The Prehistory of Private Property: Implications for Modern Political Theory

by Karl Widerquist, Grant S. McCall

Overview

This book debunks three false claims commonly accepted by contemporary political philosophers regarding property systems: that inequality is natural, inevitable, or incompatible with freedom; that capitalism is more consistent with negative freedom than any other conceivable economic system; and that the normative principles of appropriation and voluntary transfer applied in the world in which we live support a capitalist system with strong, individualist and unequal private property rights. The authors review the history of the use and importance of these claims in philosophy, and use thorough anthropological and historical evidence to refute them. They show that societies with common-property systems maintaining strong equality and extensive freedom were initially nearly ubiquitous around the world, and that the private property rights system was established through a long series of violent state-sponsored aggressions.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781474447430
Publisher:	Edinburgh University Press
Publication date:	12/05/2022
Series:	Screening Antiquity
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x (d)

About the Author

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 UniversityPress, 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 UniversityPress, 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 UniversityPress, 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).

Table of Contents

PrefaceAcknowledgements

1. Introduction

Part I: The inequality hypothesis

2. Hierarchy’s Apologists, Part One: 5,000 years of clever and contradictory arguments that inequality is natural and inevitable

3. Hierarchy’s Apologists, Part Two: Natural inequality in contemporary political philosophy and social science

4. How small-scale societies maintain political, social, and economic equality

Part II: the market freedom hypothesis

5. The Negative Freedom Argument for the Market Economy

6. The Negative Freedom Argument for the Hunter-Gatherer Band Economy

Part III: The individual appropriation hypothesis

7. Contemporary Property Theory: A story, a myth, a principle, and a hypothesis

8. The History of a Hypothesis

9. The impossibility of a purely a-priori justification of private property

10. Evidence Provided by Propertarians to Support the Appropriation Hypothesis

11. Property Systems in Hunter-Gatherer Societies

12. Property Systems in Stateless Farming Communities

13. Property Systems in Ancient, Medieval, and Early Modern States

14. The Privatization the Earth, circa 1500-2000

15. The individual appropriation hypothesis assessed

16. Conclusion

Index

Editorial Reviews

This book fills an important interdisciplinary need in joining anthropology to philosophy. It continues the argument Widenquist and McCall started in their earlier book, Prehistoric Myths in Modern Political Philosophy. Both books debunk out-of-date and incorrect assumptions about human society that somehow remain foundational in political philosophy. The prior book focused on the ideas of Thomas Hobbes, and The Prehistory of Private Property develops and expands this line of thought. The authors do a real service by opening up comparative scholarship to new perspectives about the inevitability of inequality, capitalist markets, and private property. Anyone interested in how human societies operate—and how western scholars have portrayed them—will find this a compelling read.

Arizona State University Michael E. Smith