Ludwig Wittgenstein famously stated that “the confusion and barrenness of psychology is not to be explained by calling it a ‘young science’ … for in psychology there are experimental methods and conceptual confusion.”Footnote ² The kinds of confusions that he referred to are much in evidence in Man Is by Nature a Political Animal. The type of claim advanced in the volume has a long history in the field of political science, but that does little to overcome the conceptual difficulties of past ventures, ranging from social Darwinism to biopolitics. Although the kind of approach represented here has often been criticized as reductionist, antihumanist, determinist, and so on, the more significant problems are theoretical and logical.

The first confusion arises from the title's invocation of Aristotle. There may, indeed, be lessons that can be derived from Aristotle, but they are not those suggested in the various chapters of the book. Aristotle's designation of humans as political animals, or, more accurately, animals whose nature is to live in a polis, had two related but distinct dimensions. He assumed that there was a biologically natural foundation of human behavior, including the empirical facts that humans belonged to the class of gregarious animals and that the polis was a natural, but not inevitable, outgrowth of basic human needs and tended to evolve from more primitive but necessary associations, such as the household. But, more importantly, he also characterized politics as natural in the sense that political life allowed, especially through the medium of citizenship, for both the development and exercise of the distinctly human capacity for language, which in turn was the basis of action, reason, philosophy, and normative judgment about matters such as justice. According to Aristotle, what happened in a polis was both constrained and made possible by biology, but what was more definitively and essentially natural, though contingent, was the emergent conventional character of political life. For him, other animals were only metaphorically or analogically political, and what was natural in the sense of biology was not an explanation for the particulars of political life. There is no a priori reason to take Aristotle as authoritative in these matters, but his Ethics and Politics are certainly not a springboard for the kinds of arguments advanced in this volume.

The conceptual difficulties continue when the editors reject what they refer to as the “‘classic’” meaning of the term politics, that is, the practices and institutions that, in various societies, are typically self-ascribed and distinguished as political. “Politics” is instead defined generically as an analytically distinguishable form of “human behavior,” which could apply to virtually any form of social interaction (such as, the editors suggest, “when lovers argue”). This excludes the concept of politics as designating any theoretically autonomous subject matter or form of inquiry. In one respect, this might be a welcome alternative to the tendency in some of contemporary political theory to confer an ontological status on politics and to speak of “the Political,” but it not only diverges from Aristotle but also leaves open the broader and crucial theoretical question of what constitutes that class of “social and political behaviors” of which politics is an instance.

The basic argument of the volume is that various aspects of the “biological organism” serve to “help shape and guide” politics and that, consequently, the subject can be studied by “biology, endocrinology, evolution, genetics, neurology, and physiology” (p. 2). This approach is in part designed to sidestep or overstep the “nature/nurture” debate and to complement, and in some respects transcend, the recent popularity of rational choice analysis, as well as more traditional studies based on “environmental” factors, such as institutional structures and “socialization.” But since the concept of politics, and social behavior as a whole, is left theoretically empty, the issue concerning how such phenomena are shaped and guided by biology cannot be clearly addressed. While the concept of behavior remains porous, there is a tendency in these chapters to assume the “giveness” of biological facts, as if these were independent variables, but much of the material in natural science on which they draw is both theoretically disparate and internally contested. The individual authors also seem to have quite different concepts of “shaping” and “guiding,” and there is often no clear indication of their disciplinary identity, even though in addition to political science, they apparently include sociology, anthropology, psychology, and genetics. Most, however, are not natural scientists but somewhat selective and random borrowers, who often appear to be less serious students of biology than intellectual foragers seeking support for prior agendas.

In their chapter on “Evolution as a Theory of Political Behavior,” Peter K. Hatemi and Rose McDermott claim that “evolution offers a potential foundation for a unifying theory of human behavior” and that this not only complements and, to some extent, transcends current approaches but also reconciles “human universals” and “individual differences” (p. 20). What is meant by a “unifying theory” of evolution is, however, unclear. The authors are apparently not subscribing to what is now often referred to as “universal Darwinism,” that is, the claim that evolutionary theory can be extended to nonbiological phenomena, a claim which has been advanced by scientists such as Richard Dawkins and philosophers such as Daniel Dennett. The latter argue that the process of human evolution has resulted in the emergence and autonomy of social and cultural phenomena (“memes”) but that Darwin's general theory, as well as the theory of genetic replication, can be extended to the explanation of the interactions and changes among such cultural units.

