Tea at Trianon: Book Review: "War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage" by Lawrence Keeley

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Friday, July 10, 2026

Book Review: "War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage" by Lawrence Keeley

From Steam Calliope Scherzos:

Before we get ahead of ourselves, though, Keeley’s study has been a long overdue contribution not just to anthropology but military history and theory as well. The mid-1990s was a time in which it still wasn’t altogether clear within academia if primitive cultures are capable of engaging in something like “total war,” or if the kind of violence they engage in could be considered “war” at all. Of course, the archeological record couldn’t have been clearer that primitive war is, in fact, war, and that it could be not only damaging but existentially threatening to entire communities. But Keeley’s main hurdle in writing War Before Civilization was not one of epistemology but rather ideology.
By the mid-90s, the field of anthropology had gone through two distinct phases that had impoverished the academic understanding of savage violence. The first treated primitive war with an air of condescension marked by ethnocentric assumptions. This attitude was best exemplified by Harry Holbert Turney-High and Quincy Wright, who composed their seminal works during the 1940s. They each understood primitive violence as a sort of pastime to alleviate boredom, or even a sporting affair. Actually, the idea that savages engage in war as a sport persisted in western culture for a surprisingly long time, and the educated would often refer to the idea in passing. In one interview from 1977, for instance, Marshall McLuhan says, “Tribal people — one of their main kinds of sport is butchering each other. It’s a full-time sport in tribal societies.” This characterization owes a lot to Turney-High and Wright, who not only minimized the seriousness of primitive war but also seriously undervalued the skill and ability with which primitives fought while overestimating the significance of civilized military organization.
But eventually, this sensibility grew to pass in favor of the second phase of anthropology: the politically correct phase. Instead of using the phrase “politically correct,” Keeley describes this sensibility as Rousseauist in nature, citing the enlightenment-era dispute between Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Thomas Hobbes in which the former posited that primitive man is a “noble savage” incapable of violence as a response to Hobbes’s view of man’s natural state as a “war of all against all.” Anthropology was in an unusual situation during this time because although field reporting had revealed that primitive tribes absolutely do engage in violent conflict, many anthropologists still preferred to maintain that these tribes were essentially peaceful.(Read more.)