Does it feel like the world is getting more violent by the day — that bloodshed, cruelty, and chaos are rising everywhere you look? The Better Angels of Our Nature by Steven Pinker will fundamentally shatter that assumption with mountains of data, riveting history, and one of the most counterintuitive and important arguments ever committed to print.
The Better Angels of Our Nature is best for readers who love data-driven big-picture thinking; history enthusiasts; students of psychology, sociology, and political science; anyone who wants to understand human nature on a civilizational scale; optimists looking for intellectual ammunition; and pessimists brave enough to have their worldview overturned.
Not for readers who prefer short, breezy reads (this is a nearly 700-page scholarly undertaking); those uncomfortable with statistical analysis or historical violence in graphic detail; and anyone who believes human progress is a hoax and no amount of evidence will convince them otherwise.
Table of Contents
1. Introduction
The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined — the title itself is taken from the closing lines of U.S. President Abraham Lincoln’s first inaugural address, delivered on March 4, 1861, on the eve of the Civil War — was written by Steven Pinker and published in October 2011 by Viking Penguin (Penguin Group USA).
It is a monumental work of approximately 832 pages in its hardcover edition, containing over 100 graphs and maps, and is arguably Pinker’s most ambitious book to date.
Steven Pinker himself is no lightweight. He is Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard University, a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, and the author of acclaimed previous works including The Language Instinct (1994), How the Mind Works (1997), The Blank Slate (2002), and The Stuff of Thought (2007).
He has been named one of Time magazine’s 100 Most Influential People in the World and one of Foreign Policy’s 100 Global Thinkers. In short, when Pinker makes a claim, the intellectual community pays attention — even when it disagrees.
Context
The Better Angels of Our Nature sits at the intersection of history, cognitive science, evolutionary psychology, moral philosophy, and political science.
It is not a typical history book, not a polemic, and not a self-help guide.
It is, in Pinker’s own framing, an attempt to apply the tools of quantitative social science to one of humanity’s oldest and most emotionally charged questions: is the world becoming more or less violent?
The book is squarely non-fiction, grounded in empirical datasets and peer-reviewed scholarship, but written with the propulsive energy of a great essay and, at times, the dark wit of a stand-up comedian who happens to have a PhD.
Purpose and Central Thesis
The book’s central thesis, stated plainly in Pinker’s Preface, is both simple and staggering:
“This book is about what may be the most important thing that has ever happened in human history. Believe it or not — and I know that most people do not — violence has declined over long stretches of time, and today we may be living in the most peaceable era in our species’ existence.”
Pinker is not arguing that the world is perfect, that war has ended, or that evil no longer exists.
He is arguing, with hundreds of datasets, charts, and historical case studies, that violence in virtually every measurable form — from homicide rates to war deaths to child abuse to judicial torture to the treatment of animals — has declined dramatically over centuries and millennia, relative to population size.
And more than documenting the trend, he wants to explain why it happened and what psychological and historical forces drove it.
2. Background
When The Better Angels of Our Nature appeared in 2011, the world had just come through a decade bookmarked by September 11, 2001, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Darfur genocide, and a 24-hour news cycle that made violence feel not only omnipresent but inevitable.
The cognitive psychologist in Pinker recognized a deep and troubling mismatch: the subjective feeling of living in an apocalyptic era was colliding with the objective data, and the data told a very different story.
Pinker had first touched on the decline of violence in passing in earlier books, citing work by criminologists and evolutionary psychologists like Martin Daly and Margo Wilson.
In 2007, he wrote a short piece for the online intellectual forum Edge.org about what he was optimistic about — and included the trend of declining violence. The response was overwhelming.
Scholars in historical criminology and international peace studies wrote to him, sharing datasets he had never seen, telling him the evidence was far more extensive than his brief mention suggested. That correspondence convinced him to write what became one of the most discussed and debated non-fiction books of the early 21st century.
