Yochai Benkler releases new book,
Penguin and the Leviathan: How Cooperation Triumphs over Self-Interest

NOVEMBER 1, 2011

Berkman Professor of Entrepreneurial Legal Studies at Harvard, and faculty co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, Yochai Benkler (The Wealth of Networks) is one of the world's top thinkers on cooperative structures.

In his new book, The Penguin and the Leviathan: How Cooperation Triumphs over Self-Interest, he uses evidence from neuroscience, economics, sociology, biology, and real-world examples to break down the myth of self-interest and replace it with a model of cooperation in our businesses, our government, and our lives.

Professor Benkler makes the case for a new set of design principles—such as peer production on the internet and elsewhere—to reveal how we can harness the power of human cooperation to create new systems of economic and social activity. These diverse systems fly in the face of what for decades was perceived wisdom about how to build incentives and manage complex economic, social, and technical systems to make the trains run on time. And yet, they move. And as they move, they teach us a bit about who we are, and how we might organize our lives to be not only more productive, but more humane as well. Tux, the Linux Penguin, is beginning to nibble at the grim view of humanity that breathed life into Hobbes's Leviathan.

Learn more about Yochai Benkler.