Volume 19, Number 8 · November 16, 1972
A Band Wagonload of Monkeys
By Max Gluckman
The Imperial Animal
by Lionel Tiger, by Robin Fox
Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 368 pp., $6.95
Many educated people have lately been taking a passionate interest in books about the continuing influence of our early animal genesis on human social life. This interest in itself deserves study by social scientists and psychologists. Why did so many people buy Ardrey's The Territorial Imperative, Lorenz's On Aggression, and Morris's The Naked Ape, for example, all published during 1966 and 1967, and all referring the human condition back to our animal and nonhuman primate biogenetic programming? My own experience suggests that the readers impressed by these books range from the political right to at least the disillusioned left, so clearly there can be no simple political explanation. But clearly also, for all of these readers there is an appeal, whether of justification or of hope or of despair, in oversimplifying the causes of the problems that beset mankind.
Review, 3653 words
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