Violence and Social Orders is not a good book formally, in that its sometimes intensely detailed micro-level history on matters such as English land law mixes uneasily with its sweeping macro-level perspective, announced in the subtitle: "A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History." (I deeply empathize with the problem, having tried unsuccessfully to write a book on political ideology that blended narrative historical sweep, case studies, and modeling.) It is a good one substantively, though. The account it gives of the transition from the elite bargains of traditional or "natural" states to a more open order of perpetual organizations and widespread competition is a worthwhile contribution to the Adam Smith-Charles Tilly-Francis Fukuyama tradition.
I have an issue, though. The open access order we live in feels to me not like the end of history but like a yet more mature natural state, with all the segmented, bargaining elites--academic, religious, military, financial, manufacturing, etc.--of the old order mitigated by greater impersonality and access, but still very much present. There are a lot of different 1 percents (or .01 percents), but the world we live in is very much a world of elites and others.
Maybe that is not something to be grumpy about. But maybe it is...[to be continued]
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