What About All That Non-State Violence?

We occasionally hear about how much worse things were before we got the modern state and the cool 20th century. Author Steven Pinker writes, “If the wars of the twentieth century had killed the same proportion of the population that die in the wars of a typical tribal society, there would have been two billion deaths, not 100 million.”

Daniel Sanchez replies:

To draw an endorsement of the state from such statistics is entirely vacuous.

Primitive (“tribal”) societies are primitive not because they don’t have states, but because they don’t have a developed tradition of private property. This necessarily results in economic autarky and extreme poverty. Autarky and poverty in turn result in both inter-tribal biological competition (constant warfare) and the fact that there is not enough wealth to support a parasitic state. It is private property and the division of labor that led both to a decline in inter-tribal warfare and enough wealth in societies for parasitic states to feed off.

The state owes its existence to civilization, not vice versa. And the wars that interrupt the process of civilization have been made more frequent and more bloody by the encroachment of the state on market-and-civil society.

aenkmnp

Sanchez doesn’t address the point in the quote at all. The point was about a relative reduction in the casualties of war in modern warfare not about states creating civilization.

A proper response would be that we’re talking about individual human beings and therefore “relative” is irrelevant and monstrous.

Also modern states engage in more democide.
http://www.TomWoods.com Tom Woods

No, he does. “Autarky and poverty in turn result in both inter-tribal biological competition (constant warfare) and the fact that there is not enough wealth to support a parasitic state. It is private property and the division of labor that led both to a decline in inter-tribal warfare and enough wealth in societies for parasitic states to feed off.”
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1457760294 Robert Fellner

This review of Pinker’s work is excellent: http://www.independent.org/pdf/tir/tir_17_01_10_dewolf.pdf
Anonymous

Pinger seems to miss a couple things that correlate much closer to the reduction of violence. Prosperity due to capitalism. Freer trade and commence leading to not wanting to want to kill the source of ones . wealth. There may also be an relationship to how powerful and centralized the State is. Command economies have a tendency to be more violent. That may lead to a question of the cyclical nature of history..

Rome was originally a less powerful State and was less repressive to it’s population. As time went on that State become more and more arbitrary and despotic. It continued by increased use of force against it’s own people. Finally, in the end days of the Roman Empire, when the Visigoths ended the Roman State, historical evidence cites that the general population was relieved to be out from under the yoke of the State. The collapse that followed in the middle ages resulted in drastic reductions of the human population and mass misery and poverty. So…. to understand this period, it would be necessary to take the total effect of that State, including the decline and chaos that followed.

One of the best illustrations of this is population numbers:

150 AD Rome was becoming increasingly despotic. Population began to collapse. By 400 AD, the population dropped by 20 millions to 50 million, a decline of 30%.

400 AD to 800 AD. Post collapse chaos further reduces the population to 25 million.

The population after that time was subject to increases and decreases, but it was not until the 16th Century with the beginnings of trade that the population had any sustained growth.