The Company of Strangers

Reviews / Votes

The Company of Strangers is a model of how different disciplines can enrich each other to explain human progress. -- George Peden Times Literary Supplement A welcome and important contribution... The Company of Strangers exemplifies a new breed of economic analysis, seeking answers to fundamental questions wherever they are found and ignoring disciplinary boundaries... [It] is highly readable and will be accessible to a wide audience. bert Gintis," Nature A very unusual new book about economics, and much else besides... Elaborate co-operation outside the family, but within the same species, is confined to humans. The requirements for such co-operation, and hence for modern economic life, which is founded on specialization and an infinitely elaborated division of labor, are more demanding than you might suppose... The fact that things could have turned out so differently makes the modern global economy, with all its awesome productivity, seem even more miraculous. The Economist A clear, thought-provoking and elegant book. -- Howard Davies Times Higher Education Supplement An important and timely book. -- Giles Whittell The Times (London) An entertaining, wide-ranging account about how the economy evolved in a way that allowed strangers, even potentially hostile strangers, to cooperate and even collaborate within market-based institutionsS. Seabright tells the story of how human beings, despite their genetic predisposition toward violent and even murderous behavior, have managed to produce a complex civilization through market-based institutions. Choice We now depend on the efforts of many strangers for our lives. In these days of terror and conflict, Seabright's stunning exploration of this human social experiment is timely... This is a book every concerned citizen should read, along with anybody in business who ever has to tangle with government regulations or the law, and who wants to understand why those relationships are so complex. -- Diane Coyle Strategy and Business A brilliant book. -- Martin Wolf Financial Times In his absorbing book, Seabright ... marvels at how easily we 'entrust our lives to the pilot of an aircraft, accept food from a stranger in a restaurant, enter a subway train packed full of our genetic rivals.' It's not often that an economist provides nuggets for cocktail party conversation. -- Peter Young Bloomberg News Few economists are so sweeping in their ideas as Seabright, and few so anxious to make us look freshly at the world... In The Company of Strangers, Seabright has produced one of those books that lie low, speak quietly, but work a change on the reader. -- Robert Fulford National Post There seems to be no place where Seabright is a stranger. He obviously feels as much at home among classical economists as among evolutionary biologists, quotes modern literature and ancient history with equal aplomb, jumps from experimental psychology to political philosophy and draws liberally on his personal memories of places from Ukraine to India... [His] book is obviously not meant as an exercise in planned economy, but as an excursion, without blinkers and without apprehension, through a tumultuous crowd of ideas. -- Karl Sigmund American Scientist So what does it take to become truly global? In a nutshell, it means learning how to live in The Company of Strangers. In [this] illuminating book ... Paul Seabright, himself an economist, brings together insights from history, biology and sociology to explain the concept of modern civilization. Korea Herald Paul Seabright contends that the Neolithic revolution, which saw the beginning of farming, changed not only the environment but also human nature. Settling down to tend fields promoted societies based on trust. Today, he says, all our economic institutions rely on trust... [I]t is a provocative read. -- Maggie McDonald New Scientist