The Federalist Papers Project

Homo Sapiens is the only species which has ever written a Declaration of Independence. Obviously. It's nowhere near the first foray we have made into unification around common ideals - we've been codifying laws to order our civil interactions throughout societies for millennia. Ancient cultures relied on rigid social hierarchies and strict enforcement of legal standards as the basis upon which to build a stable empire. These weren't necessarily moral and certainly weren't equitable - the strength of a method of social organization relies on individuals' beliefs in its fundamental ideals and their essential identities as members of a group rather than philosophical defensibility. Noah Yuval Harari posits in "Sapiens: A Brief History of Humanity" that the size of pre-agricultural human societies was limited in part by the number of individuals among whom mutual trusting relationships could be maintained. Our ability to form larger collectives as we ha...