War and Peace and War

416 pages

English language

Published Feb. 27, 2007 by Plume.

ISBN:: 978-0-452-28819-5
OCLC Number:: 85252994

(1 review)

Like Jared Diamond in Guns, Germs, and Steel, Peter Turchin in War and Peace and War uses his expertise in evolutionary biology to make a highly original argument about the rise and fall of empires. Turchin argues that the key to the formation of an empire is a society's capacity for collective action. He demonstrates that high levels of cooperation are found where people have to band together to fight off a common enemy, and that this kind of cooperation led to the formation of the Roman and Russian empires, and the United States. But as empires grow, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, conflict replaces cooperation, and dissolution inevitably follows. Eloquently argued and rich with historical examples, War and Peace and War offers a bold new theory about the course of world history.

4 editions

Jeff McNeill reviewed War and Peace and War by Peter Turchin

Review of 'War and Peace and War' on 'Goodreads'

5 stars

Excellent, excellent explanation and account of how history works (at least the agrarian societies). Quite a number of insights. The only letdown is in using obscure neologisms instead of coining more memorable terms. The concept of the frontier, "asabiya" (the degree to which a society can cooperate), and showing how a frontier can increase or decrease this element, as well as how classical economic theory cannot account for cooperation whatsoever. Secular cycles of rise and decline and father-son cycles of war and peace all account quite readily for much of history, amazingly enough. The well discussed point of modern empires being China, the US, and the EU are quite relevant. The real punch is when dealing with how the rich get richer and the poor get poorer in agrarian societies and how it is based on inheritance and population growth. Inequality perpetuates and is occasionally reset (when the elite are …

Excellent, excellent explanation and account of how history works (at least the agrarian societies). Quite a number of insights. The only letdown is in using obscure neologisms instead of coining more memorable terms. The concept of the frontier, "asabiya" (the degree to which a society can cooperate), and showing how a frontier can increase or decrease this element, as well as how classical economic theory cannot account for cooperation whatsoever. Secular cycles of rise and decline and father-son cycles of war and peace all account quite readily for much of history, amazingly enough. The well discussed point of modern empires being China, the US, and the EU are quite relevant. The real punch is when dealing with how the rich get richer and the poor get poorer in agrarian societies and how it is based on inheritance and population growth. Inequality perpetuates and is occasionally reset (when the elite are decimated in one way or another). The most sobering element of this work is how we are now in an elite/anti-elite clash that has to play out as the government itself has become more incapable of corrective action due to the clash (the levers of government are rendered inoperable through the clash itself). Trump is a unique symptom and set of circumstances, but the underlying mechanism is there to be clearly perceived and understood for those who would read this excellent work.