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War and Peace and War: The Life Cycles of…
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War and Peace and War: The Life Cycles of Imperial Nations (edição 2005)

por Peter Turchin

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In War and Peace and War, Peter Turchin uses his expertise in evolutionary biology to offer a bold new theory about the course of world history.  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 with implications for nations today. … (mais)
Membro:kevinmwoods
Título:War and Peace and War: The Life Cycles of Imperial Nations
Autores:Peter Turchin
Informação:Pi Press (2005), Edition: First Edition, Hardcover, 416 pages
Coleções:A sua biblioteca
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Etiquetas:political science, strategy, policy, adaptation

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War and Peace and War: The Rise and Fall of Empires por Peter Turchin

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The primary argument of the book is that powerful states arise on frontiers between different cultures or civilisations because frontiers are environments with pressures that force and select for communities that cooperate strongly in self-defence and expansion. One chapter seeks to bolster this theory by reviewing group-selection theory from evolutionary biology. This group-selection argument fails: Turchin actually skips over without explaining how a pro-social mentality can out-compete an egoistic mentality within a group. Steven Pinker lays out in this article what is wrong with group-selectionism: https://www.edge.org/conversation/the-false-allure-of-group-selection. Even more relevant to this book, Pinker in that article attacks the idea that powerful societies are more cooperative, suggesting that they are usually in fact just more able to control and indoctrinate people into fighting on behalf of the ruling elite. Turchin may be right about frontiers producing powerful states, but he does not really delve as deeply as he might into the historical processes that promote state formation, relying on very general, mostly primary source histories. For this, readers will have to get stuck into the history of particular states.

His secondary theory, essentially a Malthusian model of the oscillation of economic prosperity and collapse, is very interesting especially in the way he shows the opposite trends among the lower and upper classes. Again, however, the evidence adduced for the political impact of these trends is very general and under-analysed. History is complex and more argument is needed to clearly link these trends with political events. Perhaps though these weaknesses are inherent to the project of detecting deep causal trends below the multitudinous personalities and events of history. ( )
  fji65hj7 | May 14, 2023 |
In a nut shell Turchin asserts that fault line frontiers (areas of conflict and challenge) are necessary for the development of empires, and he does a good job of providing many convincing examples. This development is based on the concept of asabiya and provides a truly inspiring line of argument. I found this book well written and thought provoking. I found the notion of multi-ethnic frontiers being a stimulus to development and societal cohesion quite convincing. I also found his analysis of the cyclical nature of prosperity and collapse being inversely related to wealth distribution fascinating.

I have read criticisms that the exclusion of the British empire as a major focus in his analysis somehow negates the thesis, evidently because Great Britain managed to be a large and powerful empire without hard boarders. I tend to believe that Britain (as well as Japan) meet his criteria simply by being cohesive island nations interacting with the outside world.. Both the East India company's exploits and commodore Perry's forceful "opening up" of Japan speak to the conflicts envisioned as necessary for imperial development..

A compelling and thought provoking read. ( )
  skid0612 | Dec 8, 2021 |
Yet another Big History book, this one really pulled out in front of the pack for me and I think it's the best one I've read so far.

First, there's no better way to make me smile than with a reference to psychohistory, from my favorite sci-fi series of all time - Turchin compares his goal of scientifying history to Asimov's famous literary conceit right there at the very beginning of the Introduction. Turchin is serious about it though, offering a semi-mathematical framework for historical analysis he calls cliodynamics, which borrows methodologically from statistical mechanics and nonlinear dynamics. In English, that means he models the rise and fall of empires using equations that treat people as groups, and also account for chaotic behavior as well. This means that there's some population genetics lurking in the background as well. There is not actually any math in this book, however; this was a prose exposition of the equations that are all in his earlier Historical Dynamics, which I haven't read. There's still plenty of rigor, though, as he subscribes fully to Paul Krugman's sentiment that "The equations and diagrams of formal economics are, more often than not, no more than the scaffolding used to help construct an intellectual edifice. Once that edifice has been built to a certain point, the scaffolding can be stripped away, leaving only plain English behind."

He starts out by asking how empires form, which he calls "imperiogenesis". The list of empires/countries/peoples discussed extensively include Russia, America, Germans, Arabs, England, France, Austria-Hungary, and of course the good old Roman Empire. He doesn't include exhaustive histories of each one, just enough to make his points and tie them back to the larger argument. I would have liked more detail on the non-European empires like Persia, China, the various Indian empires, or anything in the Western Hemisphere, but I think those would only bolster his thesis. He finds that empires typically arise on what he calls a "metaethnic frontier", in other words a boundary between two relatively different cultures (cf. the "us vs them" struggles in Samuel Huntington's Clash of Civilizations). Thus the medieval Rus, ancestors of today's Russians, found themselves assimilating other nearby tribes in a desperate effort to fend off endless raids from the Mongols, and this gradual accretion of similar proto-Russian co-ethnics gradually built the kind of egalitarian, tightly-knit society that was capable of conquering the vast steppes of Siberia. In essence the Rus as a society unconsciously "learned" the social traits - trust, intra-group fairness, self-sacrifice for the group - that it took to be a successful empire, and other groups that didn't or couldn't develop those traits got swallowed up or annihilated. This is similar to how the Romans fought off the Gauls, Phoenicians, etc by gradually assimilating similar tribes like that Samnites and so on. He calls this level of collective solidarity "asabiya" after Ibn Khaldun's usage of the term in his Muqaddimah, his own attempt at a universal history, and ties it into Alexis de Tocqueville's and Robert Putnam's ideas of social capital.

