*The Invention of Power*

The author is Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, and the subtitle is Popes, Kings, and the Birth of the West.  Here is the main thesis:

Why Europe became distinct after the year 1000 and not before can be reduced to this surprisingly simple reason: in Europe, the head of religion and the head(s) of state were different people who faced off against one another in long-standing, long-lasting, intense competition for political control.  Certainly, the rulers of China and Japan were thought to be gods.

I consider this broadly consistent with my own views, although I see many other significant factors in the broader history, including natural geography and political fragmentation.  Nor can you dismiss the role of imperialism entirely, plus that the growth of the West came “at the right time” (for the West at least).  I like this book, but I don’t think it quite has the knockdown proof of its thesis that it pretends to.  And the book is oddly silent about Christianity as a general phenomenon.  There is talk of popes and churches on almost every page, and yet Christianity as an intellectual innovation, helping to make liberalism more likely, does not play much of a role in the narrative.  And given how general and deeply rooted some of the mechanisms are, I don’t quite understand why so much stress is placed on the 1122 Concordat of Worms — surely that is endogenous too?  It is an odd philosophy of history in which so much hinges on a single event and then for almost a thousand years the rest that follows is locked in.