"This is a successor work to Why the West Rules for Now, in which Morris once again advances an ambitious account of how certain 'brute material forces' limit and help determine the 'culture, values, and beliefs,' including the moral codes, that humans have adopted over the last 20,000 years....

This book expounds the idea of a disenchanted world composed of nation states and global functional systems. The nation state is losing some of its regulatory prerogatives and, at the same time, extending its legitimacy base in 'chains of legitimacy' to transnational institutions. There is...