A new intellectual revolution is in progress, one which is transcending the assumptions which have underlain the politics and social theory of the late modern era. In history, psychology, philosophy, and economics, the simplistic picture of human nature and society we have inherited from previous decades (but which stretches back to Rousseau, via Marx and Freud) is being replaced by an understanding of the true richness and complexity of these matters.

In history, the works of scholars such as William McNeill, Nathan Rosenberg and L.E. Birdzell, and more recently, David Landes, have been placing the history of the rise of Western societies and the Industrial Revolution on a new footing. Rousseau claimed that "man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains"; the new understanding of history sees that poverty, tyranny, and narrow clannishness and mistrust have been the general order of things throughout history. Out of this environment, a few societies slowly were able to create a new form of organisation, one able to create and distribute wealth of a nature and on a scale unimaginable in previous eras. This has in turn focused attention on the emergence of this form, "civil society". In such societies, their members know how to (and are free to) organise themselves into voluntary organisations which form a vast, complex network which carries out the bulk of society's activities. In other societies, people are subjects to be commanded by state or theocracies, and in such societies, innovation is rare and unrewarded. The West's rise is now understood as the result of the fortunate division of power between state and church institutions in the late Middle Ages, which, for the first time in history, created enough space for independent action by individuals to permit the mentality of civil society first to arise. (Classical Greece came close, but never adequately separated state, religion, and society - a fault exhibited in the trial of Socrates). The experience of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet states since the fall of the Berlin Wall has driven home the fact that market-economy formulas cannot be merely dropped in to societies like airlifted famine rations. In those countries where civil-society institutions existed once, they are blooming again; where they had been weak or non-existent, those societies have remained mired in poverty and corruption.

Within that understanding, attention is now focusing on the particular role of English-speaking societies in creating the strongest, freest and therefore most advanced of civil societies in early modern Europe. The role of Britain as the cradle of both the Industrial Revolution and parliamentary democracy is no longer understood as a fluke of history - it is rather understood as the logical consequence of the strong institutions of British civil society built over the prior two centuries. Most Western European societies had medieval parliaments and chartered companies of merchants. Why did England's Parliament rise to challenge the power of the Crown (decapitating as necessary) while its continental counterparts shrivelled into impotence? Why did English corporations transform themselves into flexible instruments for raising private capital and investing it in progressive enterprises, while their Continental counterparts remained instruments for collection of state-guaranteed monopoly rents? The answer is to be found in the strength and independence of English civil society.

Similarly, America is no longer properly seen as a new nation that sprang, like Athena fully-formed from the head of Zeus, into the world in 1776. Rather, a new appreciation is emerging of how deeply rooted most things American are in this particularly British (and primarily English) development of civil society. This appreciation began perhaps with David Hackett Fischer's Albion's Seed, which demonstrated the deepness of British cultural roots in American development, and particularly the importance of understanding the different regional cultural, linguistic, and religious traditions of the British Isles and their enduring role in establishing American regional cultures.

Kevin Phillips' new work The Cousins' Wars: Religion, Politics, and The Triumph of Anglo-America is a major, important, original, and valuable contribution to this understanding. Mr Phillips first rose to the attention of Americans when he published The Emerging Republican Majority in 1969. That book demonstrated a masterful understanding of the complexities of American society, and an astute grasp of why Americans vote as they do when they do. It successfully predicted the coming era of Republican presidential dominance which lasted from 1969 to 1992. That book drew anguished objections from old liberals and New Leftists alike; the first believing that a few more social programs could keep the Roosevelt coalition together forever, and the latter believing in the inevitability of a leftist surge, whether based on proletarian, racial, or "consciousness" politics. Phillip was right; they were wrong.

Mr Phillips' new work draws of many of the same strengths as The Emerging Republican Majority; in particular, it shares the same willingness to dig into the fine detail of ethnic, regional, religious-sectarian, and economic complexity which underlies British and American society. This fine-grained understanding of complexity is combined with the willingness to stand back and see the patterns uncovered by such research, and the courage to draw the larger conclusions thus revealed.

Specifically, The Cousins' Wars answers a particular question: if American society is deeply rooted in its British antecedents, then should not the major events of American society reflect patterns foreshadowed by the major events of British history? If, as should be obvious by now, the answer is yes, then what are those patterns, and how do they help us understand about America's history, and that of the Britain from which its institutions are drawn?