According to Bill Gates, who selected the book as the one volume he would take to a deserted island on the BBC radio program Desert Island Discs, Pinker “shows us ways we can make those positive trajectories a little more likely.
That’s a contribution, not just to historical scholarship, but to the world.” After Gates recommended the book as a graduation present in May 2017, it re-entered the bestseller list — six years after its original publication.
3. The Better Angels of Our Nature Summary
Pinker organizes this massive book around a framework he describes with elegant clarity: “a tale of six trends, five inner demons, four better angels, and five historical forces.” Let me take you through each of these in turn, because understanding the book’s architecture is essential to appreciating its argument.
The Six Trends (Chapters 2–7)
Chapter 1: A Foreign Country opens not with statistics but with a deliberate jolt — a guided tour of historical violence that most of us have conveniently forgotten or never learned.
Pinker reminds us that Ötzi the Iceman, the 5,000-year-old man discovered in the Tyrolean Alps in 1991, was murdered: he had an arrowhead embedded in his shoulder, unhealed cuts on his hands, and DNA traces of at least four other people’s blood on his weapons. Kennewick Man, a 9,400-year-old skeleton found in Washington State in 1996, had a stone projectile lodged in his pelvis.
Homer’s Iliad depicts Agamemnon telling Menelaus to slaughter the Trojans down to “the babies in their mothers’ wombs.” Medieval European illuminated manuscripts casually depicted torture, mutilation, and mass death as part of daily life.
The past, Pinker argues, was a shockingly violent place — and we have been culturally programmed to forget this.
Chapter 2: The Pacification Process describes the first and oldest trend: the transition from small-scale hunter-gatherer and horticultural societies to the first agricultural civilizations with cities and governments, beginning roughly 5,000 years ago.
The data here is remarkable. Forensic archaeology and ethnographic studies of pre-state societies show skeletal trauma rates and violent death percentages that dwarf anything in modern national statistics.
Pinker cites studies suggesting that in some non-state societies, 15–60% of male deaths were violent — compared to less than 1–2% in even the most violent modern states.
The imposition of a state monopoly on force, even an imperfect and often brutal one, reduced the constant raiding and feuding of stateless life. Pinker calls this the Pacification Process, and it represents what he estimates was a roughly fivefold decrease in per-capita rates of violent death.
Chapter 3: The Civilizing Process traces the second major trend, drawing its name from sociologist Norbert Elias’s landmark 1939 work.
Between the late Middle Ages and the 20th century, European homicide rates fell by a factor of ten to fifty. England, for example, saw homicide rates of roughly 110 per 100,000 people in the 14th century; by the early 20th century, that figure had dropped to about 1 per 100,000 — a hundredfold decline.
Pinker presents Manuel Eisner’s painstaking compilation of historical European homicide data, rendered in graphs that show a long, bumpy, but unmistakable downward slope across centuries.
The key mechanisms Elias identified — and Pinker endorses — were the consolidation of feudal territories into centralized kingdoms with functioning courts and commerce, and the gradual internalization of norms of self-restraint.
The aristocratic culture of dueling, for instance, was not abolished overnight; it faded as new norms of “civilized” behaviour took hold among the educated classes and spread downward through society.
Pinker also documents a striking exception that proves the rule: the American South, which retained an honor culture transplanted from the herding societies of the Scottish and Irish borderlands.
As late as the 20th century, Southern U.S. homicide rates were dramatically higher than Northern ones — not because Southerners were genetically different, but because they inhabited a cultural ecology that had never fully undergone the Civilizing Process Elias described.
Chapter 4: The Humanitarian Revolution covers perhaps the most emotionally resonant trend.
Beginning with the Age of Reason and accelerating through the European Enlightenment of the 17th and 18th centuries, organized movements arose to abolish practices that had been universally accepted for millennia: judicial torture (used to extract confessions in virtually every legal system in the world), the execution of witches and heretics, public floggings and mutilations as criminal punishments, despotism, slavery, and cruelty to animals.
