The Aggression Instinct: The Creation of a Public Science in 1960s America

In the 1960s a remarkable series of popular science books brought the concept of a male instinct for aggression to the American reading public. Their authors argued that a tendency to violence against members of the same species was a fixed and ineradicable element of male nature, whether male animals or male humans. Female aggression was of an entirely different order. The hypothesis also held that the aggression instinct when properly channeled could have powerful positive outcomes. Aggression could be redirected to produce bonds of companionship and love; it underlay competition over territory and thus was responsible for social order. Though their beliefs were later characterized and dismissed as “pop ethology,” the aggressionists in fact included more than just ethologists. Of those in the core of the group, only two, Konrad Lorenz and Desmond Morris, were professionally trained as ethologists, students of animal behavior. The third core member, Anthony Storr, was a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, and the fourth, Robert Ardrey, was a playwright and Hollywood screenwriter. All were distinguished by their political engagement, addressing such pressing problems as the arms race, race riots, and totalitarianism, and pushing for the social arrangements that they deemed “natural.” I argue that the aggressionists stressed the positive aspects of the aggression instinct to make possible a biological science of human nature in which they were the experts, and to recapture the study of humanity from the cultural anthropologists and sociologists. At the same time, they used the medium of the popular science book to establish a new postwar world order, one devoted to strengthening democracy, fighting racism and asserting the oneness of humanity, even as it divided the genders.