No abstract

THE NATURE OF THE UNDERSTANDINGAs many political scientists know, ‘biopolitics’ is the short-hand term used to describe the approach of those in the profession who believe that biological concepts — especially evolutionary theory, which treats behaviour as the product of both nature and nurture — and biological research techniques can help us study and understand political behaviour better.

So that the reader can better adjudge possible disagreements, we would like to begin by stating, at the very outset, the thesis argued in our book, Darwinism, Dominance, and Democracy (Somit and Peterson, 1997). As Peter Corning correctly reports in his commentary (2000), we contend that “the most important reason for the rarity of democracy is that evolution has endowed our species, as it has other primates, with a predisposition for hierarchically structured social and political systems” (1997: 1). In short, we argue that Homo sapiens has a “genetic bias” toward authoritarian political societies characterized by hierarchy, dominance, and submission.

No abstract