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David Stasavage, "The Decline and Rise of Democracy: A Global History from Antiquity to Today" (Princeton UP, 2020)
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- [00:00]
David Stasovich
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Marshall Po
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David Stasovich
Limu is that guy with the binoculars watching us.
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Marshall Po
Cut the camera.
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David Stasovich
They see us.
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David Stasovich
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Marshall Po
Hello, everybody. This is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form, and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Praveen
Welcome to the New Books Network. I'm your host, Praveen, and I'm the founder of the Twice Told Podcast. Today we'll be speaking to author and professor David Stasovich about his latest book, the Decline and Rise of a Global History From Antiquity to Today. David Stasiewicz currently serves as the Carroll and Milton Petrie professor in the Wolf Family Department of Politics at the New York University. He is affiliated with the NYU School of Law as well as its Department of history. In 2016, he published Taxing the Rich, a history of fiscal fairness in the United States and Europe, along with Ken Sheev, a book that charts the evolution of progressive taxation in 20 countries over the last two centuries. He also has a number of recent papers on these and related topics. His latest book, the Decline and Rise of Democracy, came out in June 2020 and is published by the Princeton University.
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Interviewer/Host
Press Perfect Welcome David to Twice Told now. The concept of Twice Told is that as an author you expressed your views and thoughts by writing this book. That was your first impression. I formed an impression by when I read it the first time my thoughts and impressions. Now the idea behind Twice Told is the author and the reader get to discuss. We hash out questions and doubts and that's how we enrich our perspective of this book. And which is why the name Twice Told that every time that we discuss this book our perspectives get only even more further refined. So thank you for authoring this fantastic book the Rise the Decline and Rise of Democracy I'm yet to have read such a data driven account in over the past few years. I've not read something so richly data driven of late. So my first question would be how did you come about to writing about this topic and why?
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David Stasovich
Well thank first of all, thanks for having me and thanks for the compliment on the book. I came at this topic by somewhat circuitous route. I had been for several decades doing research on the early development and later development of representative political institutions in Western Europe which was the main focus of my work or one of the main areas of my work. And I wrote a paper in 2016 on trying to ask why these forms of representative institutions emerged in Europe and not China or the Middle east and that started life as a very different project but ended up being a much more big history about democracy worldwide, past, present and potentially even future. So that was that was the process understood.
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Interviewer/Host
This is a book that should be widely read and should be discussed in schools if that was even an option. Ideally I would want that because it's important people understand what is the foundation of a democracy and why it has nothing to do so much so with education or so called civilization as much as you've outlined so beautifully the correlation between bureaucracy. So my second question would be your some examples of efficient bureaucracies in ancient as well as medieval History?
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David Stasovich
Well, yes, so we could. Obviously the. The really big example of an efficient bureaucracy from a very early date is in Imperial China, where emperors can rely on a bureaucracy selected through an imperial examination system that gives them a little bit of distance from powerful elites rather than having to rely on them for decisions, and makes the state much more autonomous from society, in a sense. Whereas in medieval Western Europe it was sort of the opposite situation, where the bureaucracies, to the extent they existed, were extremely weak and rulers therefore had to rely on members of society in a cooperative fashion to get anything done. There were also other early examples of strong bureaucracies. We could think of the. The third dynasty of Ur in Mesopotamia under King Shulgi, who had a bureaucracy and who made himself a deity in the end, in fact, because it was his. His rule was so strengthened by the bureaucracy there.
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Interviewer/Host
Understood, Understood. Now, what was the impact of these bureaucracies on early democracies?
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David Stasovich
Well, I think the main point I try to make in the book is a question of sequencing whether you get bureaucracy first or democracy first. Because if you have a strong bureaucracy like that, then rulers need their people less to rule. I mean, they have bureaucrats who they can, you know, appoint and fire and compensate as they wish, but they don't need to rely as directly with elites elsewhere from society or even commoners from society. And so that puts them in a stronger position. Whereas if you start off and you have a more cooperative, consensual form of rule, as existed in many places in medieval Europe, even if of course, it wasn't democracy, because it was very limited participation at the time, then if you start off with that, then it's possible, after a tradition of participatory governance is normally anchored, then you can build a bureaucracy subsequently, as we have in rich countries today, that exists simultaneously and is run simultaneously by members of a legislature and by the executive.
