As compared with other students of Leo Strauss who became prominent political scientists, the intellectual career of Roger Masters seems strange. As a graduate student at the University of Chicago, Masters wrote his dissertation on Jean-Jacques Rousseau under Strauss’s supervision. He then established his scholarly reputation in the 1960s through his writings on Rousseau’s political philosophy. At that point, it appeared that Masters would follow the same path taken by many of Strauss’s students who have devoted their lives to writing meticulous commentaries on the classic texts of political philosophy. But after publishing his book on Rousseau in 1968, Masters began to write about evolutionary biology. For example, he suggested that Rousseau’s account of man in the original state of nature should be compared with recent studies of orangutans as evolutionary ancestors of human beings; and he argued that Aristotle’s claim that human beings are by nature political animals was confirmed by recent sociobiological theories of human evolution and animal sociality. 1 Most recently, he has explained Machiavelli’s concept of political leadership as rooted in a natural tendency to dominance hierarchies that human beings share with other primates.2 The history of political philosophy is largely a debate about human nature.3 And Masters believes that debate can be clarified, if not even resolved, by appealing to Darwinian theories of human nature.To many of Strauss’s students, such ideas seem ridiculously perverse.Yet a few Straussians have been persuaded by Masters that this turn to Darwinian biology is essential for solving what Strauss called “the problem of natural right.”
In the Introduction to Natural Right and History, Strauss claimed that the most serious problem for the ancient Greek idea of natural right is that it seems to have been refuted by modern natural science.4 Natural right in its classic form requires a teleological view of nature, because reason can discern what is by nature good for human beings only if they have a natural end. Strauss thought Aristotle had the clearest view of this dependence of natural right on natural teleology. Modern natural science, however, seems to deny natural teleology by explaining natural phenomena as determined by mechanical causes that act without ends or purposes. This creates a dilemma. If the science of man is to be part of a nonteleological science of nature, then human action must be explained by reduction to physical impulses, which seems inadequate to explain human ends. The only alternative appears to be “a fundamental, typically modern, dualism of a nonteleological natural science and a teleological science of man,” but this rejects the comprehensive naturalism of the premodern exponents of natural right such as Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas. Neither reductionism nor dualism is fully satisfactory. Strauss concluded: “The fundamental dilemma, in whose grip we are, is caused by the victory of modern natural science. An adequate solution to the problem of natural right cannot be found before this basic problem has been solved.”
“Needless to say,” Strauss then added, “the present lectures cannot deal with this problem,” because the lectures published as Natural Right and History are “limited to that aspect of the problem of natural right which can be clarified within the confines of the social sciences.” A few years later, in a letter to Alexandre Kojeve, Strauss observed that “the difference between Plato and Aristotle is that Aristotle believes that biology, as a mediation between knowledge of the inanimate and knowledge of man, is available.” To Masters this suggests that if Strauss had attempted to resolve the problem for natural right created by the apparent refutation of natural teleology by modern natural science, he would have had to consider Aristotle’s biology in the light of modern Darwinian biology.5 To decide whether natural right is truly natural so as to be comprehensible through a science of nature, we must look to biology as the science that mediates between the natural sciences of the nonhuman universe and the social sciences of human conduct. In turning to biology, therefore, Masters has shown how the Straussian project for reviving the ancient idea of natural right might be supported by a modern biological theory of human nature.
In his first book, The Political Philosophy of Rousseau, Masters studied Rousseau’s attempt to return to a classic understanding of human nature, as an alternative to modern hedonism, while accepting modern natural science. Masters concluded that although Rousseau failed, his failure illuminated Strauss’s insight into the fundamental problem of modern thought: despite the evident progress of modern natural science, there seems to be no scientific account for the ends of human life that escapes reductionistic materialism, and yet a metaphysical dualism that separates the science of nature and the science of man seems untenable.6 While modern civilization rests upon the power of modern natural science and its technical products, modern science seems unable to judge the ends or purposes to which its fruits are directed.
In later writings—such as The Nature of Politics and Beyond Relativism—Masters tries to resolve this dilemma by proposing a revival of ancient Greek naturalism through a biological science of human nature that is neither reductionistic nor dualistic. 7 His biological naturalism is not reductionistic, he argues, because it recognizes the irreducible causal complexity in the levels of organization displayed by living things (from genes to organisms to social groups to ecosystems). And yet his naturalism is not dualistic, because although human beings are unique in their linguistic and intellectual capacities, these capacities are understood as emergent products of living nature.
