The Naturall Condition of Mankind

In 1651, Thomas Hobbes argued that the ‘Naturall Condition of Mankind’ is:

a time of Warre, where every man is Enemy to every man … In such condition, there is no place for Industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no Culture of the Earth … no Arts; no Letters; no Society; and which is worst of all, continuall feare, and danger of violent death; And the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short. (Hobbes, 1976: 186)

Hobbes’s solution was to make a social contract installing a Leviathan – an absolute sovereign who would protect the people from each other and from this terrible fate.

Upon what empirical basis did Hobbes make such claims about the ‘state of nature’? He looked to ‘the savage people in many places of America’ (Hobbes, 1976: 187). Most people now recognize Hobbes’s assertions that Native Americans have no culture as ethnocentric and his depiction of a violent savage life as plain racist. And yet, as Widerquist and McCall argue in their book Prehistoric Myths in Modern Political Philosophy, the myth that life outside the state is unbearable and that life under the state is better remains the essential premise of two of the most influential Western political philosophies in the modern world – social contract theory (contractarianism) and property rights theory (propertarianism). Critiques of these philosophies are not new. But what is new, and exciting, about this book is that a political philosopher (Karl Widerquist) enlists an anthropologist (Grant S. McCall) to systematically debunk this founding myth on the basis of empirical evidence. The results are fascinating and, I will argue, should prompt a methodological crisis for some schools of political philosophy.

Widerquist and McCall start by quoting Thomas Paine, who wrote in 1797:

the first principle of civilization ought to have been, and ought still to be, that the condition of every person born into the world, after a state of civilization commences, ought not to be worse than if he had been born before that period. (Paine 2000: 82, quoted in Widerquist and McCall, 2017a: 2)

They argue that many political philosophers assume that Paine’s first principle has been fulfilled by states. But the empirical evidence suggests that the least advantaged people under contemporary states and capitalism are worse off than they could be in stateless societies.

In the first three chapters, Widerquist and McCall show that, despite careful ambiguity over the role of the state of nature, contractarianism and propertarianism rely on two core claims. The weak ‘Lockean proviso’: states or private property are justified if everyone is better off than they would be in the state of nature. This is a normative claim, that these institutions are justified if everyone is better off. ¹ And the ‘Hobbesian hypothesis’: everyone is better off, or at least as well-off, under the state or private property system than in statelessness. This is an empirical claim that everyone is actually better off. Hobbes gave two pieces of evidence in support of his empirical hypothesis: the English Civil War and, as I’ve already stated, Native Americans.

Locke’s different account of the state of nature, even though it is less violent than Hobbes’, appeals to similar evidence in order to justify the private property regime. He appealed to two pieces of empirical evidence. First, farming and commerce produces more for everyone than is produced in the state of nature, which is a commons. Second, by making a comparison with Native Americans. He claimed that ‘a king of a large and fruitful territory there, feeds, lodges, and is clad worse than a day-labourer in England’ (Locke’s ”Second Treatise,” §41, quoted in Widerquist and McCall, 2017a: 73). Locke read the accounts of travellers and historians at the time, so his claim was based on the available evidence. The problem was that the evidence was imbued with racist colonial bias and the belief in the civilized/natural dichotomy: the popular idea that prior to the diverse array of civilizations, there was only one natural state of man, and reversion to the ‘natural’ primitive state was a constant threat to civilization.

The next three chapters examine the influence of the Hobbesian hypothesis and Lockean proviso in political thought (whether or not the thinkers agreed with them). First, 18th-century thinkers: Rousseau, Kant and Paine. Then, 19th-century thinkers: Hegel, Bastiat, Marx and Engels, Sidgwick and Kropotkin. Generally speaking, the 18th century theorists focused on other empirical problems, such as ‘what is the nature of man?’ or ‘did the state originate by contract?’, rather than the Hobbesian hypothesis (Widerquist and McCall, 2017a: 89). The 19th century theorists (with the notable exception of Kroptkin) ² focused on the normative arguments, leaving the empirics to the new disciplines of anthropology, sociology, economics and political science (Widerquist and McCall, 2017a: 97). A 70-page online appendix expands on some of these thinkers and includes others, such as Adam Smith, David Hume, Durkheim and Nietzsche (Widerquist and McCall, 2017b). In short, the overall effect was that during these two centuries the Hobbesian hypothesis escaped critique.

