MAIN IDEA:

This book is about the history of laws, where and why they came from, who and how used these laws, and the direction of their future development. The idea is to understand the necessity of laws for the proper functioning of a complex society and the inseparable link of the laws to the general ideological makeup of the society, including dominant religions and/or quasi-religions such as communism, fascism, and wokeism. Another idea is to provide a comparative analysis of laws and human behavior in major civilizations: European with its Judeo-Christian foundation, Mideastern with its Islamic foundation, Chinese with its semi-secular Confucian and other foundations, and Indian with its Caste-based foundation. In addition, the book also looks at laws created outside of the states by all kinds of groupings of the people who managed to escape the cage of states: from tribes to gangs.     

CONTENT:

MY TAKE ON IT:

This book provides an excellent review of the development of law in various civilizations and the application of these laws in real life. I think that laws are pretty much a tool used by people within a hierarchy of power to assure algorithmically maintained transfer of decisions from the top down with minimal distortion and control over the application of these decisions. The growing complexity of societies led to the slow transformation of laws from easily changeable by top leaders’ set of rules unequally applied to individuals at lower levels of the hierarchy to the independently existing in the minds of the population beliefs about wrong and proper behavior and methods of control over it. Eventually, it led to the emergence of civilizations in which leaders of the state hierarchy were expected to be enforcers of the rules rather than givers. Moreover, it required equal application of rules to everybody, consequently significantly decreasing the arbitrary power of leaders. In short, the algorithmic and non-arbitrary application of laws became imperative.