Homo Fragilis

My new book, Homo Fragilis : On the evolutionary roots of human fragility, is now out (in french) with FYP éditions, and can be ordered here.

Early praise 

“A fascinating, unsettling, courageous, and profoundly original book.”

— Nancy Huston, Canadian-born French novelist and essayist, winner of the Prix Femina and the Governor General’s Award

“Fascinating and absolutely enlightening. A reading that offers unprecedented keys to understanding human nature, social relations, and the great ideological upheavals of our time.”

— Samuel Fitoussi, French essayist and columnist for Le Figaro, author of Pourquoi les intellectuels se trompent (Éditions de l’Observatoire, 2025)

Publisher's flyer here

Foreign rights / translation queries here

Publisher's description  

"In Homo Fragilis, Samuel Veissière overturns our understanding of human evolution. Far from being a weakness, vulnerability was, in his view, the discreet yet decisive engine of our species’ success. By collectively investing in children and the elderly — the most fragile among us — humanity learned to cooperate, to transmit knowledge, and to weave a rich cultural and technical heritage. But today, this ancient spring seems to have gone awry. In the age of hyperconnectivity and social media, suffering has become an identity banner, a social currency, a lever of power, and above all, a marker of status.

Why do so many young people, in societies that are safe and abundant, sink into anxiety? Why has the quest for recognition turned into a competition of victimhood? How has the ethic of care — so essential to human survival — given rise to new forms of censorship, exclusion, and even violence?

A professor at the Université du Québec à Montréal, Samuel Veissière is one of the few scholars to articulate the combined insights of anthropology and cognitive and clinical psychology. He unfolds here a rigorous, cross-disciplinary analysis where evolutionary anthropology, cultural history, social psychology, and contemporary psychiatry intersect. With a gaze at once fresh and deeply rooted in human observation and the long history of civilizations, he sheds light on the great fractures of our time: grievance culture, the explosion of identity narratives, the psychiatrization of distress, rising radicalisms, and the collapse of common frameworks.

A masterful essay that helps us understand why fragility has become the nerve center of a cultural war now ravaging the very foundations of meaning and community — from the sacred to the political, and from the political to the intimate. In the lineage of great intellectual panoramas such as Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari or Collapse by Jared Diamond, as bracing as Paul Bloom’s Against Empathy, and no less salutary than Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation, this stimulating book proposes a new framework to connect the fragilities of our time to the ancient springs of the human condition — and to reinvent an ethic of connection, care, and responsibility."