Skipping forward about 50 years – a period when utilitarianism was dominant – Widerquist and McCall discuss the role of the Hobbesian hypothesis and Lockean proviso in the resurgent field of contemporary contractarian and propertarian political philosophy (post-1950), when the relatively weak requirement of the Lockean proviso has come under question. That though has remained a purely normative issue, taking place against the background of an ‘unexamined consensus’ that the Hobbesian hypothesis is true and so that actually existing states fulfil a weak Lockean proviso (Widerquist and McCall, 2017a: 98).

Widerquist and McCall argue that believing that states make everyone better off in comparison to stateless societies, without providing actual empirical comparisons with stateless societies, serves useful psychological and political functions that extend beyond political philosophy: it allows the advantaged to comfort themselves with the thought that the disadvantaged are better off than they would be in the state of nature, even if they live decidedly horrible lives under state institutions and capitalism (Widerquist and McCall, 2017a: 111).

The first half of the book, then, focused on the Hobbesian hypothesis in political philosophy. The second half focuses on the empirical evidence about stateless societies in anthropology and related disciplines. Anthropology became a distinct academic discipline in the 19th century, imbued with the ethnocentric assumptions of the day: West is best, the natural/civilized dichotomy, the inevitability of progress and that everyone shared in that progress. Indeed, anthropology started out as a racist discipline founded on the Hobbesian hypothesis; it sought to study those savage societies where life is nasty, brutish and short. In that sense, it is ironic to look to this discipline to try to dispel lingering prejudices among philosophers. But the difference between philosophy and anthropology is that anthropologists looked at the evidence and (for the most part) realized they were wrong. Philosophers didn’t bother.

Interestingly, the Hobbesian hypothesis apparently remained popular in anthropology until the 1940s, when the evidence against it rendered the view untenable (Widerquist and McCall, 2017a: 130). Thus, political philosophers before then are somewhat off the hook for lacking access to evidence (although some drew on the empirical evidence that disputed it, notably Kropotkin (1902)), but after that time there is less of an excuse for assuming the truth of the Hobbesian hypothesis. And now there is no excuse.

Evidence from ethnographic studies of stateless societies, mostly from the 1960s onwards, as well as the archaeology of prehistoric stateless societies, shows that the violence hypothesis (that life in stateless societies in intolerably violent), and the Hobbesian hypothesis (that everyone is better off under a state) are both false. Widerquist and McCall are aware of the limits of the empirical research they draw on – mainly ethnography (long-term participant observation), with the concern that present stateless groups may not be like past ones, and archaeology, a discipline that is constantly evolving due to new findings – but maintain that the combined output of these fields has provided a significant body of knowledge about stateless groups, sufficient to make some empirical claims.

Widerquist and McCall draw on evidence about two forms of stateless societies, both of which demonstrate the falsity of drawing an exhaustive dichotomy between living under something like contemporary state authority and the complete absence of political organization (Widerquist and McCall, 2017a: 119). First, hunter-gatherer ‘bands’: nomadic groups of about 15 to 50 people. They obtain food from foraging, treat land as a commons and make political decisions by consensus. Ethnographers have documented these groups all over the world from the tropics to the Arctic, on every kind of terrain. These groups have existed as long as humans have – about 200,000 years. Second, ‘autonomous villages’ are societies of 100 to 600 people, and have existed for about 20,000 years. They have ranks, but this is not accompanied by authority. They tend to be sedentary and treat land as a commons. Their economies are based on ‘swidden’ (slash-and-burn) agriculture, or they can be herders or hunter-gatherers. They split to settle disputes.

