Order and Anarchy

Through the study of civil society the evolution of social relations and the breakdown of social order Order and Anarchy re-examines the role of violence in human social evolution. Drawing on anthropology political science and evolutionary theory it offers a novel approach to understanding stability and instability in human society. Robert Layton provides a radical critique of current concepts of civil society arguing that rational action is characteristic of all human societies and not unique to post-Enlightenment Europe. Case studies range from ephemeral African gold rush communities and the night club scene in Britain to stable hunter-gatherer and peasant cultures. The dynamics of recent civil wars in the former Yugoslavia Chad Somalia and Indonesia are compared to war in small-scale tribal societies arguing that recent claims for the evolutionary value of violence have misunderstood the complexity of human strategies and the social environments in which they are played out.