The Better Angels of Our Nature

The Better Angels of Our Nature

by Steven Pinker

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Pinker marshals centuries of data to argue violence has declined dramatically across every measurable dimension. Reason, commerce, empathy, and the state drove this underappreciated progress.

Published:
Pages:
832
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In the Conversation

In this collection, The Better Angels of Our Nature references 2 other books and is cited by 2 other books.

It draws on Thinking, Fast and Slow and The Selfish Gene.

It’s picked up by The Dawn of Everything and Enlightenment Now.

Scroll down to read the exact passages where other authors reference this book and what they say about it.

What This Book Draws On

2

The books Pinker references and why each one mattered to the argument.

Pinker references Dawkins's evolutionary framework.

The Selfish Gene

References

The Selfish Gene

by Richard Dawkins

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What Other Authors Say About It

2

The exact passages where other authors bring up “The Better Angels of Our Nature” and what they take from it.

Graeber and Wengrow dedicate pages to contesting Pinker's Better Angels, disputing his claim that prehistoric life was uniformly violent and picking apart his use of Yanomami and Gebusi ethnographic anecdotes.

The Dawn of Everything

Cited in

The Dawn of Everything

by David Graeber and David Wengrow

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Enlightenment Now is explicitly a sequel to Pinker's Better Angels of Our Nature, extending the violence-decline data to wider metrics of progress and revisiting his arguments against cyclical and pessimist theories of history.

Enlightenment Now

Cited in

Enlightenment Now

by Steven Pinker

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Intellectual Lineage

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Thinking, Fast and Slow

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