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.These phenomena ulti-mately go back or at least this is the assumption to evolutionarymechanisms and lead to the formation of affects that usually guideindividuals in the direction of biologically beneficial behavior.Ac-cording to this view, the formation and persistence of states dependless on democratic consensus or social authority than on psychologi-cally and physically grounded relationships of dominance, which canin turn be traced back to inherited behavior pa erns (cf.Wiegele1979; Blank and Hines 2001).In this view, the emergence of hierarchies in human society is nota social phenomenon but rather an inevitable result of evolutionaryhistory.The reason given for this is that asymmetrically distributedopportunities for access and participation allegedly offer evolution-ary advantages, since stable and predictable relationships are sup-posed to favor the transmission of one s genes to the next generation.In order to establish solid grounds for this assumption, biopoliti-cians often present economic propositions and premises as ma ersof natural fact.Accordingly, human beings are by nature disposed tocompetition over scarce resources, and insofar as they are differentlyequipped biologically for competitive situations, power is distributedunequally.For this reason, social hierarchies are said to be necessaryand unavoidable (Somit and Peterson 1997).Furthermore, preferences for certain forms of government andauthority are derived from human evolutionary history.It is regu-larly assumed that the genetic endowment of human beings makesauthoritarian regimes likelier than democratic states.A democratic Life as the Basis of Politics 19state is, according to this view, only possible under particular andvery rarely occurring evolutionary conditions.A democracy canonly arise and assert itself against the dominating behavior of indi-viduals and groups if power resources are distributed widely enoughso that no actor can achieve supremacy (Vanhanen 1984).Even eth-nocentrism and ethnic conflict are traced back to determinants inhuman phylogeny, to conflict over scarce resources and the principleof kin selection.The la er idea assumes that in smaller groups thewelfare of the group member is more highly valued than the welfareof nonmembers, due to a higher probability of being biologically re-lated to one another (Kamps and Wa s 1998, 22 23).Taken together, the works of biopoliticians reveal a rather pessi-mistic image of human beings and society.Nonetheless, it would bewrong to equate biopolitics across the board with National Social-ist or racist positions.No one particular political orientation followsnecessarily if one assumes the existence of inborn characteristics.Infact, the political positions of biopoliticians vary considerably.Thespectrum extends from avowed social reformers such as HeinerFlohr (1986) to authors whose arguments follow distinctively rac-ist pa erns, for example J.Philippe Rushton, who traces the higherprevalence of criminality among African Americans in the UnitedStates to inherited behavior related to skin color (1998).To analyzethe approach with the tools of ideological critique is not sufficient.The thesis that biological factors play a role in the analysis of socialand political behavior is not the problem; the question is, rather, howthe interaction is understood and in this respect the responses ofthe biopoliticians are not at all convincing.A long list of reservationsand objections has been put forward in response to the researchperspectives they suggest.In the following I briefly present some ofthem.Although biopoliticians programmatically demand that biologi-cal knowledge should be taken into account in the social sciences,how exactly biological factors on the one hand and cultural 20 Life as the Basis of Politicsand social factors on the other interact, and how they should bedelineated against one another, are issues that remain largely un-explained in their work.Furthermore, it is unclear how the alleged biological basis concretely evokes or produces particular pat-terns of political behavior.The one-dimensional concept of geneticregulation promoted by many representatives of this approach(e.g., the idea of genes for hierarchy or dominant behavior) nolonger corresponds to current findings in biological science andhas been increasingly criticized in recent years (Oyama, Griffiths,and Gray 2001; Neumann-Held and Rehmann-Su er 2006)
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