A review of violence in these groups suggests that they are neither engaged in a war of all-against-all, as Hobbes would have it, nor are they entirely peaceful. Essentially, there is significant variation depending on the group. Archaeologists believe that human societies became more violent as the first agricultural societies emerged. Jebel Sahaba in Sudan is a mass grave containing 59 skeletons from approximately 13,000 years ago, and it is the first known example of warfare (Widerquist and McCall, 2017a: 135). The consensus view is that increasing population density leads to increased violence, possibly because violence can no longer be avoided by moving elsewhere. The establishment of states led to yet more violence: ‘Early states and empires are perhaps the most violent and warlike contexts in which humans have ever lived’ (Widerquist and McCall, 2017a: 138). European states then began ‘exporting violence through imperialism’, decimating indigenous populations in Africa, Asia and the Americas (Widerquist and McCall, 2017a: 140).

Ethnographic evidence from the world’s remaining hunter-gatherer groups reveals significant variability between band societies. Some have low levels of violence, like the Chewong in the Malay Peninsula who have no words for violence, fighting or war. However, other band societies have high levels of violence, such as the Ju/’honasi, the Hadza or the Yanamamö.

Contemporary states have done a good job of reducing death due to interpersonal violence, with the current global annual death rate due to interpersonal violence at 1 in about every 15,000. But states create new dangers. War, genocide, terrorism, famine and violence involving sophisticated weapons are uniquely associated with states. Four per cent of the French population died during the first four years of the First World War, the violent death rate of the Rwandan population during the 1994 genocide was 1 in 5 and of the Jewish population of Europe during the Holocaust around 2 in 3 (Widerquist and McCall, 2017a: 141).

Hobbes assumed that continual warfare was due to three motives: gain, fear and reputation. But these motives are largely absent in stateless societies. Gain is not a motive because nobody has much food or equipment; whatever tools a person has must be portable. Reputation has the opposite effect. Bands cultivate an ethic of non-violence; aggressors are ostracized, not celebrated, and they risk counter-attack. Neutralizing these threats means that there is less fear of attack. The most important technique that bands have for avoiding conflict is the ability to disperse. Bands are in constant flux. Bands also have rich social networks, with friends and relatives in nearby camps. These networks not only help prevent violence, but also hedge against economic and environmental uncertainty, and reinforce the social norms of ‘equality, sympathy, and nonviolence’ (Widerquist and McCall, 2017a: 171).

Widerquist and McCall move from convincingly disproving the violence hypothesis to consider Hobbes’s disparagements of the state of nature, of whether life there really is solitary, poor and short. They provide archaeological and anthropological evidence to show that life in stateless societies was and is communal, and that ethnographic evidence dating back to the first century suggests high levels of contentment. Stateless societies have rich cultures of storytelling, music, dance and art. In terms of material well-being, capitalist societies obviously produce many more luxuries. However, everyone in capitalist societies might have access to luxuries, but they do not necessarily have access to the basic necessities of life. Even on pessimistic interpretations of working life for band societies, Americans in 2003 worked on average seven hours more per week than the Ache of Paraguay. People on average are healthier in states than in band societies, and modern medicine has cured many of the diseases that killed in the past. However, new diseases have been created – obesity, stress-related illness, diabetes, heart disease, stroke, high blood pressure and cholesterol, higher rates of cancer. And many state societies have failed to deliver better health than band societies. Increasing life spans and living standards only became a trend after 1800: before that, life expectancy and health were reduced. This trend has only reached poor countries in the last few decades and still hasn’t reached all countries. Average life expectancy in Zambia in the early 2000s was 39.

