Homo anxius, or How Fear and Anxiety Conquered the Social World

Abstract

The article offers an extended review, counterpointed by a critical commentary, of two recent and outstanding volumes, Turner et al.’s The Emergence and Evolution of Religion (2018) and Sanderson’s Religious Evolution and the Axial Age (2018). Both books are eminently interdisciplinary in their scope: the first displays a distinctive deep-historical and neurosociological attention to the evolution of negative emotions and inter-group competition, while the latter focuses on the contribution of world transcendent religions to help human beings cope with new and challenging biosocial conditions derived from ultrasociality. While the two volumes gain unprecedented multidisciplinary width, they also tend to lose intra-disciplinary depth. However, and for all their differences, they both represent the vanguard of a renewed qualitative, scientific, and interdisciplinary study of the history of religion(s) through cognitive historiography. This contribution presents the main theses of both books, highlights their strengths, and provides a comprehensive discussion of their epistemological and methodological shortcomings.