Last Anarchy

For five hundred years, nothing in world politics has ever been finally won.Every bid for universal empire—Charles V, Louis XIV, Napoleon, Hitler—frightened the world into coalition, exhausted the aspirant, and restored the balance of power. Anarchy, the absence of any ruler over rulers, proved survivable, and at moments even the quiet guarantor of liberty, because the system always corrected itself. The board always reassembled. That permanence was the one thing every realist could promise.The Last Anarchy argues that the promise is about to be broken—and that artificial intelligence is the reason.Beneath the noise about chatbots and jobs lies a deeper transformation. The state was never simply a measure of power; it was a technology for producing power, a machine for coordinating millions—and that machine has always had a ceiling, fixed by the limits of human communication and cognition. Compute is the first command technology capable of lifting it. For the first time, a single center could govern the earth as easily as it once governed a province: without conquest, without design, arrived at through a race whose runners cannot stop.The result is a terminus. Power concentrates toward one sovereign and does not flow back; the balance never reassembles; sovereignty liquefies and drains in a single direction. What waits at the end is not the hopeful "e;end of history"e; but its inversion—a universal and homogeneous state, a manufactured peace, the abolition of the plurality that made freedom possible. A frozen world.Ranging from Hobbes and Max Weber to the structural realism of Kenneth Waltz, Kojève's end of history, and Carl Schmitt's sovereign exception, Bongha Lee builds a rigorous and unsettling case: the global contest over artificial intelligence is not a struggle within the world order but a struggle over whether that order will survive at all.For readers of Hal Brands's Geopolitics of AI, Kissinger and Schmidt's Genesis, Yuval Noah Harari's Nexus, and Hedley Bull's The Anarchical Society.The last anarchy is the age we are living in now. This is the account of how it ends.