Give away the map

Reading

Every entry here is a lead, not yet a citation — to be verified against the verbatim-source standard before anything from it enters the book. Giving away the map is itself a commons gesture: there's no secret being sold, only an argument being hosted.

The short course

If you read nothing else first — one for each move of the argument.

The Great Transformation — Karl Polanyi, 1944
The wave. Double movement, the dis-embedding of the market, market-as-physics. The book's intellectual ancestor.
Hierarchy in the Forest — Christopher Boehm, 1999
The fall. Reverse dominance hierarchy; equality as active achievement.
The Great Leveler — Walter Scheidel, 2017
The fight you have to win. The thesis that only catastrophe ever levels. Read it to defeat it.

Part I — The Fall

How equality was built and how it broke.

Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior — Christopher Boehm, 1999
The leveling coalition; reverse dominance hierarchy; the active suppression of would-be dominators.
Discourse on Voluntary Servitude — Étienne de La Boétie, c. 1548
The few rule only through the participation of the many; the intermediary pyramid. Short primary source; read it whole.
Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States — James C. Scott, 2017
The early state as a grain-and-labor coercion apparatus; flight and refusal as the norm.
The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity — David Graeber & David Wengrow, 2021
The escapability premise — not a one-way fall but a getting-stuck; humans experimented with many forms.
Capital and Ideology — Thomas Piketty, 2019
“Ideology” as the story that re-describes seizure as the natural order — the engine of Ch 4.
Society Against the State — Pierre Clastres, 1974
Optional / deepening. Societies that actively organized to prevent coercive power from emerging.

Part II — The Wave

Enclosure and recoil across ten thousand years.

The Great Transformation — Karl Polanyi, 1944
The double movement; the foundational frame for the whole of Part II.
…and forgive them their debts — Michael Hudson, 2018
Clean-slate / jubilee decrees as a real, recurring re-leveling technology in the ancient Near East.
Capital in the Twenty-First Century — Thomas Piketty, 2013
The long arc of concentration and the twentieth-century compression — for the clawback and re-enclosure chapters.
The Great Leveler — Walter Scheidel, 2017
The adversary thesis: only catastrophe levels. The spine of Cold Shower II.

Part III — The Chokepoint

The present quarter-turn.

Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity — Daron Acemoglu & Simon Johnson, 2023
Technology never automatically lifts the many; capture decides. The direct comp for Part III.

Part IV — The Reassembly

How the coalition comes back.

Governing the Commons — Elinor Ostrom, 1990
The design principles for commons that endure; the empirical demolition of the tragedy-of-the-commons myth. The engineering spec for Ch 14.
The Logic of Collective Action — Mancur Olson, 1965
Selective incentives; why solidarity alone always gets picked apart by defection.
Why Civil Resistance Works — Erica Chenoweth & Maria J. Stephan, 2011
The threshold-not-parity finding (the “3.5%” pattern). Treat as a robust pattern, never a law; verify the figure and its caveats before it touches the page.
Change: How to Make Big Things Happen — Damon Centola, 2021
Committed-minority tipping points in social convention. Same caution: pattern, not law.