Riane Eisler is a social systems scientist, cultural historian, futurist and, at 94, one of the most consequential thinkers of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. In 2017, she was named in the book Great Peacemakers: True Stories from Around the World as one of 20 international leaders – alongside Mahatma Gandhi and Mother Teresa – who have made major contributions to world peace.
Eisler has made these contributions from Carmel, which never stops surprising us with who turns out to be quietly living in the woods. Eisler has lived in Carmel since 1979, when she and her late partner, the psychologist and evolutionary systems scientist David Loye, sold a Spanish-style home near UC Los Angeles and moved to the Central Coast drawn by its beauty.
Loye died of Covid in 2022, after 45 years together. “I miss him every day,” Eisler says. “But I don’t cry anymore when I talk about him.”
Luckily for Monterey County residents, she would like, in what she calls her last years, to be more connected with the local community.
To meet Eisler is to meet someone whose ideas have, again and again, arrived ahead of the conversation. The Chalice and the Blade, her 1987 breakthrough, took 10 years to write and proposed something that sounded almost heretical – that human history is not the inevitable march of male domination, that for millennia our ancestors organized themselves around partnership rather than ranking, and that a more peaceful alternative isn’t utopian, but it’s our recoverable past and likely future. (Read a brief sample from the book on p. 22.)
Many books followed The Chalice. In Sacred Pleasure in 1995, Eisler traced the evolution of sexual relations; in Tomorrow’s Children (2000) she offered a practical guide to new arrangements in education; with The Power of Partnership in 2002 she translated her academic research into an approachable self-help book.
The Real Wealth of Nations – a true economic manifesto, published in 2007 – made the case for an economy that rewards caregiving. Nurturing Our Humanity, co-authored with anthropologist Douglas Fry in 2019, drew on neuroscience and the archaeology of hunting-gathering societies to bolster the same argument.
She has been read and praised by a diverse crowd, from feminists such as Gloria Steinem to politicians such as Mikhail Gorbachev, with international scholars (Marija Gimbutas), global activists (Jane Goodall) and Nobel prize winners (Desmond Tutu) in between. That she speaks to these diverse interests is no wonder; a conversation with her inspires and gives hope. In 2026, she was inducted, alongside Arnold Schwarzenegger, into the California Hall of Fame, honoring achievements that have made history.
Eisler’s biography is a story of a rapid cultural transformation, and her life is cast on the background of some of the most turbulent events of the 20th century.
Though Austria remained independent from neighboring and darkening Germany during Eisler’s early childhood, the political climate was increasingly threatening to Jewish people. Born in Vienna to a Jewish family of cutlery merchants, she watched the Gestapo come up the stairs to drag her father away on Kristallnacht, a pogrom and mass arrest in which over 90 Jewish people were killed in Vienna alone; her mother bought his freedom back. Among the men who showed up in her apartment that night in November 1938 was an old family acquaintance, someone whom her father had previously helped. Eisler’s mother confronted this presumed friend. She had to pay, but Eisler’s father was released.
The family fled Europe when Eisler was 7, ending up in the slums of Havana, Cuba. The destination was one of the very few places that would take them. Ships were being sent back, and Eisler still thinks about the passengers on the MS St. Louis, which was rejected by Cuba, the U.S and Canada, forcing passengers back to Europe, where over 250 died.
The country they arrived in was poor and brutal in its own way. Eisler’s family was stateless there, but it was also there, at a Methodist school, that a teacher introduced her to the concept of prehistory and sparked an interest that ultimately catapulted Eisler’s life and career years later.
Eisler eventually made it to California, as many Jewish families that ended up in Cuba did, where she mastered a new language and went on to study law. She eventually married, putting her studies on hold, had two daughters and experienced all the limitations young mothers experienced in her time (and still do), divorced, came back to UCLA law school in her 30s, and then woke up to the feminist movement.
“Being born a woman completely affected my life options,” she says. “I was supposed to be the lovely little woman behind the great man.”
