War and Peace and War: The Rise and Fall of Empires

by Peter Turchin

The rise and fall of the dukes of Buckingham and de Guise graphically illustrates the dangers of extreme inequality for the social order. Rampant inequality feeds into the perception of the extant social order as unjust and illegitimate, and creates excellent breeding conditions for the rise of revolutionary ideologies. In the early modern period, these ideologies took the religious form. Later, the dominant revolutionary ideologies were nationalistic and Marxist. Today, we are seeing the rise of religious-based revolutionary ideologies again, such as the Wahhabism. There are huge differences between the English Puritans, the French Jacobins, the Russian Bolsheviks, and the Islamic Al Qaida, but there is at least one common thread running through all these ideologies and movements associated with them—a burning desire for social justice.