Violence and Civilization in the Western States-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.

Introduction; 1. The Hellenic city-states system; 2. New territorial concentrations of power in antiquity; 3. The international relations of Latin Christendom; 4. The Renaissance city-state system; 5. The European states-system and the idea of civilization; 6. Cruelty and compassion in the Age of Empire; 7. Enlightenment thought and global civilization; 8. Total warfare and decivilizing processes; 9. Modernity, civilization and the Holocaust; 10. Sovereignty, citizenship and humanity in the global civilizing process; 11. Process sociology, civilization and international society; Conclusion.

Andrew Linklater is Woodrow Wilson Professor of International Politics at Aberystwyth University, a Fellow of the British Academy and a member of the Academy of Social Science and the Learned Society of Wales. He has published extensively on theories of international relations and on the importance of process sociology for the study of international society. His previous books include Men and Citizens in the Theory of International Relations (1982), Beyond Realism and Marxism (1990), The Transformation of Political Community (1998), The English School of International Relations, co-authored with Hidemi Suganami (Cambridge, 2010) and The Problem of Harm in World Politics (Cambridge, 2011).