POL S 121 Lecture Notes - Lecture 4: Noble Savage, Force Multiplication, Social Complexity
Document Summary
Continuation of last lecture - ecce john wayne (added to lecture 3) Both constructivists and realists start in 1648 - starting with states - don"t go far enough back. Anthropologists say: maybe if you go far enough back in time, we"ll find that warfare is rare. If this hypothesis is true, then we"ll find that states are either pacifying or the problem. Tried to examine mass burial sites looking for evidence of war and violence. All human communities went to war, and the 5% that didn"t go to war were only peaceful because they didn"t have the ability to. He argues: homicide and violence are persistent features of just being human. When alter and ego meet in a state of nature, they fight. Keeley argues that war is natural and common. War is not correlated with population density or state development. As states gain power, population, and wealth, it was pacifying/restraining was pacifying/restraining.
