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Hitler; as I mentioned earlier, it seemed for decades that Hitler also trumped Elias—until it became clear that he didn’t. Between 1933 and mid-1945, the Nazi Leviathan devoured its young and drove rates of violent death up to horrendous levels. But if we take just a slightly longer perspective, by the summer of 1945 this monster had of course been defeated by other Leviathans, and the downward trend in rates of violent death resumed.
    I will return to the what-about-Hitler question in more detail in Chapter 5 , but right now I just want to say that the reason Hitler does not trump Hobbes is that picking out extreme cases of vile or virtuous rulers will never prove or disprove a bigger theory about what war is good for. The reality is that no two governments are the same (indeed, given the inglorious history of political U-turns, no one government remains the same for very long), and we can only make sense of Leviathan’s impact by looking at government, as well as war, over the longest possible run.
    Table 1 , designed by the historian Niall Ferguson, is a handy tool for thinking about this. “The table should be read as a menu rather than a grid,” Ferguson explains; each society makes one or more selections from each column, mixing and matching as it chooses. There are tens of thousands of possible combinations. Hitler’s Germany, for instance, was run as a tyranny. Its objectives included security, raw materials, treasure, and aboveall land (the notorious Lebensraum ). The public goods it provided are less obvious but probably included health. Its rule was mainly military, its economic system planned (albeit badly), the main beneficiaries a ruling elite, and its social character decidedly genocidal.
    Table 1. So many ways to do things: the historian Niall Ferguson’s “menu” of forms of government
    No two societies make quite the same choices. Two thousand years before Hitler, the Roman Republic was governed by an aristocracy, which was interested above all in extracting military manpower. The major public goods it provided were probably trade and law, and it ruled chiefly by delegation to local elites, benefited most of its inhabitants, and shifted over time from a hierarchical to an assimilative character.
    For history buffs, slotting different societies into Ferguson’s menu can be a lot of fun, but there are weightier points to be made too. Across the five thousand years for which we have written evidence, some governments have acted more like Hobbes’s Leviathan and others more like Hitler’s Third Reich, but the overall trend, I argue in this book, has been toward Hobbes’s end of the spectrum, and this is why rates of violent death have declined so much.
    The only way to see this pattern—and the method I will pursue throughout this book—is to step back from the details to look over the long run at what actually happened, rather than at what theorists and self-proclaimed great men said was (or ought to be) happening. On the whole, for reasons Iwill come back to in Chapter 6 , governments pursue what they perceive as their best interests, not blueprints laid out for them by philosophers. Hitler did not need pseudoscientists to convince him to make war on Europe and exterminate what he called Untermenschen (“subhumans”); rather, he decided on war and then looked for pseudoscientists to justify it. Europe’s chattering classes were scandalized when Hitler and Stalin signed a pact proclaiming friendship between fascism and communism in 1939—“All the isms have become wasms,” some wit in the British Foreign Office quipped—but they should not have been. The truth of the matter is that the isms have always been wasms. The hard, paradoxical logic of strategy has always trumped everything else.
    Consequently, I spend a lot of time in this book talking about ordinary people—workers, soldiers, managers—and much less about