Anglo-America and Continental-Europe. 1200 Yeras of History, eBook + Audiobook

When something new appears in Europe, a technology, a risk, a crisis, the first question is: Who regulates this? In America it is: Who builds this? This is no passing mood but a reflex with twelve centuries of history behind it, so deeply worn in that almost no one notices it anymore.

This Book sets both poles side by side: the *order from below*, which grows out of custom, property and voluntary association, and the *command from above*, which raises the state to the highest form of reason itself. The path runs from the Anglo-Saxon beginnings and the half-legendary figure of Hengist through Magna Carta, the Reformation and the printing press to David Hume and the Scottish Enlightenment, to John Locke, and finally to Pennsylvania: to William Penn’s “holy experiment,” to Conrad Weiser and the Muhlenbergs, the German hands behind the American founding, and to the year 1776. And again and again back to the present, to Brussels and Silicon Valley and the question of why these old choices still shape us today.

The telling comes without a wagging finger. No “better or worse,” no indictment, but the open ledger: both traditions with their achievements and with their price. From the command from above came the rule of law, the research university and social insurance; from the order from below came personal freedom, but also the taking of the land. What weighs more in the end, the reader decides.