Within libertarian philosophy, different types of thought generally characterize and shape specific opinions regarding the state. The most simple and obvious duality within libertarianism is arguably the existence of minarchists and stateless propertarians—mainly called “anarcho-capitalists”. While otherwise almost identical in every aspect, minarchists ascribe a small set of vital functions to a small, constitutional state as absolutely necessary. Anarcho-capitalists, however, propose a variety of non-state institutions to enforce the protection of physical integrity and property rights.

It seems that the most fundamental distinction between these two strains of political thought is the pragmatic concern about the state’s role and capacity in the quelling of widespread violence. In 2011, Steven Pinker, in his best-selling political work, The Better Angels of our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, devoted significant attention to the alleged role of state-formation in the reduction of violent deaths worldwide. Blogger “Lord Keynes”, a recurring critic of anything libertarian, has reviewed this aspect of Pinker’s work.

Lord Keynes meticulously describes and analyzes the evidence of Pinker (2011) concerning the rate of violent war death of both state and non-state societies. As clearly illustrated in this scan, Pinker’s graph shows the reader that a selection of non-state death rates from war far outstrip those of state societies. This includes countries such as Germany in the 20th century, even after including the death toll due to state-based violence such as genocides and famines, amounting to a worldwide death rate of 3%. From these numbers, Pinker (2011) infers that state societies are fundamentally less violent compared to non-state societies; a position which could arguably be called Neo-Hobbesian.

Problems with Pinker’s Statistics

Any analysis of Pinker’s historical analysis of violence must include the fact that several anthropologists have responded to Pinker’s selection of data quite critically. For example, Ferguson (2013), notes that Pinker’s archeological sample can hardly be considered representative of war death rates among historical populations. Instead, he notes, Pinker selectively picked highly unusual and violent cases, leading to distortions of prehistoric war death rates. For Ferguson’s in-depth analysis of Pinker’s archeological sample, see here. Estimates allegedly based on more representative samples according to Ferguson are offered by Gómez et al. (2016).

Gómez et al. (2016) not only offer an enormous scope of knowledge about the conspecific killings among various non-human mammalian species, but they also provide the rates of lethal human-on-human violence for different modes of social organization. After dividing human societies in four types: bands (small, nomadic, egalitarian groups of people, usually hunter-gatherers), tribes (small, mostly egalitarian, groups with limited social rank usually resident in permanent villages as hunter–horticulturalists), chiefdoms (stratified, hierarchical non-industrial societies usually based on kinship) and states (politically organized complex societies), they illustrate that the rate of violent death for prehistorical bands and tribes is an estimated 2%, a rate considerably lower than the oft-cited rate offered by Pinker (2011). The data offered by Gómez et al. (2016) is direct evidence against the Hobbesian thesis holding that humans in a “state of nature” are victimized by violence relatively often compared to civilized humans.

Figure 1 illustrates that the progression from band or tribe to chiefdom has is associated with a higher violent death rate. Contrary to the Hobbesian theoretical model, the increasing social complexity associated with chiefdoms is associated with a large uptick of violent death. Resource- and status-based conflict is a likely cause of this aforementioned increase. Next, the relatively high death rate among current-day tribes and bands is explained by Gómez et al. (2016) in three ways: higher contemporary population density, better contemporary methods of detecting violent death, and the fact that tribes exhibit higher rates of killing after encountering colonial regimes. In any case, it appears that the Hobbesian stance of social complexity and ‘civilization’ as a factor negatively related to interpersonal violence must be nuanced significantly.

In an attempt to nuance, the Hobbesian theorist might appeal to the observation that classical state societies exhibited lower rates of lethal violence compared to any other form of historical social organization. In fact, after citing Pinker (2011) himself, Gómez et al. (2016) agree with the Weberian theory that the state’s monopolization of the legitimate use of violence almost invariably leads to reductions of lethal violence among private individuals. However, even this Weberian interpretation of state-formation and violence must be interpreted both with nuance and caution. Firstly, we must consider that the 2% violent death rate of prehistoric bands and tribes is lower than the 20th-century death rate resulting from state action alone. Indeed, not counting private homicides, the worldwide death rate due to war and genocide during the 20th century is 3% by Pinker’s (2011) own admission.

