Peter Turchin does fascinating and innovative work, and has been doing so for the better part of three decades. One of his primary research questions he addresses relates to the rise and fall of empires, which this 2006 book outlines. I earlier reviewed his popular 2023 book. In a sense, this is the foundational thinking and argument of his work, which draws on Ibn Khaldun and broadens the case with examples in Russia, Europe and North America.
“Different groups have different degrees of cooperation among their members, and therefore different degrees of cohesiveness and solidarity. Following the fourteenth century Arab thinker Ibn Khaldun, I call this property of groups asabiya. Asabiya refers to the capacity of a social group for concerted collective action. Asabiya is a dynamic quantity; It can increase or decrease with time. Like many theoretical constructs, such as force in Newtonian physics, the capacity for collective action cannot be observed directly, but it can be measured from observable consequences.” (p. 5-6)
“Returning to the main question of the book, we have hit upon a powerful macro historical generalization. People originating on fault line frontiers become characterized by cooperation and high capacity for collective action, which in turn allows them to build large and powerful territorial states. In other words, we have the beginnings of the theory explaining how imperial nations rise to power.” (p. 55)
“The behavioral experiments using the public goods and the ultimatum games decisively prove that Machiavelli’s self-interest premise was wrong. It is simply not true that all people behave in entirely self-interested manner. Some people – the knaves – are like that. However, other kinds of people, who I have called the saints and the moralists, behave in prosocial ways. Furthermore, different societies have different mixtures of self-interested and cooperative individuals. Cultural practices (for example, the harambee system) and social institutions have a strong effect on whether and how collective action can be sustained. The experiments also point to the key role of the moralists. Kindly saints are completely ineffectual in preventing cooperation from unraveling. In the absence of effective sanctions against free riders, opportunistic knaves waste any contributions by the saints to the common good. Self-righteous moralists are not necessarily nice people, and their motivation for the moralistic punishment is not necessarily prosocial in intent. They might not be trying to get everyone to cooperate. Instead, they get mad at people who violate social norms. They retaliate against the norm breakers and feel a kind of grim satisfaction from depriving them of their ill-gotten gains. It’s emotional, and it’s not pretty, but it ensures group cooperation.” (p. 122)
“The first members of the European Union were, and the most enthusiastic proponents of the European Union are, France, Germany, and the countries of Benelux, and Italy – almost precisely the regions that were part of the Carolingian Empire. Any region that during the Middle Ages was Roman Catholic, whether it is now Catholic or Protestant, is welcome within the European Union. Poles, Croatians, and the Czechs were eagerly encouraged to join, as soon as they freed themselves from Soviet domination. By contrast, Muslim Turkey, even though a part of NATO for more than half a century, is not a member yet, and it is doubtful that it will become one. Formerly Orthodox Ukraine and Belarus are most empathetically not welcome. Even Greece was accepted in the European Union only as a result of heavy-handed American pressure.” (p. 202)
