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23 of 26 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Vague, April 15, 2008
There has been a trend of late of publishing multi-disciplinary books with an ambition of rediscovering history, economics, sociology, whatever, or even of creating a new science, which have met commercial success. In particular, it seems that as soon as you talk about "evolution" you double the sales of your book. "The evolution of wealth" and "Guns, Germs and Steel", both excellent books, come to mind. This book seems to be surfing that wave and explicitly aims at being the next Jared Diamond (says the publisher). Unofrtunately it doesn't quite get there. It's difficult to find a thesis in this book. It claims to be a scientific model of history but it's mostly descriptive verbiage. Most of it is pedestrian historical narrative (which admittedly could be interesting to someone who knows little about world history), with a few analytical points (sometimes just summarizing someone else's book) thrown in from time to time. The part exposing the author's belief in free will is particularly naive and reads like an undergraduate philosophy dissertation. I suppose that the author's main thesis is the fact that empires tend to be built from areas located on meta-ethnic frontiers - which makes sense, if only because that's where the good armies are, but promoting it to a Universal Law of History is excessively pompous. Likewise, the asabiya concept, while not totally useless, is purely descriptive ex-post. Besides, the expression of those ideas is vague and lacks rigour. There are some interesting points. The best chapter in my view is the one on the 14th Century (largely inspired by Barbara Tuchman's Distant Mirror), explaining how Europe resolved its overpopulation problem by murderous warfare, and its inequality problem ("top-heavy" society) by the elimination of the elites either through the legal assassination of the richest nobles (England) or by purging the nobility in military defeats (France). The parallel with the end of the Roman senatorial class at the beginning of the Principate is interesting and makes me think the of the way Mr. Putin has been recovering the People's economic assets from the Oligarchs in Russia. The observation that inequalities have been increasing in the US since the 1960s could perhaps help us determine the time of the next revolution...The part on social capital in chapter 13, essentially a summary of various theories on the subject (Putnam), is very interesting as well. Finally, contrary to what seems implied by the publisher, the book makes no use of quantitative models. The author only briefly mentions a simplistic wealth distribution model with inheritance in a population which has little in common with the main discourse.
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20 of 23 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Thought Provoking - With the depth of Guns, Germs and Steel, February 20, 2006
This review is from: War and Peace and War: The Life Cycles of Imperial Nations (Hardcover)
It is a socially accepted idea that a common enemy unites. It's common sense to us, but the facts of how pervasively a common enemy can cause a nation to unify has never been laid out clearer in any book I have read. Turchin presents many cases of different people bonding together and energized by an unsettled frontier or a frontier under seige. Empires such as Rome, France and the Carolingians and the Holy Roman Empire are prime examples of nations who rose by being surrounded by enemies. These nations were forced into action for their own survival. Turchin does a fine job of backing up his theory with detailed accounts of the rise of these empires. Turchin uses the Arabic term "asibaya", a term that roughly means "unity and cooperation" to describe nations that had unified. The second part of the book deals mostly with the fall of empires. Many of these empires fell - interestingly enough - because of the common bond breaking down internally. Turchin attributes much of this to class divisiveness, i.e., the rich getting richer, the poor getting poorer and the eventual collapse of the upper class as a result, as they could no longer live off of the poor. This resulted in not only the poor revolting, but also the upper class battling with each other. For the most part this is a well written book, however the author tends to jump around a bit from chapter to chapter, which at times makes the book hard to follow. This is a minor price to pay, however for a book this well researched and informative. I'll chalk up any disorganization in the book to his inexperience in writing history books of this scope. Turchin treats the pre-capitalist dynamics in much the same way that Marx does. In fact, Turchin refers to Marx in numerous places. Say what you want about Marx, but he had a clear understanding of how people and classes of people interact. One obvious mistake in his writings, though - He attributes Voltaire's famous quote about the Holy Roman Empire ("It wasn't holy, it wasn't roman and it wasn't an empire") to Marx, which is indeed incorrect.
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19 of 24 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A compelling framework for pre-capitalist historical dynamics, November 12, 2005
This review is from: War and Peace and War: The Life Cycles of Imperial Nations (Hardcover)
Alex Alaniz's otherwise excellent review fails to mention Turchin's core concept of 'asabiya' (Chapter 4). First developed by the fourteenth century thinker, Ibn Khaldun, asabiya broadly connotes social solidarity. Similar, more narrowly-based concepts include social capital (Robert Putnam) and the idea of military fighting spirit as a force multiplier. Turchin puts asabiya at the heart of his historical dynamics, from asabiya's forging in initially fractious tribal groupings, chronically stressed at the edge of existing empires, through to the empire-building power of egalitarian high-asabiya groups, through to the decline of empire as class-stratification erodes social bonds in the empire's decadent period. Turchin traces an 'asabiya gradient' in the United States, from high in the north to low in the south, which he associates with the corrosive legacy of slavery. Steven Pinker's 'Blank Slate' made similar remarks about the lower social solidarity in the US South, although Pinker saw this as resulting from the Southern 'honour culture' which, as he saw it, had resulted from the pastoral, rather than farming background of the earliest colonists. Pastoralists have to treat others as potential enemies since their mobile assets (e.g. cattle) are so easy to steal - a reason for low asabiya. It would be interesting to know whether Turchin's more technical books have developed mathematical models/simulations of inter-society dynamics in which asabiya is a key parameter. Although Turchin's many examples and models have been drawn from pre-capitalist agrarian societies, the fundamental concepts seem eminently applicable to contemporary events (Turchin chances a few asides, but not a systematic framework). I would guess that what we're seeing here are the opening movements of an exciting, insightful and controversial research programme to come.
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