The major objections to such a biological naturalism arise from four dichotomies: mechanism versus teleology, facts versus values, determinism versus freedom, and nature versus nurture. The mechanistic causality of natural science cannot explain the purposefulness of human action. The scientific study of natural facts gives us no guidance for moral values.The determinism of scientific laws denies human freedom. And scientific explanations of natural instincts cannot account for human culture as a product of social learning. Masters rejects these four objections as resting on false dichotomies. In defense of Masters, I will elaborate his reasoning in response to these four objections.8
Against the false dichotomy of mechanism versus teleology, Masters contends that modern science recognizes formal and final causes as well as material and efficient causes.9 “Chaos theory” in modern mathematics and physics suggests that form or being can be prior to matter or becoming. And although Darwinian biology does not support a cosmic teleology of supernatural design, it does support an immanent teleology of functional adaptation. While the history of evolution by natural selection depends on events that are not purposeful, it produces living beings whose behavior is purposeful. As was the case for Aristotle, modern science finds natural purposefulness not in the inanimate phenomena of physics but in the living beings of biology.
To appeal to nature as a source of moral norms implies a teleological conception of nature as having ends, goals, or purposes. When Aristotle claims that man is by nature the most political animal, he implicitly invokes a natural teleology: political life is natural for man because it is the end or goal (telos) of his development, and “nature is an end.”10 Any notion of natural right depends on such a teleological conception of nature.
While Aristotle sometimes speaks of nature as acting like an artisan, he intends this to be taken metaphorically rather than literally. While believing that art imitates nature, he never infers from this that nature’s activity requires the conscious, intentional action of some supernatural or cosmic agent. The final cause of a natural object exists in the object itself. Nature works not like a shipbuilder building a ship,Aristotle explains, but like a doctor doctoring himself.11
Darwin’s biology does not deny—rather, it reaffirms—the immanent teleology displayed in the striving of each living being to fulfill its specific ends.12 Darwin agrees with Aristotle that organic beings are self-maintaining wholes. The hackneyed examples of organic self-development are still valid: acorns still grow into oak trees and puppies into dogs. Reproduction, growth, feeding, healing, courtship, parental care for the young—these and many other activities of organisms are goal-directed.
As Masters explains it, this idea of natural teleology as accepted by both Aristotle and Darwin does not require any belief in a Divine Creator as the source of nature’s purposefulness. Aristotle and Darwin can explain the teleological order in the animal world as a purely natural process that does not presuppose any biblical faith in an omnipotent and providential God as the origin of nature’s ends.This leads Masters to suggest that the real controversy surrounding teleology in the modern world is what Strauss called the conflict between Athens and Jerusalem, Reason and Revelation.13 Darwinian biology would support a return to Aristotelian natural right as founded on a purely natural teleology comprehensible to natural reason. But this would provide no comfort for those who believe that moral order requires religious faith in a God who enforces that order.
In fact, some of the neoconservative intellectuals influenced by Strauss—such as Irving Kristol—seem to reject Darwinism because they fear that it subverts the religious beliefs that support the moral life of common people. In explaining the great influence of Strauss on his thinking about religion and politics, Kristol observes that Strauss “was an intellectual aristocrat who thought that the truth could make some minds free, but he was convinced that there was an inherent conflict between philosophic truth and the political order, and that the popularization and vulgarization of these truths might import unease, turmoil, and the release of popular passions hitherto held in check by tradition and religion.”14 So when Kristol criticizes Darwinian biology and claims that “the religious fundamentalists are not far off the mark when they asssert that evolution, as generally taught, has an unwarranted anti-religious edge to it,” this leads some observers to infer that Straussian neoconservatives like Kristol attack Darwinism as a threat to religion, not because they are sincere religious believers themselves, but because they think religious belief is a “noble lie” that is necessary for those common people who could not live moral lives if they faced the philosophic truth of atheism.15
Masters follows Strauss in affirming the tension between reason and faith, Athens and Jerusalem, in which neither can refute the claims of the other.16 If natural right is truly natural, then it belongs to the realm of natural experience known to natural reason without any need for a religious faith that would transcend nature. That is why Strauss criticized Thomas Aquinas for implying that “natural law” might require supernatural support. Strauss wondered “whether the natural law as Thomas Aquinas understands it is natural law strictly speaking, i.e., a law knowable to the unassisted human mind, to the human mind which is not illumined by divine revelation.” 17 Following Strauss’s lead, Masters argues that the idea of natural right rests on a natural teleology that can be known by natural reason without divine revelation, and one expression of natural reason is the natural science of Darwinian biology. Classical natural right does not require a Biblical view of the universe as created by God. In contrast to Kristol, therefore, Masters insists that as long as Darwinian science sustains the teleological basis of natural right, there is no reason to fear Darwinism as a threat to the moral health of society.
