Perlman’s best known work, first published in 1983, a vast study of the rise of totalitarian lifestyles and a profound affirmation of the struggle to reassert human values. One of the most significant and influential anarchic texts of the last few decades. How Civilisation encroached on free peoples. On every continent scribes, traders and kings promoted division of labor, professional armies, social discipline, nationalist, ethnic and class fervour.