Table Of ContentThe Darker Angels of Our Nature
The Darker Angels of Our Nature
Refuting the Pinker Theory of History & Violence
Edited by
Philip Dwyer and Mark Micale
CONTENTS
List of illustrations
List of contributors
Preface
1 Steven Pinker and the nature of violence in history
Philip Dwyer and Mark S. Micale
PART ONE Interpretations
2 The inner demons of The Better Angels of Our Nature
Daniel Lord Smail
3 Pinker and the use and abuse of statistics in writing the history of violence
Dag Lindström
4 Progress and its contradictions: Human rights, inequality and violence
Eric D. Weitz
5 Pinker’s technocratic neoliberalism, and why it matters
David A. Bell
6 Steven Pinker, Norbert Elias and The Civilizing Process
Philip Dwyer and Elizabeth Roberts-Pedersen
PART TWO Periods
7 Steven Pinker’s ‘prehistoric anarchy’: A bioarchaeological critique
Linda Fibiger
8 Getting medieval on Steven Pinker: Violence and medieval England
Sara M. Butler
9 History, violence and the Enlightenment
Philip Dwyer
PART THREE Places
10 The complexity of history: Russia and Steven Pinker’s thesis
Nancy Shields Kollmann
11 A necrology of angels: Violence in Japanese history as a lens of critique
Michael Wert
12 British imperial violence and the Middle East
Caroline Elkins
PART FOUR Themes
13 A history of violence and indigeneity: Pinker and the Native Americas
Matthew Restall
14 The rise and rise of sexual violence
Joanna Bourke
15 Where angels fear to tread: Racialized policing, mass incarceration and executions as state
violence in the post–civil rights era
Robert T. Chase
16 The better angels of which nature?: Violence and environmental history in the modern
world
Corey Ross
17 On cool reason and hot-blooded impulses : Violence and the history of emotion
Susan K. Morrissey
PART FIVE Coda
18 Pinker and contemporary historical consciousness
Mark S. Micale
Bibliography
Index
ILLUSTRATION
10.1 Russia’s first ‘spectacle of execution’: ‘The execution of musketeers, Moscow 1698’, published in
Johann-Georg Korb, Diarium itineris in Moscoviam (Vienna, 1700). Library of the Hoover
Institution, Stanford, CA
CONTRIBUTORS
David A. Bell is a historian of early modern France, with a particular interest in the political
culture of the Old Regime and the French Revolution. From 1990 to 1996, he taught at Yale,
and from 1996 to 2010 at Johns Hopkins, where he held the Andrew W. Mellon chair in the
Humanities, and served as Dean of Faculty in the School of Arts and Sciences. He joined the
Princeton faculty in 2010. He has been the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim
Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies and the Woodrow Wilson
International Center for Scholars. He is the author of six books, including Lawyers and
Citizens (Oxford, 1994), The Cult of the Nation in France (Harvard, 2001), The First Total
War (Houghton Mifflin, 2007) and Rethinking the Age of Revolutions: France and the Birth
of the Modern World, with Yair Mintzker (Oxford, 2018). His latest book is Men on
Horseback: Charisma and Power in the Age of Revolutions (Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2020).
Joanna Bourke is Professor of History at Birkbeck, University of London, and a Fellow of
the British Academy. She is also the Global Innovation Chair at the University of Newcastle
(Australia, 2017–21). She is the principal investigator on a five-year Wellcome Trust-funded
project entitled ‘SHaME’ (Sexual Harms and Medical Encounters). She is the prize-winning
author of thirteen books, as well as over 100 articles in academic journals. She is a frequent
contributor to TV and radio shows, and a regular correspondent for newspapers. She has
published The Story of Pain: From Prayer to Painkillers (Oxford, 2014), and Wounding the
World: How Military Violence and War-Play Are Invading Our Lives (Virago, 2014).
Sara M. Butler is King George III Professor in British History at the Ohio State University.
She is the author of three books: The Language of Abuse: Marital Violence in Later Medieval
England (Brill, 2007), Divorce in Medieval England: From One to Two Persons in Law
(Routledge, 2013) and Forensic Medicine and Death Investigation in Medieval England
(Routledge, 2015). She has also written on a variety of other subjects such as abortion,
infanticide, juries of matrons, regulation of the medical profession and suicide.
