Carl Sagan is not usually remembered as a political prophet, except possibly in warning of the dangers of nuclear war and drug criminalization. But his inquiry questioned any nation’s “set of forbidden possibilities, which its citizenry and adherents must not at any cost be permitted to think seriously about” (such as “capitalism, God, and the surrender of national sovereignty” in the USSR or “socialism, atheism, and the surrender of national sovereignty” in the USA). He observed that prior to the decline of Hellenistic
Sagan was not a radical leftist, although his feminist wife and coauthor Ann Druyan and his New Leftist friend Saul Landau were. (In a sign of the up-in-the-air alliances of the times, Landau contributed to
He took note that the flowering of inquisitive, tolerant values in ancient Greece and Renaissance Holland grew from their trade economies. As his muse Bertrand Russell explained: “The relation of buyer and seller is one of negotiation between two parties who are both free; it is most profitable when the buyer or seller is able to understand the point of view of the other party. There is, of course, imperialistic commerce, where men are forced to buy at the point of the sword; but this is not the kind that generates Liberal philosophies, which have flourished best in trading cities that have wealth without much military strength.”
Sagan’s antidote for the existential crises of nuclear war and environmental damage was not consensus reasonable-centrism — he was apprehensive of The End of History‘s triumphalist prediction “that political life on Earth is about to settle into some rock-stable liberal democratic world government” — but the widest possible experimentation. He hoped that functional stateless societies depicted in science fiction — Robert Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, with its “useful suggestions … for making a revolution in a computerized technological society;” and Eric Frank Russell’s “conceivable alternative economic systems or the great efficiency of a unified passive resistance to an occupying power” in The Great Explosion — would set an example for “the beginning, much more than the end, of history.”