In terms of freedom, the preferred metric of propertarians, states do similarly badly. Bands’ collective decision-making and the option to leave gave members extensive political freedom. Positive freedom – the freedom to do what you want – is greater in state societies that provide a much wider range of opportunities, but those opportunities are not equally shared and not accessible to everyone. Negative freedom – freedom from constraints imposed by others – is high in band societies, but not in state societies, where all the land is owned and property rights are enforced. Political gender equality is higher in band societies, where women take equal part in decision-making. Sexual freedom is also high.

Widerquist and McCall also look at expressed preferences and observed choices, on which contractarians focus. Stateless groups have persistently resisted the encroachment of states. And despite the exit costs and not having been brought up with the skills required for stateless life, over the centuries people from state societies have made the choice to join stateless societies. James Scott documented 5000 years of resistance to states in Zomia – a region in Asia where individuals from India, China and Vietnam fled (Widerquist and McCall, 2017a: 211). There are other cases of such areas in the Philippines, Indonesia, the Middle East, central and eastern Europe, Brazil, Colombia, Florida, North Carolina, Virginia and the Great Lakes in North America. These groups have been forced to re-join states; they didn’t do it out of choice.

The authors are careful to point out, however, that none of this means that life in a stateless society is some sort of utopian idyll. It is hard. But it’s not necessarily worse than life under the state for the worst-off inhabitants. They provide a list of grim statistics about life for the worst-off in the contemporary world: the UN estimates that 963 million people are hungry, but the figures could be as high as 1.5–2.5 billion lacking adequate food and 3.5–4.3 billion living in poverty; 16,000 children die a day from starvation; 1.1 billion people lack access to safe drinking water; workers in the Indian sub-continent work on average 72 hours per week (Widerquist and McCall, 2017b: 188–189).

The final chapter considers a range of contractarian and propertarian responses to the argument. Perhaps the most important is the idea that the global population is too large today to revert to statelessness, and that any attempt to do so would result in all-out civil war. Widerquist and McCall respond that this is an empirical claim that requires supporting evidence, which is extremely difficult to obtain. Moreover, it lowers the bar for states from making everyone better off than they would be in stateless societies (which is already a low standard) to protecting people from war. What is the normative basis for setting the bar so low?

Widerquist and McCall conclude that contractarian and propertarian political philosophers should reject the Hobbesian hypothesis and, with it, their complacency about state authority and property rights. States should start fulfilling the Lockean proviso, which they can do by ensuring access to basic necessities and providing a guaranteed minimum income. Currently, Paine’s ‘first principle of civilization is violated. Our societies horribly mistreat their most disadvantaged members, and our myth that everything was even worse in prehistory makes it easier for us to do it’ (Widerquist and McCall, 2017a: 218).

Widerquist and McCall’s book is important because it shows the significance of, and challenges, a racist premise in political philosophy, and because of the way it draws on a broader range of evidence than is typical in that discipline. Still, it has three structural problems, and does not follow its arguments quite to their conclusions.

Muddied waters

There are two confusions in this book. First, the target of Widerquist and McCall’s critique is ostensibly contractarian and propertarian political philosophy. But most of the book focuses on states, not the private property regime. This would have been a perfectly good book if it stuck to the critique of contractarianism and left the sketchier critique of propertarianism for the second book, which Widerquist tells us in his preface will look in more detail at Locke’s claim that property rights are natural rights, and that capitalism is the best economic system at respecting negative freedom.

The book is also confusing because it’s not entirely clear what the target it. Is it contractarian and propertarian political philosophy? Or is it the fact that actually existing states fail to fulfil the Lockean proviso and so are not justified? If the latter, is the real target much bigger than mere philosophy? Because states and private property will continue to exist even if the political philosophies are proven wrong.

Where are the women?

Widerquist and McCall first mention women on page 149 of the book, where they hint at the higher levels of gender equality in indigenous groups past and present. They note that some ethnographers have found low rates of violence against women in band societies, which they attribute to women’s equal decision-making power. But they don’t give us much information. This is a missed opportunity. The authors convincingly argue that the social contract is not necessarily better for the worst off in state societies. But they miss the point that the social contract might not be better for half of the world’s population – women – who could have lived in more egalitarian circumstances in stateless societies.

