Why read War and Peace and War?

Book cover of War and Peace and War: The Rise and Fall of Empires

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From the author of End Times

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.…

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Why read it?

1 author picked War and Peace and War as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Harvey Whitehouse

Author

How and why have societies grown in size and complexity since the advent of farming? The tragic answer to this question lies partly in the evolution of a very specific kind of cooperation: warfare. Turchin presents a theory of how warfare increased the scale of cooperation over the course of world history but also sows seeds of conflict between the haves and the have-nots, stoking internecine conflict and dissolution.

Turchin’s ideas have contributed to our stock of plausible hypotheses about the human past, and he is one of a handful of scientists committed to testing them even-handedly.

From Harvey's list on evolutionary origins of the modern world.