The book begins by recognizing the original meaning of the term “economy” as envisioning the management of sovereign wealth as a household, where resources would always be finite and must therefore be conserved accordingly. It lays out the central premises and arguments for the use of the term “zero-sum thinking,” taking into account the origins of the terms in Anglo-American scholarship during the early decades of Cold War I (1950s–1970s). It stipulates that zero-sum thinking is just as foundational to liberal politico-economic thought as it is to the politico-economic thought of fascist and communist totalitarian regimes (autarky), as well as all the overtly theocratic regimes before them. It organizes the structure of the book into four parts—each part representing given cycles of history determined by various interacting ideologies of sovereign political economy. Each part contains two chapters and each chapter contains three to six subsections, the themes of which tend to repeat in familiar patterns over generations, centuries and millennia.