As indigenous American scholars have pointed out, at a time when white settler women were the property of their husbands and could not vote, Iroquois women had political power and authority, owned the household goods, sat on the Iroquois Grand Council and could marry whomever they wanted and divorce (Allen, 1986; Grinde and Johansen, 1990: Ch. 9). Indeed, the freedom of Native American women served as a direct influence for the early American suffragists, including Elizabeth Candy Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, and influenced at least one dissenter white woman who fled to join the Iroquois (Grinde and Johansen, 1990: Ch. 9).

Widerquist and McCall stress the sheer diversity of stateless societies. Not all stateless societies will have such high levels of gender equality, and there may be ways in which women did not benefit from Iroquois social structures. But this doesn’t matter. It is enough to show that some stateless situations could be better for women to claim that the state does not necessarily make women better off. Therefore, I wanted to hear more about what feminist anthropologists and archaeologists have to say about women’s roles in stateless societies.

Furthermore, the authors do not discuss the inherent sexism of the state of nature myth and thus do not consider how the racism and sexism of the myth intersect. The violence hypothesis was critiqued by feminists as long ago as 1706. Mary Astell picked up on Hobbes’s mushroom metaphor in De Cive, and mocked him for the idea that ‘Men sprung up like so many Mushrooms or Terrae Filii, without Father or Mother or any sort of dependency!’ (Green, 2012: 175). Even though Hobbes dropped the mushroom metaphor from Leviathan, Christine di Stefano argues it is an apt metaphor for how Hobbes perceived humans in the state of nature; because mushrooms grow rapidly and don’t require attention, they grow in crowded clusters competing for space, and they reproduce asexually (Di Stefano, 1983: 638). Humans, on the other hand, are of women born, need care and attention for many years, are socialized and educated into social groups, do not necessarily have to compete for space, and reproduce by having sex with other humans. Apparently, in the state of nature no one has sex and no one raises children, so how are there people alive to participate in the war of all-against-all? How do children reach adulthood? Where are the women in the state of nature? Feminist critiques of the violence hypothesis and the Hobbesian hypothesis are not mentioned in this book, despite the fact that they bolster the argument and provide further evidence against the claims of contractarians and propertarians.

The risk of epistemic injustice

The value of Widerquist and McCall’s book is that it brings together two fields – philosophy and anthropology – to shed light on the foundations of political philosophy. It provides a systematic literature review which demonstrates that contractarian and propertarian political philosophy take it for granted that life is better under the state than in situations of statelessness, and they prove that this claim is false on the basis of rigorous empirical research. It deserves to have a major impact on the field. It is a welcome addition for anyone seeking to decolonize the political philosophy canon. However, it also reproduces some of the power relations it highlights as unjust.

While white philosophers were busy justifying colonial expansion and the domination of indigenous and other non-white peoples on the basis of contractarian and propertarian philosophies, indigenous groups knew that their lives were worthwhile and that they lived in different, not necessarily inferior, ways. Widerquist and McCall mostly reference other Western scholars in philosophy and anthropology. They use what Westerners have said about indigenous groups to convince Westerners that indigenous groups do not live unbearable lives, rather than using what indigenous groups have said about themselves.

As bell hooks points out, when marginalized people make a point, it is ignored. When people from dominant groups make the point, it gets amplified (hooks, 1984: 51). This is what we now call ‘epistemic injustice’. This term is itself indicative of the process. The term ‘epistemic injustice’ has become mainstream in political philosophy since Miranda Fricker’s (2007) book of that name, yet it is a concept that has been used by black feminists, like hooks, for decades.

The problem, I suspect, is that the authors wanted to write a book for a specific audience – Western political philosophers, who are mostly white, and who are educated to find certain styles and modes of argumentation and knowledge production plausible, while ignoring others. So they have drawn on the literature that will appeal to and convince their audience. Furthermore, indigenous societies tend to have oral, not written, cultures, and indigenous scholarship in political philosophy is relatively recent (although in some other fields it is more established). However, these are not sufficient reasons for ignoring what indigenous groups have to say about themselves.

