Decivilization in the 1960s

Abstract

For all the lags and mismatches between the historical trajectories of the United States and Europe, they did undergo one trend in synchrony: their rates of violence did a U-turn in the 1960s. Homicide rates in five western European countries 1300-2000, shows that European countries underwent a bounce in homicide rates that brought them back to levels they had said goodbye to a century before.

Why did the Western world embark on a three-decade binge of crime from which it has never fully recovered? This is one of several local reversals of the long-term decline of violence that I examine in The Better Angels Of Our Nature. If the analysis is on the right track, then the historical changes I have been invoking to explain the decline should have gone into reverse at the time of the surges.