Robert Ardrey Compendium: Social Contract; Territorial Imperative; African Genesis

by Robert Ardrey

Overview "Violation of biological command has been the failure of social man. Vertebrates though we may be, we have ignored the law of equal opportunity since civilization's earliest hours. Sexually reproducing beings though we are, we pretend today that the law of inequality does not exist. And enlightened though we may be, while we pursue the unattainable we make impossible the realizable." In his two previous books, Robert Ardrey exploded a series of philosophical landmines. African Genesis (1961) introduced his new evolutionary approach to an understanding of men. Then came The Territorial Imperative (1966), whose title is now a common phrase in our language. The Social Contract is the third in the series, and it denies that men are created equal - but that they deserve absolute equality of opportunity.

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About the author

Robert Ardrey was born in the South Side of Chicago in 1908. He attended the University of Chicago to study biology, but became the writing protegé of Thornton Wilder. He graduated in the midst of the Great Depression and supported himself with odd jobs while he wrote under Wilder's watchful eye. His first play, Star Spangled, opened on Broadway in 1935.

He continued to have plays produced on Broadway. His most famous, Thunder Rock, became a sensation in wartime London, and is now regarded as an international classic. Ardrey's plays caught the attention of MGM executive Samuel Goldwyn; in 1938 Ardrey moved to Hollywood, where he would become MGM's highest paid writer. He is credited with over a dozen films, including The Three Musketeers (1948, with Gene Kelly), The Wonderful Country (1959, with Robert Mitchum), and Khartoum (1966, directed by Basil Dearden, starring Charlton Heston and Laurence Olivier) for which he was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Screenplay.

In the 1950s, increasingly disenchanted with Hollywood, Ardrey travelled to Africa to write a series of articles. This trip renewed his interest in human origins, and he returned to his academic training in the sciences. In 1956 he moved with his wife and two sons to Geneva, and spent the next five years travelling and researching in Eastern and Southern Africa, conducting research for what would become his first scientific work, African Genesis (1961).

African Genesis and Ardrey's subsequent books were massively popular and deeply controversial. They overturned core assumptions of the social sciences and led to a revolution in thinking about human nature. Fundamentally Ardrey argued that human behavior was not entirely socially determined, rather evolutionarily inherited instincts help determine behavior and format large-scale social phenomena. Subsequent science has largely vindicated his hypotheses.

Robert Ardrey is the winner of a Guggenheim Fellowship and the inaugural Sidney Howard Memorial Award, is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and received an Academy Award Nomination for best screenplay for his film Khartoum. Time magazine named African Genesis the most notable book of the 1960s.

For more see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_...