On two occasions, Hatemi and McDermott quote Edward O. Wilson's statement that “the boundary between the natural sciences on the one side and humanities and humanistic social sciences on the other is not an epistemological fault line, but a domain of poorly understood material phenomena that invites cooperative exploration from both sides” (pp. 17, 38). This quotation, however, unlike the book's basic argument that biological facts affect social facts, assumes that we are dealing not with theoretically distinct phenomena but with levels of the same kind of phenomena, that is, “material phenomena.” But the use of this quotation also indicates a failure to recognize that natural facts are far from given and constant. Wilson has now (e.g., The Social Conquest of the Earth, Reference Wilson2012) abandoned a central premise of his earlier work (Sociobiology, Reference Wilson1975), as well as of modern evolutionary biology in general and of much of the literature cited in the chapter. This is the assumption that natural selection works principally on the genes of individuals and that forms of social behavior, such as altruism, among both animals and humans, derive from genes. Wilson now claims that group selection and the replication of eusocial behavior is the basic explanation of altruism, as well as of the dominance of the human species. Oleg Smirnov and Tim Johnson also advocate “evolutionary modeling,” but although they distinguish their “formal approach” from more “figurative” uses of the term evolution by some social scientists, their model of “evolutionary game theory,” is, as they actually indicate, more a heuristic and ideal typification based on various general evolutionary concepts than an actual application of biological evolutionary theory.

Whatever Wilson may now believe about the basis of human altruism, his arguments exemplify a basic recurring conceptual problem in the literature of sociobiology that is manifest in this volume. This is the assumption that when we take terms that refer to characteristically human forms of social interaction, such as altruism, competition, and so on, and apply them naturalistically to what seems to be functionally similar behavior in other creatures such as ants, we have discovered either a theoretical similarity or a causal link. Darby Proctor and Sarah Brosnan fall into this fallacy by describing the behavior of chimpanzees in anthropomorphic terms, that is, “how the human ideals of politics and political behavior can be translated into useful concepts for other species” (pp. 47–48), and then abstractly defining politics, using Harold Lasswell's stipulative definition, in a manner that would apply to any creatures. They then ask what nonhuman “primates can tell us about the evolutionary roots of our own political behavior” and conclude that because the former precede humans on the evolutionary scale, studying their behavior and noting similarities with humans can explain important aspects of the origins and character of human social interaction.

The long multiauthored chapter (83 pages) by Lindon Eaves, Hatemi, Andrew Heath, and Nicholas Martin is devoted to challenging the claim that “the origin and transmission of behavioral differences is social” (p. 101), but no one has ever claimed that all behavior can be explained socially—only that social behavior can be explained socially, as apparently Wilson has now concluded. The authors, however, argue that genes are linked to the political ideas and behavior of twins and nuclear families. Two other chapters (Jason Boardman; James Fowler, Peter Loewen, Jaime Settle, and Christopher Dawes) also explore the possibility of tracing a connection between genes and politics. What is involved in these studies, however, is primarily a matter of positing correlations, but noting such correlations does not establish a causal connection between the two separate theoretical realms of biological and social phenomena.

It is also difficult to discern how such an individualistic approach could be applied to the study of collective political behavior. A chapter by Kevin Smith and John Hibbing on the “psychophysiology” of the “mind-body connection” leaves the terms mind and psychological states conceptually empty but urges on the reader a post-Cartesian form of dualism that presents mind and body, that is, political “orientations” and their biological correlates, as two autonomous but causally and interacting “domains.” A chapter on “neuropolitics” by Darren Schreiber also argues that “brain activity is correlated with mental life” but again leaves the concept of “mental life” theoretically unspecified and largely substitutes the old mind/body dualism with a brain/body dualism. Schreiber also perpetuates the book's unredeemed claim that we can, in more than a metaphorical or heuristic sense, “observe politics … in a wide variety of animals.”

The most persistent problem in the volume is the lack of clarity regarding its conception of the relationship between natural and social facts. It would be intelligible, and, from Aristotle to the present, largely beyond question, to claim that, in various respects, biological structures and processes both constrain and enable social life and that if the biological world were fundamentally different, many of our political concepts and actions would surely be different. What is being advanced in the volume, however, is the stronger claim that political facts are affected in some manner by biological and physiological facts.