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Interviewer/Host
Just a rhetorical question that for bureaucracies to form, I believe there had to be education, right down to the permitting, right down to the grassroots. Is that so?
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David Stasovich
Well, it certainly helps if you have a literate population, right? If you have a literate population, that means you need a system of writing. And a lot of societies didn't have that. Some societies did, some societies different. So. So yes, there are certain pre. Requirements for having. I think there were probably bureaucracies in some cases where societies didn't have writing, but not many. You know, if it helps, writing is the. Is a tool that allows us to communicate over distance and over time, the time machine of sorts. And so that's really important for bureaucracy to function.
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Interviewer/Host
The one takeaway for me from this book was efficient communication was the bedrock, is and was the bedrock for efficient bureaucracy as well as democracy. So which is why this question was arising. So for a bureaucracy to form, there must have been some form of proto democracy earlier through which this education spread and then a bureaucracy formed. Or how, how does that function?
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David Stasovich
Well, it, it function in different, different, in different ways in different societies. But if you take the Chinese case, it's, it's very interesting. What happens is initially the, the Chinese bureaucracy grows and doesn't exist in, in, in, in. In connection with the, with the, the examination system which examined people based on the qualities of their, their essays. But what happens is the examination system gets established under the Tang Dynasty and really expanded under the Song dynasty. And it's assisted by the fact that woodblock printing of texts starts in China under the Tang Dynasty and continues under the Song. And it's a really interesting story there because it all comes from the Buddhists basically, where when Buddhism enters China, there's a religious competition between the Buddhists and the Daoists and the, and, and, and, and the Confucians and leads to this, this environment of religious competition leads to the spread of texts again. Eventually these get adopted by the state and that's how you get so many people having access to writing now. So that wasn't a case where you have a proto democracy where people get educated and then you get a bureaucracy.
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Interviewer/Host
That's a fascinating take.
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David Stasovich
Yeah, no, it's a really, it's a really fascinating story. Or similarly, in coming back to the third dynasty of Ur under King Shulgi, you would have had scribal schools where people were taught to write, to write and to read.
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Interviewer/Host
Understood. Now could you tell us about something about autocratic tendencies in modern democracies? How do these come in?
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David Stasovich
Well, the, the difference between modern and what I call in the book, early democracy is that in early democracy there's nothing even resembling a state. There is no bureaucracy. So a ruler doesn't really have an option to just take over and become an autocrat because they need people. They don't have the means at their disposal to do anything else. And so they're forced to be democrats. And so if you think of various Native American groups in the northeastern woodlands before European colonies conquest, that would have applied in that situation in modern democracies. Today we have a somewhat more robust but also in some ways more fragile situation. It's more robust because we have advanced bureaucracies that led us to do a lot of things and that's good. But there's always the risk that if it's not, you know, if there's always a, a risk to some degree lesser or more, that a executive, be they, a president or prime minister, could try to, you know, rule through the bureaucracy to start acting more like autocrat.
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Interviewer/Host
Understood. You mentioned another point about the necessity to disallow, constitute based or local mandates in medieval England or other places as well. So why is that?
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David Stasovich
So, okay, so this was a very critical development in Europe in the early days of representative assemblies. In a lot of cases, say a town was sending someone, a representative to a parliament, they would bind that representative with strict instructions about what they could do, what they could say, what they could agree to and what they could not agree to. That was a very effective measure for the town to gain, to retain control of its representative. But as you can imagine, it made for a somewhat cumbersome form of decision making when everybody gets there and they're all bound by mandates and they can't deviate from them. So what would happen would be, if you look at a situation like say the Dutch Republic with the estates of Holland, individual town representatives, if they were considering doing something that hadn't been agreed to by the town, they'd have to travel back to the town and consult before doing anything. So a cumbersome method of decision making. So what happens in England towards the middle of the 14th century is for one reason or another, and I don't think we quite know the answer to this, but the system of mandates and reference back and instructions just goes by falls by the wayside and representatives no longer do this. And it's fascinating because it makes for the model that we have in all national parliaments today where we control our representatives by electing them and by then deciding to re elect or not reelect them. But we're not allowed to. We can write letters, we can send the petitions, but we're not allowed to formally bind them with mandates or instructions. And so it's a critical development.
