The Biopolitical Science of Lockean Liberal Punishment: A Paper for an APSA Convention in Montreal

On September 16 (Friday), I will be presenting a paper at the 2022 Convention of the American Political Science Association in Montreal.  The title of the paper is "The Biopolitical Science of Lockean Liberal Punishment."  This will be part of a panel on "Emotions and Politics," meeting in the Westin Hotel, third floor, in the St.-Suplice room, 2:00-3:30 pm.

Here is the concluding section of my paper:

For political science to become a biopolitical science, political theory would have to become a biopolitical theory by applying biological science to the reasoning of political theorists.  As an illustration of how this could be done, I have applied evolutionary biology to John Locke’s theory of how the natural human propensity to punish violations of the law of nature enforces the liberal principle that all human beings are by nature equally free.  I have summarized how Locke understood the emergence of forcible punishment and reputational punishment in the state of nature, the popular consent to forcible punishment by government, and the popular punishment of despotic government.  From this Lockean theory of liberal punishment, I have generated five testable predictions, and I have argued that they can be largely confirmed by evolutionary anthropology.

          First, evolutionary anthropology can show how in the evolutionary state of nature of hunter-gatherer bands, people enforced a cooperative social order by punishing those individuals who violated those informal norms of good conduct that Locke identified as the law of nature.

          Second, in the debate among evolutionary anthropologists as to whether the state of nature in the foraging era was a Hobbesian state of war or a Rousseauian state of peace, we can see that Locke was closer to the truth than either Hobbes or Rousseau, because while the foraging life can be generally peaceful, it easily becomes violent; and therefore people will choose to establish governmental institutions for punishment that pacify society.

          Third, as Locke predicted, evolutionary moral anthropology and social neuroscience have shown that there are some universal norms of good conduct enforced by forcible and reputational punishment.

          Fourth, we have seen that the archaeological and anthropological studies of the earliest history of government confirm what Locke learned from Acosta and Sagard about popular council democracy being one of the earliest forms of government, in which people punish those individuals who try to coercively dominate others, thus enforcing the liberal idea that every adult individual is equally free and independent.

          Finally, in support of Locke’s prediction that people will punish despotic government by rebelling against it, we have seen that the evolutionary history of government shows a natural human propensity to punish despotic rulers through violent and nonviolent resistance, although these revolutionary movements are not always successful.

          This biopolitical science of Lockean liberal punishment illustrates how political philosophy can become a biological science of human political life.  A biopolitical philosophy can become part of a biopolitical science that employs evolutionary thinking as a way of unifying knowledge across all the disciplines of the natural sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities in studying the evolved nature of human beings as political animals.  Through such a biopolitical science, we can better understand how these human political animals find their home in the order of living nature.