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We are neither the only nor the first writers to think about mutual aid. In recent years, scientific articles on this subject have followed one another at a breakneck pace. But unfortunately they remain relatively inaccessible to the general public and are rarely found in school curricula. The same goes for the long philosophical and religious intellectual lineage which dates back to Antiquity and took on a truly scientific dimension in the nineteenth century in the writings of, among others, the naturalist Charles Darwin, the sociologist Alfred Victor Espinas, the geographer Peter Kropotkin and the anthropologist Marcel Mauss.

Make no mistake: the heirs of these ‘naïve’ ideas are numerous. One need only think of the MAUSS movement,³ which was launched in 1981 by Alain Caillé and currently brings together a large panel of intellectuals under the (very stimulating!) banner of convivialism.⁴ There is also the naturalist overview by Jean-Marie Pelt, La solidarité chez les plantes, les animaux, les humains (Solidarity in Plants, Animals, and Humans, 2004), as well as the monumental syntheses in Jacques Lecomte’s La Bonté humaine (Human Kindness, 2012), Matthieu Ricard’s Altruism: The Power of Compassion to Change Yourself and the World (2015) and Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval’s Common (2019). Philosophers, managers, ecologists, economists, anthropologists and sociologists are scrambling to bring back to the forefront concepts as oldfashioned and outdated as altruism,⁵ goodness,⁶ kindness,⁷ association,⁸ equality,⁹ common goods,¹⁰ empathy¹¹ and solidarity.¹²

The strength of this newly emerging, wide-ranging intellectual trend is that it doesn’t just stay in libraries. It goes out into the streets, transforms the world through new modes of consumption, labour, construction, learning, communication, management¹³ and production.¹⁴ The emergence of a culture of common goods, peer-to-peer contact and collaboration is taking on a global dimension affecting every sector. It’s too late to stop it.

In the last century, our world became extremely efficient in terms of the mechanisms of competition. It’s high time to become equally proficient in cooperation, benevolence and selflessness. The other objective of this book is to add a stone to this edifice, to participate in the structuring of this new culture. Drawing on several disciplines, from ethology to anthropology, including economics, psychology, biology, sociology and neuroscience, we offer an overview of the most recent discoveries relating to the very powerful drive among living creatures (and not just humans) to form associations. The idea of including the rest of the living world in our synthesis was so that we could identify the overall principles and a general architecture of what might now be called ‘the other law of the jungle’.