Mr Phillips had intended to write a book about the Battle of Saratoga in the Revolutionary War. The more deeply he dug in the course of his research, the more he understood that the Revolutionary War could not be understood merely on nationalist terms; ie, as one nation's war for independence from another. Rather, it had a very large component of a civil war; both a civil war among Americans (many battles of the Revolution were between American Revolutionists and Loyalists, with few or any insular Britons involved at all) and a civil war within English-speaking society. Mr Phillips has always been an astute researcher of lines of cleavage and loyalty within society - that was why The Emerging Republican Majority was such an accurate predictor as a book. His research on the Revolution led him to understand which groups of Americans came to support independence, which supported the Crown and imperial unity, and which tried to remain neutral. This led him further afield to understand which groups of Britons in the home islands supported the Crown's attempt to keep America in the Empire, and which supported compromise or independence, and which other members of the Empire sympathised with the American secessionists, and who would have joined them, given the opportunity.

What Mr Phillips found can be summarised as follows:

1. The most consistent predictor of whether an American supported or opposed independence, or remained neutral, was his religious affiliation. This affiliation usually had regional, economic, and ethnic implications, but more often than not, when religion collided with one of these other factors, religion rather than the other factors ruled. Congregationalists and Quakers were both wealthy shipowners in New England, for example, but Congregationalist shipowners supported independence, while their Quaker counterparts were neutrals or loyalists.

2. The most consistent predictor of whether a Briton supported the Crown or sympathised with the American rebels (and many were vocal in the latter position) was religious affiliation.

3. The same religious factions that sided with American independence, both in Britain and America, supported the Parliamentary side in the English Civil War over a century before; the same factions that supported the Crown, on either side of the Atlantic, were those which had supported the Crown. In the towns of East Anglia, the core of Parliamentary support, the Crown was effectively unable to recruit soldiers for the American war. (In general, the Crown could recruit few Englishmen at all for that fight; most of its troops were Scottish, Irish, and German mercenaries.)

4. The same groups in the American North which had supported Independence in the Revolutionary War were the core of the Unionist forces in the American Civil War eighty years later. The groups which produced Loyalists and neutrals tended to produce Copperheads, draft rioters, and other Confederate sympathisers and neutrals. The groups In the South which supported secession were the same groups which produced the core of Independence support in the Revolutionary War; the group that were Crown loyalists or neutrals in the Revolution produced Union loyalists (and there were many of them) and Confederate draft evaders (and there were even more of them). Groups in Britain who supported Parliament in the Civil War and sympathised with the Americans in the Revolution tended to support the Union in the Civil War and oppose British intervention for the Confederacy; groups who had supported the Crown in the English Civil War and the American revolution tended to favour the Confederacy and British intervention in its favour.

5. The particular course of events shaping the history of the English-speaking peoples has had momentous consequences. Had the United States and the United Kingdom not formed when and as they did, including dividing into two (but no more than two) separate states at the time they did, Mr Phillips argues that it is likely that the United Kingdom would not have reformed its institutions well enough to meet the Napoleonic challenge, nor would the United States have served to assimilate so many refugees from oppression and poverty and become the large, industrially and militarily dominant power needed to turn back the authoritarian and totalitarian challenges of the Twentieth Century.

Mr Phillips has understood, as have I though my own research, that Anglo-American history needs to be studied as a continuum, with conflict among English-speakers studied as a species of civil war. Britain and America must be understood as areas separated by an ideological border created by civil war - the subsequent divergence of their politics has been primarily a matter of sorting of populations. America became more and more a country shaped by the dissenting Congregationalists, Presbyterians, Quakers, and low-church Episcopalians who lost power in England at the time of the Restoration, (and the sects, such as Baptists and Methodists, who emerged from those denominations) while England cast itself more and more in the mould of the High-Church Anglicans who won out. These differences sharpened in the Nineteenth Century; today they are softening again. Today, we look at the stereotype of the upper-class Englishman versus the democratic and demotic American, and see them as poles apart, but in reality, both nations have become dominated primarily by their middle classes. The conservatism of Nixon versus that of Heath, or the labour politics of Truman versus Attlee in previous decades were quite dissimilar; more recently the conservatism of Reagan and Thatcher, or the centre-left approach of Clinton and Blair are obvious convergences.