Every good theory of how empires rise should also be able to explain how empires fall, and his asabiya concept seems to do a decent job of explaining "imperiopathosis" as well. Asabiya is the glue of peoples, both a measure of general social capital and trust, and the thing that makes your average dude (it's mostly guys) willing to die in some wasteland hundreds or thousands of miles away from home in order to promote the greater good. He backs this up by bringing in some game theoretic/group selectionist discussion of how societies need a critical mass of moralists and institutions to discourage free-riders and cheaters, which encourages solidarity. Something that Turchin finds over and over again in history is that incredibly successful civilizations, after having built their empires, seem to be inherently unstable and prone to decay through loss of asabiya. While this sounds as unscientific as élan vital, it can actually be quantified in some ways. Basically, in a mature empire that no longer feels compelled to expand, the number of elites starts to slowly increase, both due to lower chances of dying in wars and due to the higher reproductive rate that being rich in an agricultural society allows for. Slowly, they shift from being leaders in society to being rent-seekers, and eventually they take so much of the pie that people aren't willing to trust in the civic institutions previous generations built. Eventually, a more vigorous society on the border gets its act together (in the case of the Romans, the Germans; for the Byzantines, the Arabs), and displaces the decadence that might still be numerically and technologically superior, but can't muster the will to resist. "Paraphrasing Arnold Toynbee, great empires die not by murder, but by suicide."

So asabiya can be generated through struggles and trials that bind people to each other, and it can be lost through the lack of the same unifying pressures. The differing fates of north and south Italy are discussed towards the end of the book, why north Italy, while fairly rich, still has a social capital deficit compared to countries like France or Germany, while low-trust south Italy is an "asabiya black hole", as demonstrated by the presence of groups like the Mafia. This is reflected in the very interesting fact that Italy doesn't have large public companies like other first-world nations: "The largest Italian company, Fiat, is still family owned. The typical successful Italian company is a family-owned business with perhaps a hundred employees in Milan or Bologna. They occupy a variety of niches from fashion to high-precision machinery, and they are extremely successful at what they do. But they cannot break into certain international markets because they lack the advantage of size. And they cannot grow to a large size, because the Italians, even northern ones, can cooperate only in medium-sized groups. Is this why northern Italians historically could not get beyond medium-sized states?" Religion has an interesting place in Turchin's book; while religious disputes are not necessarily meaningful in and of themselves, they're another way that groups of people use to mark "us" from "them". After reading Diarmaid MacCullough's Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years, with its endless tales of violent disputes over completely arbitrary doctrinal issues like the filioque clause or if icons are kosher or whether to make the sign of the cross with two fingers or three, this seems very true to me.

Turchin's ideas also interact pleasingly with a number of other Big History books I've read semi-recently. In no particular order/rhyme/reason:
- He's a little dismissive of Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, & Steel, saying that while the geographical determinism line of argument can explain trans-hemispherical imperial triumphs, it doesn't do a good job in the vastly more common cases where neighboring tribes with similar resources attack each other, like the Rus vs the Tatars or the French vs the English. This is true - Diamond might be able to explain the ultimate outcome, but how would that explain, for example, the asabiya-induced paralysis and chaos of the Incans after Atahualpa was captured?
- He doesn't engage much with Joseph Tainter's The Collapse of Complex Societies, which is a shame, because I still think that Tainter's (admittedly somewhat simplistic) ideas about the decreasing marginal returns on civilizational complexity are un-ignorable. Tainter is more resource-deterministic than Turchin, who allows more for human initiative in the way that societies can "choose" to lose internal cohesion by becoming more inward-focused, but I would bet that there's still something to Tainter's idea that there's a certain optimal size for societies given the resources available to them.
- I think Acemoglu and Robinson should have cited this book in their Why Nations Fail, because there's a lot of overlap between A&R's ideas about extractive vs inclusive institutions and what Turchin has to say about how institutions can shift between the two poles due to external pressures or the lack of them. Republican Rome was much more inclusive for the average pleb during the parts of its history where it was under threat, lost inclusion for a long period during things like the Gracchi brothers' reform attempts, and then became more inclusive again after enough elites killed each other during the Julius Caesar drama to stabilize the empire. A&R don't have a good account for how dynamic movement along the inclusive/extractive scale can be, and Turchin's asabiya measure seems to include that.
- Brian Fagan's The Long Summer talked about how the migrations of primitive humans (and therefore possible tribal conflicts) were driven in part by climate shifts that alternately opened up new lands and closed off old ones. Turchin showed that climate shifts didn't have much to do with the medieval French-English wars specifically, but it would be neat to see more quantification, and if there's a climate shift threshold over which a tribe could ascend to a higher (or maybe lower) level of asabiya in its need to find new lands and resources. Given that, per Tainter, the Mayans might have succumbed to environmental changes, it's reasonable to think that climate might be an input into asabiya. Climate change in our own day might have significant effects on political stability as well.
- Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature talked a lot about changes in violence. I wonder if you could correlate intra-society violence to asabiya shifts. For example, the US right after WW2 was infamously homogenous and group-centered, with low levels of crime. This changed after the Sixties, and I don't think anyone would argue that there hasn't been a relative drop in the nebulous feeling that we're one big society of Americans. Is crime a good proxy for asabiya (e.g. the Northeast is rich and low-crime relative to the South, does that mean anything?), and does the recent relative drop in violent crime rates mean the US is getting stronger asabiya-wise?
- Relatedly, I've read a lot of good books on inequality recently, like Timothy Noah's The Great Divergence. The parallels between pre-Revolutionary France or ancient Rome to the modern US in terms of the power of the wealthy are numerous and disturbing, although of course only valid up to a point. Still, how would a conservative (or a liberal, for that matter) apply the implications of this book to our current economic condition? Is rising inequality destroying Americans' ability to cooperate with each other?

