Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

This article is a spin off of our book project, "Prehistoric Myths in Modern Political Philosophy." Using hunter-gatherer societies as a focus, we argue for a heuristic continuum of egalitarian social systems ranging between relatively strong and weak forms. Weak egalitarianism is characterized by an absence of real political hierarchy, and limited differences between individuals in terms of rank, status, wealth, or power, while strongly egalitarian societies are characterized by these with some combination of powerful sharing and leveling norms, assertive social mechanisms of norm enforcement, extensive formal networks of reciprocity spanning geographical regions, and ritual practices designed to alleviate …

This article is a spin-off of my book project (with Grant McCall), "Prehistoric Myths in Modern Political Philosophy." This article makes the following points. Most justifications of government using social contact theory (contractarianism) require a claim we call, “the Hobbesian hypothesis,” which we define as the claim that all people are better off under state authority than they would be outside of it. The Hobbesian hypothesis is an empirical claim about all stateless societies. Many small-scale societies are stateless. Anthropological evidence from the smallest-scale human societies provides sufficient reason to doubt the truth of the hypothesis, if not to reject …