Pinker charts the abolition of judicial torture across European countries, showing that between roughly 1750 and 1850, country after country eliminated torture from its legal code — a change that would have seemed literally inconceivable just two centuries earlier.
The mechanism Pinker highlights here is the expansion of literacy and the rise of the novel. Reading, he argues, is a technology for perspective-taking.
When 18th-century readers wept over Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740) and Clarissa (1748) — novels written from the perspective of ordinary women suffering genuine injustice — they were exercising a moral muscle that gradually extended beyond fiction.
As Pinker writes, drawing on the historian Lynn Hunt’s work: “Stepping even for a moment into the perspective of someone who is turning black in a pillory or desperately pushing burning faggots away from her body or convulsing under the two hundredth stroke of the lash may give a person second thoughts as to whether these cruelties should ever be visited upon anyone.”
By the late 18th century, almost 100 new novels were published in England and France every year, and the readership for them was enormous. The correlation between this explosion of empathy-expanding fiction and the cascade of humanitarian reforms is, Pinker argues, more than coincidental.
Cesare Beccaria’s 1764 On Crimes and Punishments — which argued in the clearest rational language that torture and cruel punishment were not only inhumane but counterproductive — became an international sensation and directly influenced legal reformers from Frederick the Great to Thomas Jefferson.
Beccaria’s little book is a perfect example of what Pinker calls the “Republic of Letters”: the transnational intellectual community of the Enlightenment, connected through correspondence and print, in which bad ideas were subjected to rational scrutiny and discarded.
Chapter 5: The Long Peace examines what happened after World War II, and it is one of the most startling chapters in the book. Since 1945, the great powers of the world — the United States, Russia, China, the European nations — have not fought a direct war with one another.
This is historically unprecedented. In the 500 years before 1945, major power wars were routine; the gap between them rarely exceeded a few decades. The political scientist John Mueller and others have documented this “Long Peace,” and Pinker presents extensive data on the declining frequency, duration, and lethality of great-power wars from 1500 to 2000.
The graphs show a trend that, while jagged, points unmistakably downward in recent decades. The percentage of years in which the great powers fought each other has declined dramatically since World War II — and may now be approaching zero.
Crucially, Pinker does not credit this to any single cause. Instead, he identifies a “Kantian tripod” — democracy, commerce, and international institutions — as the overlapping structural forces that have made war between developed nations decreasingly rational and increasingly unthinkable.
The spread of democracy (since democracies almost never wage war on each other, a finding known as “democratic peace theory”), the deepening of trade interdependence (making other nations more valuable alive than dead), and the growth of international organizations (the UN, WTO, NATO, ICC) have collectively raised the costs and lowered the benefits of war.
He also addresses nuclear weapons with characteristic careful honesty: they may have deterred direct superpower conflict during the Cold War, but deterrence is a dangerous game, and the threat of nuclear catastrophe is one reason why the Long Peace cannot be taken for granted.
Chapter 6: The New Peace is more tentative — Pinker himself calls this trend “tenuous.” Since the end of the Cold War in 1989, organized violence of all kinds — civil wars, genocides, repression by autocratic governments, and terrorist attacks — has declined significantly worldwide.
The number of armed conflicts per year has fallen, and so have battle-death rates.
The rate of deaths from genocide peaked in the mid-20th century (with the Holocaust, the Stalinist purges, Mao’s campaigns, and Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge accounting for tens of millions of deaths) and has declined dramatically since, though episodes in Rwanda (1994) and Darfur (2003–2010) remind us that the trend is not irreversible.
International peacekeeping operations have grown enormously since 1988, and research suggests they genuinely reduce the risk of conflict resuming after a ceasefire.
Chapter 7: The Rights Revolutions documents the most recent wave of declining violence: the cascading expansion of moral concern since World War II to encompass groups previously excluded from full moral consideration.