Overall this is a really interesting book, a definite Big History champion, and is also full of great factoids. I'll close with a fascinating quote from where he talks about how medieval societies like England tried to control elite overpopulation: "Lorcin found that in commoner families males outnumbered females by 13 percent. This pattern is just what we expect in a pre-industrial society where a substantial proportion of women died in childbirth. In noble families, however, the pattern was reversed—there were only 85 males per 100 females. In other words, there were 28 percent fewer noble males than we would expect if their mortality patterns were the same as commoners... The wills studied by Lorcin allowed her to calculate that during the second half of the fourteenth century and the first half of the fifteenth, the proportions of noble girls becoming nuns were 40 and 30 percent, respectively. Only in the second half of the fifteenth century did this proportion decline to 14 percent."

Okay, one more: "Destruction of the great fortunes continued under the Tudors, who had it in for their over-rich and over-mighty subjects. The first two Tudors, Henry VII and Henry VIII, employed judicial murder with great effect, systematically exterminating all potential claimants to the English throne, who also happened to be among the richest landowners. Elizabeth I crafted a gentler method—a kind of “progressive taxation” scheme. When one of her subjects became too wealthy, she invited herself to his castle along with her whole court. After some weeks of dining and wining the queen and hundreds of her followers, the unfortunate host was financially ruined for many years to come, and was too busy paying off his debts to contemplate rebellion." ( )
  aaronarnold | May 11, 2021 |
This is a compelling read on world history, with some interesting views. Turchin develops his own theories on the rise and fall of empires, especially in the pre-modern period: empires always developed in places near a border with another group or a state that was perceived as fundamentally different and threatening, and their strength corresponded with their internal social cohesion.
This are not completely original views, as he concedes, but he intertwines them and elaborates on them in his own way. Finally, he also very much pleads for the use of theoretical models in the study of history, along his own 'Cliodynamic'-approach, that is founded on quantitative data. Very interesting, and very worthwile, but also tricky, if you ask me. See my more elaborate review on this book in my Sense-of-History-account on Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2492457974.
  bookomaniac | Dec 23, 2018 |
The primary argument of the book is that powerful states arise on frontiers between different cultures or civilisations because frontiers are environments with pressures that force and select for communities that cooperate strongly in self-defence and expansion. One chapter seeks to bolster this theory by reviewing group-selection theory from evolutionary biology. This group-selection argument fails: Turchin actually skips over without explaining how a pro-social mentality can out-compete an egoistic mentality within a group. Steven Pinker lays out in this article what is wrong with group-selectionism: https://www.edge.org/conversation/the-false-allure-of-group-selection. Even more relevant to this book, Pinker in that article attacks the idea that powerful societies are more cooperative, suggesting that they are usually in fact just more able to control and indoctrinate people into fighting on behalf of the ruling elite. Turchin may be right about frontiers producing powerful states, but he does not really delve as deeply as he might into the historical processes that promote state formation, relying on very general, mostly primary source histories. For this, readers will have to get stuck into the history of particular states.

His secondary theory, essentially a Malthusian model of the oscillation of economic prosperity and collapse, is very interesting especially in the way he shows the opposite trends among the lower and upper classes. Again, however, the evidence adduced for the political impact of these trends is very general and under-analysed. History is complex and more argument is needed to clearly link these trends with political events. Perhaps though these weaknesses are inherent to the project of detecting deep causal trends below the multitudinous personalities and events of history. ( )
  wa233 | Jul 11, 2017 |
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In War and Peace and War, Peter Turchin uses his expertise in evolutionary biology to offer a bold new theory about the course of world history.  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 with implications for nations today. 

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