The chapter begins the look ahead that is framed in terms of ’deep pluralism’. It surveys the material conditions likely to shape the future, seeing a lot of continuity in the general availablility of a cornucopia of materials and energy, but transformational potentials in digital technology, biotechnology and the falling cost of access to space.

The chapter sets out the ’big picture’ approach of the book; its concepts, terms and definitions, and the aims and structure of the book.

A striking number of accounts stress the continuity between the foreign policy of Wilhelmine and Nazi Germany. Hitler was simply a more virulent nationalist and militarist, so some sort of revisionist expansion was inevitable in German foreign policy. The Nazis, however, were a fundamentally different type of right-wing force. Hitler dismissed the very existence of humanitarian ethics as a mere social construction and illusion, refusing even the typical scorn more traditional German nationalists expressed vis-à-vis its wartime adversaries. Hitler’s regime explicitly redefined the national community not as a cultural and linguistic entity but as a biological one. Rather than a continuation of previous tendencies in German nationalism, it was a decisive moral break and led to a wholly different basis for, and type of, international aggression. Hitler dismissed the ambitions of Weimar nationalists of the Wilhelmine variety, whose only interest was to rail against the injustices of the Versailles Treaty and demand the return of lost German lands that were rightly hers. For Hitler, no one had any right to any piece of territory; one simply took it. As a consequence, he defined fundamentally different foreign policy goals than his contemporaries and predecessors: the creation of Lebensraum to provide for Hitler’s growing population.

The chapter continues the look into the near future by surveying the whole range of social institutions in play. It discusses the robustness of the institutions that define and legitimise the state; the ongoing strength of religion in the face of challenges from science and secular ideologies; the fluctuating fortunes of the market in relation to economic nationalism; the rather partial victory of human equality over inequality; and the rising importance within the social structure of humankind of environmental stewardship in relation to other institutions.

This chapter states the purpose of the book and its main argument. How can a world order that aspires to be consensual be managed and enforced? The book offers a systematic exploration of the mechanisms through which the United States was able to sustain a consensual world order. As the hegemon and enforcer of its world order, the United States acted like a “sheriff.” But whenever and wherever the United States relied upon the political ambitions of potential successors to favor leadership turnover, it was able to fulfill its preferences and to achieve better governance and greater respect of human rights. That made the United States a shrewd sheriff. In contrast, whenever and wherever the United States relied upon established dictators poised to rule for life or democratic presidents with no viable competitors, it turned into a bad cop that would either countenance bad governance and human rights abuses or would resort to coercion and coups to achieve its political goals.

A comparison of the behavior of the German army in World War I and World War II in occupied Eastern Europe shows the human cost of the difference between Wilhelmine and Nazi nationalism. Hitler aimed not at the paternalistic civilizing of conquered peoples but rather the elimination, evacuation, and instrumentalization of non-Aryan populations. Yet the fact that Hitler is the exemplar of this kind of instrumental violence indicates the rarity of behavior thought to be so common in international relations models. This has great normative implications. As much as moral philosophy seeks to maintain a separation between the way the world is and the way that it should be, all normative arguments rest on (even if only implicitly) empirical claims about what is possible. We know by the empirical rarity of those who think like Hitler that he was mistaken about the amoral nature of man, and therefore that normative theorizing still has a place. Once we understood where Hitler’s crude struggle-based biological determinism went wrong, by failing to recognize what is uniquely about humans among other animals – their morality – biology buttresses rather than undermines liberal ethics. Morality is more than a social construction.

The chapter sums up the discussion in the previous three chapters, addressing the question of where we are now in the transition process between CAPE and modernity. Was the transition short, as the material side of the story might suggest, or longer, as the social side of the story suggests? Are we now in modernity proper, or are we still in the transition? The chapter proceeds by looking for significant clusters of events, both material and social, that can give guidance as to how these questions might be answered. It argues that the unfolding contradiction between unrestrained development and the limits of planetary carrying capacity is emerging as the key dialectic for the future of humankind.