Prehistoric Myths in Modern Political Philosophy

Karl Widerquist is Professor of Political Philosophy at SFS-Qatar, Georgetown University. He is co-editor of Prehistoric Myths in Modern Political Philosophy(with Grant S. McCall, Edinburgh University Press, 2017), Basic Income: An Anthology of Contemporary Research (with Yannick Vanderborght, Jose Noguera, and Jurgen De Wispelaere, Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), Exporting the Alaska Model: Adapting the Permanent Fund Dividend for Reform around the World (with Michael W. Howard, Palgrave-MacMillan, 2012), The Ethics and Economics of the Basic Income Guarantee (with Michael Anthony Lewis and Steven Pressman, Ashgate, 2005) and co-author of Economics for Social Workers: The Application of Economic Theory to Social Policy and the Human Services (with Michael Anthony Lewis, Columbia University Press, 2002). He was a founding editor of the journal Basic Income Studies, and he has published dozens of scholarly articles. Grant S. McCall is Associate Professor in Anthropology at Tulane University, as well as the director of the Center for Human-Environmental Research, a New Orleans-based nonprofit research institute aimed at exploring and improving human responses to environmental change. His publications include Prehistoric Myth and Modern Political Philosophy (co-editor with Karl Widequist, Edinburgh University Press, 2017), Strategies for Quantitative Research: Archaeology by Numbers (Routledge, 2018) and Global Perspectives on Lithic Technologies in Complex Societies (co-editor with Rachel Horowitz, University of Colorado Press, 2019).

Does it matter that so much political theory—both contractarian and libertarian—quietly presupposes claims about stateless human societies that are not in fact true? Widerquist and McCall argue that it does, taking us on a tour of the relevant anthropological literature and spelling out the implications for political philosophy in a book that is as lucid and illuminatingly instructive as it is enjoyable.

• PrefaceAcknowledgementsIntroductionModern political philosophy and prehistoric anthropology: Some preliminary issuesThe Hobbesian hypothesis: How a colonial prejudice became an essential premise in most popular justification of government sovereigntyLocke employs the Hobbesian hypothesis: How very much the same colonial prejudice became an essential premise in the most popular justification of private property rightsThe Hobbesian hypothesis in seventeenth century political theoryThe Hobbesian hypothesis in nineteenth century political theoryThe Hobbesian Hypothesis in Contemporary Political TheoryThe Violence Hypothesis in AnthropologyNasty & Brutish? Evidence for and against the violence hypothesisAre you better off now that you were 12,000 years ago? An empirical assessment of the Hobbesian HypothesisImplications: What’s left of contractarianism and propertarianism without the Hobbesian hypothesis?IndexOnline Appendix:Appendix to Chapter 2Appendix to Chapter 5Appendix to Chapter 6Appendix to Chapter 7Appendix to Chapter 8