The Small Farm Future Blog

Remember David: thoughts on Luke Kemp’s ‘Goliath’s Curse’

Posted on October 10, 2026 | No Comments

Another book review while it’s fresh in my mind, this time Luke Kemp’s Goliath’s Curse: The History and Future of Societal Collapse (Penguin, 2025).

As is my wont, I’m going to spend more time talking about what I disagree with in the book than what I agree with, because I find it more generative. But let me begin with a quick summary of its merits, which are considerable.

First of all, it’s just really great to see a young scholar with highfaluting academic credibility taking the idea of emerging societal collapse seriously. Despite the ever-growing drumbeat of warning signals, it remains all too rare. Ridicule awaits those who say we have little option but to step into the maelstrom of growing collapse. With books like this, perhaps the tide is starting to turn.

Other good aspects of the book: Kemp has a lucid and easily intelligible framework for understanding collapses past and present, but one that allows him to survey the evidence with historical depth and subtlety. And, a sight for sore eyes on this website, he’s none too impressed with contemporary ideologies of progress, urbanism, techno-fixing and so forth. If only there were more like him.

Another strength of the book is Kemp’s discussion of the novel forces impelling contemporary collapse that weren’t around in social collapses of old – nuclear and other mass weapons, AI and dramatic global climate change chief among them. More smartly than I’ve done, he presses an argument I was vainly trying to make to a disdainful commenter here recently; in the globalised modern world system of states, societal collapses are much less common than they used to be, but all the while the existential risk of really cataclysmic general global collapse is increasing.

Finally on the upside, something I can learn from. Kemp is generally polite about everyone he discusses, apart from political rulers and fossil fuel companies. The way he enthuses about Jared Diamond’s work while quietly destroying almost its entire edifice is masterful.

Digging a little more into the framework for understanding collapse that I mentioned, Kemp’s concept of ‘Goliaths’ refers to centralized political authorities, or ‘states’ if you will, of the kind that fully emerged in the Bronze Age. Kemp regards them as somewhat like the eponymous warrior from the Bible: imposing in size, reliant on violence and yet often surprisingly fragile (p.5).

Incidentally, Kemp’s book and his ‘Goliath’ framing nicely complements Paul Kingsnorth’s Against the Machine. Whereas Kingsnorth’s critique of the Machine focuses mostly on cultural and spiritual issues, Kemp’s critique of Goliath draws more on social science, and occasionally biophysical science. But whether we call it Goliath or the Machine, both reference something deeply rooted in human psyches and histories which yet is somehow inhuman – perhaps the name for it is evil.

Anyway, Kemp’s analysis of the rise of Goliath rests on three forms of what he calls ‘Goliath fuel’ – lootable resources (i.e. some useful object or product that people can forcibly take from other people to fund their own wellbeing), caged land (i.e. difficulties faced by those who are thus forced to yield from voting with their feet and simply moving away), and monopolizable weapons. He freely acknowledges his intellectual debt with this framework to historical scholars with an anarchist perspective on the state – particularly James Scott, but also David Graeber and others.

I’m influenced by that tradition too, so I found it easy to embrace Kemp’s general framework. But I think the framework can be pushed too far, and there are a couple of ways in which Kemp does that – and one way in which he doesn’t push it far enough.

My first caveat is that Kemp endorses James Scott’s arguments (in Scott’s books The Art of Not Being Governed and Against the Grain) that cereal grains, wheat and rice particularly, are the lootable resources par excellence. In this view, cereals are basically constitutive of states because of their taxability and legibility to centralized power compared to ‘escape crops’ like root vegetables. I won’t dwell on it here, but I’ve come to find this view unconvincing. There’s something in it, but it accords too much determining power to the physical characteristics of the crops, and to make it work as a key for understanding the course of human history you have to hedge it around with so many exceptions and qualifications that it loses its force. One limiting case would be mid-nineteenth century Ireland, where the potato most definitely wasn’t an escape crop. In any case, states have got along pretty well for millennia with land taxes and head taxes – you don’t really need to see the harvest.

There are other problems with the way that Scott, and Kemp, unfurl this argument. If we must draw a line between grain characteristics and state formation, a more obvious one is the enormous nutritional productivity per acre and per labourer along with various other agronomic characteristics conducive to concentrating many people in small areas. Ultimately, it’s the dense populations enabled by calorie-rich crops, not the ease of tithes, that makes states.

