Gini Coefficients for Inequality in Locke's State of Nature and Lockean Liberal Orders

In various posts (here and here), I have argued that the Darwinian science of human evolutionary history largely confirms John Locke's view of the state of nature as the natural condition of equal liberty, while also confirming (here) that Lockean liberal social orders can approximate that equal liberty that human beings enjoyed in the state of nature.

Over the past 10 years, Darwinian social scientists have brought more precision to the empirical study of the evolutionary history of inequality by finding ways to calculate the Gini coefficients for inequality in human societies over the past 10,000 years; and this new research supports the Lockean liberal account of human history.

The Gini coefficient is a statistical measure of the distribution of income or wealth in a society that ranges from 0 (every individual or household has exactly the same amount) to 1 (one individual or household owns all of the income or wealth, and others have nothing).  (The Wikipedia article on the Gini coefficient is a good survey.)  Gini coefficients below 0.30 are considered indicators of extremely low inequality.  Gini numbers above 0.50 are indicators of extremely high inequality.  So, for example, if the richest 20% have 80% of all income, that would count as an income Gini coefficient of 0.60.  That's the income Gini number for Haiti, which is one of the highest in the world.  The number for the U.S.A is in the middle--0.40.  The lowest numbers are usually for the Nordic social democracies--such as Denmark, Norway, and Finland--which are around 0.24.

Monique Borgerhoff Mulder and her colleagues (2009) have calculated Gini coefficients for 21 historical and contemporary small-scale populations based on ethnographic data.  Timothy Kohler and his colleagues (2017) have calculated Gini coefficients for 63 archaeological sites based on archaeological data.

The 21 societies studied by Borgerhoff Mulder and her coauthors included hunter-gatherer, horticultural, pastoral, and agricultural societies.  They calculated the intergenerational transfer of three kinds of wealth--material (such as household goods, land, and livestock), embodied (such as strength, knowledge, and skills), and relational (such as the individual's position in social networks). They found that material wealth was more easily transmitted across generations, as compared with embodied or relational wealth.  And therefore there was more inequality in pastoral and agricultural societies where material wealth (such as livestock and land) was important, as opposed to foraging and horticultural societies, where material wealth was less important, and consequently there was less inequality.

They estimated Gini coefficients for wealth at 0.25 for hunter-gatherers, 0.27 for horticuluralists, 0.42 for herders, and 0.48 for farmers.  Hunter-gatherers typically have a strong egalitarian ethos, and they found that indeed their level of inequality is much lower than for other societies.  But, still, hunter-gatherers have never achieved absolute equality.  They found that among the foraging societies they examined, a child born into a family in the top 10% of wealth is 3-5 times as likely on average to remain at the top than is a child born into a family in the bottom 10%.

Locke recognized this because while he saw the American Indians in the state of nature as showing relative equality compared with other societies, he also saw that all human societies will have some inequality due to individual differences in age, birth, talents, social networks, and luck, which will make some individuals more highly ranked than others.  So, for example, among hunter-gatherers, some individuals would inevitably distinguish themselves as skillful hunters or as leaders of their groups.  Borgerhoff Mulder and her colleagues confirmed this, and concluded that those Marxist anthropologists who wanted to find "primitive communism" in foraging societies were mistaken (Smith et al. 2010, 31).

Nevertheless, the reputation of hunter-gatherers for being egalitarian is warranted when they are compared with herding and farming societies that have much higher Gini numbers.  And yet, among modern nation-states, those that have Lockean liberal social orders have lower inequality.  The United States has a slightly lower Gini number than the small-scale herding and farming societies.  And the Nordic capitalist welfare states have Gini numbers about the same as the foraging societies.  (I have written about the Nordic social democracies as liberal regimes here.)  This suggests that modern Lockean liberal social orders approximate the equal liberty of human beings in the state of nature.

There are, however, some difficulties in the research of Borgerhoff et al. that have been pointed out by critics.  First, their sample of foraging societies does not include those high-density sedentary coastal foragers with Chiefdoms--such as the Northwest Coast Indians, the Chumash, and the Calusa--who were known to have hereditary nobility and even slavery.

The second difficulty is that their ethnographic sample of foraging societies includes those like the Ache of Paraguay and the Hadza of Tanzania whose foraging life has been altered by contact with modern herding and farming societies.  For that reason, it might not be clear that these foraging societies are really representative of our original evolutionary ancestors (Caldararo 2011; Kelly 2010).  One can respond to this difficulty by pointing out that the Ache and the Hadza have not been completely assimilated into modern societies, and that ethnographers have been able to compile a record of their history before contact (Smith et al. 2011; Hill and Hurtado 1996; Marlowe 2010).  While it is true that people like the Ache and the Hadza are not "living fossils" who have been "frozen in time," it is also true that they at least resemble the societies of our ancient foraging ancestors.

Instead of relying on ethnographic studies of inequality in historical and contemporary populations, Kohler and his colleagues (2017) have gathered archaeological evidence from a sample of 63 sites or groups of sites on four continents dating from around 11,000 to about 2,000 years ago.  For their evidence of inequality, they use house size as a proxy for household wealth.  Measuring the relative sizes of houses as distributed over an archaeological site, they can measure the inequality manifested in the relative wealth of households with large houses versus households with smaller houses (Kohler and Smith 2018).

                             An excavated house at the El Palmillo archaeological site, Mexico

As expected, they found that hunter-gatherers had the lowest Gini coefficients (median = 0.17), the horticulturalists had higher numbers (median = 0.27), and farmers had the highest (median = 0.35).  They were surprised, however, to see that the wealth inequality tended to be higher in the Eurasian sites than in North America and Mesoamerica.  To explain this, they suggested that Eurasia had a greater availability of large mammals that could become domesticated draft animals that could be used for increasing agricultural production and extending the area of land in cultivation, which could have created greater concentrations of wealth in those who controlled this production.

Another possible explanation is that their sample of sites in the New World is slanted towards more egalitarian societies.  For example, they did not include any sites in South America, which could have included the Incan empire centered in Peru, which was probably one of the most unequal agrarian societies, in which llamas and alpacas were domesticated.

And while their Mesoamerican sample included the Mayan city of Tikal with a remarkably high Gini number of 0.62, it also included some cities with surprisingly low Gini numbers, such as Teotihuacan with a Gini of 0.12--lower even than that for the hunter-gatherers!  The archeology of Teotihuacan (AD 400-500) is hard to interpret.  It shows signs of autocratic rule--with its grand avenue and pyramids--but it also shows some signs of broad sharing of power--with a grid of roads, no very large royal palace, and many medium-sized houses.  Thus, pre-Hispanic Mesoamerica seems to exhibit two very different strategies for structuring power--either concentrating and centralizing power in the hands of a few kings and nobles or allowing for a collective holding of power by many individuals, including commoners (Blanton et al. 1996).

Until recent decades, it was common for archaeologists and anthropologists studying ancient Mesoamerica to assume that the prevailing model was the autocratic centralization of power, which ignored the fact that there was evidence in at least some archaeological sites for wide dispersal of power, and perhaps even in some cities something like republican or democratic rule.

I thought about this a few years ago when I was touring the ruins of Tikal, which show a palace facing onto a plaza with pyramids on the side.  It's easy to see the evidence of an hierarchical society ruled by kings, priests, and nobles exploiting the commoners.  Tikal reached the peak of its power in 200-900 AD as the capital of a conquest state.  But believing that human beings have an evolved disposition for freedom and resistance to dominance, I had to wonder whether there was any sign of free societies in Mesoamerica.

                                 Tikal the Capital of a State that Conquered Tributary Regions

I was intrigued, therefore, to learn about Tlaxcallan, which has been identified by some archaeologists as an ancient republic in Mesoamerica.  When Hernan Cortes first landed on the coast of Mexico in 1519, he heard about the powerful Aztec Empire under the rule of Moctezuma.  Marching his soldiers toward Tenochtitlan, the capital city of the Empire, located where Mexico City is today, Cortes met resistance from some of the indigenous peoples, particularly the Tlaxcaltecas.  He learned that Tlaxcallan was a small polity not far from Tenochtitlan that had successfully resisted the attempts of the Aztecs to conquer them.  He finally persuaded the Tlaxcaltecas to become his allies in his campaign to defeat the Aztecs.  By 1521, the Aztecs were defeated, and Cortes claimed their Empire for Spain.  In his letters to Charles V, the King of Spain and the Holy Roman Emperor, Cortes described the people of Mexico, and he identified the Tlaxcaltecas as a freedom-loving people:

"They had tried with all their forces both by day and by night to avoid being subject to anyone, for this province never had been, nor had they ever had an over-all ruler.  For they had lived in freedom and independence from time immemorial and had always defended themselves against the great power of Mutezuma and against his ancestors, who had subjugated all those lands but had never been able to reduce them to servitude, although they were surrounded on all sides" (Cortes 2001, 66).