The framework of thought she introduced to the world is the partnership-domination scale: not feminine versus masculine but two ways of organizing power. The blade is the power to take life. The chalice is the power to nurture it. Domination cultures organize themselves around four cornerstones: childhood and family, gender, economics and language – and so, Eisler says, must any movement that hopes to replace them.
Eisler is a distinguished professor at Meridian University, president of the Center for Partnership Systems (which advances the field of partnerism studies), and editor-in-chief of the Interdisciplinary Journal of Partnership Studies at the University of Minnesota. She is currently worried about AI in the hands of criminal regimes, but ultimately remains hopeful about the future of humanity.
“The regression,” she says, “is really a reaction.” That is a reaction to three centuries of movements, from the rights of man through abolition of slavery through feminism through civil rights, all challenging the same thing: the divinely ordained right of someone to rule over someone else.
These days, Eisler’s typical day involves working, exercise and a nebulizer for compromised lungs. She is finishing two new editions of Tomorrow’s Children and plotting another Center for Partnership Systems summit on caring economics.
She spoke to the Weekly about how her thinking and career evolved, and where it’s heading.
Weekly: Could we start with memories from Vienna and Cuba?
Eisler: I cannot forget the velvet blue curtains in our home; I loved to touch them. I also loved going with my father for green ice cream, pistachio, at a konditorei. We had to leave everything behind.
All of these experiences led me to questions: When we humans have this capacity for caring, for love, as I saw with my mother, and for courage, why has there been so much cruelty and so much violence? We’re told it’s original sin, selfish genes, inevitable, just “human nature.” Or is there an alternative?
How did you get interested in human prehistory?
The first time I learned about prehistory was in Cuba. There was a teacher who taught about prehistory. I was fascinated by this long period of human existence that we never hear about. One of my first jobs was for the Systems Development Corporation, an offshoot of the Rand Corporation. I learned what they considered “systems,” which, of course, left out women, children, the usual. But I learned the methodology.
Then I woke up, along with thousands of women in the Western world, to the feminist movement. I realized that as much as being born Jewish had affected my life and death, being born a woman at that time completely affected my life options. I could see that the conventional categories – right/left, religious/secular, Eastern/Western, capitalist/socialist – are not helpful. First of all, there have been horrible regimes under both capitalism and socialism. But secondly, they both marginalize the majority of humanity: women and children. Even feminism is marginalized in the academy – it’s “women’s studies,” when it should be our history.
You think domination is cultural, as opposed to being part of our DNA.
This is my main message: It doesn’t have to be this way. We have an alternative, but we haven’t seen it because of our fragmented consciousness. The people pushing us back today toward domination have a frame. It includes family and childhood. It includes gender. It includes economics: top-down, with the gap between haves and have-nots growing like crazy. And, what’s very important, it includes story and language. Our job right now is to show that there is a better, more peaceful – not perfect, but better – alternative, and what it is.
We seem to be culturally regressing, and yet you’re still hopeful.
Yes, but the regression is really a reaction to movement after movement for the last 300 years.
What we know from systems theory is that during periods of disequilibrium, things shift. The rights movement challenged the so-called divinely ordained right of kings to rule their subjects. Then came the feminist movement, challenging the so-called divinely ordained rule of men over women and children. Then came the abolitionist movement, the civil rights movement, the Black Lives Matter movement, challenging again the divinely ordained right of a so-called superior race to rule over inferior races. The peace movement challenges fear and violence, which are built into the domination system.
How else do you maintain a system of rankings? It starts with “God-fearing.” Then it’s fear of the government, fear of your employer, fear of your parents. And we mistake fear for respect.
Beyond The Chalice and the Blade, which of your books do you consider essential to your legacy?
Certainly, Chalice has stood the test of time. It’s the book I want as my legacy. If I live that long, I’ll write another epilogue for the 35th year. I did one for the 30th year, which takes it through the Trump years. It’s certainly the book I want as my legacy.
