Ian Morris, a professor of classics and of history, is not a scholar who shies away from big topics. In his much acclaimed book Why the West Rules—For Now (2010), he sought to trace the relative wealth and power of China and the West over not just the past generation but the last several thousand years. In the process Morris created an index of civilizational development that he elaborated in The Measure of Civilization: How Social Development Decides the Fate of Nations (2013). War! What Is It Good For? continues in this tradition and is, if anything, likely to generate far more controversy, for both its interpretations of the past and its bold and optimistic predictions.
The parts of Morris's thesis that are likely to raise hackles the most are actually those that are the best documented and find a great deal of scholarly support. He argues in the first place that overall levels of violence have been falling over the centuries and that, even taking into account the enormous bloodletting of the 20th century, the chance of a human being dying a violent death is far lower today than it was in hunter-gatherer times.
In making this argument, Morris follows in the footsteps of a number of authors such as Norbert Elias, Lawrence Keeley, Azar Gat and Steven Pinker, all of whom have provided substantial empirical documentation on how violence has been progressively channeled and limited over historical time. There are still a number of anthropologists who, following the tradition of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, argue that early societies were naturally peaceful (as well as good stewards of the environment), and that war and violence were the result of the corrupting influence of civilization. It is here that Morris's background as a classical archaeologist shines; he can cite evidence from digs from remotest China to the Andes documenting the relentless violence of early societies.
The second part of Morris's argument is that war has been responsible for its own taming, by incentivizing human societies to create institutions that limit violence and create social peace. From this, many other good things flow, particularly economic growth and social development, since peace is the precondition for everything else. Again, this has been the argument of earlier scholars such as sociologist Charles Tilly, whose famous phrase "War makes states, and states make war" summed up his research showing the importance of military competition to the growth of centralized states in early modern Europe. I made a similar argument in The Origins of Political Order about how centralized government in ancient China was the direct result of 500 years of relentless warfare. This pattern continues into the present; the Cold War led directly to the creation of the American national security establishment, while the post-September 11 war on terrorism has spawned the growth of the National Security Agency and countless new government institutions.
Morris is, of course, not guilty of anything like a blanket endorsement of war and violence, or of strong state responses to it. He distinguishes between what he labels "productive" war, which leads to the growth of institutions, and an "unproductive" counterpart that helps to undermine them. He divides the past several thousand years of human history into a productive era culminating in the establishment of the Roman, Chinese and Indian empires, and an unproductive one beginning around the time of Jesus Christ and lasting until about 1400, when relentless violence by horse-mounted barbarians led to the breakdown of all three civilizations. Productive warfare began again in Europe with the state-building projects noted by Tilly; and in a courageous intellectual leap Morris argues that the "500-year war," during which Europe colonized the non-Western world, was in the end productive as well, because it gave these societies the institutions that have allowed them to modernize in the 20th and 21st centuries.
War! What Is It Good For? does an excellent job of marshaling substantial and often very colorful evidence for the importance of war to political development, and it never looks away from the dreadful human costs of the tragic process being described. (The book has plentiful illustrations of mangled corpses and cloven human skulls to underscore this point.)
As Morris's argument gets closer to the present, however, it begins to run into some difficulties, because his story of the beneficial consequences of war imperceptibly evolves into a story of the growth of modern freedom, as exemplified by the rise of Britain in the 19th century and the United States in the 20th—what is sometimes referred to as "Whig history." While there is no question that military conflict has been a great driver of centralized state power and the growth of massive Leviathans, the rise of free societies has required the deliberate limitation of state power. The conflict-driven logic of state-building is indifferent to whether those states permit individual freedom or market enterprise to flourish: North and South Korea are equally good at controlling violence, despite the fact that one is an impoverished dictatorship and the other a liberal democracy. What the South has that the North lacks are institutions like the rule of law and democratic accountability that limit state power by protecting individual rights, and creating a framework in which market transactions can multiply.
These institutions of constraint were not driven by the same military logic as state centralization. The rule of law, for example, was rooted in many societies in an independent religious establishment that had legitimacy independent of political authority. Modern democracy arose because of the ability of organized forces in civil society, like the Parliamentary side in the English Civil War or the American colonists, to resist the power of their local Leviathan. In this struggle, violence that was productive with respect to the building of bigger states was very unproductive from the standpoint of creating free political orders.
Photo: Linda A Cicero/Stanford News ServiceThis points to a theoretical point that the book could have developed further, which is to understand the conditions under which war is "productive" in the sense of generating strong institutions. Tribes in the highlands of Papua New Guinea, after all, have been fighting one another for some 40,000 years, without this leading to much by way of social development. One obvious discriminating factor is the level of social organization needed to employ a particular military technology. As War! points out, the fundamental reason war was so unproductive in the years 1 to 1400 was that domestication of the horse allowed mounted barbarians from Central Asia to defeat far more sophisticated societies in Europe, Asia and the Middle East. This ended only with the invention of guns and modern forms of military organization, which only complex and wealthy societies could master.
This matters greatly to us today. Weapons of mass destruction, from nuclear bombs to chemical and biological weapons, can be developed only by advanced civilizations. But they can potentially be acquired and used by anyone, including terrorists living in caves in Afghanistan. Are such weapons, like the horse, going to be the great equalizers of the future, inaugurating a new age of civilizational breakdown? Or will the threat or actual use of WMDs lead to greater state control, and thus the loss of individual freedom? The surveillance state that has emerged since September 11 suggests that war continues to drive the institutionalization of states, and that that is not necessarily a good thing.
Morris has nonetheless done a great service in bringing to the fore the centrality of war in human development, and the great paradox that in our evolutionary history, we have cooperated in order to compete, and compete to cooperate.
Francis Fukuyama is a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. His book Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy will be published in October.
