Fourth age of nations

The only one of the four ages that has not happened, which makes it a proposal rather than a period. It is defined by comparison in two directions at once, and both comparisons are doing work. Against the first age it must be more diverse, more flexible and more mutually supportive, which rules out any reading of the scheme as a call to return to autonomous tribal societies. Against the third age, the supranational empire in which trade has fully abstracted the relationship between oligarchs and the people they exploit, it must be more rewarding and universally beneficial, which rules out accepting the current arrangement and reforming it. Marsh is claiming that the good features of the earliest arrangement and the reach of the present one are compatible, and that nothing available so far has combined them. Nation in all four ages means layered and overlapping societies gathered for community, cooperation and sharing, existing across borders and generations, so a fourth age is not a rearrangement of states. The machinery she proposes elsewhere is what would populate it, since user groups, epistemic communities, concentric circles and stigmergic collaboration are all attempts to supply reach and expertise without producing an oligarchy. The word potential is load-bearing. This is offered as something that could be developed rather than as a prediction, and Marsh gives the argument for it a book of its own in the series.

Proposals for post-state organization are numerous and mostly fall into recognizable families. Anarchist federalism and libertarian municipalism after Murray Bookchin argue for confederated local bodies, cosmopolitan democrats argue for institutions at global scale and network society theorists describe an emerging form without prescribing one. Elinor Ostrom's polycentric governance is the closest empirically grounded parallel. Marsh's version differs in its refusal of the usual trade-off between scale and autonomy, since most proposals accept that reach costs something in self-determination and try to price it. She treats the trade-off as an artefact of endosocial organization rather than a constraint, which is what allows the fourth age to be defined as better than the first and the third simultaneously.