Secondly, the boxplots of Figure 1 show that more than 50% of all observations of chiefdoms are characterized by virtually neglectable rates of lethal violence. While the data shows average lethal violence rate among—medieval—chiefdoms to be statistically higher than both traditional and contemporary states, this average is primarily marked by a high variance and fat tail. In other words, the majority of observations are typified by rates of lethal violence close to 0%, whilst many other chiefdoms nonetheless have very high rates surpassing 8%. In this context, the Hobbesian cannot infer from statistically significant declines in average lethal violence rates that life in pre-state chiefdoms necessarily or even generally was “nasty, brutish and short” with respect to interpersonal violence. Thirdly, the relatively recent process of transition of Medieval European manorial chiefdoms to formal states between the early Middle Ages and the 16th century serves as a relatively recent case study about the exact role state-formation played in this process.

War, Homicides, and the Formation of Statehood in Medieval Europe

The main research observing the decline in interpersonal lethal violence since the Middle Ages is conducted by Eisner (2003). Before explaining the many difficulties in attempting to estimate total populations and homicides in Medieval cities and villages, he notes that any method suggests a significant decline since the 17th century and onward (see Figure 2). Such a decline might either be explained as the decrease of violence in everyday situations, but other scholars from behavioral backgrounds hold the position that interpersonal violence over time cannot be meaningfully compared to ours. They argue, manifestations of interpersonal violence are “embedded in historically specific structures of meanings, values, and expectations and claim that considering the cultural context is essential to understanding historical manifestations of violence.” (Eisner, 2003)

For a better understanding of the post-Medieval decline of interpersonal violence, one should look at Figure 2 provided by Eisner (2014). One should take pre-modern homicide rates with caution, on one hand, they are often based on court records and the greater efficiency of modern prosecution systems leads to underestimations of historical declines in violence. On the other hand, the emergence of improvements in medical technology after the 19th century could distort the inter-temporal comparisons of homicides. Before the 19th century, large amounts of people dying from infections and internal bleeding could be saved with modern emergency care. Rough estimates concerning the percentage of people that could have been saved range from more than one-third of homicide victims to roughly three-fourths.

Notwithstanding these aforementioned sources of bias, Eisner (2003) notes that declines in homicide rates nonetheless followed remarkably similar patterns across European countries and methodologies. Notable is the fact that England and Wales always appeared to have relatively low rates of homicide among European countries.[1] Secondly, the decline in homicides in Southern-European countries appear much later compared to countries in Northern Europe.

A. The Demographics of the Decline in Lethal Violence

Immediately apparent in the historical data collected by Eisner (2003, 2014) is that the observed distribution of age and sex among perpetrators of homicides remained largely constant both over time and geographically. Contrary to our current age, the majority of medieval homicides appear to be attributable to male-on-male killings, rather than family homicides. In fact, the decline of the homicide rate in Europe after the 16th century appears to have been largely started by the reduced participation of higher classes in violent behavior. Eisner (2003) cites a scattered number of historical analyses of multiple European countries to show that class did not appear to be related to homicides and violent crime during the Middle Ages. Only during the modern age did homicide and serious violence appear to be associated with the lower classes.

Further analyses by authors cited by Eisner (2003) and historical data offer additional substantiation to the hypothesis that the decline in male-to-male killings largely determined the decline of European homicide rates. Not only did the percentage of female victims increase from 7% to 23% between the 13th and 18th century, but also the percentage of family-related homicides increased from a meager 5-10% to 50% during the same time period. These observations are largely in line with the hypothesis that male-to-male homicides dominated the decline. Many authors cited by Eisner (2003) conclude these homicides to have largely been spontaneous actions of violence, centered on areas of public drinking, such as taverns.

Other historians cited by Eisner (2003), however, argue that such violence was more guided by an underlying culture of male honor as compared to mere inebriated spontaneous violence. In much of medieval and early-modern Europe, if standard methods of reconciliation failed, a common method of knife-fighting or dueling was used instead to settle the dispute. Similarly, the cultural decline of the private vendetta and male revenge as manners to resolve conflicts further confirms the hypothesis. After establishing both the hypothesis and the underlying data, Eisner (2003) admits that the quality of historical evidence is necessarily foundationally shaky, and continues by offering a range of academic theories which might explain the assumed decline in male-to-male violence since the 16th century.

B. Why did Homicides Decline?

The first theoretical framework analyzed and elaborated on by Eisner (2003) is the psychological framework of Elias (1976), also referred to as “the theory of the civilizing process”:

“The theory of the civilizing process holds that, over a period of several centuries, personality structures have become transformed in a distinct cumulative direction. The change is characterized by an increasing affect control, a greater emphasis on long-term planning, a rationalized manner of living, a higher reflexive sensitivity to inner psychological states and processes, and a decreasing impulsivity—in brief, higher levels of self-control. Higher levels of self-control imply, in turn, the gradual pacification of everyday interactions, which becomes manifest in lower levels of violent behavior.”

