Description:
This book highlights the recent re-emergence of Edward Westermarck's work in modern approaches to morality and altruism, examining his importance as one of the founding fathers of anthropology and as a moral relativist, who identified our moral feelings with biologically-evolved retributive emotions.
Review Quotes:
'This book is an important contribution to the revival of interest in Edward Westermarck, one of the greatest but most overlooked of the classical sociologists. Most discussions of Westermarck focus on his now celebrated theory of incest avoidance, but this volume goes beyond that to consider him as a forerunner of evolutionary psychology and his Darwinian understanding of the evolution of morality. In that regard it is especially welcome.' Stephen K. Sanderson, University of California, Riverside, USA