The primatologist Frans de Waal's classic study, first published in 1982, chronicles the shifting alliances, rivalries, and power struggles among the chimpanzees of the Arnhem Zoo colony in the Netherlands, and argues that the roots of human politics run far deeper than our species. Observing the colony over years, de Waal documented how its adult males competed for dominance not through brute strength alone but through coalition-building, strategic reconciliation, deception, and the cultivation of support among females and rivals—maneuvers that looked strikingly like the machinations described by Machiavelli. He recounts in vivid detail the rise and fall of individual chimpanzees, the formation and betrayal of alliances, and the way the group's hierarchy was continually negotiated rather than simply imposed, concluding that these behaviors were governed by social intelligence rather than instinct. The book made a lasting mark well beyond primatology: politicians, business leaders, and social scientists embraced it for its insights into leadership, negotiation, and the universal dynamics of power. De Waal's larger argument is that the capacities we associate with politics—empathy and cunning, loyalty and opportunism, the drive for status and the need for social bonds—are part of our evolutionary inheritance, shared with our closest primate relatives. Written accessibly and full of memorable individual portraits, and updated in later editions with reflections on subsequent research, Chimpanzee Politics remains a foundational work in the study of animal behavior and a persuasive case that human social and political life is continuous with, rather than separate from, the world of the apes.