This theory using psychological changes in self-control is subsequently applied to the context of long-term trends after medieval times:

“On the most general level, he argues that these changes result from the internalization of outer social control, which, in turn, results from the increasing interdependency between social actors. Higher interdependency in complex and extended chains of interaction—buttressed by stable social institutions—promotes self-control, since it creates advantages for those able to dampen affect and rationally plan their behavior (Elias 1978, p. 322).”

Eisner (2003) continues by explaining two interrelated processes described by Elias which have contributed to this; namely (1) the expansion of the state and its monopoly on violence. He argues that the change of medieval warrior nobility into pacified court nobility under a monopoly on violence was decisive in reducing the violence in everyday interactions, finally completed under the system of early-modern absolutism. Factor (2) is argued to have risen out of the aforementioned pacification, namely increased economic and social interdependence. Largely in line with liberal Enlightenment thinkers, his argument is based on the assumption that large-scale trade and labor division lead to the pacification of social interactions among the relevant population.

C. The Neo-Hobbesian Framework, e.g. “The State-Control Model”

Scholars, however, are divided as to how relevant exactly the role of statehood-formation actually was in the “pacification” of European peoples after the 16th century. For example, Blanshei (1982) notes that official authorities became more and more involved with the monopolization of justice during the late Middle Ages, yet it was culturally regarded even by the authorities that violent homicides should be judged very leniently if caused by passions or defense of honor. Between the 16th and the 17th century, European countries saw increased rates of literacy; schooling; early capitalist modes of production; religious zeal, as well as the further centralization of court systems. Simultaneously, courts were increasingly substituted for private vendettas, revenge, and the private defense of honor. It was during this time, too, that courts started to regard more and more forms of homicide as unjustifiable murder, rather than unfortunate incidents to be met with a small fine in order to keep the public peace.

This model of “state-control”, to the extent that state-enforced centralization of justice can be attributed as a cause to self-control and cultural declines of private honor, rather than an effect, does nevertheless appear to have its limits:

“Strangely one-sided in respect to the role of the state as an internally pacifying institution, Elias almost exclusively emphasizes the state’s coercive potential exercised through the subordination of other power holders and bureaucratic control. Echoing the old Hobbesian theme, the decline in interpersonal violence should thus develop out of increased state control. Although the long-term expansion of the state and the decline of lethal violence appear to correlate nicely on the surface, a closer look reveals several inconsistencies.”

Eisner (2003) cites the work of Muchembled (1996) analyzing this very topic. Muchembled (1996) notes that the decline of homicide rates in Early Modern Europe does not appear to correspond to the rise of the state. For example, the Low Countries were one of the earliest places characterized by huge declines in homicide rates, yet were exempt from the emergence of centralized power structures during this time. In fact, the political system much more resembled a loosely-knit group of largely independent factions. Additionally, police forces and judicial centralization in Medieval Italian city-states were surprisingly large-scale, yet appeared largely ineffective in the curbing of violence and homicides (see Figure 2).

Eisner (2003) and Muchembled (1996) note that neither the Italian bureaucracy nor any of the modern European forms of state-coercion—such as the popular scaffold and garrotte—have had any significant effect on crime. The existence of relatively well-developed Italian bureaucracy and coercive apparatus as compared to heavily-decentralized places such as Medieval England illustrates that the “state-control” model hardly accounts for the divergent trends of homicides in Europe (Eisner, 2003; Muchembled, 1996). In fact, alternative models focusing on civil society and the legitimacy of state and judicial system appear better suited to explaining the divergence of homicide trends.

D. The Legitimacy Model of Civil Society

This theory holds that contrary to Southern Europe—marked by increasing hostility between population and state—court systems and authorities in Northern Europe gained in legitimacy in the eyes of civil society. Roth (2001) provides the example of the New England colony, which experienced a very sudden but similar decline of the homicide rate as compared to Southern mainland England:

“The sudden decline in homicide did not correlate with improved economic circumstances, stronger courts, or better policing. It did, however, correlate with the rise of intense feelings of Protestant and racial solidarity among the colonists, as two wars and a revolution united the formerly divided colonists against New England’s native inhabitants, against the French, and against their own Catholic Monarch, James II’’ (2001, p. 55).”

