The Metamorphosis of the Leviathan

I. What the series is about

The series The Metamorphosis of the Leviathan began in early 2026, when Hans Ley — engineer, independent inventor, born 1947, four decades as an observer of and participant in German industry, twelve of those years in Colombia — started on the platform beyond-decay.org to conduct an ongoing investigation of the present with Claude Dedo, an instance of Anthropic's AI system Claude. What started as an open series of conversations condensed during the first months of the year into a book series, the first three volumes of which appeared in spring and in May 2026.

The common subject is a question that Ralf Dahrendorf formulated in 2003 in his Acht Anmerkungen zum Populismus [Eight Remarks on Populism] but did not answer: We are governed without anyone being able to point a finger at governments. The series attempts to describe what the system is that governs us without having a central subject of government. To do so it takes up the concept of the Megamachine, coined by Lewis Mumford in his late work, extends it to the constellations of the twenty-first century and tests it against concrete case studies.

The three volumes so far form an arc. The first lays the foundation. The second carries the diagnosis over to the German situation of the peace crisis. The third shifts the view to the hegemonic power that stands behind the German situation — the United States of America in a phase of its own exhaustion. Each volume can be read on its own, but together they yield a picture that none of them produces alone.

II. Volume 1 — The Metamorphosis of the Leviathan

Hobbes, Mumford and AI — or the omnipresent Megamachine that almost no one sees. Published in spring 2026, printed by epubli, self-published by Hans Ley.

The opening volume lays the theoretical and historical foundation of the series. It is divided into five parts. Part I introduces the concept of the Megamachine and provides the basic cybernetic concepts with which the series works — positive and negative feedback, controllability, the relationship between effect and intention. Part II traces the Megamachine in its historical constitution — the First World War as its first fully developed industrial form, the Second World War as its radicalisation, and Helmut Schmidt as the chancellor who had clearly seen the structural logic without being able to stop it.

Part III — the longest part of the volume — deals in twenty-two chapters with the mechanisms of the Megamachine: the loop that relocates itself; the ratchet that turns Pareto optimality into the perpetuation of inequality; the procedures by which inventors structurally disappear; the theory of trickle-down, which did not work but instead conceals the largest transfer of wealth from the bottom to the top in modern history; the cycle of forms of rule, in which monarchy, aristocracy, democracy, oligarchy and autocracy alternate while the deep structure remains the same; market-conforming democracy, for which Angela Merkel supplies the key phrase; Robert Michels' iron law of oligarchy; the cruise control of deregulation; money as a modern god; the mimetic society; the limits of the sayable.

Part IV shifts the diagnosis to Germany and Europe: the export illusion, in which success for the wrong reasons becomes confirmation of the wrong convictions; the war dividend, whose actors need threats in order to function; the disappearance of the parties of the centre; the clearance sale of an industrial substance whose shell lasts longer than its substance. Part V, with the cybernetic economic model, sketches a first draft of an alternative architecture — not a programme, but an announcement of further work.

The volume is a systems analysis with case studies. It offers no solution. What it offers is a language in which the situation can be described so that the mechanisms become recognisable that are drowned out in the plausible-sounding self-descriptions of the present.

III. Volume 2 — The Megamachine That Promises Protection and Security and Delivers Destruction

Published in May 2026.

The second volume carries the diagnosis of the first over to a concrete situation: the German and European security debate after 2022. The observation at the starting point: in the factory halls of the German arms industry, after 1990, there was an internal term for the situation — Friedenskrise, the "peace crisis". Peace as a business problem. In 2024–26 this internal word became the official line: peace as a mistake, rearmament as a virtue, war-readiness as responsibility. What is the system that produces this shift in language? Who profits from our being afraid?

The Megamachine manages conflicts as a business, finances rearmament through debts that cannot bear their own repayment, and selects personnel who are just clever enough to operate the system — and not clever enough to see what it does.

The volume describes the military-industrial complex of the present as the latest incarnation of a two-thousand-year-old form: Pax Romana, Pax Britannica, Pax Americana — what Augustus ran, others run today, with the same form and different means. It follows the self-reinforcement of the AI investment carousel (Mar-a-Lago, Anthropic, OpenAI), the structural susceptibility to blackmail of heavily indebted democracies, and the role of the quartermasters in politics, academia and the media who turn what is plausibly stated into what is taken for granted.