Against the dichotomy of facts versus values, Masters argues that the natural facts about human needs and desires can guide our judgments about moral values.18 Just as the facts of health shape medical practice, the facts of human nature shape moral practice generally. And although David Hume is commonly thought to be the leading proponent of the fact-value dichotomy, Masters believes that Hume’s reliance on the natural moral sentiments or the “moral sense” manifests an ethical naturalism similar to Aristotle’s.19 Like Hume, Masters appeals to “moral feeling” as the natural basis for morality; and like Darwin, Masters sees this natural moral sense as part of human biology.20 In a manner that resembles the argument of James Q. Wilson in The Moral Sense, Masters explains the moral inclinations of human beings—such as parental care and other forms of social bonding—as rooted in the human brain as a product of natural selection.21
Masters argues that the natural moral sense arises from the combination of moral emotions such as anger, guilt, and shame and moral judgments in applying social rules to particular cases.22 The moral emotion of anger, for example, has been recognized by Aristotle, Adam Smith, and other political philosophers as a powerful motivation for punishing those who violate our sense ofjustice.23 Masters suggests that this and similar emotions have been shaped by natural selection in evolutionary history to enforce reciprocity in human social life. So when Straussians like Walter Berns defend capital punishment as an expression of the natural moral passion of anger, they are appealing to a principle of natural right rooted in human biology.24
Other moral emotions such as love and sympathy enforce affifative bonding such as the tie between parents and children. Parental care of children is a biologically natural desire that Strauss recognizes as a manifestation of natural right. In Plato’s Republic, Socrates proposes that in the just city the male and female rulers should rule equally and communally, which would require abolishing the family. If nursing and parenting children were done communally, then women would be free to do almost everything men do. Some scholars, like Natalie Harris Bluestone, believe that Plato’s Socrates stated all the basic arguments for complete sexual equality that would later be developed by feminists.25 Strauss insists, however, that the city in the Republic is against nature. “The just city is against nature because the equality of the sexes and absolute communism are against nature.”26 Furthermore, he contends, Plato intended that careful readers would see that his just city is impossible because it is unnatural, and therefore the Republic is actually an implicit critique of utopian idealism. Bluestone points out, however, against Strauss’s reading of Plato, that Plato’s Socrates declares his proposals to be “according to nature”27 She believes Socrates is right about this: since men and women are by nature identical in everything except their reproductive organs, any sexual differences in the social division of labor—such as women handling most of the child-care—must be conventional rather than natural and therefore open to change. Unlike Bluestone, who denies that there is any biological basis for psychic differences between men and women, Strauss agrees with his student Allan Bloom in affrming “the natural teleology of sex” as rooted in human biology. “Biology forces women to take maternity leaves. Law can enjoin men to take paternity leaves, but it cannot make them have the desired sentiments.“28
Yet even as Bloom seems to endorse the idea of natural teleology as rooted in human biology, he also suggests that such natural teleology is only an illusion, even if a noble illusion. “I mean by teleology,” Bloom writes, “nothing but the evident, everyday observation and sense of purposiveness, which may be only illusory, but which ordinarily guides human life, the kind everyone sees in the reproductive process.”29 The qualifying phrase—“which may be only illusory”—allows him to simultaneously deny and affirm the truth of natural teleology, which creates a strangely ambiguous position that one can find among many of Strauss’s students. Straussians like Bloom often seem to adopt a Kantian dualism that separates nonhuman nature and human culture, which would deny Aristotelian natural right. But sometimes they seem to support a revival of Aristotelian natural right as rooted in a science of human nature—the stance that has been most vigorously defended by Masters.30 In developing this latter position, Masters must reject the Kantian antithesis between nature and freedom.