The difficulty with this claim is that we are dealing with two theoretically incommensurable realms of fact. It would be similar to saying that chemical facts have a causal impact on biological facts, but, for example, biochemistry is really a matter of studying the chemical processes in biological organisms, rather than a matter of explaining the latter facts in terms of the ways in which they are affected or guided by the former. The latter proposition is also very different from, for example, the manner in which genetics has been incorporated as an important extension of the theory of evolution. In biochemistry, we are talking about biological facts all the way down and assuming that the organisms have various indigenous levels of existence. Biological phenomena do not, however, constitute a level of political phenomena, or if they were in some manner construed as such a level, it would be in the sense that a biologist might study the organisms that manifest political behavior. Politics, and conventional objects in general, such as language, are what philosophers might speak of as strongly emergent, that is, phenomena whose qualities are not traceable to their components but supervene on them. Even the rules of chess, let alone the biology of the players, do not causally explain the particular moves the players make—whatever correlations we may find between such moves and various neurological and physiological events.

A somewhat similar confusion is apparent in the claim advanced by some of the authors that political behavior can be explained in terms of “beliefs,” “attitudes,” and “preferences” that have biological causes. The first problem is that the meaning of these terms is left undetermined. One might ask if these are psychological states, physical brain states, reports of surveyed individuals, operationally defined responses to certain questions, and so on. But however these terms may be theoretically explicated, we would again be confronted with two different theoretical realms and attending but incommensurable factual content. There is no third, or common, object of inquiry that is the bearer of both mental and biological attributes. Politics, as construed by the authors, is juxtaposed to various physiological phenomena, but it is difficult to make sense of the claim that biological facts interact with social facts unless a theory is advanced that subsumes both classes of fact. It might be argued that social phenomena are gross or macro manifestations of an underlying micro reality or that political actions and ideas can be explained scientifically. This would seem to suggest, however, that social phenomena are appearances, just as various proponents of neuroscience have attempted to specify “what emotions really are,” that is, physiological states, despite their manifestation in the form of certain aspects of social behavior, but the editors claim to reject any charge of reductionism as “specious.” One might possibly argue that just as a substance such as matter has both physical and chemical properties, social phenomena possess both biological and conventional properties, but this would again raise the question of the theoretical constitution of social phenomena and conflict with the premise that natural facts and social facts are two interacting domains.

The human sciences and the natural sciences may be construed in many ways as complementary endeavors. Certainly, as chapters on “hormones” by McDermott and by Coren Apicella and David Cesarini suggest, biological factors relating to evolution, genetics, hormones, brain states, and so on are relevant for explaining how an individual acts in, for example, the game of baseball or any other form of human social interaction. Steroid injection and blood doping demonstrate how biological facts can have an impact on various sports, and few would doubt that testosterone plays a role in “classic” politics as well as in arguments between lovers, but the investigation of such matters is applied biology, which should not be confused with the claim that biology is a way of studying baseball.

What is missing in the volume, but what is necessary before there can be a serious engagement of the issues involved, is a theoretical argument about political phenomena, rather than just an arbitrary definition of politics, as well as a more focused discussion about the differences and similarities between natural science and social science. Social scientists continue to argue about whether or not the methods and/or theories of natural science can be applied to social phenomena, but these arguments have tended to skirt the crux of the matter. The fundamental difference between natural and social science is not, in the first instance, methodological but simply that while what is conceived as the facts of natural science are internally generated within the theories and discourse of natural science, social facts, no matter how they are described by the social scientist, are also conceptually constituted in the conventions that compose the language and practices of social actors. The implication of this difference is that no matter what methods social science deploys to investigate social phenomena, it is an interpretive, representative, reconstructive, and (potentially) critical endeavor as opposed to the constructive presentational character of natural science. If natural factors are construed as guiding and shaping social behavior, it is in the sense that, for example, an injury to the brain might lead to an inability to engage in emotional expression, which is not the same as suggesting that emotions are physiological states. Social science is more like natural history than natural science. Natural history presupposes biology, but even animal behavior constitutes an emergent class of facts.Footnote ³