Revolutionary nepotism.

• Author: Sailer, Steve
• Position: Book Review

Adam Bellow, In Praise of Nepotism: A Natural History (New York: Doubleday, 2003), 576 pp., $30.

Frank K. Salter (ed.), Risky Transactions: Trust, Kinship and Ethnicity (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2002), 288 pp., $79.95.

THE UNITED States currently confronts foreign policy challenges involving such highly disparate foes, friends and in-betweens as North Korea, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, Azerbaijan, Jordan, Morocco, the Congo and the Philippines. All these countries, however, possess one striking common denominator. Although dynasticism is supposed to have died and been buried by meritocracy, these countries are all led by the children of former heads of state.

The same is true of America, whose president is not just the son of a president, but also the grandson of a senator and brother of a governor. Americans tend to be willfully blind to the crucial subject of nepotism. We disapprove of it, so we feel we ought not to think about it--a dangerous illusion as we pursue a more activist foreign policy that brings us in touch with cultures that approach the topic quite differently.

The return of family rule should not surprise us. Nepotism and its more formal offspring dynasticism have provided the basic organizing principles of politics for much of human history. For example, in the early 20th century, the ruling aristocracy of Mongolia, which comprised 6 percent of the population, still consisted of the descendants in the direct male line of Genghis Khan, even though he had been dead for almost 700 years.

Indeed, Genghis Khan, who was known as The Master of Thrones and Crowns, was so successful at propagating his lineage, both by fathering countless children and granting some of his heirs enormous and enduring political privileges, that his genetic footprint on a vast swath of Asia from the Pacific to Afghanistan leaps out at population geneticists today. A 2003 study of male Y-chromosomes discovered that about 16 million living men are his direct patrilineal descendants. That's a level of dynastic success, in the Darwinian sense of the term, approaching one million times greater than that of the typical man who was alive back then.

As ferociously exemplified by The Mighty Manslayer, this urge to help copies of one's genes survive and spread is the basis of nepotism, which biologists define as altruism toward kin. It encourages human beings to help their offspring and relatives achieve power and prosperity.

The recent book In Praise of Nepotism by Adam Bellow (son of Nobel Laureate Saul Bellow) documents how the great English biologist William D. Hamilton's 1964 elucidation of the genetic reasons behind altruism toward kin formed the plinth upon which the field of sociobiology was built. Hamilton's paradigm became more widely known from Richard Dawkins' 1976 bestseller, The Selfish Gene. A more accurate, if still anthropomorphic name, would have been The Dynastic Gene, since genes thrive by promoting copies of themselves in others.

Of course, biology can explain only the rudiments of the manifestations of family feeling in the political world. Further, scientists have barely begun to consider the flip side of the desire to establish a dynasty--the widespread desire to he ruled by one. Evidence for the resurgent importance of dynasticism and nepotism is everywhere. In a broad swath of southern Asia, running from Pakistan, through India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Indonesia and on to the Philippines, the dynastic urge has often worked in conjunction with the democratic impulse. In each, voters have chosen widows or daughters to carry on from their late men-folk the family business of running the country.

Some of these women entered politics to avenge the killing or overthrow of their husbands or fathers. For example, Corazon Aquino was elected president of the Philippines following her husband's assassination by dictator Ferdinand Marcos' goon squad. Benazir Bhutto ruled Pakistan after the downfall of General Mohammad Zia Ul-Haq, who had overthrown and hanged her father. Indonesian president Megawati Sukarnoputri is the daughter of the former leftist ruler Sukarno. Sheik Hasina, prime minister of Bangladesh from 1996-2001, is the daughter of the founder of independent Bangladesh, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, who died in a military coup in 1975.

In India, the Congress Party chose as their leader in the 1999 election Sonia Gandhi, widow, daughter-in-law and grand-daughter-in-law...