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.

What could me more plausible than a line of reasoning which argues that the explanation of the origin of a system was to achieve an end that has in fact been achieved?

On the one hand, there has been a remarkable expansion of the total production and productivity of food production, and on the other hand an extraordinarily skewed distribution system, substituting medium-run threats for short-term threats for the majority of the world's population, particularly the 50 to 80 percent at the bottom.

The real threat to U.S. military power is nuclear proliferation, because if every little country has nuclear weapons it becomes very tricky for the United States to engage in military action.

The world system is coming to the structural crisis

The first and probably most fundamental aspect of this crisis is that we are now close to the commodification of everything. That is, historical capitalism is in crisis precisely because, in pursuing the endless accumulation of capital, it is beginning to approximate that state of being Adam Smith asserted was 'natural' to man but which has never historically existed. The 'propensity [of humanity] to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another' has entered into domains and zones previously untouched, and the pressure to expand commodification is relatively unchecked.

Governments first of all have been able to amass, through the taxation process, large sums of capital which they have redistributed to persons or groups, already large holders of capital, through official subsidies.