I found Mr Phillips' case to be well-made, well-researched, and well-defended throughout his main chapters, those dealing with the three "Cousin's Wars". Here I must confess that I have a strong personal interest in the topic of this book, as I am just in the process of completing a book, Network Commonwealth: The Fate of Nations in the Internet Era, which, although having a different focus, treats among other topics the specific point of The Cousins' Wars. I had no idea that Mr Phillips was preparing a book on the same topics I had been researching for years, and was startled and amazed to encounter it on the bookstore shelf. Like any author in this situation, my first reaction was "Does this mean I have to rewrite the whole book?" After a first read, I decided that Mr Phillips' work only confirmed that my conclusions were indeed part of a the intellectual trend, and an important one.

I had independently come to the conclusion stated previously, that the English-speaking world is a real entity, a thing of its own, something larger than a nation but smaller than a civilisation, whose history must be studied as a unity. Therefore, wars among its members belong in a special category, which might be called civil wars, which Mr Phillips appropriately call cousins' wars, and which I discussed as "Wars of Definition", since each war had a common element of union versus secession, i.e., what parts of the English-speaking world would form which states. To use terms from Gramsci and his followers, these wars all had elements of spatial composition: different parties resorted to the tactic of defining territory as part (or not part) of a particular national construct as a means of resolving power questions.

Since I have hardly any criticisms of the positive presentation of Mr Phillips (having used many of the same sources, I find his use of their material to be masterful, in general), my only differences with his presentation or conclusions come in the form of somewhat different frameworks of analysis, and my decision to treat as part of my system events which Mr Phillips leaves outside of his scope. I titled my chapter dealing with the civil wars of the English-speaking world "Five Civil Wars", a result of my perception of a more generic pattern which I believe arose at the time of the English Civil War, and has been developing since then. I believe that this framework, while not inconsistent with Mr Phillips', goes further, and has important implications for the present day.

I had concluded that these "wars of definition" have led over time to the creation of a tradition of union and secession as the principal revolutionary lexicon of the English-speaking world. More plainly put, when a French or Spanish-speaking person becomes alienated from his government, he typically seeks to overthrow the régime and replace it with another. When an English-speaking person becomes sufficiently alienated to contemplate revolution, his aim is typically to secede from the control of the state now defined as the enemy, and to establish a new state, or merge with a more compatible partner to form a new and differently-composed union. Rebels in the English-speaking world are, in general, separatists or secessionists. This has led to patterns usually stretching over multiple generations. I have laid out a typical sequence of stages which these wars of definition have appeared to follow. I have characterised the stages as follows:

a. emergence of alienation of a group - a growing self-definition of that group as separate and distinct, combined with the failure of representative or electoral politics to satisfy their complaints. Often, political parties, religious bodies, and other organs of civil society begin to divide along the fault lines of the future conflict.

b. tinder fires - initial scattered armed clashes and incidents reinforcing alienation,

c. plot fever - conspiracies and fears of conspiracies (an important element which Mr Phillips has researched well), finally leading to

d. hot war - sustained armed conflict with territorial, economic, religious/cultural, and political aspects. This conflict typically includes

e. choosing sides - sub-secession or territorial sorting, where parts of the population in the seceding area themselves secede to remain in the union, while other dissident areas may attempt to secede from the union, or at least sympathise with it. Following

f. burnout - the end of the principal armed conflict, usually by exhaustion or loss of political will by one side. Subsequently, there is typically

g. aftershock conflict - where the losing side attempts adjustment to the peace settlement by means other than sustained major combat; aftershocks often continue for one or two generations, and can include follow-on wars, usually more limited than the original conflict. Aftershocks continue until a

h. new synthesis is established, which sufficiently redefines both parties and issues so that any new conflict becomes a part of the next cycle.

