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What it argues
Robert Greene is a writer whose career has been built on synthesizing historical biography and social observation into frameworks for understanding power, strategy, and human behavior. The Laws of Human Nature, published in 2018, is his most explicitly psychological book — eighteen laws, each covering a fundamental aspect of human behavior that people typically deny, misunderstand, or underestimate.
The book is long and dense. Each chapter opens with an extended historical or biographical case study — Julius Caesar, Eleanor of Aquitaine, Anton Chekhov, Martin Luther King Jr., Daniel Ellsberg — and then develops the law the case illustrates. The laws cover irrationality, narcissism, role-playing, compulsion, covetousness, short-sightedness, and self-sabotage, among others. Greene's approach is Machiavellian in the classical sense: he is interested in understanding how humans actually behave, not how they should behave, and he believes that self-knowledge — including knowledge of one's own shadow, weaknesses, and impulses — is both valuable and rare.
What it gets right
- 1.
Rationality is the exception, not the rule. Emotional and irrational motivations drive most human behavior, and the rational explanations people give for their actions are often post-hoc constructions.
- 2.
The shadow self — the parts of your character you deny and project onto others — shapes your behavior from below awareness. Acknowledging it is more productive than suppressing it.
- 3.
Narcissism exists on a spectrum and is present to some degree in everyone. Understanding how narcissistic behavior escalates allows you to work with rather than against the people you depend on.
What it covers
Who wrote it
Robert Greene is an American author who has written six books on power, strategy, and human nature, including The 48 Laws of Power, The Art of Seduction, The 33 Strategies of War, Mastery, and The 50th Law, co-authored with rapper 50 Cent. He studied classical studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of California, Berkeley, and spent years working in various industries before his writing career. The Laws of Human Nature is his most comprehensive and explicitly psychological book.