Furthermore, Eisner (2003) notes:

“[The alternative theory holds] mutual trust and the legitimacy of the state as foundations for the rise of civil society. Both are, of course, clearly to be distinguished from the coercive potential of the state—strong states in terms of coercion can be illegitimate, while seemingly weak states may enjoy high legitimacy. And on the level of macro-transhistorical comparison, the decline of homicide rates appears to correspond more with integration based on trust than with control based on coercion.”

Eisner (2003) among other authors thus offer an alternative theory to the neo-Hobbesian model developed by Elias (1976) that is able to account for the notable exceptions and divergence in homicide trends across Europe and colonies where the prior model cannot. Finally, Eisner (2003) integrates the aforementioned concept of honor with this theory by noting that “defense of honor” as a concept is persistently found in high-violence societies. Societal acceptance of the legitimacy of such defenses was necessarily widespread in such societies, and has only begun to lose significance in 17th century Europe together with a wide array of other previously verbal offenses such as slander; blasphemy, and insult (Soman, 1980).

E. The Cultural Model

The final model offered by Eisner (2003) is referred to as “the cultural model” and is not mutually exclusive to the previous one. He notes that two non-tautological cultural explanations for the decline of violence in Europe focus respectively on the 16th century rise of Protestantism and modern individualism. The former, with its emphasis on sobriety, frugality, and methodic conduct in life; as well as the latter, with its emphasis on autonomy and personal responsibility, are interpreted by many historians as cultural changes directly linked to the diminishing importance of honor as social asset to be defended as well as the diminishing importance of private revenge and the vendetta.

Eisner, in a later 2014 paper, has performed additional research on this model based on modernized analyses of historical databases. Again building on the psychological framework of Elias (1976), he argues that a series of “civilizing offensives” by European elites took place during the early modern period. Described as “conscious and deliberate attempts by powerful groups to attack behaviors of common people that are considered immoral, licentious, or uncivilized and to promote a life of self-control, temperance, orderliness, and respectability.” Eisner (2014) subsequently puts forth a number of correlations between the homicide rate and factors representing such “civilizing offenses”.

First, Eisner (2014) shows that the percentage of assassinated monarchs steadily declines across the Medieval age together with the homicide rate. Similar correlations hold for the number of executions; the amount of alcohol drunk per capita, as well as its literacy rate. These variables are interpreted by Eisner (2014) as proxies for successful civilizing offenses by influential groups, but could easily be interpreted in the forms of other frameworks. For example, the increasing economic interdependence after the invention of the printing press could have played a predominant role in the early-modern rise of literacy, as opposed to a conscious civilizing offense by social or religious elites. It is one thing to establish a long-term negative correlation between e.g. literacy rates and homicide rates, but it is a whole other thing to ascribe the rise of the former variable mainly to civilizing offenses by influential groups. In other words, these correlations say very little to which extent civilizing offenses were responsible for changes in the proxy variables.

Furthermore, even if historical changes concerning self-control e.g. alcohol consumption could reliably be attributed mainly to Victorian civilizing offenses, this would say little about which particular elite was successful in each instance. For instance, were bureaucrats; religious leaders; academics, or economic elites more influential in the instilment of self-discipline? These correlations again say nothing about this question. Nonetheless, for whatever reason, historical evidence illustrated by Eisner (2003; 2014) among other authors is indicative of the theory that the elites were the first groups whose homicide rate fell drastically, to be followed by lower classes only afterward.

Considering the research and theoretical frameworks offered by Eisner (2003; 2014), it thus appears that pro-state interpretations of this paper are highly misguided. In the very blog post that acquainted me to the paper of Eisner (2003)—titled “So State Policies Never Work!?”—Gene Callahan uses the observed simultaneous decline of homicide rates and the rise of statehood as an argument for the “excellence” of the theoretical Hobbesian framework. He does not, however, acknowledge that his very citation offers substantive criticism to this framework, only to offer a number of alternatives that possibly better capture the causes of the historical decline in homicide rates. (Eisner, 2003)

An Alternative Critique of Hobbes and Elias’ Framework

Even the more cautioned arguments from people such as Gene Callahan have been criticized in scholarly literature. In a libertarian discussion in this blog post, for example, Mr. Callahan acknowledges that evidence concerning the topic might be considered ambiguous if anarchists, in turn, acknowledge that the state doesn’t cause violence—despite their occasional atrocities. This method of analyzing the historical prevalence of violence has been criticized Malesevic (2013). In order to avoid misdiagnoses for historical reality by lumping together all forms historical violence, contends the author, it is more helpful to distinguish between three levels of analysis: (1) the micro (interpersonal and intra-group); (2) the mezzo (the inter-group and inter-polity), and (3) the macro (inter-polity) forms of violent actions.