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Interviewer/Host
It's interesting that you couldn't bind locally elected politicians back then with mandates because for want of communication, but today, with such strong and powerful and memorable forms of communication, do we know why is it that we are not possibly going back to this method of government? Because this is to me seems so much more rule bound that yes, you are given a set of instructions and you will be evaluated against. How did you perform with those instructions?
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David Stasovich
Yeah, that's a very interesting question. I mean why, why don't our representatives regularly consult all their constituents with online polls or something like that? Right. That would be easy enough to sign up to and would have been feasible for some time now. And I think my sense is probably for a lot of us, we've just lost the memory that there were these practices of mandates and instructions. We have literally, most people just don't know it ever existed and would not think of it.
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Interviewer/Host
Understood. My next question is going to be about matrilineal and patrilineal societies. How, what were the differences when it came to exercising democracy between these two? And do we know when, how or why did matrilineal societies get phased out?
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David Stasovich
There's an old, old idea from Friedrich Engels which turns out to be completely wrong, but it's an interesting idea nonetheless that all societies start as out as matrilineal and then eventually most shifted to patrilineal. And that's certainly not what happened. In fact, it's true that a lot of matrilineal societies, there's. There's fewer of them, far fewer of them than patrilineal. But, you know, significant, significant. There's a matrilineal belt in Africa. Native American groups in the northeastern woodlands were commonly matrilineal. We don't know exactly why some were and some weren't. There's an old idea that makes a lot of sense that when women were involved in food production, as would have been the case with, for example, the Hauda Doshoni or the Iroquois, we call them, that you would have matrilineal practices. But it turns out that the data don't really support that on a broader range of societies. So it's a little bit of a. It's a little bit of a mystery. But we can observe that in certain matrilineal societies, the defeat, the nature of early democracy was different in that among the Iroquois or among their neighbors to the north, the Huron as we call them, or the Wendat as they call themselves, women did not directly participate in council meetings, but women were the heads of clans and they could name chiefs and they could also force chidik fire chiefs, in effect, which is quite interesting. And so it actually had quite a significant amount of political influence compared to what would have been seen in more patrilineal societies.
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Interviewer/Host
Understood. You made a solid point about caloric variability and council presence. So why is this caloric variability not associated it similarly with autocracy?
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David Stasovich
I think the, the idea is, is that it comes back to efficient communication and trying to find out information. One of the things a bureau, one of the things bureaucrats do is they implement decisions, but they also try to find out information, right? And in cases where the nature of production, be it agriculture, commercial or industrial production, is more simple, more easily observable, and more uniform, that makes their job easier. So that strengthens logically the position of a ruler. Whereas if the nature of production, and I used in the book the example of agricultural production, but it could again could be commercial production or industrial production is more heterogeneous from spot to spot, and maybe from time to time that makes the ruler's problem of figuring out what they can extract in terms of resources or revenues more difficult. And so they may be forced to rely upon members of society in a council to try to get more information rather than trying to just use their bureaucracy.
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Marshall Po
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- [19:59]
Interviewer/Host
Now wom had a fabulous bureaucracy. What are some of the reasons why these bureaucratic practices were not carried over? For example, in India, when the East India Company took over, it modified or carried forward some of the rules which were in place from the Mughal Empire. And the Mughal Empire had continued on some practices which were followed here earlier. So why is it in Europe that we see that the Roman method seemingly vanishes over time without memory?
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David Stasovich
I think there are a couple, couple of reasons for that. One is that the Romans, even at the height of their empire, never had a bureaucracy as strong and as centralized as the Chinese did. They certainly had a centralized military force. But the bureaucracy of the Roman Empire was a more decentralized operation where often they relied on local communities to collect their own taxes and then contribute those. So that's one reason. The second reason is just that the nature of the collapse following Rome was so great that all central authority of any, any sort was no longer around. I mean even, even you basically went back after the fall of Rome to a situation where Western Europe was, was a, had a, a non monetary economy even. And so in that sense it's easy to see, easier to see why any bureaucracy that did exist disappeared rather quite completely. Whereas in the Chinese case, it's really fascinating because after the, the fall of the Han dynasty, it occurs about two centuries before the fall of Rome. You have this interregnum where it looks like China might fall apart, but then it comes back together and they rebuild a bureaucracy inspired in large part by the prior model of the large scale centralized bureaucracy of the Han dynasty.
