Mediterranean Anarchy, Interstate War, and the Rise of Rome

Eckstein, Arthur M.

doi:10.1525/9780520932302

Cited by 51 publications

(8 citation statements)

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“…Such diversity plausibly existed in the ancient Roman Empire, which emphasized inclusion and diversity of both ethnicity and language to achieve the political agenda of territorial expansion. The regions covered by the empire were plausibly highly diverse in both ethnicity and language (Eckstein, 2007). This ancestral Roman tradition might have influenced the Spanish and Portuguese policies in the colonization of Latin America.…”

Section: Independence and The Four Forms Of Interdependencementioning

confidence: 99%

Varieties of interdependence and the emergence of the Modern West: Toward the globalizing of psychology.

Kitayama

Salvador

Nanakdewa

et al. 2022

American Psychologist

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Cultural psychology-the research field focusing on the mutual constitution of culture and the mind-has made great strides by documenting robust cultural variations in how people think, feel, and act. The cumulative evidence is consistent with the hypothesis that Westerners are independent, whereas those in the rest of the world are interdependent. Although this research traditionally examined North Americans and East Asians, recent research has extended this literature to other non-Western regions. We review this emerging research and describe four distinct forms of interdependence in four non-Western cultural zones. Specifically, interdependence is promoted through (a) conflict avoidance (dominant in much of East Asia), (b) selfassertion for ingroup protection (dominant in Arab regions), (c) expression of emotions that promote interpersonal resonance (dominant in Latin America), and (d) argumentation for conflict resolution (dominant in South Asia). Furthermore, we propose that the Modern West adopted the existing signature features of interdependence in the neighboring cultural zones (notably, self-assertion, emotional expression, and argumentation) and redefined the psychological function and social meaning of these features; instead of promoting interdependence, they became means to achieve independence. This theoretical integration suggests that cultural variation in basic psychological processes emerged over the last several 1,000 years under the influence of ecology, migration, and intergroup relations. The current effort underscores the need to globalize psychological science.

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Section: Independence and The Four Forms Of Interdependencementioning

confidence: 99%

Varieties of interdependence and the emergence of the Modern West: Toward the globalizing of psychology.

Kitayama

Salvador

Nanakdewa

et al. 2022

American Psychologist

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“…Yet Realism neglects domestic causes of war and peace. Eckstein [2006], for example, sought to explain the Roman Republic's wars almost entirely in terms of geopolitical anarchy. This made some sense for the early wars of the republic, but domestic power relations became much more important later on.…”

Section: Realismmentioning

confidence: 99%

Wars, Rulers, Rationality

Mann¹

2023

Arch. eur. sociol.

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This article provides the conclusions of a study of wars which are relatively well-documented through the ages and across the continents of human settlement. The evidence on which these conclusions are based is to be found in my book On Wars published by Yale University Press in July 2023. There are two main conclusions. First, the initial decisions to make either war or peace have almost always been made by a small handful of rulers and their advisors, regardless of whether they inhabit autocratic or representative political systems. They are to blame for war, not the peoples. Second, wars are rarely rational in either means or ends. They are rarely carefully calculated and they rarely bring the the desired ends, with the exceptions of where big powers aggress against small ones, “sharks swallowing minnows”, and of wars fought in self-defense where there is a reasonable chance of success. This is because in addition to the element of rational calculation so stressed by Realist theory, rulers and their advisors are substantially driven by combinations of emotions and ideologies.

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“…William Harris (1979) argued that the political dividends for successful military commands paid to the Roman elite, and the broader economic benefits enjoyed by both mass and elite in the form of land and loot, made the Romans pathologically warlike. Arthur Eckstein (2006), drawing heavily on Realist International Relations theory, countered that the bellicosity Harris assigned as uniquely Roman was instead widespread across the Mediterranean, a common and necessary cultural response to the anarchic geopolitical environment. Carthage was very much included in his assessment, as Eckstein (2006, 158-80) suggested that the city was warlike and expansionary from the fifth century onward.…”

Section: Carthage At Warmentioning

confidence: 99%

Generals and judges: command, constitution and the fate of Carthage

Taylor

2023

Libyan Stud

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This paper considers the structure and priorities of the Carthaginian state in its imperial endeavours in both North Africa and across the Mediterranean, focusing especially on the well-documented period of the Punic Wars (264–146 BC.). It suggests that Carthaginian constitutional structures, in particular the split between civil shofetim (‘judges’) and military rabbim (‘generals’), impacted the strategic outlook and marginal bellicosity of the city, making it less competitive against its primary peer-rival in the Western Mediterranean, Rome.

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Mediterranean Anarchy, Interstate War, and the Rise of Rome

Cited by 51 publications

References 0 publications

Varieties of interdependence and the emergence of the Modern West: Toward the globalizing of psychology.

Varieties of interdependence and the emergence of the Modern West: Toward the globalizing of psychology.

Wars, Rulers, Rationality

Generals and judges: command, constitution and the fate of Carthage

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