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Chapter 3 (Draft) The Hobbesian Hypothesis: How A Colonial Prejudice Became An Essential Premise In The Most Popular Justification Of Government, Karl Widerquist, Grant Mccall
Chapter 3 (Draft) The Hobbesian Hypothesis: How A Colonial Prejudice Became An Essential Premise In The Most Popular Justification Of Government, Karl Widerquist, Grant Mccall
Karl Widerquist
This chapter is a draft of Chapter Three of the book that Grant McCall and I are writing. The book is called, "Prehistoric Myths in Modern Political Philosophy." This chapter shows now Hobbes introduce an empirical claim into his most influential justification of the state. We call this claim the Hobbesian hypothesis: everyone is better off under the authority of a sovereign government than everyone would be outside of that authority. The chapter argue that this hypothesis is a strong, counterfactual, empirical claim about people in small-scale stateless societies that has not been well-established by empirical evidence.