Tasmanian Bill Mollison, of Permaculture fame, saw vitality and vigour in edge effects. He designed his agricultural system around it. Peter Turchin sees similar effects occurring at the edge of Empires, where the constant danger and turgidity under the shadow of a powerful state induces social cohesion in those confronting it.

Turchin develops his theory with the Mongols and Russians before applying it to the Roman Empire and Byzantine Empire. When the Roman Empire was waning in 300 AD, there were several larger cohesive socio-military groups opposing it. The groups, such as the Franks, Visigoths, Burgundians and Bavarians; were all within a 100 mile stretch of the edge of the Roman Empire.

Two hundred years later the dominant states in Europe were the Frankish Empire (modern day Belgium and France), the kingdom of the Visigoths (modern Spain, Portugal and southern France). Another two hundred years and the Frankish Empire of the Carolingians dominated all of Europe.

Further in the south, the constant interaction of the Roman and Byzantium Empires led to the social cohesion of the Bedouins and other Arab tribes. They were bound by a mono-theistic religion which arose out of the homebase of Mecca, and in 800 AD the Abbasid Califate stretched from the Middle East to modern day Turkey and Algiers and up to Russia.

Turchin is amazed that tribes in a seven percent area of Europe ended up being the only ones creating their own large states. The areas of the world that were not frontiered with Empires, such as Norway, Finland, etc remained small tribes, not large centralised states.

Turchin argues that this form of collective responsibility and cohesion is enough to challenge the social science theory of "rational-choice" in the area of ultrasociality. One which looked to reductivism to explain human behaviour. Reductionism was shown its limits at the turn of the 20thC with the rise of Quantum mechanics.

Turchin writes quite simply;

Machiavelli was wrong.