Robert T. Chase is Associate Professor of History at Stony Brook University, State
University of New York (SUNY). He is the author of We Are Not Slaves: State Violence,
Coerced Labor, and Prisoners’ Rights in Postwar America (University of North Carolina
Press, 2020) and the editor of Caging Borders and Carceral States: Incarcerations,
Immigration Detentions, and Resistance (University of North Carolina Press, 2019). His
work on the history of prison and policing reform and state violence has been featured on
national media programmes through radio, newspapers and television, including MSNBC,
CNN and NPR, Newsweek, Washington Post. He is currently working on a history of sheriffs
in the US South and Southwest.
Philip Dwyer is Professor of History and the founding director of the Centre for the Study of
Violence at the University of Newcastle. He has published widely on the Revolutionary and
Napoleonic eras, including a three-volume biography of Napoleon. He is the general editor
(with Joy Damousi) of the four-volume Cambridge World History of Violence and co-editor
of the Cambridge History of the Napoleonic Wars. He is currently engaged in writing a
global history of violence.
Caroline Elkins is Professor of History and African and African American Studies at
Harvard University, a visiting professor of business administration at Harvard Business
School and the founding director of Harvard’s Center for African Studies. Her first book,
Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain’s Gulag in Kenya (Henry Holt, 2005), was
awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction. She is a contributor to The New
York Times Book Review, The Atlantic and The New Republic. She has also appeared on
numerous radio and television programmes including NPR’s All Things Considered, BBC’s
The World and PBS’s Charlie Rose. She is currently working on two projects: one examining
the effects of violence and amnesia on local communities and nation-building in post-
independent Kenya; the other analysing British counter-insurgency operations after the
Second World War, with case studies including Palestine, Malaya, Kenya, Cyprus and
Nyasaland. Professor Elkins teaches courses on modern Africa, protest in East Africa, human
rights in Africa and British colonial violence in the twentieth century.
Linda Fibiger is Senior Lecturer in Human Osteoarchaeology at the University of Edinburgh
and Programme Director of the MSc in Human Osteoarchaeology. She has published widely
on bioarchaeological perspectives on violence and conflict, experimental bioarchaeology,
reconstructions of past lifeways and the promotion of professional standards, ethics and
legislation in bioarchaeology. She is currently involved in the European-funded The Fall of
1200 BC project for which she is leading the analysis of human skeletal remains from the
Balkans, with a particular focus on population relationships, lifestyle and indicators of crisis
and conflict.
Nancy Shields Kollmann is William H. Bonsall Professor in History at Stanford University;
she specializes in early modern Russian history with an emphasis on the history of law,
represented in By Honor Bound. State and Society in Early Modern Russia (Cornell, 1999)
and Crime and Punishment in Early Modern Russia (Cambridge, 2012). Her The Russian
Empire 1450-1801 (Oxford, 2017) surveys the growth and governance of the Russian empire
as a Eurasian ‘empire of difference’. She is currently working on visual sources of early
modern Russia, both produced in Russia and in European travel accounts, maps, and
pamphlet literature.
Dag Lindström is Professor of History at Uppsala University in Sweden. He has conducted
research on the history of crime since the 1980s and is co-author (with Eva Österberg) of
Crime and Social Control in Medieval and Early Modern Swedish Towns (Uppsala, 1988).
Lindström has published widely in the field of urban social and cultural history from
Medieval times to the early nineteenth century. He is co-editor (with Alida Clemente and Jon
Stobart) of Micro-Geographi es of the Western City, c.1750-1900 (forthcoming, 2021) and
co-author (with Göran Tagesson) of Houses, Families, and Cohabitation in Eighteenth-
Century Swedish Towns (forthcoming, 2021). His more recent research includes a Nordic
comparison of homicide between the seventeenth century and the present. The results will
appear in Janne Kvivouri et. al, Homicide in Deep Time: Nordic Homicide from Early
Modern to Present Era (forthcoming 2021).