Against the dichotomy of natural determinism versus human freedom, Masters argues that knowledge of the biological causes of human behavior promotes human freedom rightly understood.31 He rejects the Kantian conception of freedom as completely autonomous human choice or “free will” belonging to a “noumenal” realm that is inaccessible to sense experience. If freedom is more properly understood as the capacity for deliberate choice, then knowledge of human biology can often increase our freedom. For example, understanding the causes of dyslexia makes it easier to find ways to overcome this disability. Similarly, if we know that some people have a biological propensity to alcoholism, violent aggression, or any other disruptive behavior, such knowledge increases their responsibility to control their bad propensities through medical treatment or proper habituation.
Kant’s primary argument for a radical separation of the natural is and the moral ought, which would render natural right indefensible, was that such a separation was a necessary condition for the freedom of the will that must be assumed in all moral judgment.32 For morality to be possible, moral agents must be able to transcend nature through “free will.”The human experience of the moral ought, Kant insists, shows us “man as belonging to two worlds.”33 This is what Strauss identifies as “a fundamental, typically modern, dualism of a nonteleological natural science and a teleological science of man.”Those who accept Kant’s dualism must conclude that biology and the natural sciences in general have nothing to contribute to our understanding of morality, because morality is an utterly autonomous realm that transcends nature.
One possible reason for why Strauss found such dualism unsatisfactory is that it was one of the fundamental themes in Martin Heidegger’s philosophic endorsement of Nazism. Arguing against “biologism,” which treats human beings as rational animals rooted in the natural world, Heidegger believed that National Socialism would vindicate the spiritual freedom of the German people as “world-building” historical beings who transcend their natural animality This dichotomy between the freedom of human history and the determinism of animal nature supported Heidegger’s historicist nihilism as unconstrained by natural right.34
In contrast to this Kantian notion of human freedom as freedom from nature, Masters and other proponents of natural right would argue that our moral experience requires a notion of human freedom as freedom within nature. For Aristotle, Hume, and Darwin, the uniqueness of human beings as moral agents requires not a “free will” that transcends nature but a natural capacity to deliberate about one’s desires.
Against the dichotomy of nature versus nurture, Masters argues that human behavior emerges from a complex interaction between instinct and learning, the innate and the acquired, genes and environment.35 He illustrates the interplay of nature and culture in political behavior through his studies of how the facial displays of leaders affect audiences.There is a natural human repertoire of facial displays shared with nonhuman primates—signifying anger/threat, fear/evasion, and happiness/reassurance—that is effective in any human culture, although there are also subtle variations that reflect cultural differences. Despite the importance of cultural learning for human beings, there is no radical separation between human culture and animal instinct, because other animals have some capacity for individual and cultural learning, and even the most impressive manifestations of human learning (such as language) depend on inherited instincts of the brain that have been formed by natural selection. As is true for other animals, human beings are born with natural propensities that are shaped by learning to reflect the variable conditions of the social and physical environment. Nature must be nurtured.
Masters believes that his biological naturalism allows us to judge political regimes by standards of natural right without falling into either dogmatism or relativism. 36 His naturalistic criteria of justice are not dogmatic because they vary according to the physical and social conditions of any particular regime. And yet his criteria are not relativistic because they show that some regimes are closer than others to the central tendencies of the natural behavioral repertoire shaped by human evolution. For most of evolutionary history, human beings have lived in hunter-gatherer bands and other small groups, and although every modern nation-state is far from that ancient way of life, constitutional democracies more closely approximate the freedom and equality of hunting-gathering groups than do totalitarian or autocratic states. The failure of Soviet Marxism as a massive social experiment in environmental determinism suggests that human nature is not infinitely malleable. It also suggests that democratic capitalism is more compatible with human nature as shaped by evolutionary history than any of the modern alternatives.37
Aristotelian natural right, Masters emphasizes, is neither dogmatic nor relativistic because it affirms the necessary interaction of nature and nurture, and thus it rejects the Sophistic view that nature and nurture are antithetical. Modern behavioral ecology supports this interactionist stance: like all social animals with complex nervous systems, human beings are naturally adapted for learning flexible responses to the changing physical and social environments in which they find themselves.38 Human ethics is part of human ecology, because human communities develop those standards of right and wrong conduct that seem to satisfy human desires within the ecological conditions of each community. Prudence is required, therefore, in judging how best to satisfy the natural propensities of human beings in particular circumstances. Aristotle was correct in declaring that “although there is something that is right by nature, all is variable.”39
For example, it is natural for most human beings to have strong desires for sexual coupling and parental care that are best satisfied by the institution of marriage. For that reason, marriage is found in all human societies.40 We should expect great variability in marital practices, however, in response to the variable physical and social conditions of human life.And yet we should expect to see recurrent patterns that reflect the natural propensities of human beings. Monogamy will be more common than polygyny, because the latter will be disrupted by the sexual jealousy of the co-wives. Polyandry will be extremely rare because of the intense sexual jealousy of husbands sharing a wife. And any attempt to abolish the family completely and establish a community of wives and children will fail in the long run because it is “contrary to nature.”
