War in Human Civilization (review)

War in Human Civilization is an extraordinarily ambitious book. Azar Gat seeks a comprehensive, integrated theory of war; comprehensive in that he covers the entire span of human history and the entire range of culture and societies that exist at any particular moment in time and integrates a search for an interdisciplinary explanation of the roots of war that draws upon all of the social sciences, history, and many of the life sciences. In the process, Gat develops an evolutionary perspective that finds war to be a "natural" rather than "unnatural" activity and where the underlying reality of competition over scarce resources is the ultimate cause of socially-organized violence. He concludes that the "excitement and exhilaration" that he sees offered by war, at least in some measure, "are rooted in in-born, evolution shaped predispositions."(662) War in Human Civilization is well-written and its arguments are quite accessible. Gat provides a useful catalogue of important intellectual arguments concerning the sources of war across the wide range of literatures. These summaries, together with the rich documentation, are a significant contribution.

Gat begins with a summary of what he calls the Hobbesian and Rousseauite schools, the first pessimistic because it finds the state of nature to be "poore, nasty, brutish, and short" with the implication that society can be rescued from this condition only by the intervention of coercive authority. The second offers a more harmonious picture with war stemming from the ills of civilization rather than from the original state of nature. Gat finds the differences between the underlying assumptions of the two schools "read" into particular studies of animal behavior and anthropological examinations of relations among hunter-gatherers. Some periods, such as the 1960s, offer more "Rousseauean" interpretations, others tend to serve up Hobbesian conclusions.

Gat attempts to unify the two schools through a secondary review of literature that finds "primitive warfare" existing not only among the pre-state agriculturalists who emerged 10,000 years ago but also among hunter-gathers, living over the past 100,000 years and whose experience included homicide and intergroup fighting and killing across a wide geographic range. At the same time, there is an important conditional: violence was always a strategic choice that might or might be the best for survival and which might or might not be followed.

Aggression is thus both innate and optional. But Gat's evolutionary voice finds war close to the behavioral surface and triggered with relative ease. He also notes that many societies have been able to live in peace over many generations without their inhabitants experiencing particularly urgent biological reminders to take an alternative course of action. Aggression may be innate but still dependent on social conditions for it to be expressed. In this regard, its strength and direction is significantly different than the drives for food or for sex.

Gat's discussion is often subtle and nuanced. He notes, for example, the difficulty of determining the validity of observations from outsiders who often brought behaviors (external trade) and implements (weapons) that themselves contributed to the violence seemingly measured under experimental conditions. At the same time, he misses key reference points such as the Seville Statement on Violence, issued by an impressive list of psychologists and biologists, which expresses skepticism toward any automatic connection between genetic structure or instincts on the one hand, and aggression and war on the other.

Gat then enters a long historical discussion of war which concludes with the experience of liberal democracies and the generally optimistic thesis that we are entering – or at least a significant part of the world is entering – the period of "democratic peace." He qualifies the argument by noting that the aversion to war among liberal democracies is not absolute. They may have fought fewer inter-state wars with each other, but they have fought more colonial wars and civil wars against non-state fighting units. Moreover, early democracies may actually be more warlike, as the demos, in his view, "acquire a reputation for volatility and rashness in crisis; [and...