The Social Animal

The Social Animal is a classic investigation of human beings as social animals.The Social Animal is a short, wide-ranging, witty and accessible book that sets out the present extent of our knowledge about how human societies and institutions really work, and what motivates the people who live within them.W. G. Runciman’s superb book is a welcome corrective to the view that there are no societies, only collections of individuals and their families: he shows that wherever they may live in the world, human beings are quintessentially social animals.Using the latest insights from the fields of biology, anthropology, psychology, economic history and sociology, Runciman propose…