A pluralism of limited tools and of convivial commonweals would of necessary encourage a diversity of life styles.
I was trying to think of examples of convivial pasts and a few options seemed to rhyme in my mind. More intuitively than rigorously, just so I set the right expectations, ha:
- Ancient Greek city states
- Renaissance Italian city states
- American colonial period
These examples have a few things in common:
- Divergent competition among relatively equal polities. By “divergent” I mean that city states or American states occupied distinct social, political, economic, and technological niches and lived a “diversity of life styles”. Athens pursued a maritime-commercial-federated strategy while Sparta pursued a different strategy based on its own specific strengths, weaknesses, idiosyncrasies. Florence was built around textiles and banking, Milan around its military and scale, Genoa and Venice around their maritime empires, etc. The same could be said about Massachusetts vs Rhode Island vs Virginia vs South Carolina in the American colonial period.
- Democratic emergence. These periods correspond to the formation of democracies; Athens, Venice, Florence, American constitutionalism at both the state and federal levels etc.
- All three of these periods produced some kind of federation / proto-federation with the Delian League, the Treaty of Lodi, and Articles of Confederation, respectively. Once “consolidation” into a greater organizational structure occurs, ruinous competition was reduced, while interstate collaboration continues.
- In each of these periods no one polity could consume the others, enough individual actors existed that some coalition would emerge to prevent some kind forced consolidation by a single polity. Each federation emerged out of mutual defense pacts.