Book review, Adaptive Behavior

[agner]

My book Warlike and peaceful societies is reviewed by Carel van Schaik in the journal Adaptive Behavior, May 2018, http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10 ... 2318771975

Van Schaik does a competent job of reviewing the book and he finds the book's argument about the deceptive use of the threat of war by populists and budding dictators particularly convincing and timely. Van Schaik is less convinced that war always involves a collective action problem. He believes that warriors may fight because of the personal benefit it gives them.

I have replied to van Schaik's criticism in a commentary in Adaptive Behavior, August 2018, http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177 ... 2318787476

My reply is emphasizing the distinction between raids where the main purpose is plundering, and territorial wars where the gains go mainly to the group rather than to the individual fighter. The latter kind of war involves a collective action problem and the need for a strong leader, according to regality theory.

Van Schaik argues that social inequality can arise as a consequence of the monopolization of resources without any war. The book Warlike and peaceful societies actually discusses an important mechanism that leads to growing inequality, known as the Matthew effect: whoever has the most wealth and power can use his influence to manipulate the social system in a way that allows him to accumulate still more wealth and power. This mechanism does not require a war, but I will argue that a highly stratified social system cannot rely on the monopolization of resources alone. It also requires the psychology of regality. People will not tolerate a despotic ruler if there is no external threat and thus no need for a strong leader. The population will develop an egalitarian ideology, and the despot will be unable to find supporters willing to defend his privileges.

If anybody out there sees other reviews or mentionings of the book Warlike and peaceful societies, please let me know.

[wagersmith]

I'd love to read the review. Unfortunately, its behind a paywall. Is it available free anywhere?

[agner]

Open access is becoming more and more common, but unfortunately the review is still behind a very high paywall. I am bringing some excerpts here from Carel van Schaik's review:

Like it or not, war is a human universal. Not surprisingly, social scientists try hard to understand its causes and consequences. Yet, the challenge is great: the face of war varies tremendously, along with the size, subsistence base, and technology level of societies and has therefore changed dramatically during human prehistory and history, including the post-WWII period. Enter Agner Fog’s regality theory. According to Fog, the frequency or threat of war has profoundly affected the structure of human societies, as reflected in the gradient from peaceful to warlike, or in his parlance from kungic to regal, societies.

He also offers an extensive review of studies of modern wars, stressing how they have changed during the past half-century, and how elites manipulate, deceive, and engage in fearmongering in order to stay in power, all the while making ready use of the tendency of the mass media to exaggerate threats, known as the ‘mean world syndrome’ (or controlling the media to ensure this happens). Linked to this, Fog cites a variety of case studies in support of his view that leaders and contenders for leadership exaggerate threats in order to increase public acceptance of their rule.

There is also some criticism of the book:

regality theory does not distinguish between within-society inequality that arose through command hierarchies emerging in the face of an external threat on one hand, and inequality that arose as a result of purely internal processes based on resource monopolization by powerful elites on the other hand.

A second problem is that the book fundamentally assumes that engaging in warfare is always so risky that a serious collective action problem arises, in other words that free-riding would be adaptive and that sending men to war is always against their interests. This may well be true for enlisted soldiers in modern societies, but need not have held in small-scale, egalitarian societies, in which raids and surprise ambushes were the rule.

My answers to this criticism is published in a commentary, which you can read at https://www.researchgate.net/publicatio ... _societies

[agner]

The book has now been reviewed in The International Journal on World Peace.
https://www.researchgate.net/publicatio ... nd_Culture

As predicted, the reviewer (a law professor) has problems understanding the highly interdisciplinary study, but at least he has got the central ideas. I hope that people interested in conflict and peace research can benefit from reading about regality theory.