The Evolutionary Science of Locke's State of Nature: A Response to Seabright, Stieglitz, and Van der Straeten

 I have written a long series of posts on the evolutionary science of John Locke's state of nature (here, here, here, here, here, and here).  I have argued that the idea of the state of nature in the writings of Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau is an example of an empirical claim by political philosophers about human nature and human history that can be evaluated by the Darwinian science of how human beings originally evolved as hunter-gatherers, which we can identify as the evolutionary state of nature.  I have said that if we apply that evolutionary science of hunter-gatherer life to the philosophic debate over the state of nature, we can see that Hobbes was partly right, Rousseau was mostly wrong, and Locke was mostly right.

I was pleased, therefore, to see a recent article by Paul Seabright, Jonathan Stieglitz, and Karine Van der Straeten--"Evaluating Social Contract Theory in the Light of Evolutionary Social Science," Evolutionary Human Sciences 3 (2021): e20--which uses the evolutionary science of small-scale societies to evaluate what Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau say about the state of nature.  They see these philosophers as distinguishing between human beings living in a state of nature and human beings living in societies with formal institutions, and they see "formal institutions" as institutional norms (usually written) that are enforced by legal and political authorities.  They accept this distinction because they see the state of nature as the condition of human life in foraging bands before the invention of agriculture, which was followed by large-scale societies with formal legal and governmental institutions.  But they conclude that these three social contract philosophers were wrong about the state of nature as studied by evolutionary scientists, because these philosophers "overlooked the central role of informal social institutions in governing human behavior" (1).  

While this criticism is partly true for Hobbes, and mostly true for Rousseau, it is not true at all for Locke.  This should be clear to any careful reader of their article who notices that their specific criticisms are directly more at Hobbes and Rousseau than at Locke.  And any careful reader of Locke will know that he recognized the importance of "informal social institutions" in the state of nature, which has been confirmed by modern scientific studies of the human hunting-gathering way of life.

Seabright and his colleagues rightly criticize Hobbes and Rousseau for describing life in the state of nature as "solitary," because in fact hunter-gatherers always have a complex social life.  But they also note that Locke never uses the word "solitary," and "his description of the state of nature does not seem to indicate solitude at all" (17).

They explain:

"Across small-scale societies there is a modal pattern of social organization characterized by a three-generational system of resource flows (including co-resident offspring, parents and grandparents), a sexual and age-graded division of labor within long-term adult pair bonds . . . . and high levels of cooperation between kin and non-kin . . . . Human hunter-gatherers were probably highly inter-dependent long before the invention of agriculture, contrary to Rousseau's claim that agriculture and its associated divisions of labor paved the way for high inter-dependencies."

"Despite the popular idea that hunter-gatherers are organized in a system of small groups of co-residing kin, their social structure is actually quite fluid and comprises networks of interaction between spatially and genetically distant individuals that extend far beyond a local residential group" (11-12).

Seabright and his colleagues don't recognize that Locke sees all of this.  He speaks of the human family in the state of nature as the "first society" (Second Treatise, sec. 77), first the conjugal bonding of husband and wife based on a "voluntary compact," and then the parental care of their children.  He sees a division of labor based on sex and age.

Locke also sees social networks of cooperation and exchange extending beyond the family.  In Locke's state of nature, there are networks of exchange and trade based on "promises and compacts" (ST, sec. 14).  This extended order of cooperation is governed by social norms that Locke identifies as the "law of nature."

Seabright and his colleagues see that social norms are enforced among hunter-gatherers through violent punishment (including capital punishment), reputational costs for those who violate the norms, and third party mediation of disputes.  But they don't recognize that Locke also sees this in his state of nature, where everyone has the "executive power of the law of nature" to punish those who transgress the law of nature, where there is a "law of reputation" to enforce the law of nature through praise and blame, and where disputes are often settled by those known to be good mediators (ST secs. 6-14, 108; Essay Concerning Human Understanding II.28.5-14).

Locke's understanding of the state of nature comes largely from his study of the European reports about the American Indians, because he assumed that "in the beginning all the World was America" (ST 49), and that the American Indians provide a "Pattern of the first Ages in Asia and Europe" (ST 108).  And while it is true that Locke did not have the extensive ethnographic record of hunter-gatherers that we have today, the books in his library about the American Indians did give him a good grasp of hunting-gathering societies.

So, for example, he saw in those reports that foraging bands were sometimes at war with one another, and so he did not make Rousseau's mistake of assuming that the state of nature was utterly peaceful (ST secs. 107-108; A Letter Concerning Toleration, ed. Mark Goldie, Liberty Fund, p. 76).  Hobbes was partly right about the state of nature insofar as he saw this propensity to war.  He was partly wrong, however, in that he did not see, as Locke did, that most of the time hunter-gatherers can live by social norms of peaceful cooperation.

