Unfortunately, this book which had me so excited for nearly a month turned out to be a total dud.
The approach is more of long form sloppy thinking, not erudition. There is not enough reliance on generally accepted social scientific facts about our human past. Most unwelcome, the flaccid argument the book attempts to make is but a higgledy mush of retrograde beliefs.
The central tenet of the book is that there was a point in the human past where “we’d gotten it right” with human social and political systems, as if human biology and evolution has a specific apogee and terminus (instead of being a process that plays out in accord with the laws of physics and biology).
Another such retrograde opinion bandied about as fact, is the wholesale dismissal of critical theory as applied in the social sciences. It is treated as too tainted, merely a cultural bludgeon in the hands of leftists who’d use it to impose changes on human social structures and that there is no social-science worth in the epistemic framework. That is tantamount to saying that because people use economics to support a myriad positions in ethical dilemmas, there is no inherent utility to the intellectual tools of economic scholarship, and our society would be better without it.
Lastly (I could go on, but enough with the garbage!) the text situates itself squarely in American contemporary political concerns. Somehow the author seems to miss “how evolution and ideology shape the fate of nations” is not well represented when the national condition explicitly treated is the American one.
Good bye The Origin of Politics. I’d hoped you were brilliant, rather than banal and dull. I wish you’d have landed some deep hooks into the terra-forma of how it is that we’ve come to have a history of human behaviors punctuated by the kinds of leadership structures we’ve seen arising since the neolithic, or why it is that we continue to fail to produce human societies arranged around human rights, dignity, peace, and universal ideals of equity. We fail, and we’ve failed to attain these kinds of political structures for so long that I cannot accept that the historical record is a fluke. It is a consequence of something deep in our species behavioral repertoire… but any answers to those questions are not going to be found in this wad of drivel.