Pinker tracks the civil rights movement, the feminist movement, children’s rights reforms, gay rights, and animal rights as successive manifestations of the same underlying logic — an expanding “circle of empathy” that forces societies to recognize and reduce violence they previously ignored or condoned.
The data here are striking: lynchings of African Americans in the United States, which numbered in the hundreds per year in the 1890s, fell to near zero by the 1950s. Domestic violence rates, which were not even systematically measured before the 1970s, declined sharply once they were acknowledged and criminalized.
Rape rates in the United States fell by more than 80% between 1973 and 2008. The approval of corporal punishment of children in U.S. schools, which stood at around 90% in the 1950s, fell to about 55% by 2002 and has continued to decline.
The Five Inner Demons (Chapter 8)
Pinker is emphatic that human beings are not innately peaceful, and this chapter is a refreshingly honest account of our darker psychological tendencies. He identifies five distinct psychological systems that can drive violence:
Predatory or Instrumental Violence — violence deployed simply as a means to an end, whether robbery, conquest, or elimination of a threat. This is the cold, calculating violence of the rational actor.
Dominance — the urge for authority, prestige, and power, which drives everything from schoolyard bullying to imperial conquest. Pinker draws on evolutionary psychology to show that status competition is deeply wired into male psychology especially, arising from the reproductive advantages that high status conferred in ancestral environments.
Revenge — the moralistic urge toward retribution and justice, which fuels cycles of violence that can persist for generations. The blood feud is the purest expression of this inner demon, but it also appears in international conflicts where historical grievances are weaponized.
Sadism — the pleasure taken in another’s suffering. Pinker documents this unsettling reality through historical accounts of torture, public executions, and the culture of cruelty that pervaded pre-modern entertainment.
The crowds that gathered to watch beheadings, burnings, and torture in medieval Europe were not monsters in a special sense — they were ordinary people in a culture that had not yet learned to view suffering as intrinsically bad.
Ideology — perhaps the most dangerous inner demon of all. A shared belief system that posits an earthly utopia, whether racial purity, class liberation, or divine will, can justify unlimited violence in pursuit of unlimited good.
The 20th century’s great catastrophes — the Holocaust, the Gulag, Mao’s Great Leap Forward, Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge — were all driven primarily by ideology.
Pinker estimates that ideologically motivated killing was responsible for the deaths of somewhere between 100 million and 200 million people in the 20th century.
The Four Better Angels (Chapter 9)
Against these inner demons, Pinker identifies four psychological faculties that can orient us away from violence:
Empathy — particularly sympathetic concern, the capacity to feel another’s pain and align their interests with our own. Pinker carefully distinguishes empathy in the sense of perspective-taking from empathy in the sense of compassion, noting that the former can lead to the latter but does not always do so.
Self-Control — the ability to inhibit impulses, to anticipate the consequences of actions, and to resist the temptation of immediate violent gratification.
Pinker connects the rise of self-control norms to Elias’s Civilizing Process and to the remarkable finding known as the Flynn Effect: IQ scores across the developed world have risen by about 3 points per decade since IQ testing began in the early 20th century.
Much of this gain is in abstract reasoning and perspective-taking — the cognitive skills most useful for defusing conflict without violence.
The Moral Sense — the system of norms, taboos, and intuitions that govern social interaction. Pinker is interestingly ambivalent about this faculty: the moral sense is not always a force for peace, because when it is organized around tribal, authoritarian, or purity-focused concerns, it can actually increase violence by defining out-groups as pollutants deserving of punishment.
Reason — “the escalator of reason” is Pinker’s term, borrowed from philosopher Peter Singer, for the intensifying application of rational thought to moral questions.
As the circle of reasoning expands — as more people become literate, educated, and exposed to diverse viewpoints — the logical inconsistencies of violence become harder to maintain. You cannot simultaneously claim that your own suffering matters and that the suffering of others does not, if you are committed to consistent reasoning.
