Darker Angels of Our Nature

In The Better Angels of Our Nature Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker argued that modern history has witnessed a dramatic decline in human violence of every kind, and that in the present we are experiencing the most peaceful time in human history. But what do top historians think about Pinker’s reading of the past? Does his argument stand up to historical analysis?

In The Darker Angels of our Nature, seventeen scholars of international stature evaluate Pinker’s arguments and find them lacking. Studying the history of violence from Japan and Russia to Native America, Medieval England and the Imperial Middle East, these scholars debunk the myth of non-violent modernity. Asserting that the real story of human violence is richer, more interesting and incomparably more complex than Pinker’s sweeping, simplified narrative, this book tests, and bests, ‘fake history’ with expert knowledge.

Philip Dwyer is Professor of History and the founding Director of the Centre for the History of Violence at the University of Newcastle, Australia. He has published widely on the Revolutionary and Napoleonic eras, including a three-volume biography of Napoleon.

Mark Micale is Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, USA. He is the author or editor of seven books, including Beyond the Unconscious; Discovering the History of Psychiatry; Traumatic Pasts: History, Psychiatry, and Trauma in the Modern Age, 1870-1930; The Mind of Modernism: Medicine, Psychology, and the Cultural Arts in Europe and America, 1880-1940; and Hysterical Men: The Hidden History of Male Nervous Illness, and Traumatic Pasts in Asia: History, Psychiatry, and Trauma from the 1930s to the Present (forthcoming).