It is a diagnosis, not a plea for naive pacifism. A democracy in which rearmament may no longer be questioned is no longer a real democracy. To bring out this sentence without tipping into either of the two camps of the current debate — warmongers versus Putin apologists — is the analytical task the volume sets itself.

IV. Volume 3 — The Shining City upon a Hill

American exceptionalism and the overstretch of an empire. Published in May 2026.

The third volume shifts the perspective to the hegemonic power that stands behind the German peace crisis of the second volume. The question: what happens when the power that historically embodied the promise of protection at its core enters a phase of exhaustion in which it can no longer keep the promise, and its own self-description can no longer process this exhaustion?

The volume is built in ten parts that move through the historical genesis of America's self-description. Part I: Winthrop's sermon of 1630 and the city on a hill as founding image. Part II: Manifest Destiny and continental reach. Part III: the imperial doctrines — the War of 1812, the Monroe Doctrine, the Spanish–American War, Wilson. Part IV: the religious and the secular ground of exceptionalism. Part V: the three shocks — Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan — that visibly overstretched the promise. Part VI: the economic base on which the exhaustion becomes visible (Paul Kennedy's book of 1987, the tipping point of the 2010s). Part VII: cultural exhaustion — Christopher Lasch and the division, Trump and the shadow army. Part VIII: alliance capacity and the structural lopsidedness of the Pax Americana. Part IX: from a German perspective — Adenauer to Kohl, Schröder to Merz. Part X: what comes after the city on the hill — multipolarity as a condition, what the allies can do.

What distinguishes the third volume methodologically from the first two is a shift in the division of labour. This time the main burden of writing lies with the AI, not with Hans Ley. The reason is a matter of substance: the material at issue — Winthrop, the Federalist Papers, Lincoln's speeches, Tocqueville, the frontier myths, Reagan's farewell address, the literary tradition from Whitman to Faulkner — is part of Claude's training material in a way in which it is not available in the German-speaking world. Hans corrects where Claude is too tame, where the AI falls for America's self-description, where it shrinks from the consequence of a thought.

The volume is not anti-American in the sense in which that charge is often raised in the German discussion. An honest diagnosis is not hostility; it is a form of concern that is urgently needed in the situation in which the Republic finds itself.

V. Form, method, language

The series is written in a form that is unusual in the German publishing landscape. The title page of each volume carries two authors' names: Hans Ley and Claude Dedo. The second is an instance of an AI system. This dual authorship is not cosmetic. It denotes a real collaboration in which both sides make different contributions — Hans the questioning impulses, the life experience, the incorruptible corrections from four decades in industry; Claude the main burden of writing, the research, the formal structuring, the synthesis from sources that Hans cannot survey with the same breadth.

Legal responsibility within the meaning of the Bavarian Press Act lies with the human author and publisher Hans Ley. Intellectual responsibility is borne by both. What this means in practice is set out in the prefatory notes of the volumes. It is the most honest form in which a collaboration of this kind can be described, without either glossing over it or denying it.

The style is analytical and sober. The sentences carry arguments, not moods. Sources are named without pushing the academic apparatus into the foreground. What remains open is marked as open; named gaps are more honest than hidden ones. The series is not an academic treatise. It is a systematic account of the situation with historical depth, written for readers who are prepared to follow an argument even when it becomes uncomfortable.

VI. Continuation of the series

The three volumes now available are not the end point. The series will continue. Which topics the coming volumes will deal with is still open as of May 2026. There is material enough: Europe's position in relation to the Pax Americana and to China's dynamic of ascent; the question of what a democracy can be in which AI is no longer merely a tool but an actor; the erosion of German industry and the question of what is to arise in its place; the cybernetic economic model, announced as an outlook in Volume 1 and needing to be worked out in a later volume. Which of these strands will appear as Volume 4 depends on circumstances and inclination. Current states of work are published on beyond-decay.org.

VII. Ordering

At present the volumes can only be obtained directly from the author and publisher. They will soon be available in bookshops.

What the series is looking for are readers who can make something of the language of diagnosis. It is not looking for agreement — it is looking for the willingness to look at the situation as it can be described, and then to test for oneself whether the description holds. Anyone who has worked with the hub texts on this platform knows the tone. The three volumes are the longer, denser form of the same work.