by Steven Pinker
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.
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.
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The books Pinker references and why each one mattered to the argument.
Pinker references Kahneman on cognitive biases about violence.
Pinker references Dawkins's evolutionary framework.
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.
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.
How ideas flow through the citation network. Ancestors are books this title builds on; descendants are books that build on it.
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