He described their government as

"almost like that of the states of Venice or Genoa or Pisa, for they have no overlord.  There are many chiefs, all of whom reside in this city, and the country towns contain peasants who are vassals of these lords and each of whom holds his land independently; some have more than others, and for their wars they join together, and together they plan and direct them" (Cortes 2001, 68).

He also described their market-based economy with a marketplace where over 30,000 people come to buy and sell.

In recent years, archaeologists studying the archaeological sites of Tlaxcallan have seen evidence confirming Cortes's comparison of Tlaxcallan with the Renaissance Italian republics (Fargher et al. 2010a; Fargher et al. 2010b; Wade 2017). In contrast to the political structure of the Aztec Empire--with kingship vested in members of the nobility--the archaeologists have found signs in Tlaxcallan of government by a council with members recruited from the ranks of commoners.  The socioeconomic egalitarianism of the city is manifested in the urban layout of scattered public plazas next to modest houses rather than royal palaces.  The distribution of standardized apartment buildings for common citizens and the fact that the art does not depict individual leaders or dynasties suggest that power was widely shared, and so inequality was low.

I have written about my recent visit to the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City (here).  One weakness in that museum's presentation of Mesoamerican history is that it displays the power of Moctezuma's autocratic rule over the Aztec Empire while remaining silent about Tlaxcallan's republican freedom and its denial of imperial rule, which expresses the evolved natural desire to be free from oppressive dominance.

Human nature was originally shaped in the hunter-gatherer state of nature that was a condition of equal liberty.  Consequently, we can expect that social orders that approach that original condition of equality and liberty will arise throughout human history.


REFERENCES

Blanton, Richard E., et al. 1996. "A Dual-Processual Theory for the Evolution of Mesoamerican Civilization." Current Anthropology 37: 1-14.

Borgerhoff Mulder, Monique, et al. 2009. "Intergenerational Wealth Transmission and the Dynamics of Inequality in Small-Scale Societies." Science 326: 682-688.

Caldaro, Niccolo. 2011. "On the Use of Contemporary 'Hunters and Gatherers' as Models for Prehistoric Patterns of Wealth Distribution." Current Anthropology 52: 265.

Cortes, Hernan. 2001. Letters from Mexico. Trans. Anthony Pagden. New Haven, CN: Yale University Press.

Fargher, Lane F., Richard Blanton, and Verenice Heredia Espinoza. 2010a. "Egalitarian Ideology and Political Power in Prehispanic Central Mexico: The Case of Tlaxcallan." Latin American Antiquity 21: 227-251.

Fargher, Lane F., et al. 2010b. "Tlaxcallan: The Archaeology of an Ancient Republic in the New World." Antiquity 84: 1-15.

Hill, Kim, and A. Magdalena Hurtado. 1996. Ache Life History: The Ecology and Demography of a Foraging People. Hawthorne, NY: Aldine de Gruyter.

Kelly, Robert L. 2010. "A Good Start." Current Anthropology 51: 109-110.

Kohler, Timothy A., et al. 2017. "Greater Post-Neolithic Wealth Disparities in Eurasia than in North America and Mesoamerica." Nature 551: 619-622.

Kohler, Timothy A., and Michael E. Smith. 2018. Ten Thousand Years of Inequality: The Archaeology of Wealth Differences.  Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press.

Marlow, Frank W. 2010. The Hadza Hunter-Gatherers of Tanzania. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Smith, Eric Alden, et al. 2010a. "Reply." Current Anthropology 51: 119-126.

Smith, Eric Alden, et al. 2010b. "Production Systems, Inheritance, and Inequality in Premodern Societies." Current Anthropology 51: 85-94.

Smith, Eric Alden, et al. 2010c. "Wealth Transmission and Inequality among Hunter-Gatherers." Current Anthropology 51: 19-34.

Smith, Eric Alden, et al. 2011. "Wealth Inequality in Foraging, Horticultural, Pastoral, and Agricultural Populations: A Reply to Caldaro." Current Anthropology 52; 579-580.

Wade, Lizzie. 2017. "Unearthing Democracy's Roots." Science 355: 1114-1118.

On Deneen (3): Does Liberalism Create a New Aristocracy Based on an Ignoble Lie?

Yes, Deneen claims, liberalism necessarily creates what he calls a "titanic inequality" (3, 139-40), which allows a small elite group of people with great wealth, power, and status to rule over society in a way that makes it impossible for those outside the ruling class to improve their desperately impoverished lives.

This new aristocracy or "liberalocracy" (152) depends on liberalism's ignoble lie.  In Plato's Republic, Socrates thought the legitimacy of the perfectly just city would depend upon teaching a noble lie:  people must believe that all people in the community are naturally equal in that they have all been born into the same family, but they are also naturally unequal in that each person has been endowed at birth with different talents and propensities corresponding to different metals in their souls: gold for the ruling class, silver for the soldiers and public officers, bronze and iron for the workers.  As Deneen explains in a recent article in First Things (April 2018), this is a noble lie, because it teaches noblesse oblige--the obligation of the nobility to rule for the common good of all and not merely for the selfish interests of the ruling class.  This is the teaching that supported the legitimacy of the older aristocratic order in medieval Europe: in the ancient regime, the hereditary aristocracy was supposed to rule for good of the whole community. 

By contrast, the new aristocracy of liberalism rules by an ignoble lie, because the liberal elites have been taught that they can pursue their own self-interest with no obligation to serve the lower classes.  But at the same time, the liberal ruling class has been taught that it is not really a ruling class, and so they must profess belief in radical equality and denounce the evils of "elitism," while hypocritically refusing to acknowledge their own elite status.  And so, for example, we see privileged students at the most elite universities violently protesting against speakers on campus whom they think are perpetuating inequalities of race, gender, and class, while ignoring the fact that their elite universities are themselves bastions of inequality.

Deneen suggests that Plato's noble lie is actually a truth, at least insofar as it recognizes "the fact of inequality" (First Things, 28).  Human beings really are unequal in their innate and acquired capacities and inclinations, and consequently every society will be unequal in its structure: some people will have greater wealth, power, and status than others.  The great political problem is how to prevent this inequality from causing class conflict by arranging the social order so that the ruling class and the underclass can cooperate for the common good of all.

In his article for First Things, Deneen explains how Plato's noble lie achieves this:

"Only if each group accepts each part of the 'lie,' as Socrates explains, is a kind of social contract achieved.  Elites and commoners both accept the part of the myth that does not appeal to them for the sake of the part that does.  Elites are distinguished in a society that justifies inequality; commoners are best off in a society that compels service of elites for the whole.  Instead of acting as warring parties, both sides work for the good of all."

As Deneen indicates, the ancien regime was an attempt to achieve this kind of social contract.  Can it work?  Deneen gives contradictory answers.  Sometimes he says yes, the ancien regime--or a "Burkean society"--can work:

"A Burkean society is organized for the benefit of the ordinary--the majority who benefit from societal norms that the strong and the ordinary alike are expected to follow.  A society can be shaped for the benefit of most people by emphasizing mainly informal norms and customs that secure the path to flourishing for most human beings; or it can be shaped for the benefit of the extraordinary and powerful by liberating all from the constraints of custom.  Our society was once shaped on the basis of the benefit for the many ordinary; today it is shaped largely for the benefit of the few strong" (148).

Here it seems that in arguing against the liberal social order, he is also arguing for the illiberal social order as the alternative to liberalism.  But elsewhere in his writing, he contradicts this, because he says that the illiberal social order--the ancien regime or Burkean society--fails.

The illiberal regime fails, Deneen admits, because its ideal social contract cannot be achieved in practice.  He agrees with a remark in Barbara Tuchman's A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century--quoted both in his article and as the epigram for his book--as saying that the aristocratic rulers of the Middle Ages failed to abide by their chivalric code of public service: "In practice, they were themselves the oppressors, and by the 14th century the violence and lawlessness of men of the sword had become a major agency of disorder.  When the gap between ideal and real becomes too wide, the system breaks down."