This isn’t a particularly grave objection to Kemp’s overall thesis. But it does bear on a slight tic in his analysis. I like the concept of ‘Goliath fuel’ and Kemp’s associated idea that agricultural surpluses are a necessary but not sufficient condition for the emergence of Goliaths. At least it’s a little more sophisticated than the ‘foraging good, farming bad’ or ‘farming = states = oppression’ narratives that are so popular nowadays. But by turning cereals into state-making agents of evil, Kemp too often backslides into equations of that sort, which is problematic for reasons of both historical accuracy and contemporary politics, as I’ll shortly argue. Just as we need to abandon progress narratives, I think we also need to abandon regress narratives where we project political perfection onto idealised past hunter-gatherer societies (not ‘complex hunter-gatherers’ but the proper, ‘simple’ ones) of almost perfect peace, health and equality, including gender equality.

But a bigger problem with Kemp’s analysis is that it’s based on a 99% sociology of rational political calculus. Let me explain what I mean. Kemp brings a healthy scepticism toward rulers, elites and those who put themselves above others in their pursuit of power. He uses this scepticism to good effect, especially against arguments about the benevolence of modern welfare states, where the gains for ordinary people have typically arisen through their own activism, and sometimes at the expense of less fortunate people in other places. But he also pushes the argument too far.

In this James Scott/Luke Kemp worldview – which I do share to a considerable extent – kings and other rulers are mere robbers and bandits, helping themselves to the fruit of other people’s work. People see this and seek escape wherever possible (hence the importance to rulers of caged land and monopolizable weapons). But rulers also use the soft power of legitimizing ideology – state religions that warrant hierarchy, claims to divine power or blessing, patriarchal values of a strict but loving father and so on.

In Kemp’s view, this is all just legitimating guff that masks naked coercive force. But this can’t explain its efficacy. Yes, rulers certainly do try to cover their coercive force with a carapace of ideological justification, with greater or lesser degrees of success. But those greater or lesser degrees prompt questions about the power of ideology – or, as I’d prefer to call it, political culture. In Kemp’s view, it’s as if a wily commoner – if they dared – were to say to the king “You’re just a jumped-up bandit. Why should I do what you say when I’m out of your sight?” To which the king replies “Because I’m blessed by the gods and the father of the people.” And then the commoner says, “Ah, got you. Sorry, I didn’t realise. Well, you carry on then.”

While Kemp generally offers a refreshing critique of progress ideology, there’s a reversion to it here in the implicit idea that, unlike us moderns whose pragmatically disenchanted grasp of politics enables us to realise that there are no gods and that everyone is born equal, past people whose political cultures involved hierarchy or divinity just weren’t clear-sighted enough to notice they were being played. This is bad sociology. You have to take people’s cultural categories more seriously and see how their tensions play out. Typically, people in the past were perfectly well aware of the way that rulers tried to boost their power through claims of rank and divinity, while still subscribing to rank and divinity as real qualities in the world.

This has several implications. For one thing, it complicates Kemp’s 99% view. His idea is that if we could only knock the tiny minority of over-mighty Goliaths off their lofty perches then the rest of us could get on, happy in our equality. This pays little attention to the way that Goliath behaviour suffuses society – formulations like ‘the people’, ‘the community’, ‘ordinary people’, ‘the silent majority’ and so on (some of which I confess I’ve invoked myself – I even did so above) are inadequate in this regard. To be fair, Kemp does mention this, but I don’t think he takes its implications seriously enough. It’s not only that among ‘the community’ would-be Goliaths lurk. It’s also that ‘the community’ is often another kind of Goliath.

One aspect of humans is our tendency to mimic each other (Harvey Whitehouse explores this in his fascinating book Inheritance). The way this gets represented in a lot of critiques of rulership in radical politics is along the lines of “yeah sure, ordinary people mimic the power moves of the high-up folk – and we need to put a stop to that too”. Hence, again, this problematic attempt to find a category of pure and uncorrupted people – if not hunter-gatherers, then perhaps subalterns or proletarians, the lowest of the low in agrarian or industrial society. Hence, too, the rebuilding of the Kremlin by the Bolsheviks. But what if it’s the high ups who are mimicking the power moves of the people, just more successfully? On this view, power goes all the way down – there is no ultimately pure form of society where we meet each other as true, equal members of the community. (This is something that of our two illustrious anarchist forebears, David Graeber understood better than James Scott).

On this view too, the laudable desire to get rid of over-mighty Goliaths becomes more complicated, because no sooner have you and I toppled one than another is bound to pop up – in fact, it might be you or me. On which note, the whole Biblical story of Goliath is pregnant with possibilities that complicate Kemp’s use of it. David, a poorly-armed, ordinary young boy kills the great warrior of an enemy kingdom … and then becomes a problematic, usurping king in his own one. Maybe the story was a legitimating attempt by a pro-David faction. Hey, the king was just an ordinary guy like you or me, yet chosen – we could be kings too, if we walk the path of power and devotion. Or maybe it was a cautionary tale from an anti-David faction. Power corrupts.

