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#619 Philip Dwyer The Darker Angels of Our Nature: Refuting the Pinker Theory of History & Violence

The Dissenter

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Is the Past More Violent Than the Early Modern Period?

Historians have come out to de bunk the kinds of figures that pinker uses. He's done is focused in on some of the most violent periods in human history and has blown out of proportion some of the figures surrounding them, he says. For example, he talks about the mediaeval period as though it were extraordinarily violent. In fact, it was probably much less violent than the early modern period in the sixteenth and seventeenth century.

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