Micro-Level Violence (interpersonal and intra-group)

Malesevic (2013) starts off by criticizing the Hobbesian and Eliasian frameworks adhered to by Pinker (2011) by first analyzing the micro-level of interpersonal violence. Citing a large amount of research, he argues, contrary to notions of increased ‘pacification’, that humans are psychologically hard-wired to avoid violent interpersonal confrontations. In addition, Malesevic (2013) again cites a large number of historical research arguing, contra Pinker (2011), that the patterns of violent behavior in daily interactions remained quite constant over long periods of pre-modern time. While he acknowledges the relatively large decline of European homicide rates from the 16th century onwards, he subsequently argues that this decline originated from an already fairly low base of micro-level violence. He notes:

“There is an obvious and noticeable difference between the homicide rates in, for example, fourteenth-century and early twentieth-century Switzerland (37 and 1.4 respectively per 100,000 per year) (Eisner, 2003: 99) but even the extremely high figure of 37 only suggests that during an entire year in fourteenth-century Switzerland less than 0.04% of individuals lost their lives through inter-personal violence. The key point here is that the inter-personal, face-to-face, killing has always been and remains a rare phenomenon. […] These data clearly show that the levels of inter-personal violence are not substantially different: from 1232 to 1248, annual homicide rates in England oscillated between as high as 30 and as low as 6.8 per 100,000 in Warwickshire and Kent respectively. In the 1999–2001 period, the US homicide rate for the whole country was at 5.6 per 100,000 ranging from 8.1 in San Francisco to 42.9 in Washington, DC. Similarly among European states, the homicide rates ranged from 22.1 for Russia (18.4 for Moscow), 10.6 for Lithuania (8.9 for Vilnius) to 1.2 per 100,000 in Switzerland (1.7 for Geneva) and Sweden (2.8 for Stockholm). This is not to say that the scale of inter-personal violence does not change from time to time nor that there are relatively stable decreasing trends, such as in sixteenth- to twentieth-century Europe, but only that one cannot detect irreversible patterns which would suggest that micro-level violence in the pre-modern world was rampant.”

Mezzo-Level Violence (inter-group)

After explaining that random and inter-group violence was extremely rarely tolerated across historical societies—including Medieval Europe—Malesevic (2013) analyzes a 17th-century letter from mother-to-daughter; describing beautiful countrysides, good wine, visits to dear friends, and casual remarks about the gruesome torture and dismemberment of a local thief. In fact, Malesevic (2013) contends that acceptance of gruesome inter-group violence towards disobedient social inferiors was quite common in stratified hierarchical societies across the world. He, however, argues that Pinker (2011) and Elias (1976) are wrong to assume the widespread prevalence of such inflictions of pain since such spectacular and cruel practices are necessarily inefficient manners for large-scale inter-group homicide. He writes:

“Even the notorious Spanish Inquisition, under the widely feared Tomás de Torquemada, was responsible for only 2000 murders between 1450–1500. As Perez (2006) shows despite Inquisition’s vicious rhetoric ‘the death penalty was passed in 3.5 per cent of cases, but only 1.8 per cent of those condemned were actually executed’ thus between 1540 and 1700 only 810 individuals were killed. Since much of this violence was ritualistic and aimed at reinforcing status divisions, the focus was on the spectacular and morbid rather than on efficiency that would eliminate large groups of individuals. In this sense the pre-modern perpetrators of violent acts had neither interest, nor ideological know how or organizational means to kill or even torture huge numbers of people. […] Whereas before modern times inter-group violence was for the most part a status deterrent aimed at reinforcing internal group boundaries and communicating its message in a most brutal manner, the modern age generally dispenses with macabre cruelty and utilizes violence in a much more instrumental way.”

Malesevic (2013) continues by assuming that state-formation after the 15th century lead to ‘pacification’ of interpersonal social interactions—the extent to which this is true has been analyzed previously by Eisner (2003). However, he notes that the accumulation of power in the bureaucratic state and the disarmament of local populations leads to a social structure in which violent action is transformed into administrative power. Under this new form of violence, notes Malesevic (2013), interpersonal and inter-group violence is increasingly delegitimized. He argues that it is no mere historical coincidence that so many mutually-incompatible secular ideologies—such as socialism, liberalism, nationalism, republicanism—used to justify current states share their basis on enlightenment ideals.

