Order and Anarchy

Civil Society, Social Disorder and War

Bibliographic Data

ID19906404
AuthorsRobert Layton (0000-0001-8695-7425, Durham University, corresponding author)
Year2006
Publication date2006-05-25
Open AccessYes
TypeBOOK
VenueOrder and Anarchy (SOURCE_BOOK)
PublisherCambridge University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1017/cbo9780511617263
OpenAlexW211757993
Open LibraryOL3413701M
ISBN9780511617263
LanguageEN
Citations received8
References cited107

Through the study of civil society, the evolution of social relations, and the breakdown of social order, Order and Anarchy re-examines the role of violence in human social evolution. Drawing on anthropology, political science, and evolutionary theory, it offers a novel approach to understanding stability and instability in human society. Robert Layton provides a radical critique of current concepts of civil society, arguing that rational action is characteristic of all human societies and not unique to post-Enlightenment Europe. Case studies range from ephemeral African gold rush communities and the night club scene in Britain to stable hunter-gatherer and peasant cultures. The dynamics of recent civil wars in the former Yugoslavia, Chad, Somalia and Indonesia are compared to war in small-scale tribal societies, arguing that recent claims for the evolutionary value of violence have misunderstood the complexity of human strategies and the social environments in which they are played out

Action (physics) · Aggression · Civil society · Collective action · Darwinism · Economics · Enlightenment · Environmental ethics · Epistemology · Order (exchange) · Peasant · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Situated · Social Darwinism · Social order · Social science · Social system · Sociology · Spanish Civil War · Evolutionary Game Theory and Cooperation · Law · Philosophy · Psychology · Social Psychology

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