Again, there’s a subtlety to Kemp’s analysis that’s alive to these possibilities, and he’s strong on the point that, historically, political collapses don’t usually last for long – something I don’t think I’ve addressed adequately in my own writing. But all this complicates his analysis in ways I don’t think he fully appreciates. We need to do more than take out Goliath with a well-aimed slingshot, or even than burn the supply of Goliath fuel. Minimally, it’s necessary to be aware of what I called in one of my books the ‘mysteries and passions’ animating human behaviour, which so often confounds liberal-rational attempts to found a better society.

This all comes to a head toward the end of Kemp’s book where he addresses present times, the possibilities for collapse, and what to do about it. It’s where I don’t think he pushes his framework with its sceptical view of political culture far enough.

I guess I should make due allowance for the pressures on writers of books like these to end on an upbeat ‘we can do this’ note. But while I agree with Kemp’s action points so far as they go – spread the word, organise, democratise – they seem weak in the face of his preceding framework. Lootable resources, caged land, monopolizable weapons – most of us are in a worse position today on all these fronts than our hapless forebears in agrarian Goliath states of the past, yet the implications go missing in Kemp’s apparent conviction that citizenries today can overcome our Goliaths in ways our forebears rarely did. Perhaps he does believe in progress after all.

Kemp has little to say in this last part of the book about contemporary food production, unlike his historical sections where he discusses cereals and the rise of the grain state at length. The main exception is a worrying wobble into ecomodernist territory with a remark about buttressing the chemical synthesis of food to safeguard the future (p.412).

Likewise, his quite reasonable critique of the idea of personal carbon footprints and collective human responsibility for climate change veers into problematic ‘green transition’ territory – it’s all the fault of those fossil fuel companies who are stopping us from switching to less damaging forms of energy. Yes, those companies have played a malignant role, but it’s not as if they’re drug pushers getting societies hooked on stuff they could do without. Kemp of all people should understand what a terrible mess our Goliaths have got us into in relation to lootable resources, caged territory and monopolizable weapons when it comes to the contemporary energy system and global geopolitics. If people manage to exit from this morass, the result will look more like Scott’s Zomia (the upland southeast Asian zone where people escaped from lowland grain states). There will be shatter zones of petty cultivators rather than some stabilised, egalitarian and low-carbon version of contemporary capitalist society.

Unfortunately, few of us have a Zomia to head for nowadays – not even in Zomia. It’s a lot harder now than it used to be to escape Goliaths by voting with our feet and physically moving out of their range. Hence the need, I think, to consider how we can escape Goliaths without moving, or at least without moving much – something I discussed in my book Finding Lights in a Dark Age and that we’ve discussed on this site in relation to creating refugia. This is a theme I’d like to explore further.

Kemp makes an excellent historical point concerning the Black Death that we can learn from in this respect (p.251). People sometimes say that the Black Death empowered ordinary people (those ‘ordinary people’ again!), paving the way for greater commerce and prosperity. As Kemp rightly points out, this was true in northwest Europe where there was a pre-existing development of guilds, village communities, fraternities and groups for managing the commons. It wasn’t true in Eastern Europe, where the depopulation caused by the Black Death prompted aristocracies to clamp down further on peasant cultivators and their labour in the absence of such developments.

So, in relation to present and future collapse, I believe there’s a lot to be said for building contemporary equivalents of guilds, village communities, fraternities and groups for managing the commons. The point, though, is that these are methods for producing and managing tangible local resources among small communities of people who are oriented to their own livelihood-making and acutely aware of the need to keep local Goliaths in their box. That’s a different proposition to expecting the modern state – scion of past Goliaths that Kemp spends so many pages aptly skewering – to come good after a bit of democratic agitation.

All that said, let me end by returning to the positives. Goliath’s Curse is a fine book which is great to think with, and I have no doubt that its scepticism toward power and progress will help concentrate people’s minds in the right direction. Goliath, Kemp tells us, is still Goliath. Albeit nowadays he’s clothed in modern democratic welfarism, he is not your friend. All I’d add is that we need to keep an eye on David too.

Current reading

James Scott The Art of Not Being Governed

Kathleen Jamie Sightlines

W.H. Hudson A Shepherd’s Life

Octavia Butler Parable of the Talents

Timothy May The Mongol Empire