It seems to me the only pertinent question is: cui bono? It is clear that the size of the privileged strata as a percentage of the whole has grown significantly under historical capitalism. And for these people, the world they know is better on the whole than any their earlier counterparts knew.

I am suggesting that there is, and always has been, a rather high correlation between ethnicity and occupation/economic role throughout the various time-space zones of historical capitalism.

The language of intrinsic human rights represented a significant advance beyond the previous language of world religions in terms of its universal applicability and its thiswordliness.

It was the French Revolution that served as the catalyst of this renovation. Its impact was to make the concept of popular sovereignty the new moral justification for the political system of historical capitalism.

The second reason why we haven't observed the growing gap is that our historical and social science analyses have concentrated on what has been happening within the 'middle classes' - that is, to that ten to fifteen percent of the population of the world-economy who consumed more surplus than they themselves produced. Within this sector there really has been a relatively dramatic flattening of the curve between the very top (less than one percent of the total population) and the truly 'middle' segments, or cadres (the rest of the ten to fifteen percent).

The concept that one ought to restrict one's political involvement to one's own state was deeply antithetical to those who were pursuing the accumulation of capital for its own sake.

It seems to me the only pertinent question is: cui bono? It is clear that the size of the privileged strata as a percentage of the whole has grown significantly under historical capitalism. And for these people, the world they know is better on the whole than any their earlier counterparts knew.