Deneen also observes: "A vast disconnect once existed between the philosophy of the West and its practices.  The ideals of liberty, equality, and justice coexisted with extensive practices of slavery, bondage, inequality, disregard for the contributions of women, and arbitrary forms of hierarchy and application of law" (185).  So here Deneen actually agrees with liberalism's criticism of the ancien regime's social contract as a failure.

And yet while admitting the failure of the illiberal social contract, Deneen insists that the liberal social contract is also a failure, which leaves his reader frustrated by a negative critique without any positive recommendation.

But then the reader might wonder whether Deneen's negative critique of liberalism is supported by the empirical evidence.  As Deneen says, the Lockean liberal social contract depends on showing how equality and inequality can be combined in a society in a way that serves the good of all classes of people.  On the one hand, everyone should be equal in their natural liberty to pursue their happiness as they please, so long as they do not coercively impede the equal liberty of others to pursue their happiness.  On the other hand, this equal liberty will allow the differences in people's talents and inclinations to be expressed, so that there will be inequality in social outcomes: some people will have more property, power, and prestige than others.  This need not cause class conflict as long as there is enough equality of opportunity to bring about social mobility upward and downward, and as long as those people in the lower classes see ever growing improvement in the conditions of their life, so that they can live happy lives.

This Lockean liberal social contract contains at least four empirical claims about how inequality in a liberal social order will serve the common good of all.  Deneen argues that all four of these claims have been proven false.  But in making this assertion, he does not survey all of the pertinent evidence. In fact, he is completely silent about much of the evidence.


TITANIC INEQUALITY?

The first empirical claim is that the inequality in a liberal society will not be so great as to totally separate the ruling class from the underclass and thus create class conflict with no sense of a shared common good.  Deneen asserts that this is a false claim, because liberalism actually creates "titanic inequality--far outstripping the differences between peasant and king" (139).

Deneen does not present any historical evidence to support this assertion.  Actually, the evidence gathered by economic historians suggests that he is wrong about this, because the inequality in pre-modern illiberal societies was generally greater than in most liberal societies today.  Much of this research has been surveyed by Milanovic, Lindert, and Williamson (2011), and it has been presented graphically by Max Roser here.

These scholars have estimated inequality across individuals within each of the 28 pre-industrial societies for which data were available, and they have compared these estimates with inequality in modern societies.  These pre-industrial societies did not have the sort of income distribution data that we have today.  But it is possible to gather data through constructing "social tables," where economic classes are listed with their estimated average incomes and population sizes.  This data can then be used to estimate a Gini coefficient of inequality--a statistical scale where 0 represents complete equality of wealth (no one having a bigger share than others) and 1 (or 100%) represents maximum inequality (one person having all the wealth).  Gini coefficients below 30 are considered indicators of low inequality.  Gini coefficients above 50 are considered indicators of high inequality.

If Deneen were right, we would expect to see a much higher Gini for the modern liberal societies than for the pre-modern illiberal societies.  But that's not what we see.  For the Roman Empire in the year 14, the Gini is 39.4.  For Italy in 2000, the Gini is 35.9.  For England and Wales in 1688, the Gini is 45.0.  For the United Kingdom today, the Gini is 32.4.  For France in 1788, the Gini is 55.9.  For France in 2000, the Gini is 31.2.

As compared with the pre-industrial societies, the modern liberal regimes here do not show "titanic inequality--far outstripping the differences between peasant and king."

Another way of judging Deneen's assertion is to look at the contemporary cross-country data on inequality.  Oddly, while Deneen claims to show the failure of liberalism around the world, he looks almost exclusively at the United States, making no attempt to look at evidence from other countries.  But if he is right about liberal inequality, then he should predict that the most liberal countries will have the highest Gini scores.  The evidence suggests otherwise.

As I have indicated in other posts, we can take the Human Freedom Index as an index of liberalism, because it measures both economic and personal freedom, with freedom defined as negative freedom (absence of coercion).  So we can look at countries ranked highest on the Human Freedom Index to see if this is correlated with high Gini scores.

Here are the rankings on the Human Freedom Index for the top 10 countries (with the Netherlands and the UK tied for 10th) and the United States.  The numbers in parentheses are the Gini scores, which I have taken from the CIA's World Factbook.

1. Switzerland (29.5)
2. Hong Kong (53.9)
3. New Zealand (36.2)
4. Ireland (31.9)
5. Australia (30.3)
6. Finland (21.5)
7. Norway (26.8)
8. Denmark (28.5)
9. Netherlands (28.6)
9. United Kingdom (32.4)

17. United States (41.0)

Now look at the list of the top 10 countries with the highest Gini scores--showing the greatest levels of inequality--with their rankings on the Human Freedom Index in parentheses.

1. Lesotho 63.2 (96)
2. South Africa 62.5 (68)
3. Micronesia 61.1 (no HFI ranking)
4. Haiti 60.8 (78)
5. Botswana 60.5 (78)
6. Namibia 59.7 (69)
7. Zambia 57.5 (112)
8. Comoros 55.9 (no HFI ranking)
9. Hong Kong 53.9 (2)
10. Columbia 53.5 (93)

Notice that 5 of the countries on the top 10 ranking for freedom have unusually low Gini scores (below 30).  Finland's Gini score (21.5) is the lowest Gini score for all 159 countries in the world!  Hong Kong is the anomalous case--ranking in the top 10 for both freedom and inequality.

Notice that of the 10 countries with the highest Gini scores, all--with the exception of Hong Kong--have very low rankings on the Human Freedom Index.

Here the empirical evidence for a high correlation between liberalism and low inequality seems clear.

There has been some degree of inequality in every human society that has ever existed.  Even the nomadic foraging bands famous for their egalitarian ethos show some inequality.  Some anthropologists have noted that while hunter-gatherers show little inequality in material wealth (such as household goods and land), they do show some inequality in embodied wealth (such as weight and hunting success) and social wealth (such as reputation and the size and quality of social networks), which can be transmitted by inheritance (Smith et al. 2010).  The anthropologists studying this have estimated that this creates a high bias in the life chances according to the parent's wealth: a child born into the top 10% in wealth of the population is five times as likely to remain in the top 10% as the child born into the bottom 10%.  They have estimated that the average Gini coefficient for these foraging bands could be around 25, which is similar to the Gini scores for liberal countries today.  So we might conclude that liberal societies are restoring the level of inequality found in the prehistoric bands that dominated most of our evolutionary history.

Deneen might want to dispute this evidence.  But we don't know, because he says nothing about any of this evidence.


PERMANENT INEQUALITY WITH NO SOCIAL MOBILITY?

The second empirical claim of liberalism that Deneen denies is the idea that a liberal society with equality of opportunity will allow people to move up and down the social structure, so that people will not be permanently fixed at the top or at the bottom.  On the contrary, Deneen believes, "liberalism and market capitalism perpetuate titanic and permanent forms of inequality that might have made dukes and earls of old blush" (140).

Deneen explains:

"Liberalism was justified, and gained popular support, as the opponent of and alternative to the old aristocracy.  It attacked inherited privilege, overturned prescribed economic roles, and abolished fixed social positions, arguing instead for openness based upon choice, talent, opportunity, and industry.  The irony is the creation of a new aristocracy that has enjoyed inherited privileges, prescribed economic roles, and fixed social positions" (135).

Just two pages before this passage describing "fixed social positions," however, Deneen speaks about "both upward and downward movement" in liberal societies that "leads all classes to share a pervasive anxiety," because "social status" is always "insecure" (133).  I see no way to resolve this contradiction.  But generally he seems to deny that there is any social mobility in a liberal regime.

As I have argued in other posts, the empirical data for economic inequality does not necessarily show a lack of equal opportunity for social mobility, because there can be a lot of mobility into and out of the top economic ranks of society.  Economists who study this have shown that over 50 percent of American households will be in the top 10 percent of income-earners for at least one year in their lives.  Over 11 percent of Americans will be among the top 1 percent of income-earners (people making a minimum of $332,000 per year) for at least one year in their lives.  94 percent of the Americans who join the top 1 percent group will keep that status for only one year.

