Riane Eisler and David Loye
Co-founders of The Center for Partnership Studies
Riane Eisler is a social scientist, attorney, and author whose work on cultural transformation has inspired both scholars and social activists. Her research has impacted many fields, including history, economics, psychology, sociology, and education. She has been a leader in the movement for peace, sustainability, and economic equity, and her pioneering work in human rights has expanded the focus of international organizations to include the rights of women and children.
Dr. Eisler is internationally known for her bestseller The Chalice and The Blade: Our History, Our Future, now in 23 foreign editions, including most European languages and Chinese, Russian, Korean, Hebrew, Japanese, and Arabic.
Her newest book, The Real Wealth of Nations: Creating a Caring Economics – hailed by Archbishop Desmond Tutu as “a template for the better world we have been so urgently seeking,” by Peter Senge as “desperately needed,” by Gloria Steinem as “revolutionary,” and by Jane Goodall as “a call for action” – proposes a new approach to economics that gives visibility and value to the most essential human work: the work of caring for people and planet.
| Dr. Eisler keynotes conferences worldwide, and is a consultant to business and government on applications of the partnership model introduced in her work.She has spoken at the United Nations, and International venues have included Germany at the invitation of Prof. Rita Suessmuth, President of the Bundestag (the German Parliament) and Daniel Goeudevert (Chair of Volkswagen International); Colombia, invited by the Mayor of Bogota; and the Czech Republic, invited by Vaclav Havel (President of the Czech Republic). |
Other books drawing from her multidisciplinary research include the award-winning The Power of Partnership: Seven Relationships that Will Change Your Life and Tomorrow’s Children: A Blueprint for Partnership Education in the 21st Century, as well as Sacred Pleasure: Sex, Myth, and the Politics of the Body, a daring reexamination of sexuality and spirituality, and Women, Men, and the Global Quality of Life, documenting the key role of women’s status in a nation’s general quality of life. Her earlier books, drawing from her legal experience, include Dissolution and The Equal Rights Handbook, widely used in the campaign for the Equal Rights Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
Riane Eisler was born in Vienna, fled from the Nazis with her parents to Cuba, and later emigrated to the United States. She obtained degrees in sociology and law from the University of California, taught pioneering classes on women and the law at UCLA, and now teaches in the Transformative Leadership Program at the California Institute of Integral Studies. She is a founding member of the General Evolution Research Group (GERG), a fellow of the World Academy of Art and Science and World Business Academy, a Councilor of the World Future Council, and a commissioner of the World Commission on Global Consciousness and Spirituality, along with the Dalai Lama and other spiritual leaders. She is co-founder with Nobel Peace laureate Betty Williams of the Spiritual Alliance to Stop Intimate Violence (SAIV), www.saiv.net and president of the Center for Partnership Studies, www.partnershipway.org, dedicated to research and education.
Eisler has written over 300 articles in publications ranging from Behavioral Science, Futures, Political Psychology, The Christian Science Monitor, and The UNESCO Courier to Brain and Mind, the Human Rights Quarterly, The International Journal of Women's Studies, and the World Encyclopedia of Peace.
Dr. Eisler is the only woman among 20 great thinkers including Hegel, Adam Smith, Marx, and Toynbee selected for inclusion in Macrohistory and Macrohistorians in recognition of the lasting importance of her work as a cultural historian and evolutionary theorist. She has received many honors, including honorary Ph.D. degrees, the Alice Paul ERA Education Award, and the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation’s 2009 Distinguished Peace Leadership Award, and is included in the award-winning book Great Peacemakers as one of 20 leaders for world peace, along with Mahatma Gandhi, Mother Teresa, and Martin Luther King.
Dr. Eisler can be contacted at center@partnershipway.org. Her personal website is www.rianeeisler.com.
Social psychologist, systems-theorist, futurist, and CPS co-founder David Loye is the author of widely respected books on the use of the brain and mind in prediction, political leadership, race relations, and is the developer of new theories of moral sensitivity and evolution.
A former member of the psychology faculty of Princeton University, Dr. Loye was a professor in the research series and Director of Research for the Program on Psychosocial Adaptation and the Future at the UCLA School of Medicine for nearly a decade.
Loye is a co-founder of the new Society for the Study of Chaos Theory in Psychology and a co-founder of the General Evolution Research Group, a multidisciplinary group composed of scholars from Italy, France, Finland, Hungary, Russia, China and the United States, as well as an editor of the group's journal World Futures: The Journal of General Evolution.
Loye is also the founder and initiating developer and facilitator of The Darwin Project and the prospective Great Adventure distance-learning and theory-building programs. The mission of The Darwin Project is to speed the shift in our homes, schools, and the media from only teaching destructive “first-half” Darwinism to the inspiring liberation of Darwin's long lost completing half — along with all the fields of modern science that support and expand Darwin's original full vision to reveal caring, love, moral evolution, and education as the prime drivers for human evolution.
3,000 Years of Love: The Life of Riane Eisler and David Loye is an unusual joint biography that describes the development of Loye's life and writings before and after he met Eisler. It begins with the humor of a Garrison Keillor childhood on a cool lake in Minnesota and the hot oil fields of Oklahoma, which he writes of in Brave Laughter. Next were World War II in the Navy, post-War years as a television newsman in the Edward R.Murrow days, his national award-winning book The Healing of a Nation, his decade as a psychologist on the faculties of Princeton and the UCLA School of Medicine. Then, comes the partnership of Loye and Eisler and the decades of their pivotal involvement in the development of evolutionary systems science, resulting in Loye's Darwin’s Lost Theory, Darwin on Love, Bankrolling Evolution, Measuring Evolution, and other books of Loye’s Darwin Anniversary Cycle, and lifelong involvement in social and political activism behind the visionary power of The River and the Star, The Glacier and the Flame I, II, and III, The Science of Evil, and other books of his Moral Transformation Cycle.
Besides 3,000 Years of Love, Loye writes of their lives together in the development of advanced evolution theory, the great social movements of our times, and the joyful everyday enjoyment of life in Return to Amalfi and two books of love poems, 100 Days of Love and 1001 Days of Love.
During recent years he has been primarily involved with the scientific study of moral sensitivity. One phase of this research involves a comprehensive re-evaluation of the work of Darwin, Kant, Marx and Engels, Durkheim, Freud, Piaget, Kohlberg, Gilligan and other pioneers in scientific moral studies in the light of new discoveries in brain research, feminist and gender studies, human prehistory, and the systems dynamics of human cultural evolution. Loye has focused primarily on the development of action-oriented evolution theories. These include Moral Transformation Theory, Evolutionary Action Theory, and a Triadic Theory of Evolution.
With the motto “Books to Reclaim the American Mind, Heart, and Soul,” this new explosion of books for Loye in his eighties has set the goal and tone for the publication of new books on science . . education . . politics . . morality . . spirituality . . entertainment and humor . . and love by the Benjamin Franklin Press.
