摘要：Norbert Elias and Steven Pinker maintain that human´s history manifests a pacification trend regarding both international and international relations. They describe a steady decline of violence and cruelty within families, villages, gender relations and child care on the one side and regarding sovereignties such as states and nations on the other side. Although institutional improvements are regarded as decisive to this pacification trend both authors earmark psychological transformations as even more crucial. Both authors describe that premodern humans are shaped by psychological structures that resemble to those of children, thus referring to the old tradition of comparing ontogeny and historical developments, widely spread in the pre-war era of social sciences. The article here describes that modern Piagetian cross-cultural psychology supports this view evidencing that premodern peoples do not develop the fourth stage of human development, the formal operations, to that depth and extent as modern humans do, due to the expansion of education and socialisation techniques in the past generations. This new theory, called structure-genetic theory programme, is able to explain the facts Elias and Pinker demonstrate in a surprising and convincing way. The conclusions that have to be drawn from these insights go far beyond the research of the history of violence and touch the foundations of man´s history on earth.