Moreover, the factors that explain higher household incomes among Americans are not fixed over a lifetime, and they are to some degree a matter of personal decisions, which means that people are not forced to remain in one income bracket for their whole lives.  American households with higher than average incomes tend to be households where the members are well-educated, in their prime earning years (between the ages of 35 and 64), working full-time, and are in stable marriages.  Households with lower than average incomes tend to be households where the members are less-educated, outside their prime earning years, unemployed or working only part-time, and they are likely to be unmarried.

The New York Times has created some vivid charts on economic mobility in America based on a study of 20 million American children from 1980 to 2015, which shows movement up and down the class structure.

Deneen is silent about this evidence.

INEQUALITY WITH NO ECONOMIC IMPROVEMENT FOR THE LOWER CLASSES?

The third empirical claim of liberalism about inequality denied by Deneen is the argument that liberal inequality improves the economic life of everyone: the rich get richer, and the poor get richer.

Contrary to what Deneen says, the evidence supporting the liberal claim is overwhelming.

People live in absolute poverty when their income is so low that they cannot live a dignified life, because they live in grinding poverty.  For most of human history prior to 1800, almost all human beings lived that way.  Increasingly, very few people in liberal societies today live in such destitute conditions.  But even when those people with the lowest income in a society are living much better than the poor of the past, they can be living in relative poverty in that their income is much lower than others with higher incomes.

The U.S. Census Bureau reports that the median American household income increased 5.2% in 2015 over 2014, which is the largest one-year increase since record-keeping began in 1967.  This increase in 2015 is shown at all income levels, including the middle classes and the poor.  From 2014 to 2015, there was a 1.2% decrease in the poverty rate, which is the largest annual percentage drop in poverty since 1999. So, on average, everyone's economic condition is improving.  Although the rate of economic improvement for the lower and middle classes in America has slowed somewhat over the past 30 years, there has still been improvement, and so everyone really is on average better off today than they were a few years ago.


In liberal societies, the number of people living in such destitute conditions of poverty that they cannot live dignified lives is approaching zero.  And so absolute poverty has been almost completely abolished.  This is happening around the world, as the level of global poverty moves towards zero.

The empirical evidence for this is summarized by Pinker in Enlightenment Now, by Deirdre McCloskey in her books on the "bourgeois virtues," and by Max Roser here.

Deneen ignores this evidence.


INEQUALITY THAT MAKES IT IMPOSSIBLE FOR THE LOWER CLASSES TO HAVE A HAPPY LIFE?

The fourth empirical claim by liberalism denied by Deneen is the idea that the inequality in a liberal regime need not impede the pursuit of happiness by those in the lower classes. 

Deneen assumes that inequality must make people in the lower ranks of society unhappy.  But this ignores the empirical evidence gathered by various scholars that people prefer unequal societies (Starmans, Sheskin, and Bloom 2017).  Laboratory studies, cross-cultural research, and experiments with babies and young children indicate that human  beings naturally favor fair distributions, not equal ones, and that they prefer fair inequality over unfair equality.

Moreover, data from the pooled World Values/European Values Surveys, with 169 representative national samples in 68 nations, 1981 to 2009, and over 200,000 respondents indicate that inequality does not reduce happiness in advanced societies, and that inequality might actually be beneficial in developing countries (Kelley and Evans 2017).

Deneen does not look at any of this evidence.  He does consider, however, the evidence on happiness and social class in America gathered by Charles Murray in his Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010.  But even here, Deneen is selective in his reporting of Murray's empirical research, because Deneen is careful not to report points where Murray contradicts Deneen's argument.

As indicated in my previous post on Murray's book, he makes an Aristotelian and Thomistic argument that the end of all human action is happiness, and that we pursue happiness by satisfying our natural inclinations.  In applying this idea to America, Murray makes three general points.

The first point is that Murray shows how the American founders were successful in framing a liberal government that would secure the conditions for people at all levels of American society to pursue their happiness.  Up to the 1960s, Murray argues, the American pursuit of happiness was the same for all classes.  All were able to attain happiness by their accomplishments in the four major domains of life--family, vocation, community, and faith. 

Murray's second point is that beginning in the 1970s, there has been a divergence among white Americas. Those in the upper classes (identified by Murray as "Belmont") were still happy because they were successful in those four domains of life, but those in the lower class (identified as "Fishtown") were not as successful.  Those in Fishtown had higher rates of familial instability, joblessness, drug addiction, crime, and disorderly neighborhoods.  As a consequence, people in Fishtown were less likely to report being "very happy."

Murray's third point is that this gap between Belmont and Fishtown narrows or even disappears as the people in Belmont and Fishtown become similar in their achievements.  Among those with high work satisfaction and good marriages, 45% of those in Belmont and 30% of those in Fishtown report being "very happy."  Among those who also report high social trust and weekly religious worship, the difference totally disappears--both in Belmont and in Fishtown, 60% of these people report being "very happy."

Deneen reports the second point, but he is silent about the first and third points.  He does not report Murray's first point, because Deneen believes that the American founding--beginning with the Declaration of Independence in 1776 and the Constitution adopted in 1789--established a liberal regime that made it impossible for Americans to properly pursue true happiness (101-102, 141-42, 161-73,188-89).  And so he doesn't want to recognize Murray's evidence that the American founding secured the conditions for people in all social classes to pursue and attain their happiness.

Deneen does not report the third point, because he does not want to consider the evidence for Murray's claim that the gap between Belmont and Fishtown can be closed when people in Fishtown develop the same social virtues as the people in Belmont.

Deneen's report of Murray also engages in a complete reversal of what Murray actually says.  Here's what Murray says: "A great many people, especially in the new upper class, just need to start preaching what they practice," that is, the moral virtues of stable family life (Murray, 305).  Here's what Deneen reports: "Fishtown is descending into social anarchy.  Murray has argued that Belmont simply needs to practice what it preaches--extol the virtues of virtue" (Deneen, 149).  Deneen's report is exactly the opposite of what Murray actually says!  I have no idea why Deneen does this.

Deneen must pass over Murray's first and third points in silence, because Deneen is trying to argue that the social disorder in the lives of many people in the white underclass of Fishtown is the inevitable condition for all people who live in a liberal regime like America.

Deneen's story about the America family is very different from Murray's.  According to Deneen, the American liberal regime initially destroyed the institutions supporting family life.  This led to "the instability of families regardless of social class," and then "the family could be reassembled along liberal lines," so that "the liberal family is reconstituted to serve as the launching pad for the autonomous individual" (150-51).  But this reconstructed "liberal family" can be achieved only among those very few elite Americans who live in the aristocratic families of Murray's Belmont.  The majority of Americans, who are not in the liberal ruling class, cannot enjoy the benefits of a stable family life.

Deneen's story is hard to understand, because if liberalism necessarily destroys all family life, as he says, then it is hard to see how there can be a "liberal family," which would seem to be a contradiction in terms.  Murray thinks a "liberal family" is possible, because he thinks that a liberal society allows for the cultivation of those social virtues that sustain successful family life.  As I indicated in my previous post, John Locke's Some Thoughts Concerning Education shows how liberal parents can cultivate those virtues in their children.

Deneen presents no empirical evidence to show that his story about the American family is correct, and Murray's is wrong.

REFERENCES

Kelley, Jonathan, and M. D. R. Evans. 2017. "Social Inequality and Individual Subjective Well-Being: Results from 68 Societies and Over 200,000 Individuals, 1981-2008." Social Science Research 62: 1-23.

Milanovic, Branko, Peter H. Lindert, and Jeffrey G. Williamson. 2011. "Pre-Industrial Inequality." The Economic Journal 121: 255-72.

Smith, Eric Alden, et al. 2010. "Wealth Transmission and Inequality among Hunter-Gatherers." Current Anthropology 51: 19-34.

Starmans, Christina, Mark Sheskin, and Paul Bloom. 2017. "Why People Prefer Unequal Societies." Nature Human Behaviour 1: 1-7.

The Evolution of Democracy is Natural But Not Inevitable: Locke and Sagard on the Huron in the State of Nature

To explain the history of democracy, it is often said that it was invented in ancient Athens.  After it died out in ancient Greece and Rome, democracy vanished from Europe for over a thousand years.  It then reemerged in early modern Europe, in some of the Italian city republics and in England.  In England and the United States, it eventually evolved into the modern form of democracy with competitive elections and universal suffrage.  This modern democracy then spread around the world. 

