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

by Peter Turchin

Here then a powerful general principle of world history is uncovered: A close connection exists between fault-line frontiers and new, expansionist states. However, what about the specific mechanism that I proposed to account for this empirical generalization—the role of frontier in nurturing high degree of cooperation, or asabiya, to use Ibn Khaldun’s term? This explanation runs counter to the “received wisdom” of social science in the twentieth century, when the main current was to downplay the importance of cooperation and altruism while putting on the pedestal self-interested, “rational” motives of behavior. Influential thinkers, such as Carrol Quigley in his The Evolution of Civilizations: An Introduction to Historical Analysis, or Joseph Tainter in The Collapse of Complex Societies, contemptuously dismissed theories, such as Ibn Khaldun’s, as “the softening of the fiber” or “mystical” explanations. The majority of social scientists perceived cooperation and collective solidarity as somehow “soft” and unscientific, while (and this was particularly true for the economists) extolling the virtues of the “rational-choice theory” that explained the collective behaviors of human masses by assuming that all people behave in a purely self-interested manner.