This marvellous book, The Company of Strangers: A Natural History of Economic Life by Paul Seabright, is just out in a revised edition. The title refers to the extraordinary accomplishment of modern economies in extending mutual trust vastly beyond the small family and social networks of prehistory, even though our genetic characteristics as 'murderous apes' have changed little. The first edition was published when hubris about globalization was at its height. Seabright, professor of economics at the University of Toulouse (and a friend of mine), ended it with a warning about the fragility of the globalized economy, given what other disciplines from psychology to evolutionary biology and anthropology had been learning about human nature and human society.

The new edition has a foreword by Daniel Dennett, and a new chapter reflecting on the financial and economic crisis. Dennett aptly compares The Company of Strangers to Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel in its breadth of understanding. He sums up the central argument thus:

“Co-operation depends….on trust, a sort of almost invisible social glue that makes possible both great and terrible projects, and this trust is not in fact a natural instinct hardwired by evolution into our brains. It is much too recent for that. Rather, it is a by-product of social conditions that are at once its enabling condition and its most important product. We have bootstrapped ourselves into the heady altitudes of modern civilization, and our natural emotions and other instinctual responses do not always serve our new circumstances.”

Of course the financial crash came along as a vivid example of the fragility of modern civilization, a self-fulfilling implosion of markets. The trustworthiness of the financial system most of the time meant we trusted it also when that confidence was misplaced. His conclusion about whether or not we've escaped relatively lightly, at least compared to the violence of the 1930s and 40s? “It would be foolish to engage in self-congratulation to early.”

There's a parallel perhaps with another or Diamond's books, Collapse, which ties the collapse of civilizations to ecological and social overstretch. A cheering thought for the weekend.