In his effort to root the idea of natural right in modern natural science, and thus solve what Strauss believed was the fundamental problem of natural right, Masters challenges the dichotomies that have traditionally separated the humanistic study of ethics from the scientific study of nature.There is no absolute gap between mechanism and teleology if a full explanation of living beings requires accounting for formal and final causes as well as material and efficient causes. There is no absolute gap between is and ought if human morality is founded on a natural moral sense. There is no absolute gap between nature and freedom if human freedom expresses a natural human capacity for deliberate choice. And there is no absolute gap between nature and nurture if habituation and learning fulfill the natural propensities of human beings. If Masters is right in these claims, then the science of the human good is part of the science of human nature.
Although I find the arguments of Masters largely persuasive, I suspect that many readers will disagree. As Strauss indicated, most contemporary scholars have responded to the apparent refutation of ancient naturalism by modern natural science in one of two ways—reductionism or dualism. The reductionists will agree with Masters that moral feelings are governed by the emotional control centers of the brain, but they will conclude from this that belief in the objectivity of morality is only a useful illusion. The dualists, including many of the students of Strauss, will insist that human biology is irrelevant to human ethics and politics, because human beings as rational beings differ in kind and not just in degree from all other animals, and for that reason Darwin’s evolutionary account of human morality and intellect is wrong.Yet for those of us who regard both of these opposing positions as inadequate, the alternative offered by Masters in his attempt to solve the problem of natural right is one of the most exciting intellectual projects of our time.
See Roger Masters, “Politics as a Biological Phenomenon,” Social Science Information 14 (1975): 7-63; and Masters, “Jean-Jacques is Alive and Well: Rousseau and Contemporary Sociobiology,” Daedalus (Summer 1978): 93-105.
See Roger Masters, Machiavelli, Leonardo, and the Science of Power (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1996).
See Larry Arnhart, Political Questions: Political Philosophy from Plato to Rawls, 2nd ed. (Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press, 1993).
Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), 7-8. Masters has offered his reading of this passage in two papers—“Classical Political Philosophy and Contemporary Biology,” a paper presented at the 1978 meetings of the Conference for the Study of Political Thought in Chicago, and “Evolutionary Biology and Natural Right,” in Kenneth L. Deutsch and Walter Soffer, eds., The Crisis of Liberal Democracy: A Straussian Perspective (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987), 48-67.
The remark to Kojeve appears in a letter that has been published in the revised edition of Leo Strauss’s On Tyranny, edited by Victor Gourevitch and Michael S. Roth (NewYork: The Free Press, 1991), 279. Masters quotes this passage in his Machiavelli, Leonardo, and the Science of Power, 207.
See Roger Masters, The Political Philosophy of Rousseau (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1968), 66-89, 106-18, 418-20, 428-30.
See Masters, The Nature of Politics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), and Masters, Beyond Relativism: Science and Human Values (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1993).
My points are more fully developed in Darwinian Natural Right: The Biological Ethics of Human Nature (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998).
Masters, Nature, 143-46, 241, 247-48; Masters, Relativism, 17, 36-41, 126-29, 136-38, 149-52, 201-3, 223-24.
Aristotle, Politics, 1252b28-1253a19.
Arisotle, Physics, 199b30-32.
