This book is easy to read, revolutionary in its interpretation of the evolution of human egalitarianism and altruism, and in addition a warning about our current state of liberal democracy -- though the author does not see the danger.

The book traces out how the development of language and the use of tools and weapons, allowed our ancestors, the hunter-gatherers to overthrow the hierarchy we find in other primates. That is, males hate to be dominated, and if they can they will form coalitions and enforce egalitarianism. So for tens of thousands of years, virtually all human bands used weapons to kill upstarts who might try to dominate the group, and gossip maintained a keen eye on everyone's contribution to the group. Free-riders were suppressed, eliminated or expelled, and after time they were kept to a minimum genetically.

In addition, altruism within the group was selected for through group evolutionary strategies. That is, with this new arrangement of group cohesion and forced adherence to the group's particular ethos or moral code, the groups who had higher levels of ethnocentrism, patriotism, or altruism towards members of the group -- including willing to die for the group when battled broke out between groups -- predicted that group evolutionary strategies selected for these very traits. That is, altruism was a product of between-group warfare and competition for resources.

When humans began to form civilizations however, and with the accumulation of wealth in the form of food through the growing of crops and the domestication of animals, dominance once again took over. Through religion, actuarial practices, and coercive leadership, humans once again yielded to the authority of a central figure.

So far so good. But Boehm believes that with our present Western democracies, that all is well again. This is surprising, because by the very mechanism he so elegantly elucidates in the book, by all reasonable measures, we are now in an ecological situation where racial strife, a return of free-riders, and an end to altruism will set in. By our very form of government there is no need to abide by rules as we know them, and the people who have the genes for selfishness or the free-riders will again multiply. That is, human behavior is never fixed but is always changing. Evolutionary stable states can only exist when the environment does not change -- but it has. From welfare to shirking military duty, the new free-rider will again out-produce the once altruistic motivated solid citizen. Free-riders can hide within modern democracies, and they are not bound by the old moral codes. We are surely entering a dysgenic trend in these traits, if not in intelligence itself. So I see little optimism that what was once a wonderful mechanism for human advancement against dominance will not now slide back towards more aggressive and a selfish human nature. Fortunately, with a better understanding of the human genome, and a renewed interest in neo-eugenics, we may be able to salvage our evolved egalitarian traits once again.

From the time I picked up this book until finishing it within 36 hours, I was captured by this excellent work on human politics from an evolutionary perspective. Boehm shows close scholarship in his summaries of hunter-gatherer and other society's ethnographic evidence bearing on politics. He also contrasts this human focus with our closest relatives, the apes, and chimps in particular. Readers may find of interest the struggle, rather than ease, with which egalitarianism appears among simple societies. The book also raises questions about the origin of human egalitarianism that will stimulate readers and research for years to come.

Why should one read books about a political system that is dead and gone? The answer is, of course, that it is not so dead and gone after all. Communism may have collapsed as a political force, but the countries of eastern Europa are still full of the people it has created. People who have just been released from prison are like an ownerless dog, Hein's narrator says, constantly looking for a new master to caress and beat them. Maybe that is how quite a lot of people feel after the Iron Curtain has come down... Peter Dallow has just been released from prison in the East Germany of 1968; he had played the piano in a political cabaret, and a tango about the ageing ruler of the country had so infuriated the authorities that all members of the group are sentenced to spend two years in prison. Dallow still feels he was innocent, because he wasn't even a member, he had just stepped in for the man who usually played the piano. Hein's book is about the months after Dallow's release from prison.

The mood is similar to the one in Coetzee's "Disgrace": Dallow used to be a lecturer at Leipzig university, and his attitude towards his students seems to have been one of contempt and cynicism. Now he is in a state of disgrace, people feel uneasy in his presence and want to get rid of him. The Communist state, however, will not let go of him: The authorities, the secret service, the police, are annoyed that Dallow does not want to live on as if nothing had happened. Nobody could escape the system, no matter how hard he or she tried. Actually they keep trying to force Dallow to return to his post at the university. Maybe people like him are even more useful for a dictatorship than those who never got into trouble: Dallow is broken and cynical, he will never resist the government again; in contrast to practically all the people around him he is completely indifferent towards the hope for reform embodied in the Prague Spring.

Dallow's perspective offers a shocking picture of the state of human relationships in his country: Here too cynicism abounds. Love is only mentioned once - as an impossible dream. Sex is regarded as a purely physical need ("I feel like having sex with you."), and young girls gladly trade it for a place to spend the night. People leave each other just like that. Most characters seem to be scarred after lost battles. This, of course, is Dallow's perspective, and he refuses to cherish any hopes at all. Maybe Hein wanted to show what East Germany was like without the hope for change. The book was first published in 1989, when this change was finally happening...