"Human history is largely a record of failure. Economic strife, inflation, military overstretch, foreign warfare, domestic unrest, famine, and disease have always conspired against us and usually defeated us. More often than not, we have to struggle through hard times, enduring a substantial reduction in living standards and state capacity, or the total collapse of institutions. At the end of the twentieth century, people scoffed at such ideas. In the 1990s, nothing seemed quite so absurd as collapse —unless, of course, you were living in China, where collapse was widely feared, or in Russia, Rwanda, and the former Yugoslavia where it actually happened. Yet, even so, the threat of world war and nuclear annihilation suddenly seemed remote after the end of the Cold War, and advanced thinkers announced a new era of steady progress everywhere. The less less-terrifying prospect of decline seemed simply implausible. The purpose of this book is threefold: to explain what makes civilization what it is,; to show what we are in danger of losing in the event of collapse, and to point the way toward renewal."-- Provided by publisher.