Pinker argues that this faculty of reason, more than any sentimental feeling, is ultimately what drives the expansion of moral concern.
The Five Historical Forces (Chapter 10)
In the final chapter, Pinker brings history and psychology together, identifying five exogenous forces that have engaged our better angels more than our inner demons:
The Leviathan — the Hobbesian state, with its monopoly on legitimate force, which removes the temptation for preemptive attack, inhibits the cycle of revenge, and adjudicates disputes through courts rather than combat. Pinker credits the rise of effective statehood as perhaps the single most important force behind the Pacification Process.
Commerce — a positive-sum game in which trading partners are more valuable alive than dead. As global trade has expanded, the economic incentives for conquest and pillage have diminished relative to the incentives for exchange.
The expansion of trade networks across larger and larger distances, enabled by technological progress, has gradually extended the circle of people whose death would be economically costly rather than beneficial.
Feminization — the increasing influence of women’s interests and values in politics and culture. Since violence is overwhelmingly a male activity — men commit approximately 90% of homicides worldwide — cultures that empower women tend to move away from the glorification of violence and are less likely to breed the dangerous subcultures of rootless young men that historically have driven conflict.
Cosmopolitanism — the expansion of people’s ability to take the perspective of those unlike themselves, driven by literacy, mobility, and mass media. Pinker argues that the same forces that drove the Humanitarian Revolution — the spread of reading, the growth of cities, the development of mass communication — continue to operate today.
The Escalator of Reason — the gradual but cumulative effect of rational thought applied to moral questions. As Peter Singer’s work on the expanding circle of empathy documents, the logic of equal consideration tends, over time, to extend moral concern to ever-wider circles of beings. This is not a comfortable or inevitable process, but it is a real one.
4. The Better Angels of Our Nature Analysis
Let me be direct: The Better Angels of Our Nature is one of the most genuinely important books I have read in years, and I say that with full awareness of how often that phrase is used and how rarely it is deserved.
This is a genuinely groundbreaking work — not because Pinker invented all of the data he presents (he is scrupulously honest about drawing on dozens of other scholars’ datasets), but because he assembles them into a single argument of extraordinary scope and then defends that argument with intellectual rigor and good-faith engagement with the counterevidence.
What struck me most powerfully on first reading was the chapter on the Humanitarian Revolution.
The data on the abolition of judicial torture — showing country after country eliminating a practice that had been universal for millennia, within a span of roughly 100 years — is genuinely vertiginous.
We are so accustomed to thinking of moral progress as a vague aspiration that seeing it documented with dates and statistics feels almost surreal. Pinker convincingly argues that the Enlightenment was not just an intellectual fashion but a genuine moral revolution with measurable consequences.
According to the philosopher Peter Singer, writing in The New York Times Book Review, Pinker’s book is “a supremely important book. To have command of so much research, spread across so many different fields, is a masterly achievement. Pinker convincingly demonstrates that there has been a dramatic decline in violence, and he is persuasive about the causes of that decline.”
I was also moved — genuinely moved — by the chapter on the Long Peace.
The idea that major powers have gone 80-plus years without fighting each other directly, in a world where such wars had been routine for all of recorded history, should elicit more astonishment than it does. We have become so accustomed to this peace that we have stopped noticing it. Pinker is doing something valuable when he forces us to notice.
The Flynn Effect material in Chapter 9 is another highlight. IQ scores have been rising at a rate of about 3 points per decade across the developed world since testing began — which, if you extrapolated back, would mean our great-grandparents scored at what we would now classify as borderline intellectual disability.
This paradox dissolves when you realize that the gains are concentrated in the abstract, context-free reasoning sections of IQ tests, not in factual knowledge.
We have gotten dramatically better at taking the perspective of hypothetical scenarios, reasoning about what would happen if certain conditions obtained — precisely the cognitive skill most needed for moral reasoning and conflict resolution.
