Stone Age Mindset

Luke Kemp’s ‘Goliath’s Curse: The History and Future of Societal Collapse’ diagnoses civilizational symptoms while sidestepping serious solutions.

By Aaron LabareeJanuary 2, 2026

• History

• Politics

GOLIATH’S CURSE: The History and Future of Societal Collapse by Australian environmental policy researcher Luke Kemp combines two genres of the Big, Serious Book: the History-of-Everything Book and the Doom Book. In what he styles “a people’s history of collapse,” Kemp describes how, historically, collapse was not an isolated event but the inevitable result of unequal and exploitative societies. He goes on to explain how this applies to our own society and suggests a way out. Kemp’s two-books-in-one sit a little uncomfortably together, and neither is ultimately very persuasive.

First, the history of everything. Kemp tells the story of civilization through the history of collapse, starting with the disappearance of the Neanderthals and proceeding to the fall of the Roman, East Asian, and pre-Columbian empires and the destruction of various societies under colonialism. All these would seem to be very different stories and much more history than could fit into a single book, but in Kemp’s view, it’s really the same story. All these societies, he argues (except for the Neanderthals), were essentially the same. They were examples of what he calls “Goliath”—“a collection of hierarchies in which some individuals dominate others to control energy and labour”—and they all collapsed because of the weaknesses inherent to such states.

These weaknesses included inequality, extractive institutions, and oligarchical rule, all of which made these states vulnerable when they were hit by shocks like droughts or invaders. Basically, they were badly governed because they existed for the benefit of elites at the expense of the population. The particular collapses happened in different ways in different places. For the Mayapan city-state in Central America, drought led to bloody infighting among different groups of ruling elites. In Rome, worsening inequality and corruption created a fiscal crisis that eventually led the empire to lose control of its armies. European states were able to avoid (or put off) collapse by inflicting it on their colonies as they extracted resources.

In the case of colonialism, millions of people around the world were killed or immiserated by conquest. But collapse wasn’t always a bad deal. Kemp provides evidence that, in many cases, collapse actually improved the lives of most people. Skeletons from the period after the fall of Rome are, on average, taller than those of people living during the empire and have fewer dental caries and bone lesions, indicating that general health and nutrition improved. The same is true for the Late Bronze Age collapse. Although cities burned when empires and city-states crumbled, Kemp argues that most of the population didn’t die but just left for the countryside to farm and forage. For ordinary people, the fall of a great empire meant relief from taxation and state repression. Eventually, however, another state would rise, and the boom-and-bust cycle would start again.

There was a time, according to Kemp, before human society was caught in this cycle. This was the Paleolithic, when nomadic bands’ small size, mobility, and egalitarianism made them resilient. “In the Palaeolithic,” he writes, “our hunter-gatherer ancestors relied on trade, hospitality, reciprocity, and mutual aid to cooperate, maintain the peace, and survive the ice age. They were practising what we usually think of as ‘civilized conduct’: restraint, political wisdom, and cooperation without coercion.”

Kemp’s counterintuitive ideas about how, historically, collapse actually improved many people’s lives are well argued and may be surprising to many readers. His history of the world will probably not be. It’s the story of our fall from Paleolithic grace, from egalitarian nomadic bands to sedentary living, hoarded grain, hierarchical society, male domination, and war, right up to our current ecological breakdown. This story will be familiar to readers of other big-picture history books, such as Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (1997) and David Graeber and David Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (2021)—and there’s some truth to it. In the past generation or two, much scholarly work has challenged the old cliché of a historical march from barbarism to civilization. Most anthropologists and archaeologists might not go so far as to say, as Kemp does, that our Paleolithic ancestors were “well-travelled, well-connected socialites who usually lived in vast societies,” but there’s plenty of evidence to suggest that Paleolithic life was cooperative, egalitarian, and relatively free from war.

Kemp has synthesized an impressive amount of recent research in archaeology, anthropology, and other fields. Scholars will certainly debate many of his points, but broadly speaking, he defends his argument well. The problem, though, is that—since, in Kemp’s own description, the fatal qualities of “Goliaths” are shared by every large society that has ever existed—it’s unclear how useful it is to identify these structural flaws. One assumes that all states are somewhat oppressive and unstable, and the important thing is to understand why some are more so and some less. But for Kemp, these differences are not very important; the one that matters is between Paleolithic hunter-gatherers (or modern cultures that resemble them, like the Khoisan) and Goliaths.

Fittingly enough, then, Kemp’s history of civilization is a history of barbarism. Where others might be dazzled by Mycenaean treasures, to Kemp this society was “an unsustainable system of competing palaces extracting wealth from the lands and people around them.” Likewise, the Incan Empire was “an ethnic pyramid scheme,” Rome was “the largest slave system ever to have existed,” and the ancient Mesopotamian states were “rackets.”

