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As soon as we decided to cover a handful of quietly influential books from the 1990’s, many of you predicted that we would be discussing The Sovereign Individual. Just as many hedge funders and other financial services professionals look to The Fourth Turning for frameworks and predictive value, The Sovereign Individual has been cited by influential figures in the technology industry and is on every recommended reading list for understanding Web 3.0. Peter Thiel’s introduction to the latest edition is instructive and worth a read. Many of the book’s predictions – such as those about economic inequality, the erosion of state sovereignty, and the potential implications of a pandemic in an interconnected world – have been proven true and reinforced many readers’ buy-in to the underlying theory.
Mogg & Davidson were not the likeliest couple to write a definitive book on the transition from industrial to information-based societies. We’ll leave aside the opportunity for conspiracy theorizing at this moment. Instead, we’ll just note that Davidson was an investment advisor and Mogg was an intellectual heavyweight journalist / newspaper editor who would have a popular Substack if he was still alive. His son, Jacob Rees-Mogg, is one of the most prominent politicians in the UK today.
The Sovereign Individual is the last in a series of books in which Mogg & Davidson sought to develop a materialist theory of history with explanatory value for the evolution of human society. They believed they had amalgamated the relevant theories and facts to explain transitions such as that from nomadic hunter-gathering to agriculture, from the economic structure of the Roman Empire to that of feudalism, from chivalric feudalism to the industrial nation-state, and finally the ongoing transition into an Information Age. Just as the merchant and the industrialist usurped the power of the knight and the bishop in recent centuries, Mogg & Davidson predicted that the nation-state’s power had peaked and had already started to atrophy. In its place would arise a greater proliferation of jurisdictions centered around the reign of the Sovereign Individual:
“In some respects, high-speed computation has already made it possible to mimic the magic of the genie. Early generations of "digital servants" already obey the commands of those who control the computers in which they are sealed much as genies were sealed in magic lamps. The virtual reality of information technology will widen the realm of human wishes to make almost anything that can be imagined seem real. Telepresence will give living individuals the same capacity to span distance at supernatural speed and monitor events from afar that the Greeks supposed was enjoyed by Hermes and Apollo. The Sovereign Individuals of the Information Age, like the gods of ancient and primitive myths, will in due course enjoy a kind of "diplomatic immunity" from most of the political woes that have beset mortal human beings in most times and places.
The new Sovereign Individual will operate like the gods of myth in the same physical environment as the ordinary, subject citizen, but in a separate realm politically.
Commanding vastly greater resources and beyond the reach of many forms of compulsion, the Sovereign Individual will redesign governments and reconfigure economies in the new millennium. The full implications of this change are all but unimaginable.”
The book is a long, enjoyable read. For a summary, we direct readers of Citizen Scholar to Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin’s thoughts on it (below).
For an even more detailed set of thoughtful notes, we recommend friend of Citizen Scholar Mike Aniello’s reflections. Aniello distills the driving forces behind Mogg & Davidson’s analysis well as follows:
“Megapolitics — the influence of structural factors (topography, climate, microbes, and technology) on human incentives & the resulting rise and fall of governments, economies, cultures, and violence
Logic of Violence — the rationale for violence according to a given set of megapolitical factors
Returns on Violence — the resources gained from violence according to a given set of megapolitical factors”
Just like Aniello, we at Citizen Scholar are interested observers of the book but not fully bought in to the analysis. The authors are committed to a materialist analysis, and we tend to emphasize that many incentives which drive people are either spiritual and immaterial or based on non-rational, intuitive action that imperfectly corresponds to predictions based on a rational actor hypothesis.
We also take issue with some things presented as facts in the book, such as the idea that piety was as completely detached from practiced morality in the Middle Ages to the extent suggested in The Sovereign Individual. However, we do find value in the analysis about the transition we are currently living through. We’re especially worried about coercive power of nation states. The book predicts that governments could lash out more as institutions suited to old arrangements struggle to get control over the means of wealth production presented by the Information Age. We’re not as confident as the authors are that the people with militaries will fail, and we fear the suffering and instability that could result as they attempt to do so. We do see this process playing out as the US Government seeks to get greater visibility and taxation ability over international Web 3.0 businesses which are supposed to be censorship-proof and supportive of human liberty. We’ll continue to monitor this process and are eager to get your thoughts on how this might play out.
All the best,
The Citizen Scholar Team
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Discussion #33: The Sovereign Individual: Mastering the Transition to the Information Age, by James Dale Davidson and Lord William Rees-Mogg