in the Age of Intelligent Machines".

The traditional metaphors for human progress that have been coopted from other sciences-- economics, geology, and engineering-- and do not adequately portray what exactly man hath wrought. In this book, De Landa works through history three seperate times and discusses-- through the use of terms like 'bifucation' and 'singularities' how he believes it did progress....

I really like this book: I think that it is definately a text whose time has come..... BUT.... having read both this and 'War...' I want to warn readers of their one failing-- the author-- because of his broad sweep-- seems to occasionally make errors in the myriad of references that he makes (the book is meticulously footnoted, to its credit). Though this is largely an editor's problem, it is bad.... something that someone who is going at things fast-and-furious and from a broad sweep is likely to have happen....

It doesn't blight the whole. This is a must read.... though fans of traditional disciplines might not find a whole lot to like about with it (and might find a lot more along the lines of my above point....)