- [21:56]
Interviewer/Host
Now do you think this had, the fall of Rome had something to do with population replacements? Especially when we look at Britain as.
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David Stasovich
An example, there's umpteen reasons for the fall of Rome. So that's a difficult, that's a difficult question. What happened? Certainly what we can say with the specific case of Britain is that after the Romans pull out in 410 of the common Era and just say that's it, we're done, everybody's on their own. And there are a lot of, there is population, significant population incursions from parts of what is now Denmark and from Scandinavia. But the genetic evidence suggests that the population of current day English people is actually quite mixed between those populations as a not, let's sort of say more recent immigrants that would have come from, say from, you know, from South Asia or from, from the Caribbean or elsewhere. But if you go people who are, whose families were there earlier, say from the 6th century or before, there's quite a mix between Original Celts, original sort of more Roman sources and then Scandinavian. Scandinavian sources.
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Interviewer/Host
Now, do you think that modern church was the Roman bureaucracy reimagined? And what was the impact that the Church had on Europe?
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David Stasovich
Well, the Church had an enormous impact on Europe. And the, the, the one thing that I'd want to highlight, because this is what I highlight in, in the book, is the way in which a lot of governance practices that emerged first in the Church were then adopted by secular rulers. So, for example, when we're thinking about forming a representative assembly, and initially these assemblies have just nobles and bishops and who are representing themselves. In fact, what happens is there's an interesting question that emerges when you think about a city sending a representative to an assembly. How can a whole city send a representative? Well, obviously we can't have all the people from the city. So we have one person. And then how, how can that be justified? And so we invent the idea of a city as being a fictitious person. And this is how the, the whole idea of the modern corporation emerges of, you know, corporation has legal personhood, just like you or I would. And this all started off in the Church, actually, because a Pope Innocent IV in the middle of the 13th century was very big on this idea of a fictitious person, Persona ficta, as he called it in, in Latin. And he was thought of that for individual components of his. The Catholic Church, like a monastery itself, might be thought of as a, as a fictitious person. And therefore we get, you know, ways of organizing things in new ways and happened there in the Church first. And then the ideas travel to secular rulers.
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Interviewer/Host
Was the idea of the QOT an original for the Church, or was this a more localized idea which was then adopted by the Church?
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David Stasovich
I think it was something. What often happens is that practices emerge first and then the legitimation comes afterwards. And so QLT comes in at a point where there had already been a number of practices of assemblies and some sense of consent. There just wasn't a theory of it yet. And it's useful to have a theory for a practice to help reinforce that practice and justify it. And so that's where QLT comes in. And yes, that is something like, you know, just like the story of a fictitious person that really emerges first in the Church from a sort of re. Rediscovery and reimagination of Roman law and then gets adopted by secular rulers after.
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Interviewer/Host
The Renaissance and the development of modern warfare and the colonial era. How is it that democracy survived? Or for where are the. What are those instances where democracy got reversed because of this newfound power in firepower?
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David Stasovich
Well, yeah, I think the. What. There's a great book by a historian named Phil Hoffman, who's a Caltech, on how, how Europeans, why Europeans conquered the rest of the world. And you know, it's not because. He suggests, it's not because we, at the time we initially conquered, say in the 16th century, that we were more powerful, smarter, better economies, whatever. It's really that we had an advantage in terms of firepower and that's what allowed for these, these, these conquests to happen. And so what then happens is when Europeans come in and conquer different continents, in some cases they conquer societies that were more autocratically oriented, such as the Inca in present day Peru, but then they also conquer and kill off other societies that had more early democratic forms of governance. And of course, Europeans themselves, even as democracy was emerging and developing in Europe, didn't particularly like the idea that their colonies should rule themselves democratically. It was democracy or for us, but not for the conquered.
- [27:14]
Interviewer/Host
Why is it that the rule of democracy was allowed for the Europeans themselves? For example, if a warlord in Europe had a significant amount of firepower and mercenaries, what was stopping them from becoming autocrats themselves? The way that it played out in most of South Asia, Case in point being Afghanistan and parts of India.