In The Decline and Rise of Democracy: A Global History from Antiquity to Today (2020), David Stasavage denies this story by arguing that democracy did not need to be invented by Europeans because it has arisen naturally in human societies throughout the world over thousands of years.  This became clear, Stasavage observes, when Europeans first explored the Americas and discovered that some of the native Americans were living in democratic political systems.  For example, in North America, the French saw that the Huron Confederacy was ruled by a system of councils with broad popular participation.  In Mesoamerica, the Spanish discovered that the people of Tlaxcala were ruled by what looked like a democratic republic that had resisted conquest by the Aztec Empire.

The Huron and Tlaxcala illustrate how democracy has evolved naturally throughout history around the world: whenever the circumstances are such that those trying to rule over a society are compelled to seek the consent of the people they govern, then democratic practices are likely to arise.  Stasavage admits, however, that this is not inevitable, because whenever the circumstances are such that rulers can govern a society through a state bureaucracy without the direct consent of the people, then autocratic institutions are likely to arise.  In the Americas, the Aztec and Inca Empires were illustrations of such autocracy.  So autocracy is also natural but not inevitable.

Stasavage thinks that all governments depend either directly or indirectly on the consent of the governed.  But that consent can be either the express consent of the people through some kind of popular council or assembly in a democracy, or it can be the tacit consent of the people to an autocracy by their not revolting against it. 

In contrast to the early forms of democracy that have arisen in many regions of the world throughout history, Stasavage contends that modern democracy--with representatives chosen in competitive elections with universal suffrage--is a European invention that arose from the particular historical circumstances of modern Europe that led eventually to modern democracy in England and the United States.

I find most of Stasavage's reasoning persuasive.  And yet I would put more emphasis than he does on two points--that democracy first arose among our earliest hunter-gatherer ancestors, and that the political ideas of thinkers like John Locke have been crucial for the history of democracy.

DEMOCRACY IN HUNTER-GATHERER BANDS

In only one sentence (p. 34), Stasavage mentions the possibility that some form of democracy appeared among early hunter-gatherer societies.  In fact, that would explain why democracy is natural for human societies, because it arose in our earliest evolutionary history in Paleolithic hunter-gatherer bands, so that it is part of our genetically evolved human nature.

This might seem odd if we identify foraging bands as anarchistic societies, because being "stateless societies" (as anthropologists call them), they seem to lack any governmental rule at all.  But as I have argued in a previous post, if "anarchy" is taken in its literal sense of "no rule" or "no governance," then foraging societies are not anarchic, because they do have some form of governance, even if the governance is informal, fluctuating, and decentralized.  Pure anarchy is a fiction, because no human society can endure as a social order without some governance.

Some anarchist theorists have implicitly conceded this point.  For example, the best history of anarchist thinkers and movements is Peter Marshall's Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism (2010).  Anarchists begin by distinguishing between society and the state, he indicates, and then they argue that a society can be a self-regulating order of governance without a state.  He writes: "Pure anarchy probably never existed.  Stateless societies and peasant societies employ sanctions of approval and disapproval, the offer of reciprocity, and the threat of its withdrawal, as instruments of social control.  But modern anthropology confirms that in organic or 'primitive' societies, there is a limited concentration of force.  If authority exists, it is delegated and rarely imposed, and in many societies no relation of command and obedience is in force" (12).

If the minimal requirement for a democracy is having the people of a society actively consenting to their governance, then a stateless society of a foraging band in which the people employ "sanctions of approval and disapproval" to control their leaders so that there is "no relation of command and obedience" would seem to be democratic.

I have written about how John Locke saw this in the state of nature in America from his reading of Jose de Acosta's report in his Natural and Moral History of the Indies.  In the Second Treatise (par. 102), Locke quoted Acosta's claim that in America there were many societies with "no government at all" and "no kings," but with "captains" or "chiefs" that the people chose to lead them when they needed leadership in war or peace.  

It seems confusing or even self-contradictory to say that while there was "no government at all," the people chose those who governed them.  But there's no contradiction if we understand "no government" to mean no centralized bureaucratic state in a hunter-gatherer society that does have some governance by leaders chosen by the people and a system of customary laws enforced by public approval and disapproval.

This is the first of three levels in the history of government that Acosta saw in America.  Acosta assumed that the first settlers in America who crossed over from Asia to North America lived in hunter-gatherer societies (Acosta 380-81).

The second stage came later in history when some groups lived in "free associations or communities, where the people are governed by the advice of many, and are like councils.  In time of war, these elect a captain who is obeyed by a whole tribe or province.  In time of peace, each town or group of folk rules itself, and each has some prominent men whom the mass of the people respect; and at most some of these join together on matters that seem important to them to see what they ought to do" (359).

Acosta's third stage is that of autocratic monarchy or empire--like that of the Incas or the rule of Montezuma in Mexico.  Originally, this was a "moderate rule" that is the best, in which the kings and nobles acknowledged that their subjects were "equal by nature and inferior only in the sense that they have less obligation to care for the public good."  But later this monarchic rule became tyrannical as the rulers treated their subjects as beasts and treated themselves as gods (346, 359, 402).

In some passages of his book, Acosta combines the first two stages and suggests that even the most primitive hunter-gatherers had some informal leadership by which prominent people could mediate disputes and lead them in war, but always constrained by the informal consent or resistance of the community.  The one passage quoted by Locke is an example of this, as though Locke figured out that even primitive foragers would have some episodic and informal structure of rule in which some individuals would have more influence than others, although excessive dominance would be checked by popular resistance.

In other words, politics is constant in all human societies, in that some individuals will be politically ambitious in seeking the support of others in becoming leaders, and there will be political rivalry in the competition for positions of leadership.  The many other individuals who do not wish to rule will defer to those who lead them, but they will also resist oppressive dominance by their leaders.  Human beings really are political animals by nature.

Acosta's three levels of political order corresponds at least roughly to what some modern political anthropologists have identified as a four-leveled typology of preindustrial political systems: band, tribe, chiefdom, and state (Flannery and Marcus 2012; Service 1971; Lewellen 2003:15-41).  In bands and tribes, political power is decentralized and egalitarian.  In chiefdoms and states, political power is centralized and inegalitarian.  In bands, people live by hunting wild animals and gathering wild plants.  In tribes, people continue hunting and gathering, but they are also horticulturalists who engage in some small-scale farming of domesticated plants and pastoralists who herd some domesticated animals.

Locke identified both bands and tribes as societies in the state of nature, because people in these societies are naturally free and equal in that all adult individuals are free from any coercive subordination to anyone else.  They live by customary rules of good conduct, and each individual has the right to enforce those rules by punishing those who violate them.  No adult individual feels compelled to take orders from anyone else, although people will voluntarily consent to informal and situational leaders.

DEMOCRACY IN HORTICULTURAL TRIBES

One of Locke's sources for information about tribal societies in America was Gabriel Sagard's Long Journey to the Country of the Hurons, which was first published in French in 1632.  Locke bought this book during his stay in France, 1675 to 1679.  His notes on the book date from 1679, when he had returned to England, in the midst of the Exclusion Crisis.  Anthony Ashley Cooper, the First Earl of Shaftesbury, was leading those members of Parliament who wanted to exclude James, the Duke of York, from inheriting the throne from his brother King Charles II, because James was a Catholic; and Shaftesbury's group feared that a Catholic king of England would promote the royal absolutism of the French Catholic monarchy.  Locke was associated with Shaftesbury and his group, which would become the Whig party.  Their opponents would become the Tory party.  According to Peter Laslett, Locke began writing his Two Treatises on Government in 1679, in response to the Exclusion Crisis, although it would not be published until after the Revolution of 1688.

In Locke's notebook, his notes on Sagard are under the heading Immitanda, indicating that Locke regarded Huron society as worthy of being imitated.  And, indeed, much of what Locke says about the state of nature as the original condition of humanity was shaped by his reading of Sagard (Talbot 2010: 27-44).

In 1610, the French exploring Canada began to visit the four confederated Iroquoian-speaking tribes they called the Huron, who called themselves the Wendat.  The French found their settlements scattered across a peninsula located between Georgian Bay and Lake Simcoe northwest of Lake Ontario.  Some of these settlements had as many as 2,000 people.  The total population for about twenty settlements was about 30,000.  The larger settlements were surrounded by palisades to protect them from attack, because the Huron Confederacy was often at war with the Iroquois Confederacy of five tribes settled south of Lake Ontario.  The Huron were a horticultural society based primarily on the cultivation of corn, but also beans and squash.  The women did most of the farming work.  The adult men brought in other food from hunting, gathering, and fishing.  The men were also warriors who took pride in their courageous fighting against the Iroquois.  The men also engaged in extensive trading networks.  Political alliances were built around trading relations.

