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Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior. Christopher Boehm. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999. 292 pp.
In Hierarchy in the Forest, Christopher Boehm takes on the challenge of discovering the roots of democracy, which he acknowledges is at the heart of his intellectual quest. To him, democratic processes do not begin with ancient Greece, as is commonly supposed, but go much further back, at least to the origin of modern humans about 100,000 years ago. Undoubtedly, one of his more controversial suggestions is the idea that group selection probably favored the evolution of altruism and the suppression of free riders, at least by the time modern humans emerged. He argues that if we can better understand the egalitarian societies that were common during the long period of time in which modern humans were living as foragers, we will come closer to understanding human nature. As he points out, even many tribal societies in historical times have succeeded in maintaining egalitarian structures. The critical issue is why there have been so many despotic political systems if altruism is part of human nature. Boehm asserts that the hierarchical aspect of human nature and of the common ancestor of humans and apes is not absent in egalitarian social systems. Rather, egalitarian social systems involve a "bizarre" type of political hierarchy in which the weak combine forces to dominate the strong. If hierarchical behavior is not absent in egalitarian societies but, rather, used by the weak to gang up on potential upstarts, despotism is not that hard to understand. One need only to postulate a scenario in which the...