Andrew Bard Schmookler: A Brief Biography

Andrew Bard Schmookler graduated summa cum laude from Harvard College and earned his Ph.D. through the University of California, Berkeley and the Graduate Theological Union in a program created to accommodate his comprehensive theory of the forces that have shaped how civilization has evolved— later published by the University of California Press as The Parable of the Tribes: The Problem of Power in Social Evolution.

For more than fifty years, he has pursued a single overarching question: What are the forces that have shaped the human story, and what must humanity understand if civilization is to flourish rather than fail?

Over the decades, he has drawn together insights from evolutionary biology, psychology, history, politics, economics, and religion into a coherent picture of how the human world works.

Among his other published books are Out of Weakness: Healing the Wounds that Drive Us To War; The Illusion of Choice: How the Market Economy Shapes Our Destiny; Fool’s Gold: The Fate of Values in a World of Goods; Debating the Good Society: A Quest to Bridge America’s Moral Divide; and What We’re Up Against: The Destructive Force at Work in Our World—and How We Can Defeat It.

His writings have appeared in newspapers across the country, including the Baltimore Sun, the Christian Science Monitor, and the San Francisco Chronicle.

Schmookler served at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, D.C., where he wrote assessments for Congress and the Executive Branch on emerging international dangers and opportunities. The Public Agenda Foundation later commissioned him to identify and interview leading thinkers from the various fields relevant to the question, “How can the United States best achieve security in the age of nuclear weapons?” In 2012, he was the Democratic nominee for Congress from Virginia’s very conservative Sixth Congressional District.

The eminent sociologist Robert Bellah described his intelligence as “both subtle and wide-ranging… a man of enormous talents and resources.” Joseph Montville, diplomat and scholar of conflict resolution, called him “one of the great intellectual integrators of the twentieth century.”