Philip Cunliffe
posted 6 September 2007

As the title suggests, Azar Gat’s book is designed to provide a deep and multifaceted account of the enduring nature of large-scale, organised violence throughout human history. Gat’s book is self-consciously ambitious in its scope and aim. A strategic and military historian by training, Gat lists in his preface the varied set of disciplines and branches of human knowledge with which he had to familiarise himself in order to engage on this study: ethology (animal behaviour), evolutionary theory, evolutionary psychology, anthropology, archaeology, historical sociology and political science. He insists that both academic modesty and specialisation has impeded our understanding of war. He also insists that the big question – the role of war in human nature and culture – is not too big for serious treatment. Thus he sets out to begin with conflict in humanity’s primitive origins and sweep through to twenty-first century war and terrorism.

Gat structures his material around the philosophers Hobbes and Rousseau, as providing two contrasting approaches to the origins of human conflict. Gat styles the Hobbesian approach as the one that sees conflict and competitive violence as endemic and engrained, while the Rousseauvian approach sees humanity’s natural meekness as corrupted by the development of the state and private property. The set-up may be surprising. For although the influence of these two thinkers is inescapable, the actual substance of their anthropological musings on humanity’s original ‘state of nature’ can seem naïve and fanciful – at least by the standards of today’s scholarship, with its vast trove of accumulated knowledge, powerful new scientific tools and sophisticated methodologies.

But Gat shows that, in their broad terms at least, these thinkers’ frameworks (and Hobbes’ in particular) still provide useful organising principles to structure our understanding – not least because there are enduring and universal currents in human development, and because of the logical rigour of the theories themselves. That said, part of Gat’s thesis is to overthrow Rousseauvian assumptions in favour of Hobbesian ones – he shows for example that all the evidence points to pre-state societies being significantly more violent than state societies, thereby affirming Hobbes’ famous claim that the state diminishes violence by monopolising it. Thus Gat would have us believe that when Enlightenment thinkers saw in the tribes of North America a ‘state of nature’ akin to their own primitive origins, and when they turned to Tacitus’ writings on the Celts to understand the ‘savages’ of the New World, they were not so far off the mark. Pre-state societies share similar ‘structural’ features, wherever and whenever they may occur. No need then, to throw out that copy of Engels’ The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State just yet. Gat is content then, to treat primitive societies precisely like that – by virtue of their isolation and backwardness, they are taken as ‘laboratories’ shedding light on the origins of human conflict.

In approaching war Gat prefers the scale of ‘relative time’ over that of ‘absolute time’, arguing that human societies can be classified along a single spectrum punctuated by recurrent social and technological developments. This provides a timescale that does not necessarily correlate with the ‘customary fixed chronology, arbitrarily derived from the particular history of the west’: ‘Thus, for example, the civilizations of pre-Columbian Mesoamerica and Peru, magnificent and sophisticated in many ways as they were, are treated here as late Stone Age or Copper Age states and empires […] In relative time, the Dark Ages preceded, as it were, rather than followed, classical antiquity.’ (original emphasis, p155). In some respects, Gat’s broad sweep and willingness to classify all of human societies along a single spectrum is both exhilarating and insightful. Of course, whether one chooses to look at Mesoamerican civilizations as Stone Age or Copper Age partly depends on what question one is looking at. A ‘relative time’ scale is an advantage of a focus on war. By its nature, war exerts pressure on social development, prompting technological adaptation, mimicry and diffusion, and social homogenisation and intermixing. The study of war offers some simple, decisive turning points around which to study human societies in all their variety: the domestication of the horse, the development of the chariot, the development of fortifications around urban settlements, the invention and adoption of gunpowder, and so on.

The advantage of this approach is demonstrated, for example, in Gat’s account of the Mayans of Central America. As Gat relates, until Mayan writing was deciphered, the absence of fortifications in Mayan cities led archaeologists to assume a Rousseauvian civilisation of gentle and pious farmers. But in fact, as Gat shows, the (relative) lack of fortifications among the Maya was simply because they were not so far advanced in their urban evolution. In other words, throughout human history all urban settlements began without fortifications, and the Mayan settlements had simply not progressed far enough along the path of urban evolution to fortify all their cities systematically. This does not mean that life was peaceful before the city walls went up. Rather, the prospect of house-to-house combat in densely populated urban settlements was sufficient to deter or withstand enemy assault (at least by comparison with the easy pickings available from raiding villages). Only with the development of more powerful states, and their corollary standing armies, did seizing a city become a realistic possibility, thereby demanding the development of fortifications (pp278-289). Thus, argues Gat, ‘it would appear that only the misleading perspective of absolute chronology – where the relative one is far more appropriate – creates the optical illusion that pre-Columbine America was fundamentally different from the Old World.’ (p284).

