Violence and Civilization in the Western State-Systems

Andrew Linklater´s The Problem of Harm in World Politics (Cambridge, 2011) created a new agenda for the sociology of states-systems. Violence and Civilization in the Western States-Systems builds on the author´s attempts to combine the process-sociological investigation of civilizing processes and the English School analysis of international society in a higher synthesis. Adopting Martin Wight´s comparative approach to states-systems and drawing on the sociological work of Norbert Elias, Linklater asks how modern Europeans came to believe themselves to be more ´civilized´ than their medieval forebears. He investigates novel combinations of violence and civilization through a broad historical scope from classical antiquity, Latin Christendom and Renaissance Italy to the post-Second World War era. This book will interest all students with an interdisciplinary commitment to investigating long-term patterns of change in world politics.