I’m also redoing Tomorrow’s Children. There will be two books, one geared to Montessori and private schools, and the other to public schools. And I’m revising The Power of Partnership. I’m overloaded and working too much.
What about The Real Wealth of Nations? Someone could run on this book as a ready political program.
Yes, my book on economics. I think The Real Wealth of Nations is very important in terms of introducing the kind of economy we really need. The argument between capitalism and socialism is a distraction.
When that book was published in 2007, what did it even mean to put caring and economics in the same sentence? That has changed. I think the book and the ideas in it have influenced politics. In California, I know it has had influence – we now have parental leave.
What do you think about the distrust of so-called experts in the avalanche of expert voices, including those pushing humanity in the wrong direction?
Academia. Yes, I’ve questioned it. But I am somewhat academic myself; I’m an independent academic working on systems analysis and whole-systems transformation. AI and the people who push it in the wrong direction worry me. With AI, an economics of care is essential, because that’s the work that distinguishes human capacity. I know in Japan there are robots caring for people, but that’s not what people need. People need real care from real people. That’s the one thing we humans can do that machines really can’t.
How do we change the world?
You have to intervene at inflection points. Family and childhood are one; we know from neuroscience that’s an inflection point. Intervene where your heart takes you; get involved with issues that move you, such as gender, sexual assault, abuse of children. In all these spheres, violence gets normalized. Have a frame that’s different, operate with the idea of partnership in mind. Of course, unless we change the economic rewards system, it won’t stick.
Which fundamental figures in thinking are important to you?
There are two men whose thinking I like. One is Gandhi. He said something I think is fundamental: We must not mistake the normal for the habitual. The other is Einstein, who said: You cannot solve problems with the same consciousness that created them. That’s my motto.
Look at the title of The Chalice and the Blade. It’s not about feminine versus masculine, but symbols of how power is conceptualized. Is power “power over,” like the blade, the power to take life? Or is it the chalice’s power, the power to nurture and illuminate life? Men don’t have it so good in domination systems either. They get to be king of the castle of their homes, controlling women and children, and women learn to manipulate. It’s a mess for everybody.
What does the current confusion over gender tell us?
I think there’s a difference between gender and sex. There are two basic forms of humanity – male and female, and how those roles and relations are organized is fundamental, even though it hasn’t been considered that way. Gender is in flux, because we don’t know how much is innate and how much is acquired.
But we see women taking on leadership, and we know that men can take on caring. Look at all the men caring for babies, diapering, feeding. Gender is a very fluid thing.
What books have stayed with you your whole life?
When I was a child, I was a ferocious reader. The Russians had a profound influence on me. I also liked Flaubert. I like the classics.
Carmel is a beautiful but economically ruthless environment – vacation homes while workers commute from Salinas and beyond. Any comments about what isn’t working here?
The widening gap between haves and have-nots is not sustainable. We’re back to the Gilded Age, and that brought all those movements toward partnership. But now, with AI, it’s a different ball game, and it’s quick. So we’ve got to be prepared. We should be working on a smooth transition from domination to partnership, because at our level of technology, domination is taking us to an evolutionary dead end. It’s not just climate change. It’s technologies of destruction, like nuclear bombs, like technological warfare. We should, in our self-interest, work on a smoother transition. At the very least, we should be ready with a different economic infrastructure.
Tell us about your decades of work alongside your husband.
Those 45 years with David Loye were the best years of my life. We did have separate studios. For the first two books I wrote, he was my in-house resource. Then we separated, and I wrote my books and he wrote his books.
I wrote a book about our life. It’s full of his poetry, it tells the story of our relationship. I really wrote it as part of my grieving for him.
All these people are claiming credit for rediscovering Darwin – well, David did that. He was a really strange mix of a scientist and a mystic. I loved the environmentalist in him, and the poet. He was the most creative person I ever knew.
How does your typical day look?
Very busy. I work every day. I do try to take care of my body with daily exercises and using my nebulizer.
Pleasures?
I’m a chocoholic. So a bar of chocolate. But I’m also very disciplined. The work is hard, but I do it.