Human History as an Evolution of Strategic Equilibria

This paper presents a theoretical synthesis interpreting human history as an evolution of strategic equilibria. Drawing on established results from game theory, institutional economics, political economy, and cultural evolution, it argues that major social institutions—such as states, laws, religions, and governance systems—can be consistently understood as equilibrium-fixing mechanisms arising from strategic interaction under constraints. Rather than proposing a new normative framework or predictive model, the paper integrates existing literature to offer a high-level structural interpretation of historical development. Institutions are analyzed not primarily as moral or ideological constructs, but as mechanisms that stabilize cooperation, suppress profitable deviation, and resolve collective action problems in repeated and large-scale games. The paper further discusses how digitalization and AI-driven optimization make these equilibrium dynamics increasingly explicit in contemporary governance, while emphasizing that ethical, democratic, and humanistic values function as exogenous constraints rather than intrinsic components of economic or game-theoretic rationality. The contribution lies in theoretical integration: providing a unified conceptual framework for understanding long-run social and institutional evolution without asserting historical determinism or normative prescription.