The Kingdom of France in the Twelfth Century Was Not a Totalitarian Regime

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As human societies grew larger, it was impossible to have large scale democracies. You don't have any example of a large scale democracy until the late eighteenth century or even the nineteenth century. The same technologies can also be used to build totalitarian regimes which were also impossible before the modern age. And that's when we see themerg of these two new political systems.

Yuval Noah Harari is one of the rare historians who can give us a two-million-year perspective on today’s headlines. In this wide-ranging conversation, Yuval explains how technology and democracy have evolved together over the course of human history, from paleolithic tribes to city states to kingdoms to nation states. So where do we go from here? “In almost all the conversations I have,” Yuval says, “we get stuck in dystopia and we never explore the no less problematic questions of what happens when we avoid dystopia.” We push beyond dystopia and consider the nearly unimaginable alternatives in this special episode of Your Undivided Attention.