Where the unequal status of men was previously used to justify violent action, the new-found equality of all men has served as a delegitimizing factor for interpersonal and inter-group violence (Malesevic, 2013). He notes that “whereas in the pre-modern world, violence was a social device for the demarcation and reinforcement of inter-group hierarchies, in modernity, violence is often a mechanism for the organizational and ideological control of the entire social order.” A consequence of this is that the central issue becomes who will control the state apparatus; often the only viable means to successfully organize inter-group violence in the modern age (Malesevic, 2013).

“What is more important is that as the coercive and organizational powers of states significantly increase in modernity, so does the potential for greater inter-group violence. It is no accident that modernity was inaugurated through inter-group violence that characterized the French Revolution, the Jacobin Reign of Terror and the Napoleonic Wars. Whereas the rulers of pre-modern polities had little or no organizational means, nor need, to exterminate entire groups of people inhabiting their polities (as the periodic spectacles of scapegoat torture would suffice), the modern era has acquired organizational means for the mass extermination of specific groups.”

Malesevic (2013) finishes the section by noting that the specific ideologies underlying the multiple campaigns of genocide, politicide, and classicide during the 20th century are a natural outgrowth of violence as administrative state power and egalitarian thought. The doctrinal purism and ambitions of social engineering to achieve a just and rational polity lead these ideologues to the conclusion that any opposition to such grand schemes can be nothing short of deliberate malice. Paradoxically thus, writes Malesevic (2013), in an age where modern secular ethics ascribes all humans as of equal moral worth, the only way to delegitimize one’s political opponents is to deny him membership of the human race. It is, therefore, the inclusivity, universalism and moral egalitarianism that paradoxically create the conditions for greater dehumanization of one’s political enemy.

“As Levene (2008), Mann (2005), Hinton (2002) and Bauman (1989) convincingly argue and document, genocide is a direct product of the modern condition: the availability of organizational and infrastructural means for undertaking such a gigantic task and the prevalence of a depersonalized yet highly rationalized ethic and logic that conceive the annihilation of huge groups of people as the most efficient way of implementing a particular ideological blueprint. In this sense, the aptly named ‘Timbers of Justice’ (guillotine) and the gas chambers represented, in the words of their inventors and their users, the ‘most rational’ and ‘most humane’ way to dispose of evil obstructers who stood in the way of the perfect society. The guillotine was a product of this modern and humanitarian rationality, being conceived with an aim ‘to put an end to the inequality of death prescribed by the state. To end the vile tortures, burnings and other pagan forms of execution, handed out and measured according to social class and status. The guillotine was the embodiment of equality’. In a rather perverse way so were the gas chambers of the ‘Final Solution’.”

Thus contrary to the popular and widely-cited work of Pinker (2011), the systematic dehumanization of such political opponents under many statist societies are not remnants of an old age. Instead, it is described as a distinctively modern phenomenon which traces its very roots back to the egalitarian ethos of the enlightenment era; the very era of reason from which Pinker’s “better angels” supposedly originates. Also contrary to Eliasian notions of modernity’s civilizing self-restraint, the goal-oriented collective use of violence explicitly “requires cool-headedness, instrumental rationality, and self-control” (Malesevic, 2012). It, therefore, appears that neither framework is well-suited to explain the instances of highly-organized mass murder committed by state-actors during the past century.

Macro-Level Violence (inter-polity, a.k.a. war)

Malesevic & Ryan (2012) write that whereas the medieval world was characterized by episodes of gruesome cruelty and torture, these macabre practices often conceal their low efficiency as a means of destruction. In a similar vein to his analysis of mezzo-level violence, he describes that Medieval violence was often justified vertically—as punishment for crimes of lower-classes—while modern, state-based violence is justified and inflicted horizontally. In medieval times, brutalizing one’s inferiors was often seen as legitimate while killing one’s fellow aristocrats was seen as a heinous crime. Malesevic (2013) argues that the modern age is characterized by the opposite phenomenon: murdering your fellow national provokes moral outrage while killing enemy combatants is widely viewed as a heroic deed. States, rather than “civilizing” men to become less violent, simply increase the systemic organization and externalization of violence. He continues:

