Robert Ardrey
American playwright and popular-science author of African Genesis
Also known as: Ardrey
Robert Ardrey (1908–1980) was an American writer best known for popular-science books on the paleoanthropology of human aggression — African Genesis (1961), The Territorial Imperative (1966), The Social Contract (1970). Quigley engages him as a foil rather than an ally: a "contemporary charlatan" whose work he reviewed at length in his Washington Sunday Star pieces and whose claims he treated with sharp critical attention in Weapons Systems and Political Stability.
The Washington Sunday Star reviews
Quigley reviewed Ardrey's The Social Contract under the title "Robert Ardrey: The Current Scheherazade" in the Washington Sunday Star of 11 October 1970 (Book Reviews 23–24). The piece names Ardrey alongside "Marshall McLuhan, and C. D. Darlington" as "contemporary charlatans peddling nostrums" (Book Reviews 14). The complaint is intellectual rather than ideological: Quigley charges that "Ardrey's brilliant discoveries (who are numerous) are, as often as not, people we have known about for years, and who, in many cases, have done a few good things, but are far from being the Newtons, Darwins, and Galileos that Ardrey insists they are" (Book Reviews 25).
The aggression argument
In Weapons Systems and Political Stability Quigley engages Ardrey's African Genesis at the level of evidence. Ardrey's case for innate human aggression is, in Quigley's reading, "based on a very selective examination of the evidence on human origins" (WS 81); Africa cannot be characterized for the relevant period "by a single unscientific sensationalist like Robert Ardrey" (WS 99). The treatment matters for Quigley's larger argument because it positions him against the popular evolutionary-psychology genre that, in the 1960s and 1970s, was being marshaled in support of pessimistic views of human cooperative capacity — views that conflicted with Quigley's own developmental civilizational scheme.
Cited in
- book-reviews · p. 14 Quigley
Other contemporary charlatans peddling nostrums, like Robert Ardrey, Marshal McLuhan, and C. D. Darlington.
- book-reviews · p. 23 Quigley 1970-10-11
'Robert Ardrey: The Current Scheherazade', a review by Carroll Quigley in The Washington Sunday Star, October 11 1970, of a book: THE SOCIAL CONTRACT: A Personal Inquiry into the Revolutionary Sources of Order and Disorder, by Robert Ardrey.
- book-reviews · p. 25 Quigley 1970-10-11
Ardrey's brilliant discoveries are, as often as not, people we have known about for years, and who, in many cases, have done a few good things, but are far from being the Newtons, Darwins, and Galileos that Ardrey insists they are.
- weapons-systems-political-stability · p. 81 Quigley
Robert Ardrey, whose African Genesis (1961) was based on a very selective examination of the evidence on human origins.
- weapons-systems-political-stability · p. 99 Quigley
A period by a single unscientific sensationalist like Robert Ardrey.