THE SEARCH FOR SOCIETY
     Quest for a Biosocial Science and Morality

Hardcover: 264 pages ISBN: 0-8135-1464-9
Paperback: 264 pages ISBN: 0-8135-1488-6

Publisher: Rutgers University Press, 1989
www.rutgerspress.rutgers.edu
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This is the best "overview" of my general position on society and culture. Look for the argument about the "paleoterrific" as the period of greatest human happiness.

From the jacket: The social sciences are in turmoil. There is not even any agreement on the nature of the subject matter. Robin Fox has always spoken out for a science of society based on evolutionary theory as a way out of the confusion. Here he shares with us, in essays, his explorations of this contentious subject matter. His focal point is the endemic opposition to any approach based on innate human qualities, and hence any definition of cultural universals. This opposition is deeply ingrained and often irrational, so Fox digs into its past to uncover its philosophical and political underpinnings. He goes to Locke and Bacon and the marriage of liberalism and science in the seventeenth century for his answer. He traces the development of these ideas up to Durkheim and modern behavioral science. In the process he makes a plea for revision of the concept of culture, suggesting "ethosystem" as a substitute; a re-evaluation of theories of violence and aggression, and an analysis of kinship, totemic, and all other social categories, which lodges them firmly in neurological and mating systems. This book is in effect the "equal time" response to Clifford Geertz's Interpretation of Cultures.
     Fox concludes with an exercise unusual for a social scientist: an exploration of the possible fate of mankind based on a re-analysis of history and pre-history, which regards the former an evolutionary aberration. The theme of a possible "natural" morality based on natural science but not committing the naturalist fallacy runs through the book. These ideas are addressed to a wide audience, including historians, philosophers, theologians, political and life scientists, historians of ideas, and, not least, a general public puzzled about the state of learning and about its own fate as a species.

"Robin Fox thinks like a biologist and writes like a social scientist, a rare and formidable combination. His essays, consistently brilliant and entertaining in style, bring the best parts of the two domains closer together." E. O. Wilson

"Fox's challenge to social scientists is simple: either face the inescapable fact that what we are today is largely the result of our species' long yesterday, or reconcile ourselves to an unpleasant tomorrow." Richard Shelley Hartigan, author of The Future Remembered: An Essay in Biopolitics

Review comments:

"Robin Fox has written a brilliant and important book. Although his critique of the prevailing belief in "culturalism" – the view that human social behavior is emancipated from nature – is primarily directed to anthropology, it is relevant to all the social sciences, and particularly to the study of politics." Roger Masters, in Politics and the Life Sciences

" This is an adventurous book, a collection of ethnological essays along with a common and coherent theme that strongly and explicitly espouses evolutionary biology. Individual essays are exploratory, entertaining, lucid, sometimes erudite, and rich in the history of ideas… Fox ends by saying that humans today "are like someone who has been handed a great fortune along with instructions to committ suicide”; that is, just when we began to understand our roots in evolution, we had to invent the atomic bomb… Fox's book of essays makes for spirited reading. It is a highly imaginative, philosophically oriented adventure in speculative and not-so-speculative social biology that even the not-so-inclined reader will find easy to assimilate." Christopher Boehm, in the American Anthropologist.

"Robin Fox, in recounting his "search for society" offers us a most provocative treatise on what the ground rules for a biosocial science of humanity ought to be. His intellectual quest is brilliantly erudite but ultimately overshadowed by his larger mythic quest for morality based in biosocial reality." Robert L. Savage in Politics and the Life Sciences

"Robin Fox's The Search for Society offers a lively non-technical entrée into a discourse often so clotted with computerspeak and statistical correlations among ill-defined entities as to seem an attempt to persuade by intimidation. A prolific English anthropologist whose early work anticipated many sociobiological themes, Fox displays an awareness of the history of thought that is (perhaps deliberately) lacking in most American sociobiology. Search also eschews the intensive focus of a few crucial issues that characterizes scientific discourse. The volume is a group of speculative essays that seek to extend and consolidate the sociobiological perspective and to declare what Fox sees as the wider implications of this special field. He makes explicit what has often been left implicit and sometimes even denied: that sociobiology is central to the functional defense of conventional categories. He also makes sociobiology part of the longer span of Western thought, one moment in a longer discourse about functional limits on human variability, which found earlier statements in classical philosophy, the Christian tradition, and secular conservatism." Fred Mathews, in Comparative Studies in Society and History