“Although in modernity violence has become less publicly visible, it is, in fact, much more prevalent. The modern age differs from its pre-modern counterparts in hiding death, as both killing and dying are removed from the public eye. The animals we eat are killed in the closed and distant slaughterhouses, our morgues are removed from the public view; our old and sick die in hospices and hospitals; we do not organize public hangings neither do we torture or burn people in the town squares. Yet in times of war the citizens of modern polities generally give tacit or explicit consent for the mass murder of those who inhabit other polities. Moreover, it is regularly those who are the least affected by the calamities of war that often support the most extreme forms of violent retaliation. For example, surveys of the British public in the Second World War clearly show that there was substantially greater support for the reprisal bombing of German cities among individuals living in the areas unaffected by the Luftwaffe’s aerial bombardment than by those who lived in the cities that were excessively bombed. Similarly, in the wars of Yugoslav succession, it is the civilians (academics, journalists, university students, and teachers) rather than the front-line soldiers who regularly expressed the most extreme attitudes towards the despised enemy.”

The occasional but brutal infliction of pain in pre-modern times has thus made way for a callous and depersonalized ethos that avoids personal responsibility through a bureaucratic delegation of tasks (Malesevic, 2013). Two particular examples of the ethics of modern warfare includes the substantial number of polled Americans supporting the complete extermination of all Japanese by even more atomic bombs during WII, as well as the use of “kill ratios” in the Vietnam war, which was a measure of success primarily based on the killing of as many (suspected) enemy soldiers as possible. Malesevic (2013) notes that this form of ethics, in turn, has recently made way for an even more depersonalized form of war ethics; one that reduces human casualties simply to ‘collateral damage’.

In contrast, after citing a number of sources, Malesevic (2013) describes medieval warfare basically as a series of ritualistic skirmishes, often based on the avoidance of open-field conflict. Medieval rulers possessed pitifully small armies, limited war budgets and little to no popular support for waging wars, which was primarily seen as the private affairs of nobility. In addition, society itself was not structured in a way as to allow for extended campaigns of enemy destruction. Malesevic (2013) notes that mutually-suspicious nobility and the lack of war bureaucracy and infrastructure simply did not allow for such scales of mass-murder. In a previous paper, Malesevic & Ryan (2012) write:

“Whereas only 60,000 people lost their lives in all wars combined during the 10th and 11th centuries, this figure increases to approximately 1.4 million for 14th and 15th centuries combined, and 7.8 million for the 16th and 17th centuries. Nevertheless, it is the 19th and especially the 20th century that witnessed a staggering escalation of mass killings, with human casualties amounting to 19 million and 111 million respectively (Eckhardt 1992: 272-3).”

After reading this, the adherent of Pinker’s (2011) optimistic theory might offer a couple of objections. First, he might object, is the notion that one shouldn’t judge the intensity of macro-level violence on basis of absolute casualties, but one should instead focus on the relative casualty rate (per 100,000 people). The adherent could then argue that using such measurements, rather than an absolute measure, could suggest that the chance of a randomly-chosen person to die in warfare is actually much smaller during our state-dominated age, especially after the first half of the 20th century—a period referred to as the “long peace”.

This argument is very common in discussions about the nature of modern warfare and is subject to a number of rebuttals. First, one could in turn object that the increase of war casualties since the 11th century far outpaced population growth. This is a consistent observation with Figure 3, which reveals the rate of conflict-related death rate rarely ever exceeding 5 out of 100,000 annually during the 1400-1600 period. In contrast, the modern era is characterized by intermittent periods of peace and wars, with the latter being associated with death rates ranging from 20 to 100 per 100,000 people; with WII having a rate as high as 180 out of 100,000 annually. But more importantly, the figure illustrates that the death toll due to violent conflicts is not uniformly or normally distributed across time, but appears to exhibit a very fat tail, a phenomenon explained in-depth by Cirillo & Taleb (2016) in their critique of Pinker (2011).

Cirillo & Taleb (2016) describe “fat-tailed” phenomena such as war casualties as variables that are dominated by very specific events. The process of calculating the mean of historical violent deaths, for instance, is therefore almost entirely dominated by a small set of specific conflicts, rather than by e.g. homicide rates. In their criticism of Pinker’s (2011) theory that the decline of war casualties and conflicts after the 1950s is evidence of “our better angels”, they claim that Pinker mistakes the absence of data for evidence. Holding issues such as tail-risk in mind, Cirillo & Taleb (2016) gathered historical data concerning war deaths and attempt to find any long-run trends. Contrary to any superficial conclusions one might infer from looking at data plots, their tail-driven model reveals no trend whatsoever neither in the number of conflicts nor the per capita death rate.

