War: What is it good for? Read Online Free

Richardson’s and more ambitious, extending back to 1500 and forward beyond 2000. Like all academic industries, this one is full of controversy, and even in the best-documented war in history, the American-led occupation of Afghanistan since 2001, there are multiple ways of counting how many people have died. But despite all these issues, Richardson’s core findings remain intact. As the world’s population has grown, the number of people being killed has not been able to keep up. The result: the likelihood that any one of us will die violently has fallen by an order of magnitude.
    The new intellectual edifice got its capstone in 2006 with the publication of Azar Gat’s monumental War in Human Civilization . Drawing on an astonishing range of academic fields (and, presumably, on his own experience as a major in the Israel Defense Forces), Gat pulled the new arguments together into a single, compelling story of how humanity had tamed its own violence across thousands of years. No one can nowadays think seriously about war without engaging with Gat’s ideas, and anyone who has read his book will see its influence on every page of mine.
    Thinking on war has gone through an intellectual sea change. Just ageneration ago, the decline-in-violence hypothesis was still the wild speculation of an aging sociologist, not even worth mentioning to schoolchildren baffled by Shakespeare. And it still has its opponents: in 2010, for instance, Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá’s book Sex at Dawn, strenuously denying that early human societies were violent, became a bestseller; in 2012, after several years of making similar arguments in the pages of Scientific American magazine, John Horgan pulled them together in his book The End of War; and in 2013, the anthropologist Douglas Fry assembled essays by thirty-one academics in his volume War, Peace, and Human Nature questioning whether rates of violent death really have fallen across the long term. But though all of these books are interesting, full of information, and well worth reading, all seem to me (as will become clear in the chapters that follow) to use the evidence rather selectively, and all have been overtaken by a tidal wave of broader studies reinforcing the key insights of Elias, Keeley, Richardson, and Gat. While I was writing the first version of this introduction, not one but two major works on the decline in violence appeared in the space of a single month: the political scientist Joshua Goldstein’s Winning the War on War and the psychologist Steven Pinker’s Better Angels of Our Nature . A year later, the Pulitzer Prize-winning geographer Jared Diamond devoted the longest section of his book The World Until Yesterday to the same point. Arguments continue to rage, but on the basic issue, that rates of violent death really have declined, there is growing agreement.
    Until, that is, we ask why violence declined.
    War Makes the State, and the State Makes Peace
    On this question, the divisions are deep, heated, and very, very old. They go back, in fact, to the 1640s, a time when hardly anyone thought there was a decline in violence to explain. The very bloodiness of this decade in Europe and Asia was in fact what prompted the philosopher Thomas Hobbes to put the key question on the table. Hobbes had fled England for Paris when it became clear that his homeland was descending into civil war, and the subsequent slaughter of a hundred thousand of his countrymen convinced him of one big thing: that left to their own devices, people will stop at nothing—including violence—to get what they want.
    If so many had died when England’s central government collapsed, Hobbes asked himself, how much worse must things have been in prehistorictimes, before humans had even invented government? He answered the question in Leviathan, one of the classics of political philosophy.
    Before the invention of government, Hobbes reasoned, life must have been a