Customer Reviews

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

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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.

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.

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....)

While reading this I couldn't help but wonder about the advantages to reformatting high school ciriculum with more attention paid to the nonlinear nature of things as presented in here. Forget dates and names and specific places - these things are forgotten anyway - De Landa is all about concepts and reasons why. From urban landscapes as human exoskeletons to the corporate drive to control our very genes this historical account is really an intense examination of the progress of matter-energy over the last one-thousand years as the term progress itself becomes questioned along with a great many other things. I recommend this book to those who have ever asked why - and those who never have. So get your hands on it, read it, read it again, and pass it along. There's not a disappointing page between its covers.

Some people read books the way they settle into a favorite armchair--to feel comfortable in a familiar setting or genre. Others read to have the all-too-familiar worldview with which they've grown bored cracked open like a walnut so they can eat a form of intellectual meat they've never before imagined. For the folks who are continually discontented with old ideas and who feed with manic delight on new ones, De Landa's book is a must. Once you've read the first hundred pages, you'll find yourself living in a new geopolitical and historical world. one whose inner workings you now see through a pair of x-ray goggles.

This book is extraordinary. I recently took a class with Manuel DeLanda in which he explored the themes of this and his other book "War In the Age of Intelligent Machines." His concept of non-linear history is beautiful, a fusion of academic disciplines that have forever been blockaded from such a delicate and well thought out junction. DeLanda uses geology, gunpowder, and farm animals to explain that human histories of power have everything to do with chaotic patterns. He makes everything easy to understand. His book has recreated the world for me.

I really liked this book for several reasons. First of all, it is extremely well written and relatively easy to understand when considering the content involved. For example, DeLanda gives interpretations of Deleuze and Guatarri's work that, at least for me, greatly aided in clarifying "A Thousand Plateaus". Even though i was previously familiar with D & G, who DeLanda draws from extensively, i had never before read, for example, Prigogine or Braudel. However, unlike many authors who demand that one has extensive background knowledge of the writers discussed, DeLanda takes the time to give meaningful and understandable interpretations of these writers such that one previously unfamiliar can gain a suitable understanding. Furthermore, DeLanda provides extensive examples of his philosophy "in action" in history, such as the "double articulation" machine that he borrows from D & G. Yet again, unlike D & G, who provide vague and jagged examples of their philosophy, DeLanda goes deep into each example, explaining it in detail rather than assuming knowledge on the part of the reader. In fact, much of the "philosophical" content of "A Thousand Years..." is borrowed. However, even so, DeLanda APPLIES this philosophy masterfully and in a unique and suitably complex manner. This is a book that i would reccomend to persons in all fields of study and employment, as it explores many of problems in our current system and aids in understanding what otherwise might be taken for granted.

This is a fascinating odyssey through the compelling concept of nonlinear theory. In using detailed examples De Landa performs amazing explications as to the relationship between nonlinear theory and various historical processes. His suggestion to "destratify" and "experiment" with reality are exciting views in contrast to the rampant homogeneity propagated through the seams of our society. A truly envigorating book that with patience and thought can radically reconfigure your outlook on history and any other entity that may need a tweak of nonlinearity.

My edition was published by Zone Books which seems to believe that games with layout and fonts are fun. They start their chapters with something like 18pt and then shrink it with each turning page until things get normal again. It's cute on chapters 1 and 2. Less so by chapter 5. And by the time chapter 9 on Linguistic History is rolling around, downright annoying. I wanted to rip out all the 18pt pages and shove them so far up the large intestine of the layout designer that he or she would have their fill of fiber for two months. But then I'd have to kick myself for damaging this amazing book.

Human history is a symphony and De Landa chooses to play 3 difficult instruments: biology, economics and linguistics. He flows from one logical illustration to the next without ever failing to footnote. The aforementioned final chapter of this book on linguistics was one of the most profound and insightful essays that I have ever read.

This is a hard book. It kept me up late and made my lunch breaks run long. If you read just one general history book, read Plagues and Peoples. If you read two, read this as well. If you don't read any history books then go play a video game or something.

WELL, this guy is just as intertaining in his lectures as he is in his book. While the class is billed as a graduate architecture history course, it really is more like a philosophy class. His points are well contrived and straight foward, but I haven't quite swallowed the hook whole yet.

The book itself however is quite good. All one needs is an open and receptive mind that is able to free itself from any preconceived notions and generalities that we often catagorize life into. i.e. "The Market" "Captialism" "The People"-words we use for a non-specific ambiguious thoughts