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Chargement... The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (édition 2012)par Steven Pinker (Auteur)
Information sur l'oeuvreThe Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined par Steven Pinker
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[Pre-reading comments. I ordered this one from the library because it's one of Bill Gates's recommendations for the year. I was dismayed when it came and I saw that it not only is 700 pages long (not 806 as listed here; there's a hundred pages of back matter), but has narrow margins, small type, and almost no white space on the pages. I bet it's the equivalent of a thousand pages of more conventional book design. Yikes! But as I flipped through it reading a paragraph here and there I kept thinking, "hm, that's interesting." Let's see how far I get in it.] Aaand no. Sorry. I just kept picking up other books instead. Faced with the ceaseless stream of news about war, crime, and terrorism, one could easily think we live in the most violent age ever seen. Yet as New York Times bestselling author Steven Pinker shows in this startling and engaging new work, just the opposite is true: violence has been diminishing for millenia and we may be living in the most peaceful time in our species's existence. For most of history, war, slavery, infanticide, child abuse, assassinations, programs, gruesom punishments, deadly quarrels, and genocide were ordinary features of life. But today, Pinker shows (with the help of more than a hundred graphs and maps) all these forms of violence have dwindled and are widely condemned. How has this happened? This groundbreaking book continues Pinker's exploration of the esesnce of human nature, mixing psychology and history to provide a remarkable picture of an increasingly nonviolent world. The key, he explains, is to understand our intrinsic motives--the inner demons that incline us toward violence and the better angels that steer us away--and how changing circumstances have allowed our better angels to prevail. Exploding fatalist myths about humankind's inherent violence and the curse of modernity, this ambitious and provocative book is sure to be hotly debated in living rooms and the Pentagon alike, and will challenge and change the way we think about our society.
But in its confidence and sweep, the vast timescale, its humane standpoint and its confident world-view, it is something more than a science book: it is an epic history by an optimist who can list his reasons to be cheerful and support them with persuasive instances. I don't know if he's right, but I do think this book is a winner. The biggest problem with the book, though, is its overreliance on history, which, like the light on a caboose, shows us only where we are not going. “The Better Angels of Our Nature” 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. While Pinker makes a great show of relying on evidence—the 700-odd pages of this bulky treatise are stuffed with impressive-looking graphs and statistics—his argument that violence is on the way out does not, in the end, rest on scientific investigation. He cites numerous reasons for the change, including increasing wealth and the spread of democracy. For him, none is as important as the adoption of a particular view of the world: “The reason so many violent institutions succumbed within so short a span of time was that the arguments that slew them belong to a coherent philosophy that emerged during the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment. The ideas of thinkers like Hobbes, Spinoza, Descartes, Locke, David Hume, Mary Astell, Kant, Beccaria, Smith, Mary Wollstonecraft, Madison, Jefferson, Hamilton and John Stuart Mill coalesced into a worldview that we can call Enlightenment humanism.” Appartient à la série éditorialeContient暴力の人類史 上 par スティーブン・ピンカー 暴力の人類史 下 par スティーブン・ピンカー Prix et récompensesDistinctionsListes notables
S'appuyant sur des milliers d'études, plus de trente années de recherches et des statistiques incontestables, Steven Pinker montre que, malgré le terrorisme, malgré les conflits contemporains, la violence n'a cessé de diminuer dans le monde au cours des siècles. Des premiers mythes aux grandes conquêtes planétaires, des Croisades à l'Inquisition, de l'esclavage aux conflits du XXe siècle, Steven Pinker revisite l'histoire de l'humanité depuis la révolution humaniste qui a permis aux idées des Lumières de progresser. Il montre comment les échanges commerciaux, les organisations internationales et les récentes révolutions des droits (des minorités ethniques, des homosexuels, des femmes, des enfants et des animaux) ont conduits à privilégier « la part d'ange en nous », selon le mot d'Abraham Lincoln,et à céder le pas aux motivations d'altruisme et de coopération inhérentes à la nature humaine.(source : 4e de couv.) Aucune description trouvée dans une bibliothèque |
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Google Books — Chargement... GenresClassification décimale de Melvil (CDD)303.609Social sciences Social Sciences; Sociology and anthropology Social Processes Conflict and conflict resolution ; ViolenceClassification de la Bibliothèque du CongrèsÉvaluationMoyenne:
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However I would have preferred of the book was shorter and more to the point. I walk away with lots of extra visions of medieval torture that I had managed to avoid to date. ( )