Today’s book review: The Invention of Prehistory: Empire, Violence, and Our Obsession with Human Origins, by Stefanos Geroulanos.

An insightful, long perspective.

Geroulanos starts with a strong assertion. “Human origins are not mere abstractions,” he writes. “Nor are they simple prompts for thought experiments and pure scientific inquiry. Promises and violence have regularly been unleashed in their name.”

Geroulanos is right that human origins matter. He’s also right that to understand western civilization you must first understand human history. Here’s the key: Building and sustaining a government that works well is really hard. People take modern society for granted all the time.

When America’s founders wrote its Constitution in 1787, the history of government had been awful. Kings and tyrants dominated through fear and force. Their friends got some of the bounty. While the great majority toiled in misery. It was all “empires and violence,” as Geroulanos puts it.

America’s fourth president James Madison worried that history’s iron law of kings dominating governments would ensnare the new nation: “We have heard of the impious doctrine in the old world, that the people were made for kings, not kings for the people. Is the same doctrine to be revived in the new, in another shape . . .?”

The answer turned out to be a resounding no. And if you put it into historical context — with help from this book — you’ll see that this is a big achievement.