It thus appears that the rebuttal of Pinker’s advocates is neither supported by simple inter-temporal comparisons of war deaths nor in-depth risk-analyses. Nevertheless, even if we grand Pinker (2011) the benefit of the doubt and labor under the assumption that inter-polity violence declined per capita after the 16th-century—especially after 1950—his theory is even then subject to a number of objections. Firstly, as Malesevic (2013) aptly describes, the largest number of war casualties during medieval times were attributable to exhaustion, hunger, famine, and disease. In contrast, modern warfare is unique in the incredible absolute number of soldiers and civilians being able to be slaughtered within the timespan of a few moments.

One must, of course, acknowledge that the existence and development of war infrastructure and modern weaponry did not arise in a vacuum. In contrast, just as the existence of states was instrumental in the ideological and technological facilitation of genocides, it was without a doubt instrumental in the creation of large-scale weaponry and weapons of mass destruction to be used against foreign combatants and civilians (Malesevic, 2013). Holding this insight in mind, one is invariably drawn toward the conclusion that Pinker and adherents of his theory like Gene Callahan are mistaken when they try to draw a picture of the 20th century as one of the historically least bloody in respect to warfare.

Again, even if we adhere to the doubtful assumption that relative war deaths in medieval times surpassed those of the 20th century, one must be very careful in using this metric to describe that century as “less bloody”. For instance, Mr. Cowen argues that neither the murder of six million Jews nor the number of casualties in European ditches during WII is “half as bloody” if the world population was twice as high. Similarly, if India and China’s population would increase two-fold, any future European conflict with a similar death toll to WII would appear in Pinker’s (2011) charts as a particularly “less bloody” conflict compared to WII.

In an extended sense, focusing exclusively on per capita measures of war deaths and genocides to assess the level of human violence invariably downplays the role of modern agriculture and medicine to support a greater number of human lives. As Timothy Snyder notes, “If carrying capacity increases faster than mass murder, this looks like moral improvement on the charts, but it might mean only that fertilizers and antibiotics are outpacing machine guns and machetes.”

Final Remarks

The argument offered by Snyder, in my opinion, hits the argument of Pinker (2011) and co. in its weak spot. In their failure to differentiate between different types and social contexts surrounding the existence of violent death, Pinker (2011) lumps all instances together in order to paint a picture of a past rife with violence: “Nasty, Brutish and Short”. It was only the Leviathan state forcibly monopolizing the legitimate use of violence, which caused violence among humankind to decline. Based on the two following doubtful notions addressed in this thesis, namely that:

The Hobbesian model of “state power” sufficiently explains the decline of homicide rates all across Europe after the 15th century and onward. Non-state societies necessarily engage in more and deadlier types of warfare than do state societies.

Rests notion (3) stating that—espoused by Gene Callahan—the state doesn’t cause violence due to notions (1) and (2). However, even the doubtful correctness of notion (1) and (2) wouldn’t justify (3) in any real or ethical sense. Pinkerian analysis, based essentially on de-contextualization of violence, would view a medieval village with a population of 500 in which two men die in public knife-fighting during a drunken quarrel over insulted family honor—cheered on by much of the surrounding village—as necessarily worse than a nation-state with a population of 100,000,000 in which 350,000 ethnic minorities are systematically mass murdered by the ruling party. This conclusion would be reached simply and solely because one’s likelihood of dying a violent death is higher in the former case.

It is essentially the former case—drunken brawls or duels over honor going too far—that typify the type of violent death in medieval Europe. It is in contrast; exactly the systematic and organized mass murder of thousands of “public enemies” that typified the 3% of the world population killed by states during the 20th century. Contextually, it is therefore completely unfounded—as Mr. Catalan does—to claim that the state does not cause violence, murder, and bloodshed based on the doubtful notion that its bureaucratic monopolization of justice also prevented sporadic, widely-distributed homicides.

The organized displacement and murder of thousands by the decree of a small elite is not only something made possible by the infrastructure that statehood necessitates for its own survival but also by the multitude of mutually-exclusive egalitarian ideologies that sprang out of Enlightenment thought (Malesevic, 2013). In our current day and age, violence might not be as cruel and openly-displayed as in medieval times. Instead, it is hidden from public view, externalized, and most importantly; more organized and dehumanized than ever.

[1] Yet, this might simply represent the more comprehensive country-wide coverage of homicides in England and Wales, rather than a focus on population clusters, as is the case on continental Europe.

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