Cultural Evolution

Ronald F. Inglehart is the Lowenstein Professor of Political Science at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He holds honorary doctorates from Uppsala University, Sweden; the Free University of Brussels, Belgium; and the University of Lueneburg, Germany. Inglehart helped found the Euro-Barometer surveys and is founding president of the World Values Survey Association, which has surveyed representative national samples of the publics of 105 countries containing over ninety percent of the world's population. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. In 2011, he won the Johan Skytte prize in Political Science, often considered the highest prize awarded in the field.

• Introduction: overview of this book; 1. Evolutionary modernization and cultural change; 2. The rise of postmaterialist values in the West and the World; 3. Global cultural patterns; 4. The end of secularization?; 5. Cultural change, slow and fast: the distinctive trajectory of norms governing gender equality and sexual orientation; 6. The feminization of society and declining willingness to fight for one's country: the individual-level component of the long peace; 7. Development and democracy; 8. The changing roots of happiness; 9. The silent revolution in reverse: the rise of Trump and the authoritarian populist parties; 10. The coming of artificial intelligence society.

'This book is the product of an extremely ambitious project - ambitious in terms of the broad scope of the various aspects of society that its theoretical insights purport to explain, but also in terms of the range of the social science disciplines that are swept up and integrated into this 'Evolutionary Modernization theory'. One could even regard this enterprise as striving towards what would be the equivalent of 'unified field theory' in physics. What Chutzpah! And what a burden of proof such an ambitious enterprise would face. Remarkably, Inglehart succeeds in this demanding task, the ultimate product of which I regard as one of the most important works in the social sciences in decades.' Richard Gunther, Ohio State University