The New York Sun review of Randall Collins‘ new book Violence: A Micro-sociological Theory, highlights Collins’ distance from macro-level analysis based on history and demographics in favor of a method which seeks out individual cases to identify the conditions present at the time the violence was committed.

Review author Graeme Wood highlights Collins’ tentative conclusions:
“Mr. Collins concludes with recommendations: Educate soldiers about forward panic and how easily it can feed its own appetite (addictively, ‘like eating salted nuts’). Learn how to defuse dangerous situations by matching an aggressor’s bluster without seeming to top it. And, most interesting of all, he urges us to consider reviving the practice of dueling — which was, during its heyday, a way to reduce and contain violence, not a way to encourage it.”