All true enough, I guess. But if the only other option is to live in the Ice Age, this is an empty exercise. It doesn’t help that all these zingers about “rackets” have such a sound-bite feel to them. Kemp writes as though he invented the idea of critiquing power. But revealing the operations of power behind cultural productions and professed ideals is a common practice of academia. Kemp practices a crude, TED Talk version of it. His critiques of the conventions of history are themselves conventional and simplistic. Quoting the historian and archaeologist Ian Morris, Kemp defines ideology as “a pack of lies that benefits someone.” “Most ideologies,” he writes,

are ideologies of domination: they benefit those atop a hierarchy. Whether it’s the Hobbesian story, the caste system, racism to justify slavery, kings representing gods, or the myth that progress rests on the indispensable genius of a few billionaires, every society has stories to justify their inequalities.

After several hundred pages, this kind of glib radicalism becomes tedious. I admit to being so exhausted by the repetitive and oversimplified quality of Kemp’s historical account that I found myself counting the pages until we could reach the section that dealt with our likely doom.

The second portion of the book, however, offers even fewer new ideas than the first. The problem is that the most interesting argument Kemp has to make—that, historically, societal collapse actually benefited the majority of people—doesn’t apply to our society. The collapse of today’s “Global Goliath” would be a disaster even for the poorest. As Kemp points out, since our modern states provide so many more benefits than, say, Akkad or Sumer, the suffering caused by their collapse would be much greater. What we’re left with is a familiar litany of dire statistics about the state of the world, along with a list of catastrophic risks. There’s nuclear war (not really so unlikely), AI (not just a risk in itself but also a risk intensifier, like climate change), and climate change (even worse than you thought, since Kemp holds that the higher-end levels of warming are more likely than is commonly believed). All these risks are well summarized and terrifying. But they’re nothing new, and it’s unclear what Kemp’s theory of Goliaths adds to our understanding of the present’s crises.

Kemp’s analysis is essentially that the problems we are facing spring from faults shared by every large society since the end of the last ice age. Where does this leave us? Doomed, you would think. Kemp claims not. “Most of the challenges we face are entirely solvable,” he writes. Unfortunately, he has no solutions. No real ones, at least. To “slay Goliath,” Kemp writes, “we should democratize the world, level power, reduce Goliath fuel, reduce existential risk, and see what world blossoms from this new civilization.” Easy-peasy. More specifically, he recommends that we levy a massive tax on carbon to combat climate change, curb the power of AI companies by taxing their supply chain, and introduce sortition (direct democracy) in place of our semi-representative current form. In other words, a program for radically reconfiguring society along egalitarian lines, which he sketches out in five pages—and for which progressives and radicals alike have been arguing for centuries.

Strikingly, although Kemp styles his book “a people’s history of collapse,” he has almost nothing to say about the history of collective struggle, revolution, and resistance to state power. The word “socialism” does not appear in Goliath’s Curse. This is a glaring oversight. What was Marx’s “withering away of the state” but his version of “slaying Goliath”? And Marx’s communist idyll, in which people work a few hours a day and have the rest for leisure, resembles Kemp’s (plausible) vision of the Paleolithic lifestyle to which we could aspire. It’s understandable if Kemp doesn’t want to try and reinvent Marxism or explain how contemporary left-wing movements, divided and on the defensive, can save the world. But he offers nothing in their place. No philosophy, no ideology, no vision that appeared to him in a dream. “[J]oin an activist group,” he urges, “advocate for workplace democracy, and discuss political matters in a productive way—whether it be nuclear weapons or mass surveillance or climate collapse—with friends and family members.”

Kemp’s suggestions, ultimately, are not serious. And there’s something a little unserious about this whole book. Calling civilization “Goliath” is not much more than a gimmick—and one that erases much of the complexity of history in favor of a simplified Big, Serious Book narrative. It’s a shame, because Kemp has done his research: indeed, his thoughtful and well-argued comments in the 99 pages of endnotes make better reading than the book itself. A book that took the time to tell the stories of a few such collapses in depth would have been valuable. As it is, Kemp’s wealth of material is used to support an argument that could have been made in a magazine article.

What’s also frustrating is that the points Kemp makes about Paleolithic life could be a spur to the imagination if he developed them. He says flat-out that we’ve never had a civilization worthy of the name since the Old Stone Age, but he doesn’t pursue this argument. He should: it’s compelling. Bruce Chatwin wrote a very good book about exactly this. Part travelogue, part novel, part fantasy anthropology, The Songlines (1987) describes premodern nomadic life in poetic terms and suggests that we should return to it. “Renunciation,” Chatwin writes, “even at this late date, can work. […] The world, if it has a future, has an ascetic future.”

We have to go back—like, all the way back. Not exactly practical either. But this eccentric spiritual-aesthetic ideal might inspire someone. Goliath’s Curse, its sparks of interest smothered by the weight of being a Big, Serious Book, is unlikely to.