By blending serious research with relevant contemporary examples, Our Political Nature casts important light onto the ideological clashes that so dangerously divide and imperil our world today. It shows how political orientations arise from three clusters of measurable personality traits that entail opposing attitudes toward tribalism, inequality, and differing perceptions of human nature. Together, these traits are by far the most powerful cause of left-right voting, even leading people to regularly vote against their economic interests. Our political personalities also influence our likely choice of a mate, and shape society's larger reproductive patterns. This book tells the evolutionary stories of these crucial personality traits, which stem from epic biological conflicts. Based on dozens of exciting new insights from primatology, genetics, neuroscience, and anthropology, this groundbreaking work brings core concepts to life through current news stories and personalities.

An Artforum Best Book of the Year A Legal Theory Bookworm Book of the Year Nature no longer exists apart from humanity. Henceforth, the world we will inhabit is the one we have made. Geologists have called this new planetary epoch the Anthropocene, the Age of Humans. The geological strata we are now creating record industrial emissions, industrial-scale crop pollens, and the disappearance of species driven to extinction. Climate change is planetary engineering without design. These facts of the Anthropocene are scientific, but its shape and meaning are questions for politics—a politics that does not yet exist. After Nature develops a politics for this post-natural world. “After Nature argues that we will deserve the future only because it will be the one we made. We will live, or die, by our mistakes.” —Christine Smallwood, Harper’s “Dazzling...Purdy hopes that climate change might spur yet another change in how we think about the natural world, but he insists that such a shift will be inescapably political... For a relatively slim volume, this book distills an incredible amount of scholarship—about Americans’ changing attitudes toward the natural world, and about how those attitudes might change in the future.” —Ross Andersen, The Atlantic

In Man Is by Nature a Political Animal, Peter K. Hatemi and Rose McDermott bring together a diverse group of contributors to examine the ways in which evolutionary theory and biological research are increasingly informing analyses of political behavior. Focusing on the theoretical, methodological, and empirical frameworks of a variety of biological approaches to political attitudes and preferences, the authors consider a wide range of topics, including the comparative basis of political behavior, the utility of formal modeling informed by evolutionary theory, the genetic bases of attitudes and behaviors, psychophysiological methods and research, and the wealth of insight generated by recent research on the human brain. Through this approach, the book reveals the biological bases of many previously unexplained variances within the extant models of political behavior. The diversity of methods discussed and variety of issues examined here will make this book of great interest to students and scholars seeking a comprehensive overview of this emerging approach to the study of politics and behavior.

Concern over environmental problems is prompting us to reexamine established thinking about society and politics. The challenge is to find a way for the public's concern for the environment to become more integral to social, economic, and political decision making. Two interpretations have dominated Western portrayals of the nature-politics relationship, what John Meyer calls the dualist and the derivative. The dualist account holds that politics—and human culture in general—is completely separate from nature. The derivative account views Western political thought as derived from conceptions of nature, whether Aristotelian teleology, the clocklike mechanism of early modern science, or Darwinian selection. Meyer examines the nature-politics relationship in the writings of two of its most pivotal theorists, Aristotle and Thomas Hobbes, and of contemporary environmentalist thinkers. He concludes that we must overcome the limitations of both the dualist and the derivative interpretations if we are to understand the relationship between nature and politics. Human thought and action, says Meyer, should be considered neither superior nor subservient to the nonhuman natural world, but interdependent with it. In the final chapter, he shows how struggles over toxic waste dumps in poor neighborhoods, land use in the American West, and rainforest protection in the Amazon illustrate this relationship and point toward an environmental politics that recognizes the experience of place as central.

This 1992 book explains how people acquire political information from elites and the mass media and convert it into political preferences.

Politics "with" the environment

Buried in many people and operating largely outside the realm of conscious thought are forces inclining us toward liberal or conservative political convictions. Our biology predisposes us to see and understand the world in different ways, not always reason and the careful consideration of facts. These predispositions are in turn responsible for a significant portion of the political and ideological conflict that marks human history. With verve and wit, renowned social scientists John Hibbing, Kevin Smith, and John Alford—pioneers in the field of biopolitics—present overwhelming evidence that people differ politically not just because they grew up in different cultures or were presented with different information. Despite the oft-heard longing for consensus, unity, and peace, the universal rift between conservatives and liberals endures because people have diverse psychological, physiological, and genetic traits. These biological differences influence much of what makes people who they are, including their orientations to politics. Political disputes typically spring from the assumption that those who do not agree with us are shallow, misguided, uninformed, and ignorant. Predisposed suggests instead that political opponents simply experience, process, and respond to the world differently. It follows, then, that the key to getting along politically is not the ability of one side to persuade the other side to see the error of its ways but rather the ability of each side to see that the other is different, not just politically, but physically. Predisposed will change the way you think about politics and partisan conflict. As a bonus, the book includes a "Left/Right 20 Questions" game to test whether your predispositions lean liberal or conservative.