1 - Violence and Honor

Summary

The fact that violence in the West has been declining since 1500 has long been recognized by scholars; they have debated the reasons for the shift since the late nineteenth century, when pioneering sociologists like Emile Durkheim and Max Weber posited fundamentally different causes for this shift. Weber provided the dominant paradigm of the middle of the twentieth century, in large measure because the “civilizing process” theory of Norbert Elias had such a broad impact, one easily seen even today in textbook treatments of early modern Europe. Elias wrote his doctoral dissertation under the direction of Alfred Weber, Max's brother. Durkheim's theories have returned to prominence, as the Elias hypothesis has suffered from the empirical research it helped inspire. With respect to France in particular, Michel Nassiet's La violence, une histoire sociale: France, XVI ^e–XVIII ^e siècles, as its title suggests, has tried to provide a more holistic understanding of the shift in violence.

More recently, scholars like the psychologist Steven Pinker, from outside the two disciplines most involved in this debate—history and sociology—have entered the fray. Pinker focuses on exogamous forces— essentially cultural—that have led to a decline of violence in the West. As Gregory Hanlon points out, in a review essay, Pinker's thesis builds on a foundation of sand: he relies heavily on Elias’ civilizing process and, far worse, on inaccurate crime statistics for the early modern period Hanlon balances this criticism with a strong endorsement of Pinker's larger premise: that we need to combine research in the social and socalled hard sciences to reexamine historical phenomena. Modern cognitive research, for example, raises fundamental doubts about rational choice theory in economic history. Grand theories built on assumptions about what constitutes “modern” behavior in a “capitalist” economy thus become dubious assertions about why eighteenth-century Frenchpeople changed their attitude toward violence.

Assigning primacy for the decline of violence to a single aspect of a society's evolution—be it intellectual, economic, cultural, or political—is ultimately misguided. In studying such phenomena, Hanlon rightly argues we need a more integrated approach, one that combines behavioral and social sciences with insight from historical investigation.