The French descriptions of Huron culture are found mostly in three sources.  The first was Samuel de Champlain's account of his visit to the Huron between may 1615 and May 1616.  Champlain was an explorer, a soldier, a cartographer, and a trader who worked for trading companies involved in the valuable fur trade.  He supervised the development of the French colony along the Saint Lawrence River.  

The second source was Sagard.  He was a lay brother of the Recollects, who were a branch of the Franciscan order.  He went to Canada from Paris to promote missionary work among the Huron.  Before leaving he studied the Huron language, and he later published an important dictionary of the Huron language.  He arrived in Huron country in August of 1623 and stayed there until May of 1624.  At this time, he saw Huron society at its peak of development.  Beginning in 1634, the Huron were decimated by epidemic diseases passed to them by the French--particularly the smallpox and measles.  Over two-thirds of the Huron people died.  Then in 1649, the Huron were devastated by an invasion of Iroquois warriors fighting with firearms acquired from trading with the Dutch colonists.  Those of the Huron who survived were forced to abandon their villages and leave their native territory.  So Sagard's reports are a valuable record of what Huron society looked like before this collapse.

The third source for studies of the Huron is the Jesuit Relations.  The Relations were annual reports published in Paris by the Jesuits to chronicle their activities among the Huron from 1634 to 1650.  They were filled with detailed descriptions of Huron life and culture.

Anthropologist Elizabeth Tooker has paraphrased much of what was written in these three sources in writing her Ethnology of the Huron Indians, 1615-1649 (1964).

In taking notes on Sagard's book, Locke was relying on some of the best anthropological ethnography available to him.  Anthropologist Bruce Trigger is one of the leading scholars today of Huron history, and he has praised the work of Sagard and the other French observers of the Huron in the first half of the seventeenth century.  He notes that they saw the Huron before the extensive contact with the Europeans had altered their way of life.  "Unlike most modern anthropologists, these visitors did not find themselves living among groups who had long been influenced by Europeans and who were under the surveillance and control of a colonial administration that had altered their way of life to accord with European standards of propriety" (Trigger 2002:1).

The archaeological evidence for the earliest human occupation of southern Ontario suggests that the first humans there were foragers who lived by hunting, gathering, and fishing (Trigger 2000:105-176).  Fluted spear points associated with mammoth and mastodon hunting have been dated between 11,000 and 8,000 B.C.  Later, the principal game animals were deer, moose, and caribou.  Around 500 A.D., corn was introduced, and slowly horticulture became more important.  This confirms Acosta's insight that the first human societies in the Americas were hunter-gatherer bands, long before horticultural tribes.

Locke's notes on Sagard (found in Oxford University's Lovelace Collection of Locke's Papers) have never been published.  But Ann Talbot has published some extracts from these notes in her book (Talbot 2010:27-44).

By comparing Locke's notes, Sagard's book, and Locke's Two Treatises and Letters on Toleration, one can see at least nine elements of Locke's account of the state of nature that he could have taken from Sagard:  (1) the law of nature, (2) the state of war, (3) natural punishment, (4) rulers by consent, (5) council governance, (6) religious toleration, (7) marriage and divorce by voluntary contract, (8) property, and (9) egalitarian hierarchy.

(1) The law of nature.  Sagard noted how hospitable the Huron were in their treatment of the Franciscans, freely sharing their lodging and food.  "For they hold it proper to help wayfarers and to receive among them with politeness anyone who is not an enemy, and much more so those of their own nation" (1968:88).  When the Franciscans decided that they needed to build a church to facilitate their mission of teaching Christianity, the Huron helped to build it.  When one young man complained that he did not want to do such work for those who were not his relatives, he was reproved for being so unfriendly.  Sagard observed how remarkable they were in showing themselves "so full of human kindness" in helping in the building of the church (1968:78).

Locke's notes show how impressed he was by this description of the friendly sociability of the Huron.  He noted that they were "merry and even tempered grave and serious but not sullen nor melancholy."  They were "lovers of order."  They "quarrel not with their neighbors."  They were "friendly, liberal, and charitable to all strangers as well as acquaintances except enemies."

In this way, the Huron showed Locke how people in a state of nature without any centralized governmental rule over them could live sociably together according to customary rules of good conduct.  In his Second Treatise, Locke concluded that this showed how the state of nature "has a Law of Nature to govern it, which obliges every one: And Reason, which is that Law, teaches all Mankind, who will but consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his Life, Health, Liberty, or Possessions" (par. 6).  In the Letter Concerning Toleration, Locke said that the American Indians were "strict Observers of the Rules of Equity and of the Law of Nature" (Goldie ed., 40). 

If there is such a law of nature in the state of nature, then Thomas Hobbes is wrong in asserting that the state of nature must always become a state of war--a war of each against all--because as Locke says, the state of nature can be "a State of Peace, Good Will, Mutual Assistance, and Preservation" (par. 19).

(2)  The state of war.  Notice, however, that the Huron were friendly with everyone "except enemies."  Sagard described their frequent wars with the Iroquois and other tribes.  Usually they went to war to avenge the killing of someone by an enemy.  The young men were eager to go to war so that they could win the glory from fighting courageously.  When they defeated an enemy, they took prisoners and brought them back to their villages where they were tortured in the most brutal ways.  They did their best to prolong the torture over many days.  

Sagard saw warfare among the Huron as rooted in their culture of blood revenge and feuding:

"There is scarcely any nation that is not at war and dissension with some other, not for the purpose of possessing their territory and conquering their country, but solely to exterminate them if possible and to take revenge for some slight wrong or unpleasantness, which is seldom a great matter.  But their misgovernment and the want of police, which leaves their wicked fellow-citizens unpunished, is the cause of all this evil. . . . And thus it happens most frequently that for the fault of one man alone two entire tribes make war very cruelly upon one another, and are always in continual dread of being surprised the one by the other" (1968:163-164).

So among the Huron, the state of nature often became a state of war, just as Hobbes warned.  Consequently, it seems that Locke in the Second Treatise must concede this point to Hobbes: "To avoid this State of War (wherein there is no appeal but to Heaven, and wherein every the least difference is apt to end, where there is no Authority to decide between the Contenders) is one great reason of Mens putting themselves into Society, and quitting the State of Nature" (par. 21).

Here we see what William Batz (1974:667-68) has called an "anthropological ambiguity" in Locke's historical anthropology.  On the one hand, Locke says that the state of nature was not a state of war, as Hobbes claimed, but rather a state of peace.  On the other hand, Locke says that the state of nature could easily become a state of war, and that's why people consented to leaving the state of nature and establishing government to pacify social life.  This is why scholarly commentators on Locke have debated whether or not Locke was ultimately a Hobbesian.  

The reason for this confusion is that the anthropological reports about native American peoples available to Locke disagreed about whether these people in America were peaceful or bellicose.  They were peaceful insofar as they could live by customary rules of cooperation within each society, and they could even enforce rules for peaceful trading between different societies.  But they also engaged in homicidal violence both within and between their societies.

This anthropological ambiguity continues today in the intense debate among anthropologists about the evolution of human warfare.  The Hobbesian anthropologists argue that our evolutionary ancestors living in stateless societies--bands or tribes--were often at war, and that the establishment of bureaucratic states had a pacifying effect on human life.  The Rousseauian anthropologists argue, on the contrary, that our prehistoric ancestors were peaceful, and that warfare was a cultural invention that arose after the emergence of settled agrarian societies and bureaucratic states.

Often the anthropologists assume that the debate is between two alternatives, represented by Hobbes and Rousseau, and they ignore Locke as taking a third position.  Consequently, I have argued, they fail to see that the evidence supports the conclusion that Hobbes was partly right about the state of nature, Rousseau was mostly wrong, and Locke was mostly right.  

The evidence shows that Hobbes was right about the state of nature being a state of war, and therefore Rousseau was wrong.  But the evidence also shows that Hobbes was wrong in claiming that life in the state of nature was a perpetual war with no peaceful cooperation.  In fact, people in foraging bands and horticultural tribes  have lived in communities with norms of peaceful cooperation that included intertribal cooperation such as networks of trade.  And they sometimes had long periods without intertribal war.

Locke was right to see that the state of nature is a state of peace that easily becomes a state of war: establishing government can therefore have a pacifying effect through the rule of law to settle disputes that easily become violent feuds in the state of nature.