This system divides the historical civil war of the English-speaking world into five events, rather than Mr Phillips' three, and takes a somewhat broader view. The following discussion sets out some of the areas in which I feel Mr Phillips could have gone further. The Five Civil Wars, in this scheme, are:

1. The British Civil War. This begins with the succession of James I to the English throne, which marks the beginning of stage a. in the above scheme, and also places the issue of the political unification of the British Isles on the agenda for the first time in the modern era. It proceeds through two generations (forty years) of increasing alienation of various groups, both Catholics (primarily in the peripheral areas - Northern and Western England, Wales, Ireland, and highland Scotland) and Calvinists (English Puritans and Scottish Presbyterians). The formation of New England is part of this process of alienation. After two generations of increasing alienation and breakdown of the English and Scottish constitutions as conflict-resolving mechanisms, a multi-sided, full-scale conflict breaks out. Although Mr Phillips does not see a major compositional question in the English portion of the civil war, the British civil war clearly has a major compositional element. The victorious Cromwell created a unitary constitution for the entire British Isles, with a single church establishment for the entire state. Although Scottish Presbyterians were theologically quite close to English Puritans, they were far from identical, and resisted the imposition of a unitary constitution quite vigorously. The refusal of the Scots to accept Cromwell's unitary constitution, and the Cromwellian invasion of Scotland must be seen as a compositional as well as religious aspect of the British Civil War. In this analytical system, the end of fighting constitutes exhaustion stage, while the Restoration becomes the aftershock conflict (in this case, without much fighting). The Restoration amount to an example of Stage h, a new synthesis, (and also an act of secession, as Scotland and Ireland became autonomous entities again) because Parliament and Crown disappeared as parties, to be replaced by Whigs and Tories, creating a somewhat different definition of the conflicting parties.

2. The Glorious Revolution. This must be marked as a separate and distinct stage of conflict. Although Mr Phillips discusses the Revolution of 1688, his focus on England leads him not to treat it as a major event on the scale of the other Cousins' Wars. Although the Revolution of 1688 was bloodless in England, it was still a violent civil war of Britain. The crisis of alienation began as the good feelings of Restoration broke down and the heirs of the Puritans (now Nonconformists) and Anglicans alike began to ally as Whigs. Monmouth's rebellion and the state violence (the "Bloody Assizes") following it were examples of the tinder fire stage. William of Orange's invasion did not end the war, but merely delayed the hot war phase until James could regroup and land in Ireland, which was already in rebellion. Aftershocks included the Act of Union of 1707 between England and Scotland (the compositional aspect of the Revolution, which created the United Kingdom), and the 1708, 1715, and 1745 Jacobite rebellions. (Those who do not believe there was a compositional element to the British Civil War need only compare the genuinely unitary Cromwellian constitution of Cromwell with the Treaty of Union of 1707. The latter guarantees Scots the religious, educational, and juridical autonomy which gave the United Kingdom its particular quasi-federal structure, which I believe served in turn as an unacknowledged source for the American constitution written eighty-two years later.) Those conflicts had a substantial compositional component, as many Scots supported the Jacobites primarily in hopes of undoing the Treaty of Union. Only after 1745 and the final military/political defeat of the Jacobites was a new synthesis fully established, and the Tory party finally transferred its loyalty fully to the house of Hanover.

3. The American Revolution. This was the first civil war in which territorial definition became the principal issue, although we have seen that it was an important issue in its two predecessor conflicts. The Revolutionary crisis must be considered to be launched with the end of the French and Indian War and the passage of the Quebec Act, which crystallised the alienation of the New England and Appalachian Scots-Irish radicals and set off the plot fever stage almost immediately. Tinder fires began almost as quickly - the burning of the treasury cutter Gaspée and the Regulator rebellions must be counted as such. Mr Phillips charts this process very well, as he does through the hot war stage. The Taking Sides phase of this war included the process by which Quebec, Nova Scotia, and the British Caribbean colonies considered and failed to join the secession, as well as the many subsecessions within the Thirteen Colonies. This phase meant that the Revolution not only divided the First British Empire into the United Kingdom and United States, but also created the seeds of English-speaking Canada as a nation. Mr Phillips charts these currents well. Following the exhaustion phase, ending in the Treaty of Paris, the conflict simmered on through extensive aftershock wars - particularly the campaign of 1794 in which Federal forces defeated the British Indian allies of Ohio and finally took possession of the Old Northwest, and the War of 1812 itself - which could also be termed the War of Canadian Independence.

The most unorthodox conclusion of this analysis is classifying the United Irish insurrection of 1798 as an aftershock of this conflict. Although not directly sparked by the American Revolution, it was a direct reaction to the post-Revolutionary reforms