Galtland Index

Farewell to Westphalia

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Farewell to Westphalia

Farewell to Westphalia is Jarrad Hope and Peter Ludlow’s 2025 book-length case that the Westphalian nation-state is an obsolete governance technology and that cryptographic communities are its emerging successor. Dedicated to Julian Assange and the memory of Hal Finney, it is the most systematic bridge in the corpus between cypherpunk foundations and post-state political theory.

What the Book Argues

The opening move is historical deflation: the Peace of Westphalia (1648) ended the Thirty Years’ War by making what states do internally their own business — and the wars since suggest the form deserves less reverence than it gets.

“Sovereign nation states are human technologies designed to facilitate the peaceful organisation of human beings, solving for their ideological, political and religious differences.”

— Jarrad Hope and Peter Ludlow, Farewell to Westphalia

But a technology invented alongside Pascal’s adding machine need not be the end of history; the book’s stated central idea is that applying blockchain to human governance “will be, by far, its most important application”. The chapters build the case in layers: why nation-states are obsolete and sovereignty questionable (ch. 2); the “Cambrian explosion” of post-state governance experiments (ch. 3); conceptual foundations from the cypherpunks’ privacy and the hacktivists’ transparency (ch. 4); the technical base — immutable records, Byzantine fault tolerance, Satoshi’s solution (ch. 5); smart contracts, oracles, and DAOs as governance tools (ch. 6); corruption as the disease of centralised governance and crypto as its structural cure (ch. 7); whether “Cyberstates” are the answer — territory, recognition, national identity — with a pointed contrast between network states and blockchain communities (ch. 8); exit, exile, and access as the real levers of voluntary order (ch. 9); a post-territorial re-formalisation of sovereignty (ch. 10); the rights and responsibilities of blockchain communities (ch. 11); how such communities collaborate through relational contracts and DAO-mediated treaties (ch. 12); and what happens when they are attacked — PSYOPs, kinetic attacks, and Jason Lowery’s Softwar thesis (ch. 13).

Why It Matters in This Wiki

The book supplies the missing middle between the wiki’s cypherpunk lineage and its political end-state material: where The Sovereign Individual predicts the nation-state’s decline from megapolitical forces, Hope and Ludlow write the engineering and constitutional manual for what replaces it — network states and blockchain communities grounded in exit rather than voice. It extends crypto anarchy from May’s markets to full governance stacks, and its conflict chapter imports Softwar’s power-projection frame into the post-state setting. Its CC BY-SA publication and Assange/Finney dedication place it self-consciously inside the tradition the wiki documents.

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