Mark S. Micale is Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Illinois in Urbana-
Champaign. His fields of specialization include modern comparative European intellectual
and cultural history; post-Revolutionary France; the history of science and medicine,
especially the mental sciences; psychoanalytic studies; masculinity studies; and historical
trauma studies. He is the author or editor of seven books, including Beyond the Unconscious
(Princeton, 1993); Discovering the History of Psychiatry (Oxford, 1994); Traumatic Pasts:
History, Psychiatry, and Trauma in the Modern Age, 1870-1930 (Cambridge, 2001); The
Mind of Modernism: Medicine, Psychology, and the Cultural Arts in Europe and America,
1880-1940 (Stanford, 2003); Enlightenment, Passion, Modernity: Historical Essays in
European Thought and Culture (Stanford, 2000); and Hysterical Men: The Hidden History of
Male Nervous Illness (Harvard, 2000). After thirty years of teaching – at Yale, the University
of Manchester and the University of Illinois – he retired in 2017 and now lives in Los
Angeles.
Susan K. Morrissey is Professor of History at the University of California, Irvine. She is a
specialist in Russian history, and has published books and articles on student radicalism,
suicide, and terrorism, including Heralds of Revolution: Russian Students and the
Mythologies of Radicalism (Oxford, 1998) and Suicide and the Body Politic in Imperial
Russia (Cambridge, 2006). She is currently writing a monograph about political violence in
late imperial Russia.
Matthew Restall is Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of History and Director of Latin American
Studies at Penn State University. He was recently the Greenleaf Distinguished Professor at
Tulane University and president of the American Society for Ethnohistory. He is a former
National Endowment for the Humanities, John Carter Brown Library, Institute for Advanced
Study at Princeton, Library of Congress and US Capitol, and Guggenheim fellow. He edits
Hispanic American Historical Review and book series with Cambridge and Penn State
university presses. His two dozen books in six languages include The Maya World (Stanford,
1999); Maya Conquistador (Beacon Press, 1999); Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest
(Oxford, 2003); The Black Middle (Stanford, 2009); 2012 and the End of the World (Rowman
& Littlefield, 2012); The Conquistadors (Oxford, 2012); and When Montezuma Met Cortés
(Ecco/HarperCollins, 2018), which won the 2020 Howard Cline Prize. His newest books are
Return to Ixil: Maya Society in an Eighteenth-Century Yucatec Town (University Press
Colorado, 2019); Blue Moves (Bloomsbury, 2020); and The Maya: A Very Short Introduction
(Oxford, 2020).
Elizabeth Roberts-Pedersen is Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Newcastle.
She has published on several elements of the history of modern warfare, including
international volunteering, discipline and military medicine. Her book examining the effects
of the Second World War on the theory and practice of psychiatry, funded by an Australia
Research Council Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA), is forthcoming with
Cambridge University Press.
Corey Ross is Professor of Modern History at the University of Birmingham. He is the
author of numerous works on modern Europe, global environmental history and modern
empire. His most recent book, Ecology and Power in the Age of Empire (Oxford, 2017), won
the American Historical Association’s George Louis Beer Prize. He is currently writing a
book on the history of European imperialism through the lens of water, with the support of
the Leverhulme Trust and National Endowment for the Humanities.
Daniel Lord Smail is Professor of History at Harvard University, where he works on deep
human history and the history and anthropology of Mediterranean societies between 1100
and 1600. His current research approaches transformations in the material culture of later
medieval Mediterranean Europe using household inventories and inventories of debt
collection from Lucca and Marseille, and he is also embarking on a study of slavery in later
medieval Provence. His books include Legal Plunder: Households and Debt Collection in
Late Medieval Europe (Harvard, 2016), On Deep History and the Brain (University of
California Press, 2008) and The Consumption of Justice: Emotions, Publicity, and Legal
Culture in Marseille, 1264-1423 (Cornell, 2003).
Eric D. Weitz is Distinguished Professor of History at City College and the Graduate Center,
City University of New York. His most recent book is A World Divided: The Global Struggle
for Human Rights in the Age of Nation-States (2019). His other major publications include
Weimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy (2007; Weimar Centennial (third) edition 2018); A
Century of Genocide: Utopias of Race and Nation (2003; reprint with new foreword 2014);
and Creating German Communism, 1890-1990: From Popular Protests to Socialist State
(1997), all with Princeton University Press. Weimar Germany was named an ‘Editor’s
Choice’ by The New York Times Book Review. Weitz edits a book series for Princeton,
Human Rights and Crimes against Humanity.
Michael Wert is Associate Professor of East Asian History at Marquette University. A
specialist in early modern and modern Japan, he is the author of Meiji Restoration Losers:
Memory and Tokugawa Supporters in Modern Japan and Samurai (Harvard, 2013). He is
