Description

Despite the brief initial survey of primatology, this is not really a book about "the origins of violence". Rather, it is an examination of various literary texts through the lens of the work of Raphael Lemkin, who invented the word "genocide" in 1944. For Docker, Herodotus and Thucydides reveal the genocidal basis of Athenian imperial democracy, and Aeschylus and Euripides offer "'Gandhian' moments of profound questioning of the value of war, violence and vengeance". On the other hand, the Aeneid and the Old Testament (particularly Exodus and Joshua) "represent an ethical disaster", describing divinely sanctioned genocide. We move then from Tacitus to early modern colonial narratives, detouring for a somewhat thin attack on Quentin Skinner and a bland "colonial" reading of The Tempest, before the very interesting (and frustratingly compressed) final section, where the author calls in Spinoza and John Toland in defence of the Enlightenment against those who think that modern industrial genocide is its logical conclusion. A strange assortment, but some chewy morsels.