The Wall Street Journal’s James Q. Wilson called the book “a masterly effort to explain what Mr. Pinker regards as one of the biggest changes in human history: We kill one another less frequently than before.”
That captures the core achievement accurately, while perhaps underplaying the book’s psychological and philosophical depth.
5. Strengths and Weaknesses
Strengths
The book’s primary strength is the sheer scale and rigor of its empirical case. Pinker does not cherry-pick; he presents the data that complicate his argument as well as those that support it, and he discusses the methodological limitations of historical datasets with unusual candor.
The graphs are produced with care, and Pinker explains exactly where each dataset comes from and what its limitations are. For a book aimed at a general audience, this is an unusual and admirable degree of intellectual honesty.
The writing is also genuinely excellent. Pinker has a gift for the unexpected analogy, the well-chosen historical example, and the dry, self-aware humor that makes a 700-page book feel — most of the time — like a pleasure rather than a duty.
His discussion of the evolution of fairy tales, for example, illuminates the normalization of violence in pre-modern culture with a vividness no statistical table could match.
The psychological framework is another strength. By grounding the argument in cognitive science and evolutionary psychology, Pinker avoids the naive progressivism that plagues some accounts of moral improvement.
He never suggests that humans have become fundamentally different, or that we have overcome our inner demons permanently. He is arguing that changing circumstances have consistently engaged our better angels more than our inner demons — and that this is a contingent, reversible achievement, not a guaranteed trajectory.
Weaknesses and Criticisms
The book is not without real problems, and I want to be honest about them.
The most substantial criticism, raised by several serious scholars, concerns Pinker’s treatment of data from non-state societies. His claim that prehistoric and pre-agricultural peoples experienced dramatically higher rates of violent death — drawing on Lawrence Keeley’s War Before Civilization (1996) — has been contested by anthropologists including Douglas P. Fry, who argues that the sample of societies Pinker draws on is biased toward more sedentary, complex hunter-gatherers, and that genuinely nomadic hunter-gatherer societies show lower rates of violent death.
A 2016 study published in Nature found that lethal violence caused roughly 2% of human deaths around the time of human origin — still significant, but lower than Pinker’s figures suggest.
Recent 2024 archaeological reviews by Hugo Meijer further challenge the “15% adult male mortality from war” figure that appears in Pinker’s early chapters. This does not demolish his overall argument — even the lower figures suggest violence was higher in pre-state societies than in modern ones — but it does mean the size of the decline may be somewhat smaller than Pinker claims.
Scientific American critic Robert Epstein raised the issue of confirmation bias: “Pinker wants peace, and he also believes in his hypothesis; it is no surprise that he focuses more on facts that support his views than on those that do not.”
This is a fair concern. The book’s treatment of the 20th century’s world wars is sometimes criticized for being too quick to fold these catastrophic events into an overall narrative of decline.
The two World Wars killed somewhere between 70 and 85 million people — an absolute number without historical precedent, even if the per-capita rate was lower than some earlier periods. Whether you weight by absolute numbers or relative rates has significant implications for how you read the data.
The Scientific American reviewer also raises a future-looking concern: when a smaller and smaller number of people can do increasingly greater damage — through bioweapons, cyber-attacks, or nuclear devices — the absolute numbers of potential victims could spike catastrophically even if per-capita rates remain low.
Pinker acknowledges this in the book, but critics feel he does not spend enough time on it.
Some critics, particularly on the political left, have argued that Pinker’s framework implicitly endorses the nation-state and liberal market capitalism as the engines of peace, while underweighting forms of “structural violence” — poverty, economic exploitation, colonial extraction — that do not show up in homicide statistics.
Edward Herman and David Peterson’s book Reality Denial: Steven Pinker’s Apologetics for Western-Imperial Violence (2012) makes this case in sharp terms, though many reviewers felt it went too far in its accusations.
Length is another genuine issue.