Some of my previous posts on this can be found here, here, here, here., and here.

(3)  Natural punishment.  The persistence of war in Huron society arises from each individual having the right to seek revenge against any perceived wrongdoer.  This is what Locke in the Second Treatise called "the Executive Power of the Law of Nature"--that "every Man hath a Right to punish the Offender, and be Executioner of the Law of Nature."  Locke concedes that this must seem a "very strange Doctrine to some Men," And yet he argues that the law of nature, like all other laws governing human conduct, would be "in vain" if there were no one with the power to execute that law, which must include the power to execute any murderer (pars. 7-8, 11).

Paradoxically, this natural right to punish that enforces social peace under the law of nature also provokes social conflict when the right to take revenge creates unremitting feuding.  Here we see the "inconveniences of the State of Nature, which necessarily follow from every Man's being Judge in his own Case," and we can see why people sought a remedy for these inconveniences by having each individual give up his executive power of the law of nature and resigned it to a governmental order with the power to make, enforce, and adjudicate standing laws of justice.  Here is how centralized political power originates by popular consent to leave the state of nature (pars. 87-89).

Nevertheless, if a monarch is unrestrained by law in exercising arbitrary, absolute power to oppress the people, he has thereby put himself into a state of nature in relation to his people, and they can reclaim their natural right to punish him as they would anyone who aggressively attacks them (pars. 91-93).

It should also be noted that in the state of nature, the natural right to punish has two levels: there is a natural right to punish with physical force those who inflict physical harm on others, and the people must give up this right to public institutions with the establishment of government and civil law; but there is also a natural right to punish with social disapproval those who have engaged in blameworthy conduct, and this right is retained by the people even after the establishment of government and civil law.  This second kind of natural punishment is called the "law of reputation" in the Essay Concerning Human Understanding.  I have written about this in an earlier post.  Sagard saw this in the Huron because they were generally motivated to win social approval and to avoid social disapproval, and that's how the customary norms of their society were enforced.

(4) Rulers by consent.  In his reading of Sagard's book, Locke saw how a tribal people in a state of nature could establish government by their consent in selecting their rulers.  In his notes on the book, Locke observed that "their kings are successive only when they are heirs to their father's virtues and are obeyed rather by persuasion than by force," and that the Huron "choose for officers those who upon trial they find fit" (Talbot 2010:36).

In his notes on Sagard's History of Canada, Locke wrote under the heading Politia: "The kings of Canada are elective, but the sons never fail to succeed their fathers when they are heirs to their virtues, otherwise not, and their kings are rather obeyed by consent and persuasion, than by force and compulsion, the public good being the measure of their authority.  Sagard, p. 418.  And this seems to be the state of regal authority in its original at least in all this part of the world" (Locke 1997:274).

The reports from Sagard and others about how the American Indians selected their rulers influenced what Locke said in the Second Treatise about the beginning of political societies in the state of nature.  He claimed that the American Indians "by consent were all equal, till by the same consent they set Rulers over themselves.  So that their Politick Societies all began from a voluntary Union, and the mutual agreement of Men freely acting in the choice of their Governors, and forms of Government" (par. 102).

Locke identified the need for military leadership in war with other societies as the primary reason for people in the state of nature consenting to rulers.  

"Since then those, who liked one another so well as to joyn into Society, cannot but be supposed to have some Acquaintance and Friendship together, and some Trust one in another; they could not but have greater Apprehensions of others, than of one another: And therefore their first care and thought cannot but be supposed to be, how to secure themselves under a Frame of Government, which might best serve to that end; and chuse the wisest and bravest Man to conduct them in their Wars, and lead them out against their Enemies, and in this chiefly be their Ruler" (par. 107).

"Thus we see, that the Kings of the Indians in America, which is still a Pattern of the first Ages in Asia and Europe, . . . are little more than Generals of their Armies; and though they command absolutely in War, yet at home and in time of Peace they exercise very little Dominion, and have but a very moderate Sovereignty, the Resolutions of Peace and War, being ordinarily either in the People, or in a Council.  Though the War it self, which admits not of Plurality of Governours, naturally devolves the Command into the King's sole Authority" (par. 108).

(5) Council governance.   In saying that matters of war and peace were decided "in the People, or in a Council," Locke was reporting what he had learned from Sagard about how the Huron confederacy was ruled by chiefs with the consent of popular councils (Sagard 1968:148-166).  The accuracy of Sagard's description of the Huron council system has been confirmed by Bruce Trigger (2002:80-96).

This Huron government by councils was organized at four levels: the clan segment, the village, the tribe, and the confederacy.  In each of the twenty villages (communities of up to 2,000 people), each clan segment had two chiefs, one for peace and one for war.  The civil chiefs managed the day-to-day affairs of the clan segment.  The war chiefs were prominent only in times of war.  The chiefs were influential, but they had no power to command anyone to obey their orders without the individual consent of every person subject to the order.  Sagard observed that "a chief has no absolute authority among them, although they pay him respect, and the tribe is led by entreaty, advice, and example rather than by commands" (1968:148).

The chiefships were hereditary in particular lineages, but there was no rule to decide which individual within a particular lineage would inherit the office.  A new chief was selected by the members of the lineage, with the older women of the lineage having the most influence.  They selected the person with the best qualifications for the office.  Chiefs who did not perform their duties well and who therefore became objects of public criticism could be dismissed at any time by the women of the lineage.

The primary duty of a chief was to announce the decisions reached through a process of discussion leading to consensus among all the adult men and women of his group.  Chiefs could not make decisions on their own.  Rather, they acted only as discussion leaders helping their groups to reach agreement, in which every individual had to consent.  Each clan segment was autonomous in making decisions for its group.  Above the level of the clan segment, the Huron had a system of representation in which chiefs represented their clan segments.

The civil chiefs of the clan segments met in a village council, along with the old men of the village.  This village council met frequently, often daily.  Although no chief was superior in rank to any other, one of the civil chiefs was recognized as the head chief or spokesman for the village.  The council met in the house of the head chief.  The head chief announced the topics to be discussed, and then everyone in the meeting expressed their opinions.  Proposals were changed until there was a consensus.  The head chief then announced the council's decision.  Everything that concerned the village as a whole was discussed in these council meetings.  All legal disputes between people in different clan lineages were adjudicated by the village council.

Occasionally, there were general meetings attended by all of the men of the village who were twenty-five years old and older.  No women or young men attended.  But the opinions of the women, particularly the older women, were conveyed through the men that attended.

Each of the four Huron tribes had a tribal council made up of the chiefs of the clan segments from the villages of the tribe.  One of these chiefs was designated as principal chief for the tribe based on his inherited lineage.  The people of each tribe saw themselves as a collection of clan segments, and so each clan segment managed its own affairs, and the chief of the clan segment was independent of the other chiefs.

Any chief could call for a tribal council meeting to deliberate about matters that concerned the entire tribe.  They would meet in the house of the principal tribal chief.  And as with the lower level councils, topics would be discussed until a consensus was reached.

Finally, there was a council for the entire Huron confederacy of four tribes.  This confederacy council was made up of all the civil chiefs who sat on the four tribal councils, who represented all of the Huron clan segments.  The confederacy council met once a year in the spring, and the meeting could last several weeks.  They deliberated about matters concerning the whole confederacy.  Special meetings could be called by any confederacy chief to deal with any problem involving the entire confederacy.

This council system of government for the Huron Confederacy was very similar to the government of the Iroquois Confederacy that united five Iroquoian tribes in northeast North America.  Some scholars have seen evidence that some of the American Founding Fathers--particularly, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and John Adams--saw the Iroquois Confederacy as a model for how to organize a federal republic with popular representation (Grinde and Johansen 1991).  Other scholars have argued that the evidence for this is not clear.  

Arguing against Bruce Johansen's claims about Iroquois influence on the Founders, Elisabeth Tooker objected: "The most glaring deficiency in Johansen's discussion . . . is one he himself admits to: a failure to consider the writings of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century philosophers, most importantly John Locke . . . . If he had done so, he might have realized that the image he holds of the Indian is a legacy from them.  If his account of Franklin's and Jefferson's ideas is correct, so also were theirs--like Johansen, they saw the Indian through Locke's eyes, not through Indian eyes" (1990:294).  Maybe so, but Locke's eyes were looking at the American Indians as presented in traveler's books like Sagard's.  She asserts that "ideas such as 'the state of nature,' 'natural law,' and 'natural rights' are like so many other ideas we hold, Western philosophical ideas, not empirical findings" (1990:296).  But this ignores the fact that Locke really did believe these ideas were "empirical findings" from the study of the Huron and other American Indian societies.

