July 2018
This isn’t rocket science. Review of five books, including Ultrasociety by Jonathan Marks (Evolutionary Anthropology)
“Peter Turchin’s Ultra Society lurches back to the microevolution analogy. Here the driving force in human cultural history is intergroup competition, meaning war. Thus, history will be reducible to military tactics, technology to weaponry, and culture to its EurAsian cutting edge. Turchin’s argument is that a proper naturalistic, biological, evolutionary view shows that the modern, cooperative world is the unintended consequence of the history of war, the most obvious form of competition between groups. How so? ‘By eliminating poorly coordinated, uncooperative, and dysfunctional states it creates more cooperative, more peaceful, and more affluent ones.'”
April 2018
Review of Ultrasociety in Journal of Cognitive History by Anders Klostergaard Petersen
“Ultrasociety is written with élan and elegance, and the argument presented by the author is new and thoughtprovoking. Contrary to other scholars in the field, Turchin accentuates war as the fundamental evolutionary driver. This may sound excessively hideous and cynical to readers, but Turchin sophisticatedly and persuasively develops his argument throughout the book.”
Fall 2017
Review of Ultrasociety in Evolutionary Studies in Imaginative Culture by Ian Morris
“In this ambitious, learned, and valuable book, biologist-turned-historian Peter Turchin addresses three big topics, which he defines as “the evolution of cooperation, the destructive and creative faces of war, and the strange trajectory of human egalitarianism” (230). His main goal is to explain the undeniable fact that humans are ultrasocial. Following the biologist Edward O. Wilson, he calls this the ability to “cooperate in large groups of genetically unrelated individuals” (14), and argues that “it was violence—societies making war on each other—that drove the evolution of ultrasociality, and it was ultrasociality that ultimately made violence decline” (219).”
October 2017
Współpraca to dziecko wojny in Forum Akademickie by Piotr Tryjanowski
“Ultrasociety to jedna z pierwszych analiz powstałych dzięki wykorzystaniu coraz popularniejszego podejścia badawczego nazywanego eksploracją Big Data. Rzecz jasna komputery wyłącznie wspomagają analizy, zaś idea rodzi się w głowie badacza. Turchin ma swoją idée fixe, że wojny są ważniejsze od rolnictwa, bo to one mają rozleglejsze czasowo i przestrzennie konsekwencje. Wspólne życie na farmie pomaga w powstaniu wspólnoty, lecz naprawdę scala dopiero wspólne stawiane czoła napastnikom, walka o zasoby – pokarm, wodę, prestiż i partnerki do rozrodu, a przede wszystkim o życie.”
December 2016
Review of Ages of Discord in Siam News by Richard H. Burkhart
“Peter Turchin, an exemplary interdisciplinary professor and scholar, has set out to remedy this scarcity of mathematical history using classic applied mathematics and solid historical data, and none too soon. His latest book, Ages of Discord: A Structural-Demographic Analysis of American History, is a warning shot across the bow of the U.S. ship of state – that dangerous shoals and storms lie dead ahead, with huge swells already rocking the boat.”
September 2016
Review of Ultrasociety in Journal of Bioeconomics by Mark Koyama
Ultra Society is the most recent book by Peter Turchin, the polymath evolutionary scientist, and author of numerous scholarly and popular works on cultural and social evolution. Let me begin the review by stating that Turchin is one of the most underrated scholars in the social sciences and that, like everything else he has written, Ultra Society is replete with insights and is an enjoyable and worthwhile read.
February 2016
Review of Ultrasociety in Evonomics by Cameron K. Murray
“Professor Turchin’s new book Ultrasociety identifies the causal mechanisms hidden in the twists and turns of human civilisation by quantifying the rise and fall of empires. The book translates some of Turchin’s academic work on cliodynamics, making it accessible to the interested lay reader. What is cliodynamics? My best translation is that it is the scientific study of history that seeks to use quantification to test, eliminate and open new competing hypotheses about the evolution of human civilisation.”
December 2010
Review of Secular Cycles in the International Social Science Review by Donald J. Zeigler
“What is the motive force of history? Peter Turchin, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Connecticut, and Sergey Nefedov, a senior research scientist at the Institute of History and Archaeology of the Russian Academy of Sciences, attempt to provide an answer to that question with a masterful, interdisciplinary synthesis of evidence that points to the answer in demographic-structural theory à la Jack Goldstone.”
January 2007
Review of Historical Dynamics in the Journal of Peace Research by William C. Terry
“Historical Dynamics is a wonderful behind-the-scenes look at an effort to turn informal theories into cogent mathematical models capable of producing fresh insights.”
July 2006
A review of Historical Dynamics in American Journal of Sociology by Dingxin Zhao
“The book is well organized and clearly argued. … unlike some simple-minded mathematical modelers, Turchin is very familiar with the relevant literature and has made a genuine effort to incorporate historical data into his models. I have learned a great deal from this work, and I strongly recommend it to scholars who are interested in historical sociology and mathematical modeling in social sciences. This said, however, I would like to point out some of the problems with this book…”
March 2006
Commentary on my article in Structure and Dynamics
A comment by Andrey Korotayev
A critique by Natalia Komarova, and my response
December 2005
A review of War and Peace and War in The Times Higher Education Supplement by Gordon Johnson
“History has had a long, and on the whole fruitful, relationship with adjacent subjects such as archaeology and anthropology, and is just emerging from a testing (and largely negative) cohabitation with literary and cultural theory. Turchin’s view of our subject from the perspective of an evolutionary biologist, versed in the hard language of mathematics, promises a great deal. He may not have invented a new science or rewritten the history of the world, but he might encourage others in the history profession to think differently and to consider whether they should take down their disciplinary scaffolding from time to time to share their ideas more effectively with a popular readership.”
Gordon Johnson is president of Wolfson College, Cambridge, and general editor, The New Cambridge History of India. full text of the review
October 2005
A review of War and Peace and War in Library Journal text here
May 2005
A review of Historical Dynamics in Contemporary Sociology by Philip A. Schrodt
“When an individual from the natural sciences takes on a complex issue in the social sciences, the result can be either an exercise in naIve determinism bordering on the absurd, or a set of provocative insights bringing new perspectives to classical problems. In the latest volume in Princeton’s ‘Studies in Complexity’ series, biologist Peter Turchin has accomplished the latter…” see the whole review
Another review of Historical Dynamics in Theory and History by Noël Bonneuil
“…what he [Turchin] perceives to be insights gained by mathematical modeling could as easily be seen as misconceptions aided and abetted by mathematical dust in the eyes.” see the whole review
December 2004
A review of Historical Dynamics in Economics of Transition by Paul Seabright
“This fascinating and ambitious book presents a number of attempts to quantify and test theories of the growth and decline of political organizations over a time-span of many centuries. The author’s ambition is to show that a rigourous quantitative theory of historical dynamics is possible—he calls it ‘cliodynamics’. This involves expressing the underlying relationships in the form of differential equations and testing predictions against various kinds of historical data. Though the underlying philosophy is a little less novel than the author recognizes—quantitative macroeconomics with political and institutional variables is becoming increasingly fashionable—the book is rich in applications of the approach and full of illuminating historical material…”see the whole review
February 2004
A review of Historical Dynamics in Nature by Joseph Tainter: here
“Social theory is a minefield, even for those experienced in it. The quantification of historical patterns is useful and important, and should have a place in historical research. But sophisticated mathematics will not improve naive social theories.”
June 1999
Review of Quantitative Analysis of Movement in The Quarterly Review of Biology by Jeannette Yen