At nearly 700 pages of dense argument and documentation, the book demands a significant commitment. Some chapters — particularly the very long Chapter 8 on inner demons, which dives deep into neuroscience and evolutionary psychology — feel as though they could have been trimmed without loss of the core argument.
6. The Better Angels of Our Nature Quotes Worth Knowing
Pinker’s Preface sets the entire tone with a declaration that few books in any genre have matched for sheer audacity:
“This book is about what may be the most important thing that has ever happened in human history. Believe it or not — and I know that most people do not — violence has declined over long stretches of time, and today we may be living in the most peaceable era in our species’ existence.”
On the challenge of perceiving the decline:
“The human mind tends to estimate the probability of an event from the ease with which it can recall examples, and scenes of carnage are more likely to be beamed into our homes and burned into our memories than footage of people dying of old age.”
On the logic of morality and the Enlightenment:
“Morality, then, is not a set of arbitrary regulations dictated by a vengeful deity and written down in a book; nor is it the custom of a particular culture or tribe. It is a consequence of the interchangeability of perspectives and the opportunity the world provides for positive-sum games.”
On what literacy and reading do for empathy:
“Reading is a technology for perspective-taking. When someone else’s thoughts are in your head, you are observing the world from that person’s vantage point.”
On the book’s ultimate purpose:
“Instead of asking, ‘Why is there war?’ we might ask, ‘Why is there peace?’ We can obsess not just over what we have been doing wrong but also over what we have been doing right. Because we have been doing something right, and it would be good to know what, exactly, it is.”
7. Comparison with Similar Works
Hans Rosling’s Factfulness (2018) covers overlapping territory — arguing that the world is better than we think on most measurable indicators — but is shorter, more accessible, and less focused on violence specifically.
Rosling is the gentler, more data-visualization-friendly companion to Pinker’s deeper theoretical argument.
John Mueller’s The Remnants of War (2004) and Retreat from Doomsday (1989) anticipated parts of Pinker’s argument about the Long Peace and the declining legitimacy of war among developed nations. Pinker acknowledges Mueller as a major influence.
Jared Diamond’s The World Until Yesterday (2012) examines traditional societies and their relationship to violence, with some overlapping themes around the role of the state in reducing violent death. Diamond is more ethnographically focused and less statistically ambitious.
Lawrence Keeley’s War Before Civilization (1996) is one of Pinker’s primary sources for the prehistory chapters and is worth reading for those who want to go deeper on archaeological evidence for pre-state violence.
Norbert Elias’s The Civilizing Process (1939, English translation 1969) is the sociological classic that underpins Pinker’s Chapter 3. Reading Elias alongside Pinker gives you the intellectual genealogy of the most historically rich part of the book.
Peter Singer’s The Expanding Circle (1981) provides the philosophical framework for Pinker’s discussion of the moral circle and the escalator of reason. Singer himself praised The Better Angels lavishly in The New York Times Book Review.
According to Five Books, Pinker himself would also recommend adding Oona Hathaway and Scott Shapiro’s The Internationalists (2017) to the reading list, as their account of how the 1928 Kellogg-Briand Pact helped establish the post-1945 norm against war of conquest complements his Long Peace chapter beautifully.
8. Conclusion
The Better Angels of Our Nature is one of those rare books that changes the way you see the world — not by giving you a new opinion, but by giving you a new set of facts, a new framework for interpreting them, and a new vocabulary for talking about something as vast and emotionally charged as the history of human violence.
After reading it, you will not be able to look at a newspaper headline about war or crime without the automatic contextual question: compared to when? Compared to what? By what measure?
Do I think Pinker is right about everything? No. The critiques about his pre-state violence data are legitimate, and the book’s near-800-page length means that not every argument is as tight as it could be.
As Pinker closes his Preface:
“As one becomes aware of the decline of violence, the world begins to look different. The past seems less innocent; the present less sinister.”
That shift in perspective — hard-won, evidence-based, and genuinely humbling — is the most lasting gift this formidable book has to offer.