Stasavage has added to these empirical findings by showing that the council governance practiced by the Huron has been widespread in human societies throughout history.  Using data from the Standard Cross Cultural Sample of 186 societies that were representative of the best described societies for specific geographic areas, Stasavage found that for most of these societies there was some council governance, either at the local level or at the level of a central authority (Stasavage 2020; Ahmed and Stasavage 2020).  He also found, however, that autocratic political executives could sometimes develop rule by bureaucracy as a substitute for shared rule with a council.

(6) Religious tolerance.  From his study of the travel literature about the American Indians, Locke concluded that societies in the state of nature show religious tolerance.  He might have found support for this in Sagard's book, because Sagard reports that the Huron were remarkably friendly to the Franciscans, allowing them to freely teach Christianity in the attempt to convert the Huron and turn them away from their native animistic and shamanistic religious beliefs.

In his Letters on Toleration, Locke pointed to the American Indians as showing how people could "live together in Society, make one People of one Language under one Chieftain, who shall have no other Power but to command them in time of War against their common enemies, without any municipal Laws, Judges, or any Person with Superiority established amongst them, but ended all their private Differences, if any arose, by the extemporary Determination of their Neighbors, or of Arbitrators chosen by the Parties";  and in such a society the rulers had no power to use public force to compel people to profess belief in any religion. This should show us that "the Care of Souls does not belong to the Magistrate" (Locke 2010:26, 70).

I have written previously about the evolution of religious liberty in the state of nature.

(7)  Marriage and divorce by voluntary contract.  In the Second Treatise, attacking the idea that paternal power is the absolute right of a father, Locked asked:  "And what will become of this Paternal Power in that part of the World where one Woman hath more than one Husband at a time?  Or in those parts of America where when the Husband and Wife part, which happens frequently, the Children are all left to the Mother, follow her, and are wholly under her Care and Provision?" (par. 65).

Sagard was probably one of Locke's sources for this.  Sagard reported:  "If in the course of time husband and wife like to separate for any reason whatsoever, or have no children, they are free to part. . . . Hence it often happens that some woman spends her youth in this fashion, having had more than a dozen or fifteen husbands, all of whom nevertheless are not the only men to enjoy the woman, how much married they be; for after nightfall the young women and girls run about from one lodge to another, as do the young men for their part on the same quest, possessing them wherever it seems good to them, yet without any violence, leaving all to the wishes of the woman.  The husband will do the like to his neighbor's wife and the wife to her neighbor, no jealousy intervening on that account, and no shame, disgrace, or dishonor being incurred" (Sagard 1968:124-25).

Sagard also indicated, however, that if a couple had children, divorce was rare except for some important reason.  And if the parents did divorce, the children were usually divided up, the daughters going to the mother, the sons to the father, although this was not always the rule.

This supported Locke's claim that marriage was a voluntary compact that could be terminated by consent of the spouses, as long as they provided for the procreation and education of their children (par. 81).

It should also be noted that women had great influence in Huron society, because it was matrilineal (inheritance passed through the female line) and matrilocal (husbands joined the wife's family).

(8) Property.  In his chapter on property in the Second Treatise, Locke referred to the American Indians ten times (par. 26, 30, 36-37, 41, 43, 46, 48-49).  Most of what he said followed what Sagard had written about property among the Huron.

The foraging Indian claims property in his food by appropriating it to himself through his labor.  "The Fruit, or Venison, which nourishes the wild Indian, who knows no Inclosure, and is still a Tenant in common, must be his, and so his, i.e. a part of him, that another can no longer have any right to it, before it can do him any good for the support of his Life" (par. 26).  "Thus this Law of reason makes the Deer, that Indian's who hath killed it; 'tis allowed to be his goods who hath bestowed his labour upon it, though before, it was the common right of every one" (par. 30).

The horticultural Indian claims property in the food he has grown, but his farming of the land is not intensive, and so he does not produce much surplus.  And so the Indians are "rich in Land, and poor in all the Comforts of Life," and "a King of a large and fruitful Territory there feeds, lodges, and is clad worse than a day Labourer in England" (par. 41).

The American Indians had trade networks based on exchange through bartering.  But their commercial activity was limited by their not having invented money (par. 46-49).

(9)  Egalitarian hierarchy.  Locke could see in Huron society evidence for natural human equality, because the Huron asserted the equal right of every individual to be free from coercive dominance by others.  But he also saw that the Huron were not really equal in all respects, because some people had higher social status than others.  Locke had to admit that even the most egalitarian societies in the state of nature show some inequality.  Even if absolute equality is not attainable in any society, Locke suggested, we might expect to see in a free society like the Huron an egalitarian hierarchy.

Locke indicated that in the Second Treatise:

"Though I have said above, Chap. II, That all Men by Nature are equal, I cannot be supposed to understand all sorts of Equality: Age or Virtue may give Men a just Precedency: Excellency of Parts and Merit may place others above the Common Level: Birth may subject some, and Alliance or Benefits others, to pay an Observance to those to whom Nature, Gratitude or other Respects may have made it due; and yet all this consists with the Equality, which all Men are in, in respect of Jurisdiction or Dominion one over another, which was the Equality I there spoke of, as proper to the Business in hand, being that equal Right that every Man hath, to his Natural Freedom, without being subjected to the Will or Authority of any other Man" (par. 54).

This could be a description of the Huron.  Age makes a difference, because adults have higher rank than children, and older men and women generally have the highest rank.  Birth makes a difference, because men born into certain clan segments have a greater chance of becoming a chief.  Virtue and merit are also important, because those selected for the office of chief must be judged to have the talents and traits of character required for being a good chief; and war chiefs must be judged to be courageous and wise in their military leadership.  Alliance, benefits, and gratitude are all factors that influence social ranking, so that chiefs are respected only as long as they are generous in giving away much of their wealth to others.  Sex differences are important, because the offices of government are held only by men, and yet women (particularly, in a matrilineal and matrilocal society) have great influence over social life.

In all of these ways, Huron society is hierarchical, in the sense that some people have greater power or status than others.  But then anthropologists have long recognized that all human societies are hierarchical in some manner, even those hunter-gatherer bands that are often identified as the most egalitarian of societies (Flanagan 1989).  As I have indicated in a previous post, all mammalian societies have some form of leadership.

Nevertheless, the Huron can still be understood as having an egalitarian hierarchy, in which their many forms of inequality are compatible with their equality in their natural freedom, so that no individual is forced against his will to obey anyone else.  Huron chiefs have no authority to force their will on anyone.  The chiefs can only announce the decisions that have been consented to by their followers.  Chiefs who become too arrogant in asserting their dominance over others will be criticized, ridiculed, or even deposed.  This is what Chris Boehm has called a "reverse-dominance hierarchy" (1999): although rulers might want to be dominant, and their followers might often defer to them, tyrannically dominant behavior will provoke resistance from those being exploited; and the ultimate punishment of the tyrant is execution.

In an egalitarian society, equality does not mean absolute equality of wealth and status; but it does mean equality in individual autonomy, so that no one can use greater wealth or status to gain power over another (Gardner 1991; Kelly 2013:243-48; Woodburn 1982).  People in egalitarian hunter-gatherer societies have told anthropologists that "we are all headmen," and each person is "headman over himself" (Lee 1979:348).  Similarly, Locke said that in the state of nature, every person must recognize all others as his equal--"all being Kings as much as he" (ST, 123).

Previously, I have written about how it is now possible to calculate the Gini coefficients for inequality in human societies over the past 10,000 years.  The reputation of hunter-gatherers for being egalitarian is warranted because they have some inequality, but it is lower than herding and farming societies.  And among modern nation-states, those that have Lockean liberal social orders have lower inequality than in the illiberal societies.  The United States has a slightly lower Gini number than the small-scale herding and farming societies.  And the Nordic capitalist welfare-states have Gini numbers about the same as the hunter-gatherer societies.  

This suggests that modern Lockean liberal social orders can approximate the equal liberty of human beings in the state of nature.  As I have argued previously (here and here), there is inequality in a liberal order but it is a "good inequality."

REFERENCES

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