Table Of ContentTHE PREHISTORY OF PRIVATE PROPERTY
THE PREHISTORY OF PRIVATE
PROPERTY
Implications for Modern Political Theory
Karl Widerquist and Grant S. McCall
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CONTENTS
Preface vii
Acknowledgments x
1. Introduction 1
Part One: The inequality hypothesis
2. Hierarchy’s Apologists, Part One: 5,000 Years of Clever
and Contradictory Arguments that Inequality is
Natural and Inevitable 15
3. Hierarchy’s Apologists, Part Two: Natural Inequality in
Contemporary Political Philosophy and Social Science 42
4. How Small-Scale Societies Maintain Political, Social,
and Economic Equality 55
Part Two: The market freedom hypothesis
5. The Negative Freedom Argument for the Market Economy 79
6. The Negative Freedom Argument for the Hunter-Gatherer
Band Economy 100
Part Three: The individual appropriation hypothesis
7. Contemporary Property Theory: A Story, a Myth,
a Principle, and a Hypothesis 127
v
vi The Prehistory of Private Property
8. The History of an Hypothesis 147
9. The Impossibility of a Purely A Priori Justifi cation of
Private Property 162
10. Evidence Provided by Propertarians to Support the
Appropriation Hypothesis 178
11. Property Systems in Hunter-Gatherer Societies 194
12. Property Systems in Stateless Farming Communities 209
13. Property Systems in Ancient, Medieval, and
Early Modern States 227
14. The Privatization of the Earth, 1500–2000 ce 240
15. The Individual Appropriation Hypothesis Assessed 258
Conclusion
16. Conclusion 269
References 274
Index 295
PREFACE
Prehistory is often treated as the stuff of myth. Although archaeology,
anthropology, and other fi elds provide good evidence about humans
in the deep past, many people—even otherwise good academic
researchers—feel free to make wild assertions about prehistory, the
“state of nature,” or any remote peoples without fear that anyone
will ask them to back up their claims with evidence.
You might expect philosophers and political theorists to be immune
from making such wild assertions. Even if philosophers’ work isn’t
primarily empirical, their job is to be truth seekers: to expand human
knowledge by looking for weaknesses in past theories, improving or
replacing them with new theories supported by the strongest evidence
and argument they can fi nd, and to submit their theories to the scru-
tiny of their peers, who in turn will probe those theories for weak-
nesses. If this process works, human knowledge continually trends
toward improvement as it seems to have done over most of history.
It’s a good method.
But it’s an imperfect method. Normative theorists have nothing
but the scrutiny of their peers to improve their theories. Although
they do their best to improve theories when contradictory evidence is
apparent, researchers, like all people, share the prejudices of their day.
Modern social science and philosophy inherited a lot of shared prej-
udices from earlier eras, including ideas about “civilized man” and
“the savage,” about settled people and nomads, about the benefi ts of
existing institutions, and so on. The evidence that contradicts shared
prejudice is hard to fi nd in a world where scientifi c knowledge is too
large for any single person to grasp, and academic inquiry is divided
into increasingly separate subfi elds. It’s possible for researchers in one
fi eld to continue passing on claims that have long been refuted by
vii
viii The Prehistory of Private Property
researchers in other fi elds. Anthropologists are not trolling through
philosophy journals looking for claims to debunk. Shared prejudices
remain alive in one discipline until people within that discipline take
the time to challenge them.
Contemporary theories contain so many shared prejudices about
prehistory and about stateless peoples that a genre of literature
debunking false claims about history and prehistory has developed in
recent years. Such works include: Privatization in the Ancient Near
East and Classical World by Michael Hudson and Baruch A. Levine
(1996); The Myth of the Noble Savage by Tar Ellingson (2001); The
Art of Not Being Governed and Against the Grain by James C. Scott
(2009, 2017); Debt: The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber (2011);
Communal Property: A Libertarian Analysis by Kevin Carson (2011);
Paleofantasy by Marlene Zuk (2013); “Farewell to the ‘childhood
of man’” by David Wengrow and David Graeber (2015); Sapiens by
Yuval Noah Harari (2015); “The Early Modern ‘Creation’ of Prop-
erty and its Enduring infl uence” by Erik Olsen (2019); “The Anti-
Nomadic Bias of Political Theory” by Erik Ringmar (2020); Plunder
of the Commons by Guy Standing (2019); Edges of the State by John
Protevi (2019); “Property, Legitimacy, Ideology: A Reality Check” by
Enzo Rossi and Carlo Argenton (forthcoming); Civilized to Death by
Christopher Ryan; and many more.
This book is the second (and hopefully last) book in our contribu-
tion to this debunking genre.
The fi rst book, Prehistoric Myths in Modern Political Philosophy
(Widerquist and McCall 2017), which is available for free download,1
debunks false beliefs associated with what we call, “the Hobbesian
hypothesis” or “the mutual advantage hypothesis”: the empirical
claim that everyone is better-off in society today than they were or
would be in a society without either the state or the private prop-
erty rights system. Prehistoric Myths shows how Thomas Hobbes and
John Locke relied on versions of this false empirical claim in their
respective justifi cations of state sovereignty and the property rights
system. It shows how centuries of political philosophers have fol-
lowed Hobbes and Locke using this hypothesis in arguments without
presenting much if any evidence for it. It then uses the best evidence
1 See http://oapen.org/search?identifi er=625284
Preface ix
available from anthropology to show that this hypothesis and related
claims are false. Although many, perhaps most, people are better-off
today, a signifi cant number of people have not only failed to share in
the benefi ts of these institutions; they are worse-off than an otherwise
similar individual could expect to be in a small-scale society with nei-
ther of these institutions. Until we start treating the least advantaged
people better, we live in a parasitic society.
Our new book debunks three more claims, which we introduce in
Chapter 1.
Karl Widerquist and Grant S. McCall, May 2020
