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Hilton Root, Professor of Public Policy at George Mason University, argued, "Henrich's genius and the source of his methodological originality reside in his application of contemporary social science to uncover universal laws, and to classify and categorize social reality in a context-free approach. ... The evidence strongly supports the importance of repressing 'kinship intensity' in trajectories toward modernity." However, the reviewer also argued that readers will not learn the larger-system context that also defined Europe, saying, "Only in passing does Henrich note that the Church did not apply the marriage rules on elite lineages with the same rigor as it did on peasant communities". Root also noted, "Tracing an outcome, e.g., the distinctive psychology of Western society, to an original cause, the Church ban on cousins wedding, is in itself WEIRD." The reviewer said that despite "jumping from the fifth century to the High Middle Ages ... the book makes a significant contribution to the study of what makes the West unique and will be a landmark of early twenty-first-century social science."
The Unusual Humans In History
Hilton Root, Professor of Public Policy at George Mason University, argued, "Henrich's genius and the source of his methodological originality reside in his application of contemporary social science to uncover universal laws, and to classify and categorize social reality in a context-free approach. ... The evidence strongly supports the importance of repressing 'kinship intensity' in trajectories toward modernity." However, the reviewer also argued that readers will not learn the larger-system context that also defined Europe, saying, "Only in passing does Henrich note that the Church did not apply the marriage rules on elite lineages with the same rigor as it did on peasant communities". Root also noted, "Tracing an outcome, e.g., the distinctive psychology of Western society, to an original cause, the Church ban on cousins wedding, is in itself WEIRD." The reviewer said that despite "jumping from the fifth century to the High Middle Ages ... the book makes a significant contribution to the study of what makes the West unique and will be a landmark of early twenty-first-century social science."