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  • "When modern man goes out into a city to mingle with strangers, he is bound by a multitude of constraints that prevent him from asserting his Paleolithic personality. When a stranger offers him food, he cannot simply seize it as his prize but must meekly sign a credit-card slip. When the credit card ... Continue

    "When modern man goes out into a city to mingle with strangers, he is bound by a multitude of constraints that prevent him from asserting his Paleolithic personality. When a stranger offers him food, he cannot simply seize it as his prize but must meekly sign a credit-card slip. When the credit card company asks for settlement of his account, he cannot proudly tell them to go hang but must pay up, or face endless petty nuisances that--most of the time--are a credible incentive to comply. When another stranger picks his pocket, he must report the theft patiently to the police rather than seeking out the perpetrator and killing him along with his tribe. In short, bourgeois prudence has driven out panache, and modern society is unimaginable in any other way." (p 256)[return][return]"[A]lmost all of the institutions of modern society can be understood as dedicated to an utterly unnatural division of labor between strangers. The idea of such cooperation on its own would be powerless with the institutions that makes individuals believe in the cooperation of others, but the institutions, in turn could not work unless they built on a natural disposition in human beings to cooperate within them. The political ideas that humanity will need for its survival in the next century are, therefore, all ideas about how to makes these institutions work." (p 244)

    

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• ― Leebeck said on Feb 28, 2008 about the Paperback edition| Add your feedback

Human beings are the only species in nature to have developed an elaborate division of labor between strangers. Even something as simple as buying a shirt depends on an astonishing web of interaction and organization that spans the world. But unlike that other uniquely human attribute, language, our ability to cooperate with strangers did not evolve gradually through our prehistory. Only 10,000 years ago--a blink of an eye in evolutionary time--humans hunted in bands, were intensely suspicious of strangers, and fought those whom they could not flee. Yet since the dawn of agriculture we have refined the division of labor to the point where, today, we live and work amid strangers and depend upon millions more. Every time we travel by rail or air we entrust our lives to individuals we do not know. What institutions have made this possible?

In The Company of Strangers, Paul Seabright provides an original evolutionary and sociological account of the emergence of those economic institutions that manage not only markets but also the world's myriad other affairs.

Drawing on insights from biology, anthropology, history, psychology, and literature, Seabright explores how our evolved ability of abstract reasoning has allowed institutions like money, markets, and cities to provide the foundation of social trust. But how long can the networks of modern life survive when we are exposed as never before to risks originating in distant parts of the globe? This lively narrative shows us the remarkable strangeness, and fragility, of our everyday lives.

• evolutionary psychologyevolutioneconomicshistory