The Prehistory of Private Property
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Georgetown University From the SelectedWorks of Karl Widerquist Spring 2021 The rP ehistory of Private Property Karl Widerquist, Georgetown University-Qatar Grant S. McCall, Tulane University of Louisiana Available at: https://works.bepress.com/widerquist/117/ The Prehistory of Private Property: Prehistoric Myths in Modern Political Theory, Book Two This is an early draft of a book later published by Edinburgh University Press. Please Cite the final version only: Karl Widerquist and Grant McCall, The Prehistory of Private Property: Prehistoric Myths in Modern Political Theory, Book Two, Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming 1 Table of Contents Introduction 1. Introduction 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 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 Two: 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 Three: 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 Conclusion 16. Conclusion 2 Preface Prehistory is often treated as the stuff of myth. Although archaeology, anthropology, and other fields 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 find, and to submit their theories to the scrutiny of their peers, who in turn will probe those theories for weaknesses. 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 prejudices from earlier era, including ideas about “civilized man” and “the savage,” about settled people and nomads, about the benefits of existing institutions, and so on. The evidence that contradicts shared prejudice is hard to find in a world where scientific knowledge is too large for any single person to grasp, and academic inquiry is divided into increasingly separate subfields. It’s possible for researchers in one field to continue passing on claims that have long been refuted by researchers in other fields. 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 it. 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 Graeber (2015); Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari (2015); “The Early Modern ‘Creation’ of Property and its Enduring influence” 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); and many more. This book is the second (and hopefully last) book in our contribution to this debunking genre. The first 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 1 http://oapen.org/search?identifier=625284 3 everyone is better off in society today than they were or would be in a society without either the state or the private property rights system. Prehistoric Myths shows how Thomas Hobbes and John Locke relied on versions of this false empirical claim in their respective justifications of state sovereignty and the property rights system. It shows how centuries of political philosophers have followed Hobbes and Locke using this hypothesis in arguments without presenting much if any evidence for it. It then uses the best evidence available from anthropology to show that this hypothesis and related claims are false. Although many, perhaps most people are better off today, a significant number of people have not only failed to share in the benefits of these institutions; they are worse off than an otherwise similar individual could expect to be in a small-scale society with neither of these institutions. Until we start treating the least advantage people better, we live in a parasitic society. Our new book debunks three more claims. -Karl Widerquist and Grant S. McCall, May 2020 4 Acknowledgements We started working on this project (which now involves two books, an online appendix, and several articles) over a dozen years ago—several years before we met each other. We can’t possibly list all the people who helped in those years. We explicitly thank our wives and our families and anonymously thank and apologize to everyone else who has given us feedback and encouragement since the Bush Administration. See the preface and acknowledgements of our first book for more-but-still-insufficient acknowledgements. -Karl Widerquist and Grant McCall, on our respective front porches during the COVID-19 outbreak in New Orleans, May 10, 2020 5 Introduction 6 Chapter 1 Introduction The true myths of our time are the beliefs we accept without thinking. They get far less scrutiny than the ones we self-consciously choose to accept. Many common beliefs about prehistory and about the origin and development of private property rights are speculative to the point of mythmaking. Nothing is wrong with speculation. But something is wrong with misidentifying speculation as fact. Something’s very wrong with basing political power structures and onerous duties on dubious and often self-serving speculations or unnoticed myths. And that is exactly what we do. We are often unaware of the destructive myths embedded in common beliefs about our institutions. These “prehistoric myths” are so ingrained in our cultural thinking that they can be hard to recognize, much less debunk. Pure normative theory has an important place in philosophical reasoning, but a priori reasoning is one thing and applied empirical reasoning is another. Any theory that includes even one empirical claim is an applied theory that can be definitively established only with empirical evidence. As both this book shows, philosophers have a bad habit of slipping unsupported empirical premise into an otherwise a priori, normative argument, calling little attention to it, and inviting readers to accept it without question. Obscurity and ambiguity have helped perpetuate belief in these claims for centuries and given then their “mythical” status. A “myth” is not always a bad thing. They often communicate greater truths in ways people can more easily understand and remember. But some myths are destructive myths. These myths communicate greater falsehoods in ways that affects us sometimes beyond or conscious awareness. For example, the Garden of Eden story can be interpreted as telling the greater truth that all people begin as innocent children who don’t understand right and wrong, but when they eventually learn right from wrong, they inevitably choose to do wrong making everyone’s lives harder. Or it can be interpreted as telling the greater lie that it’s all Eve’s fault. That’s an example of a destructive, self-serving, and dubious myth. This book uses the word “prehistory” in a broad sense. Prehistory can refer to the time before written language first appeared on Earth, ending around 3000-2500 BCE. It can refer to the time before any particular society developed written records of its own, ending gradually around the world at different times after 3000 BCE and still continuing in a few remote places. But prehistory can also mean the history that precedes and leads up to some particular phenomenon. The Prehistory of Private Property is the history before the establishment of the private property system from the deep past to the enclosure and colonial movements that slowly made the private property system ubiquitous over last 100-500 or so years. This book debunks three prehistoric myths that are often use in justifications of economic inequality.