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David Stasovich
Yeah, I think there were European. Some tried this. The, the notable exception to the democratic trend is Prussia. Whereas, you know, before the Thirty Years War, in terms of con, consensual and consultative practices via estates, which is another form of assembly, Prussia looked like a lot like the rest of Western Europe. But what then happens is you've got a lot of destruction during the Thirty Years War and they succeed in building this very powerful bureaucracy that supports an autocratic model of rule. But Prussia is kind of an exception in that regard. I mean, the French kings try to rule on their own, but they're still in many cases obliged to have local assemblies that they, that they, that they need to negotiate and bargain with. So my sense has always been that European rulers, even late in the game, had relatively weak bureaucracies and just didn't have the, the means to rule so autocratically understood.
- [28:42]
Interviewer/Host
Understood. Now this would lead me to my next question, which was about the impact of language on the formation of democracies. Case in point being Prussia and the German, German speaking region at large. So do you believe that there was any correlation between how language developed and did it have any influence on bureaucracy and democracy?
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David Stasovich
So I think one of the questions that could be investigated that I sort of mentioned in the book, but do not probe in depth, is whether when you have certain societies evolved systems of writing or communication that were extremely complex and that required a lot of specialized training. Others had forms of writing or language that were more simple and straightforward and required less effort to learn. And so, you know, there is an old suggestion that if you have writing based on an Alphabet that is simpler and can provide broader access for the population rather than some more complex form of writing which may be accessible only to an elite. And so that could have reference for whether you have a more autocratic or a more democratic polity. And interestingly, it continues over even into things that aren't strictly writing, but we might call writing adjacent. So the inka have this, had this marvelous thing called the khipu, which was a series of strings connected, of different colors and different lengths that could be used to convey large amounts of information, but required a lot of training to understand and to interpret. And so it was really only, we believe, highly trained bureaucrats working within the state itself who would have been able to communicate in this way. And so that again, is a form of communication that reinforces autocracy rather than democracy.
- [30:44]
Interviewer/Host
Understood. Now, during the Warring States period, you mentioned about meritocracy or abdication in China. So how did you, what were your thoughts about this? How did you find out about this?
- [30:56]
David Stasovich
Well, it was from a specialist of China called Sarah Allen regarding some texts that had been rediscovered that suggested that there were early ideas in China, cases of promotion by merit and promotion by abdication. And during the war in states period, I think that fed into, since you had intense competition between these large powerful states before you get unification under the, the Qin dynasty, there, there were pressures to try to recruit bureaucrats more by their ability and not by their connections or something like that. And so I think that's where those ideas emerged from.
- [31:37]
Interviewer/Host
Now moving to the Islamic world, when did and how or why did the Umayyad caliphate start to move away from the concept of shura and mashwara? How did this happen?
- [31:49]
David Stasovich
Yeah, I think this, this happened without any intentional or real planning. But what one needs to realize is that the concept of shura was something of, say, choosing the next caliph through a shura process, a consultative process, or deciding something else through a process of shura. This had existed in pre Islamic Arabia as a face to face thing. And what you have with the Islamic conquests is that the conquests spread so quickly and so far to the point where within a few decades you've got a large caliphate covering vast amounts of territory. The question of how to organize something that had been a face to face consultative mechanism on a totally different scale becomes very, very difficult to think about. If you think about what happened with Europeans, Europeans would have initially started with small scale consultative bodies and then gradually they grew their states and they grew their entities and they developed a theory about how we could have consultation at scale by this idea of a city as a fictitious person via the theory of qot, et cetera. The. But those took several centuries to develop, really. Right. It just, they didn't just invent it one day and said, okay, here's how we do it. And so for the Islamic world, I just have the sense of that they didn't have the time to figure this out. And so you've defaulted to a more autocratic form of rule.
- [33:27]
Interviewer/Host
You mentioned that England was different as far as Europe was vis a vis democracy. Why?
- [33:33]
David Stasovich
Well, the first reason was something we've already discussed, this lack of mandates. It wasn't unique to England, but it was something that was distinctly English and made for a very different parliament and explains why we have the sort of parliaments and congresses and legislatures that we have today were all influenced by the English model that do not rely on mandates. So that's the first thing. I think the other thing is going back to even the Anglo Saxon period, the English monarchs are in a somewhat stronger position with respect to their people than other European monarchs. And I don't want to exaggerate here, but if you think about the fact that circa the turn of the first millennium, the Anglo Saxon state is the only society in Western Europe with the exception of Spain under Islamic rule, where there are direct taxes on agriculture collected, that requires a lot of effort and knowledge. And so for one reason that we don't entirely understand, could have been because England was a relatively compact place. I don't know. English rulers were in a somewhat more, somewhat stronger position with respect to their, their localities.
