The stories we tell matter, especially when we aren't aware we're telling them, or how they shape our behavior. In Fight Like An Animal: Revolutionary Biology in Defense of Life, Arnold Schroder argues that all modern conceptions of politics, from anarchism to fascism, exhibit a shared confusion. All are based on some form of the nature-nurture binary: the idea that human behavior is either biologically or socially-determined, and that the more it is biological, the less it is social. This idea is not simply wrong, but logically incoherent. We can only adapt to so many different kinds of society through a highly-structured biology, which we should seek to understand if we wish to find new ways of living.

Based on decades of immersion in the environmental movement, Fight Like An Animal describes how largely-forgotten debates about human nature still have concrete impacts on political projects today. When we escape the confusion they cause, we can direct our attention to something that should be obvious: individual differences in political personality. Political personality is the core orientation to the world from which specific political behaviors and perceptions emerge. We must ask how different kinds of people shape societies in different ways, and how people are shaped, in turn, by the societies they create. Neither of these questions make sense in isolation: they are endlessly entangled.

Using this integrative framework, Schroder offers simple, readily-accessible tools for conceiving of social change processes and crafting strategic initiatives, whether for a book club or a global revolution. Applying insights gained everywhere from oil refinery blockades to baboon stress hormone profiles, Fight Like An Animal is an earnest argument that, no matter how mired in darkness and confusion, the world can make sense. Spanning genres from political philosophy to social sciences to environmentalism, this text has something for everyone while at the same time challenging us to stretch our ways of knowing in how we do the hard work of integrating theory and action in the real world.