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Informationen zum Autor 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 University Press, 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 University Press, 2002). He was a founding editor of the journal Basic Income Studies , and he has published dozens of scholarly articles. Klappentext Uncovering the ways in which modern philosophers perpetuate prehistoric myths Why are stories about the Stone Age so common in political philosophy? The state of nature, the origin of property, the genesis of government, and the primordial nature of war and inequality are perennial favourite topics in political philosophy, but what role do these accounts play in philosophical argument? Does the best available evidence from the fields of archaeology and anthropology support or conflict with the stories being passed on by political philosophers? This book presents an anthropological critique of philosophy, examining political theories to show how - despite significant equivocation - the most influential justifications of government and of private property rely on the seldom-questioned empirical premise that people in a society with a government and/or private property rights system are better off than people in societies without those institutions. It presents convincing evidence that much of what we think we know about stateless peoples comes not from scientific investigation, but from the imagination of philosophers or the prejudice of past colonialists. Karl Widerquist is an Associate Professor of political philosophy at SFS-Qatar, Georgetown University. Grant S. McCall is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Tulane University. Zusammenfassung The state of nature, the origin of property, the origin of government, the primordial nature of inequality and war – why do political philosophers talk so much about the Stone Age? Widerquist and McCall draw on archaeology and anthropology to show that much of what we think we know about human origins comes from philosophers’ imaginations. Inhaltsverzeichnis PrefaceAcknowledgementsIntroductionModern political philosophy and prehistoric anthropology: Some preliminary issuesThe Hobbesian hypothesis: How a colonial prejudice became an essential premise in most popular justification of government sovereigntyLocke employs the Hobbesian hypothesis: How very much the same colonial prejudice became an essential premise in the most popular justification of private property rightsThe Hobbesian hypothesis in seventeenth century political theoryThe Hobbesian hypothesis in nineteenth century political theoryThe Hobbesian Hypothesis in Contemporary Political TheoryThe Violence Hypothesis in AnthropologyNasty & Brutish? Evidence for and against the violence hypothesisAre you better off now that you were 12,000 years ago? An empirical assessment of the Hobbesian HypothesisImplications: What's left of contractarianism and propertarianism without the Hobbesian hypothesis?IndexOnline Appendix:Appendix to Chapter 2Appendix to Chapter 5Appendix to Chapter 6Appendix to Chapter 7Appendix to Chapter 8...