- [34:56]
Interviewer/Host
Understood. You make a bold assertion when you say the Magna Carta was not as important as historians today make it out to be.
- [35:05]
David Stasovich
It was not as important initially, but it became very important as this sort of understanding, I think. And so it wasn't a big deal. I say at first, as in the first few years and decades, but what you get very quickly in the 13th century, already several decades afterwards, is Magna Carta gets reissued even though King John had repudiated it. Magna Carta gets reissued and rulers see that this is a useful way to organize things because they can actually get things out of their people in this way, because if you don't adhere to something like Magna Carta, you're not going to get anything, you're not going to get anywhere with them.
- [35:43]
Interviewer/Host
So in a way, is the Magna Carta one of the founding bedrock for what would later become capitalism?
- [35:50]
David Stasovich
Yes, you could say that. To the extent that you think capitalism depends upon the existence of a certain degree of freedom for people to pursue their own economic interests. Yes.
- [36:01]
Interviewer/Host
Understood, understood. You wrote quite extensively about slavery especially, and in the United States, but extending the concept of slavery which existed in England as well, colonial England and then later United States. So how did this somewhat. How did this coexist with democracy?
- [36:21]
David Stasovich
Yeah, it's a very strange process. And I think it all comes to whether people who had exit options and who didn't have exit options, that when white colonists come over from Britain, one of the things that is quickly realized is that the people running the colonies don't have much control over them initially. At Jamestown, they try to have a sort of more top down, hierarchical form of rule and it doesn't really work. And you're talking about a land, there's great abundance of land. If people are unhappy, they can just move off. And so what you end up doing, and because the many cases you have to entice them to come in the first place is there are these explicit ideas of saying, come to Virginia, we will have a vote. You'll have political rights, which is very interesting. Now, when you think of black people coming from Africa, of course the story is completely flipped because first of all, there's no enticing of them. They're brought by force in horrible, you know, the most horrible conditions we can think of. And once they get there, that's not like they can just melt off into the rest of the population or set up their own farm or something like that. So they have no exit option. And because they have no exit option, it's possible to, unfortunately to sustain a much more coercive form of labor. So that's why to my mind, you get this coexistence of political rights for some and the complete absence of political rights for others.
- [37:51]
Interviewer/Host
Now my last question would be about democracy and its challenges today. And how do you think we could possibly overcome them?
- [37:58]
David Stasovich
Well, one of the questions I have is that we, I think we need to consider more how we do this at scale, remembering that our democracies today are much larger than early democracies and that when the U.S. republic was first created, this was an issue of ardent debate between federalists and antifederalists Whereas one of the main criticisms the antifederalists had, if not the main criticism, was that this just wouldn't work at scale. Citizens would be unable to control their representatives and the whole thing would fail. And we've been taught in school in the US that, no, this was all solved. And it's fine we have representative democracy, but maybe we need to think about a little bit more. What are the ways we can connect better with our representatives and with each other when we are now 300 and however many million people it is spread over a very wide territory? And I'm writing a starting work on and writing a new book on the history of popular governance at scale that is going to address these questions.
- [39:06]
Interviewer/Host
Oh, nice. When does that book come out?
- [39:09]
David Stasovich
Well, it's not written yet, so it's not. I would make probably 2027 or 2028. Yeah. Depending upon how quickly it goes.
- [39:16]
Interviewer/Host
Okay, got that. Any other books that you'd recommend for readers to follow up after your book?
- [39:22]
David Stasovich
I would recommend if you want to go on this European story of how things started in the church and then go were moved into secular the domain. I would read a book from a scholar at Stanford named Anna Jamala Bus, and it's called Sacred Foundations. That's also a Princeton University Press book which has received a lot of attention. Deservedly so.
- [39:49]
Interviewer/Host
Understood, Understood. This was a fantastic conversation, David. Thank you for your time.
- [39:55]
David Stasovich
Thank you very much. It was great. Thank you.