George Monbiot admits that as of 2003 he and the Global Justice Movement to which he belongs and to whom this book is addressed have misdiagnosed the cause of the current global sickness and consequently have offered the wrong prescriptions (p. 2). The problem which needs to be confronted, he says, is not economic globalization but the lack of democratic political globalization.

Humanity on a Tightrope: Thoughts on Empathy, Family, and Big Changes for a Viable Future, written by biologist and environmentalist Paul Ehrlich and psychologist Robert Ornstein, is a short book about the need to expand our sense of empathy and in-group identification to all of humanity. Unlike virtually all contemporary books on sociopolitical and environmental topics, it explicitly discusses global government.

Strobe Talbott, president of the Brookings Institute, provides us an excellent overview of human political history enriched by personal experiences and comments, all organized to show how humanity is slowly but surely creating ever larger political units to the point where now the next step is a creation of a global nation, a politically unified community that encompasses the whole Earth. Talbott gave us his general viewpoint in his 1992 article in TIME when he said, "I'll bet that within the next hundred years . . .