The Darker Angels of Our Nature: Refuting the Pinker Theory of History & Violence

417 Pages·2021·32.103 MB·English

by  Philip Dwyer (editor), Mark Micale (editor)

The Darker Angels
of Our Nature

The Darker Angels
of Our Nature
Refuting the Pinker Theory
of History & Violence
Edited by
Philip Dwyer and Mark Micale
BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC
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First published in Great Britain 2022
Copyright © Philip Dwyer and Mark Micale, 2022
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Angel of Death statue, Wroclaw, Poland. A monument to the victims of the
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Dwyer, Philip G., editor. | Micale, Mark S., 1957- editor.
Title: The darker angels of our nature: refuting the Pinker theory of history & violence /
edited by Philip Dwyer and Mark Micale.
Description: London; New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021. | Includes
bibliographical references and index. |
Identifiers: LCCN 2021000369 (print) | LCCN 2021000370 (ebook) |
ISBN 9781350140608 (hardback) | ISBN 9781350140592 (paperback) |
ISBN 9781350140615 (epub) | ISBN 9781350140622 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Pinker, Steven, 1954- Better angels of our nature. | Violence–History. |
Violence–Historiography. | Violence–Psychology.
Classification: LCC HM1116 .D385 2021 (print) | LCC HM1116 (ebook) |
DDC 303.609–dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021000369
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021000370
ISBN: HB: 978-1-3501-4060-8
PB: 978-1-3501-4059-2
ePDF: 978-1-3501-4062-2
eBook: 978-1-3501-4061-5
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CONTENTS
List of illustrations viii
List of contributors ix
Preface xiv
1 Steven Pinker and the nature of violence in history
Philip Dwyer and Mark S. Micale 1
PART ONE Interpretations
21
2 The inner demons of The Better Angels of Our Nature
Daniel Lord Smail 23
3 Pinker and the use and abuse of statistics in writing
the history of violence
Dag Lindström 39
4 Progress and its contradictions: Human rights,
inequality and violence
Eric D. Weitz 57
5 Pinker’s technocratic neoliberalism, and why it matters
David A. Bell 73
6 Steven Pinker, Norbert Elias and The Civilizing Process
Philip Dwyer and Elizabeth Roberts-Pedersen 87
PART TWO Periods
105
7 Steven Pinker’s ‘prehistoric anarchy’: A bioarchaeological
critique
Linda Fibiger 107
vi CONTENTS
8 Getting medieval on Steven Pinker: Violence and medieval
England
Sara M. Butler 125
9 History, violence and the Enlightenment
Philip Dwyer 142
PART THREE Places
161
10 The complexity of history: Russia and Steven Pinker’s thesis
Nancy Shields Kollmann 163
11 A necrology of angels: Violence in Japanese history as a
lens of critique
Michael Wert 176
12 British imperial violence and the Middle East
Caroline Elkins 197
PART FOUR Themes
219
13 A history of violence and indigeneity: Pinker and the
Native Americas
Matthew Restall 221
14 The rise and rise of sexual violence
Joanna Bourke 236
15 Where angels fear to tread: Racialized policing,
mass incarceration and executions as state
violence in the post–civil rights era
Robert T. Chase 252
16 The better angels of which nature?: Violence and
environmental history in the modern world
Corey Ross 273
17 On cool reason and hot-blooded impulses:
Violence and the history of emotion
Susan K. Morrissey 293
CONTENTS vii
PART FIVE Coda 315
18 Pinker and contemporary historical consciousness
Mark S. Micale 317
Bibliography 337
Index 374
ILLUSTRATION
10.1 Russia’s first ‘spectacle of execution’: ‘The execution of
musketeers, Moscow 1698’, published in Johann-Georg
Korb, Diarium itineris in Moscoviam (Vienna, 1700).
Library of the Hoover Institution, Stanford, CA 171
CONTRIBUTORS
David A. Bell is a historian of early modern France, with a particular interest
in the political culture of the Old Regime and the French Revolution.
From 1990 to 1996, he taught at Yale, and from 1996 to 2010 at Johns
Hopkins, where he held the Andrew W. Mellon chair in the Humanities, and
served as Dean of Faculty in the School of Arts and Sciences. He joined the
Princeton faculty in 2010. He has been the recipient of fellowships from the
Guggenheim Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies and
the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. He is the author
of six books, including Lawyers and Citizens (Oxford, 1994), The Cult
of the Nation in France (Harvard, 2001), The First Total War (Houghton
Mifflin, 2007) and Rethinking the Age of Revolutions: France and the Birth
of the Modern World, with Yair Mintzker (Oxford, 2018). His latest book is
Men on Horseback: Charisma and Power in the Age of Revolutions (Farrar,
Straus, Giroux, 2020).
Joanna Bourke is Professor of History at Birkbeck, University of London,
and a Fellow of the British Academy. She is also the Global Innovation Chair
at the University of Newcastle (Australia, 2017–21). She is the principal
investigator on a five-year Wellcome Trust-funded project entitled ‘SHaME’
(Sexual Harms and Medical Encounters). She is the prize-winning author
of thirteen books, as well as over 100 articles in academic journals. She is a
frequent contributor to TV and radio shows, and a regular correspondent for
newspapers. She has published The Story of Pain: From Prayer to Painkillers
(Oxford, 2014), and Wounding the World: How Military Violence and War-
Play Are Invading Our Lives (Virago, 2014).
Sara M. Butler is King George III Professor in British History at the Ohio
State University. She is the author of three books: The Language of Abuse:
Marital Violence in Later Medieval England (Brill, 2007), Divorce in Medieval
England: From One to Two Persons in Law (Routledge, 2013) and Forensic
Medicine and Death Investigation in Medieval England (Routledge, 2015).
She has also written on a variety of other subjects such as abortion, infanticide,
juries of matrons, regulation of the medical profession and suicide.
Robert T. Chase is Associate Professor of History at Stony Brook University,
State University of New York (SUNY). He is the author of We Are Not