Thus Gat’s approach is neither crassly Eurocentric nor technologically determinist. This is demonstrated by Gat’s discussion of the development of the dense, heavily-armoured infantry formations, most often associated with the phalanxes of ancient Greece. Gat points out that this specific type of infantry formation is in fact the military offspring of city-states throughout history:

we lack evidence about warfare patterns in pre- and proto-state Mesopotamia. However, with respect to the state period itself the excavation of the Vulture Stele … has revealed to astonished modern scholars the familiar ranks and files of a six-deep phalanx-like dense formation, with locked shields and levelled spears, previously identified with the Greek poleis of almost 2,000 years later. Indeed, rather than being uniquely Greek, the close-order and close-quarter infantry formation has been independently invented several times over, most notably by city-states (p293).

As Gat shows, this military development was facilitated by the greater egalitarianism, ease of communication and possibilities for political organisation afforded by concentrated urban settlements. As such means were not available to more rural societies, they were prey to being hierarchically dominated by raiding pastoralists and mounted warrior castes. This urban infantry proved decisively important in key periods: for example, it was this infantry organisation more than gunpowder that helped the communes and city-states of the Middle Ages shake off feudal relations of domination by militarily crushing the mounted aristocrats; and it was the infantry of the Arabian trading city-states (and not the mounted Bedouin hordes of popular imagination) that established the first Islamic empire.

Although the historical detail is often interesting, Gat’s syncretistic approach yields a vague and indeterminate level of abstraction. Thus Gat’s sweep is broad enough to stimulate anyone by providing eclectic insights, but rarely deep enough to satisfy anyone with an in-depth knowledge of a particular field. The eclectic range of sources and disciplines allows Gat to shuttle sideways between disciplines more than synthesising them. Indeed, neither Eurocentrism nor technological determinism are as problematic for Gat as his penchant for sociobiology, which leads him to polish off banal points with a scientific gloss. For example, take Gat’s claim that genetic kin selection can provide us with a vital clue in deciphering Franco-German nationalist conflict over the province of Alsace-Lorraine:

One’s people or nation – an extension of the original genetic cum cultural regional group – can evoke the greatest devotion, indeed, fraternity within a motherland or fatherland (the words are revealing), no matter how genetically related its members actually are […] The evolutionary logic of kin selection in small groups has been inflated beyond its original applicability. This is the ‘atavistic’ element that baffled modern observers often evoke vaguely in order to explain people’s willingness to kill and get killed for seemingly remote causes. It provided an indispensable clue for understanding why, for instance, beyond all real utilitarian considerations, a Frenchman or German was prepared to get killed for Alsace-Lorraine, the possession of which had no practical bearing on his daily life … (original emphasis, p136).

Of course, it should come as no surprise to anyone who believes in evolution that political passions have their roots in some sort of primordial biological drive or response. But is nationalism really made any less ‘baffling’ by virtue of having pointed out the genetic logic of kin selection? Surely what ‘baffles’ modern observers (or the smart ones at least) about nationalism is not that it represents some primitive remnant of cave-living, but that it seems primitive in comparison to other forms of political organisation or political solutions available in the here and now. In other words, what makes nationalism seem primitive is not its similarity with primordial biological responses, but its backwardness by the standard of other forms of political organisation available to us today (whether they be liberal, socialist, or whatever). That said, it is a classic liberal manoeuvre to explain away disagreeable social phenomena by reference to natural phenomena. But what really explains people’s willingness to die for one remote cause rather than another is that thing which is even more atavistic and mysterious than primordial biology – the power of belief.

For if human beings are political animals, then saying that political allegiances have some primordial root in biology is verging on tautology, unless it can tell us something more specific about the content, direction or nature of those passions. If we remind ourselves that all of humanity’s political allegiances will necessarily have some biological root, then it becomes clear that Gat has not actually added anything substantive to our understanding of nationalism, nor of why people die for remote causes. Gat’s point is then merely banal. The way he tries to escape being banal is by being elliptical. On the one hand, Gat is not as stupid as to come out and openly say that we are genetically programmed to be nationalists. But on the other, a few spurious associations between words (motherland and ‘mother’) are used to imply that some deep wisdom has been imparted about how our national allegiances interlock with some basic genetic affiliations.

Of course, civil wars fit the model less well. Fraternity, was after all, famously invoked by the French revolutionaries (alongside liberty and equality) against their fellow (aristocratic) Frenchmen: feudalism and absolutism had to be overthrown before ‘fraternity’ came to be seen as a primordial bond that transcended class. And even then, national culture had to be actively created, not because the ruling classes felt warm kinship with their social inferiors, but because they had to cement their rule over increasingly restive and well-organised labour movements. This is all, of course, basic political sociology and history 101 – but it needs re-iterating in the face of the sociobiological silliness to which Gat is so partial. Gat’s book is certainly an advance on previous attempts to offer ‘big’ answers to the ‘riddle of war’, such as John Keegan’s more trite 1993 History of Warfare. But it does not convincingly demonstrate his original proposition: that the big questions are not too big for serious treatment.