Ebook: Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History

This book makes some very ambitious claims but I did not feel that it lived up to them. For a simple and obvious example, the subtitled claim to provide a "conceptual framework for interpreting recorded human history (I have to laugh at the word "recorded" in that claim - as if it is somehow tempering its ambition by excluding UNrecorded human history) is not fulfilled, as the book concentrates almost exclusively on Western societies, thereby omitting quite a bit of human history and leaving open the question of how well the framework would hold up with respect to other societies.

Secondly, I found their typology of societies - (1) limited access orders consisting of fragile, basic and mature natural states, and (2) an open access order - to have much less value than the authors claim. Those states are described briefly and in very general ways and the borders between them are sketchy and imprecise. One or at most a handful of examples is provided for each, leaving me to wonder how the typology would hold up if applied to a bigger sample.

Third, their presentation of whay they mean by an "open access order" had a "one size fits all" description that vastly oversimplifies: extend the franchise and liberalize the ability to form corporations and you have an open access order. See page 240: "By the early 1850's, open access to political and economic organizations had been institutionalized in the United States." Hello? Slavery? Native Americans? Female suffrage? This is an example of the book's frequent and considerable overstatements.

It also illustrates an aspect of the book that perplexes me, namely the incessant use of categorical statements. The book is replete with them, and it is implausible that they are all completely true as applied to "human history". But the authors make no effort to shade, qualify, temper or provide a lot of backup for such assertions. For me, at least, it cost them some credibility; also, it slows the reading down as one tends to stop and say "wait a minute" when one comes across an implausibly categorical statement.

Finally, I did not find it to be the paradigm shift that others see it to be. The notions of seeing societies as made up of shifting coalitions of elites, of managing violence as a primary problem for any society, of creating and distributing economic rents as a primary tool of managing order, of personal relations shifting to impersonal relations as the society matures and expands, candidly just did not strike me as THAT novel.

There are certainly many insights in this book, and I actually agree with more of it than this review might imply. I simply think it does not come close to measuring up to its ambitious claims.