The book brings to bear on the history of England’s political, ideological, and economic institutions over the past 300 years the concepts of current evolutionary theory, in which collective human behaviour is analysed as the acting-out of information transmitted at the three separate but interacting levels of the biological, the cultural, and the social. In this approach, social change (or its absence) is traced to the variation and selection under external pressure of the information that defines the roles by which social institutions are constituted. Since the early eighteenth century, Engl ... More

The book brings to bear on the history of England’s political, ideological, and economic institutions over the past 300 years the concepts of current evolutionary theory, in which collective human behaviour is analysed as the acting-out of information transmitted at the three separate but interacting levels of the biological, the cultural, and the social. In this approach, social change (or its absence) is traced to the variation and selection under external pressure of the information that defines the roles by which social institutions are constituted. Since the early eighteenth century, English society has undergone enormous changes in the beliefs, attitudes, and manners of its people transmitted by imitation and learning. But there has been no comparable change in the structural distribution of political, ideological, and economic power. This persistent disjunction is explained by focusing not on the individual actors but on the reproductive fitness of the rule-governed practices of which they are the carriers. The motives of rulers and policymakers by whose quasi-random decisions change is initiated cannot explain social-evolutionary outcomes which they are unable either to predict or to control. Only in hindsight, by what evolutionary theorists call ‘reverse engineering’, is it possible to see how and why England has remained democratic in its politics, liberal in its ideology, and capitalist in its economy. Hence the book’s title: the lived experience of successive generations of the English people has been transformed almost out of recognition, but changes in the power attaching to their roles have all been within, not of, much the same self-replicating institutional forms.