For the argument that Darwinian biology supports teleology, see two papers by James G. Lennox—“Teleology,” in Evelyn Fox Keller and Elisabeth A. Lloyd, eds., Keywords in Evolutionary Biology (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), 324-33; and “Darwin Was a Teleologist,” Biology and Philosophy 8 (1993): 409-21.
See Masters, “Evolutionary Biology,” 57, 59-60, 62-63.
Irving Kristol, Neoconservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea (New York: The Free Press, 1995), 8.
For the attack on Darwinism, see Irving Kristol, “Room for Darwin and the Bible,” The New York Times, September 30, 1986. For the argument that this shows the influence of Strauss, see Ronald Bailey, “Origin of the Specious,” Reason 29 (July 1997): 22-28.
Masters, Relativism, 6-7, 152-53.
Strauss, Natural Right and History, 163.
Masters, Nature, xiv-xv, 21-22, 179-86, 226-27, 231-33, 239-41; Masters, Relativism, vii-viii, 4-11, 33-34, 42-45, 106-34, 145-55.
Masters, Relativism, 115-16, 124, 130, 220.
Masters, Nature, 246; Masters, Relativism, 9, 64, 111, 130-31, 155, 211, 215-16.
See James Q.Wilson, The Moral Sense (NewYork:The Free Press, 1993).
See Roger Masters, “Naturalistic Approaches to Justice in Political Philosophy and the Life Sciences,” in Roger Masters and Margaret Gruter, eds., The Sense of Justice: Biological Foundations of Law (Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications, 1992), 67-92.
See Larry Arnhart, Aristotle on Political Reasoning: A Commentary on the “Rhetoric” (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University, 1981), 114-34; Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Press, 1982), 67-71, 86-91.
See Walter Berns, For Capital Punishment: Crime and the Morality of the Death Penalty (New York: Basic Books, 1979).
See Natalie Harris Bluestone, Women and the Ideal Society: Plato’s “Republic” and the Modern Myths of Gender (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1987).
Leo Strauss, The City and Man (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), 127.
See Plato, Republic 456b-c.
Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987), 110,130-31.
Bloom, Closing, 110.
See Bloom’s Closing, 110-16, 126, 130, 166, 181, 300-301, 307, 357-58. Leon Kass would be another example of someone influenced by Strauss who vacillates between Aristotelian naturalism rooted in human biology and Kantian historicism rooted in human transcendence of biology through culture. See Kass, Towards a More Natural Science (New York: Free Press, 1985), 249-75, 291-93; Kass, “Man and Woman: An Old Story” First Things, Number 17 (November 1991): 14-26; Kass, The Hungry Soul (New York: Free Press, 1994), 208-15; and Kass, “The Permanent Limitations of Biology,” an unpublished paper.
Masters, Nature, 235-38; Masters, Relativism, 111-12, 130-31.
See Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, translated by Norman Kemp Smith (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1965), 409-15, 464-79.
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, trans. Lewis White Beck (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1956), 90.
See Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), 71-75; Heidegger, “Political Texts,” in Richard Wolin, ed., The Heidegger Controversy:A Critical Reader (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993), 54, 59, 62, 64, 68; Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism,” in Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1993), 226-230, 245, 254; James E Ward, Heidegger’s Political Thinking (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995), 68-81; and Anne Harrington, Reenchanted Science: Holism in German Culture from Wilhelm II to Hitler (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996).
Masters, Nature, 17, 29, 33-36, 71, 130-36; Masters, Relativism, 7-9, 24-26, 68-69, 74, 87, 116, 119-22, 138-43, 145-55.
Masters, Nature,xiv, 186, 223-33, 245; Masters, Relativism, 55,94, 118-19, 135, 198-200.
The idea that democratic capitalism conforms to human nature as shaped by evolutionary history has been argued by Alexandra Maryanski and Jonathan Turner in The Social Cage: Human Nature and the Evolution of Society (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992).
Masters, Relativism, 124-29; Masters, Machiavelli, 94-99.
Aristotle, Nícomachean Ethics, 1134b29-30.
See Donald Brown, Human Universals (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991); Carol Ember and Melvin Ember, Anthropology, 7th edition (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1993); and William Stephens, The Family in Cross-Cultural Perspective (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1963).