This book runs the risk of epistemic injustice in two ways. First, it ignores what indigenous groups say about themselves. Second, by potentially becoming the main text that Western political philosophers use to dispute the racism of the state of nature myth, it could further marginalize those voices. The latter point is not the responsibility of the authors, but by including more indigenous scholars they could have given their work a platform.

Political philosophy’s methodological crisis

Despite these problems, this book is a breath of fresh air for at least two reasons. First, much political philosophy is focused on justifying the state (or it simply assumes that the state is justified). This book does the opposite. It looks at reasons why states and private property might not be justified. Second, instead of basing its philosophical claims on intuition or conjecture, it uses empirical evidence. Of course, the evidence isn’t perfect. But the authors are well aware of that, and make an effort throughout to identify potential problems.

Fundamentally, their work raises the question: how many other untested empirical assumptions lie at the foundations of contemporary Western political thought? How many racist (and sexist) prejudices form the basis of political theory? Furthermore, it raises a methodological question: how much longer can philosophers invoke dodgy thought experiments and intuitions in order to build up self-justifying philosophies? Intuitions emerge within a socio-political, economic and cultural context. They emerge from an embodied person with or without various kinds of privilege. They are not independent, universally applicable ideas. A good example is Hobbes’s story about the motivations behind the war of all-against-all: gain, reputation and fear have not always seemed likely candidates as the dominant or most basic human motivations.

The authors explicitly claim that this book is not a contribution to the a priori vs. empirical debate (deriving ethical principles in pure theory vs. examining how the world works to derive ethical principles), and that they are not criticizing the fact-independent principles in contractarianism or propertarianism, only their empirical application (Widerquist and McCall, 2017a: 15). But I think the book does call into question a priori theory and fact-independent principles, because it sheds light on the prejudices that sneak into philosophical thinking – prejudices that can lie dormant, passed on from generation to generation.

Indeed, the authors themselves disappointingly fall into the trap of using a prejudicial thought experiment at the end of the book when considering the objection to their argument that statelessness now would result in a perpetual civil war due to population density. They suggest that the disadvantaged could engage in a thought experiment whereby the state introduces a policy to reduce population size so that small-scale statelessness does become viable.

This thought experiment fails to think about who would benefit from such a policy. While it may benefit the ‘disadvantaged’ overall in the future, there is a sub-group of the disadvantaged – women – whose bodies will be controlled in the meantime, by enforced contraception or sterilization; policies that have been employed by states in the past and present. Is this a sacrifice women should be expected to make for the ultimate goal of reduced population size so we can all live in stateless societies? On what basis can we make that comparison: the loss of women’s actual negative liberty vs. potential greater overall utility in a speculative future?

This thought experiment depends on the idea that statelessness would be possible again if we lived in smaller populations, but that is mere speculation. We could live in smaller-scale societies again and, given our history of living in states for 5000 years, peaceful statelessness may or may not be possible. Even though the authors don’t endorse this solution, this thought experiment gives people ammunition for making claims about population reduction, and the inevitable control of women’s bodies, without any good reason. They criticize Hobbes’s state of nature on the basis that an apparently ‘off-the-cuff’ remark has influenced 400 years of political philosophy (Widerquist and McCall, 2017a: 174), so why use an off-the-cuff sexist thought experiment when they don’t even need it to make their overall argument?

In using this thought experiment, the authors have failed to consider the radical implications of their own work. By working together as a philosopher and an empirical social scientist, they have shown that speculation in philosophy is appropriate only in very limited circumstances. Philosophers wanting to use thought experiments and imagined state-of-nature-type scenarios need to provide strong reasons for doing so that are devoid of untested empirical assumptions. They also need to make sure they are not smuggling in prejudices.