Although Locke's state of nature is a roughly egalitarian condition, in the sense that everyone is equally free from the arbitrary absolute power of anyone else, some people have higher status or prestige than others.  Seabright and his colleagues write:

"Status hierarchies do indeed exist across diverse small-scale societies, but rather than resulting simply from variation in material wealth, they are often linked to relational wealth (i.e. social ties in marriage, food-sharing, and other cooperative networks) and embodied wealth (i.e. physical and cognitive abilities, such as strength and knowledge/skill, underlying variation in food production and reproductive success)" (13).

They do not recognize, however, that Locke sees all of these status hierarchies in his state of nature (ST secs. 54, 74, 94, 105).  While Locke 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 (2009) confirmed this, and concluded that those Marxist anthropologists who wanted to find "primitive communism" in foraging societies were mistaken, because hunter-gatherers have a Gini coefficient of around 0.25.  I have written about this in a previous post.

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--such as Denmark, Norway, and Finland--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.

In all of these ways, the evolutionary science of the hunter-gatherer way of life as the original social life for our human ancestors confirms Locke's account of the state of nature; and thus it confirms the Lockean liberalism based on this view of the state of nature.

In Spinoza's Theological-Political Treatise, perhaps the first full defense of modern liberal democracy, he declared that the democratic state is "the most natural state," because it approaches most nearly the equal liberty of human beings in the state of nature.

Darwinian evolutionary psychology can confirm this by showing that the social life of our hunter-gatherer ancestors manifested the individual liberty and equality that liberal theorists have attributed to the state of nature.  And therefore the liberal conception of government as instituted among men to secure the individual rights that first arose in the state of nature might indeed be "the most natural state."

Foragers assert their individual autonomy and liberty in resisting the attempts of anyone to establish dominance over them.  So the liberal ideas of equal liberty and dignity for all individuals and resistance to the sort of dominance hierarchies established in agrarian states (with extractive or limited access institutions) can be understood as appealing to the original liberalism of the state of nature.

This kind of Darwinian liberal thinking is suggested in the writings of people like Alexandra Maryanski, Jonathan Turner, Paul Rubin, Christopher Boehm, and Christian Welzel.

Azar Gat on War in the State of Nature: Refuting Rousseau, Vindicating Locke

The debate among the early modern political philosophers over the state of nature can be settled by modern evolutionary anthropology.  Over the years, I have argued on this blog that this is an example of how evolutionary anthropology can clarify, and perhaps even resolve, disputes in the history of political philosophy. 

Evolutionary anthropologists studying the evolution of war and peace have been divided into Hobbesians who believe that our hunter-gatherer ancestors were naturally violent and warlike and Rousseauans who believe that hunter-gatherers were naturally peaceful.  But in setting up this debate as Hobbes versus Rousseau, they have overlooked the position of Locke.  This is a serious mistake, because the weight of the evidence and argumentation on this issue today is on the side of Locke's account of the state of nature as a state of peace that tended to become a state of war.  It seems now that while Hobbes was partly right and partly wrong about the state of nature, Rousseau was mostly wrong, and Locke was mostly right.

As I have indicated in some previous posts, Azar Gat is one of the leading scholars defending the Hobbesian side of this debate and criticizing the Rousseauan side.  He concedes, however, that Hobbes was wrong on some points, because he failed to see that our hunter-gatherer ancestors were social animals and not solitary individuals, and that they were capable of living in peace for long periods of time, despite their propensity to violence and war.  Gat does not recognize that Locke was closer to the truth about the evolutionary state of nature than either Hobbes or Rousseau, and that the Hobbesians and Rousseauans today have been moving towards agreement on the Lockean account of the state of nature.

Gat elaborated his reasoning in his 2006 book War in Human Civilization (Oxford University Press).  Now he has restated some of this reasoning and surveyed some of the most recent research in an article that has just been published--"Proving Communal Warfare Among Hunter-Gatherers: The Quasi-Rousseauan Error," Evolutionary Anthropology, 24 (May/June, 2015): 111-126.

In this article, he shows that the Rousseauans have been retreating from Rousseau over the past 30 years, because the scientific evidence against the Rousseauan state of nature has been accumulating to the point that it cannot be ignored.  He shows that the Rousseauans have moved through three positions. 

First, they embraced Classical Rousseauism, which was Rousseau's original claim that human beings in the state of nature were totally peaceful, until the settlement into sedentary and agricultural life, which brought violent conflict. 

Second, they adopted Extended Rousseauism, which claimed that serious violence did not arise until the emergence of centralized states.  This position is associated with the "tribal zone theory," according to which simple hunter-gatherers and complex hunter-gatherers and horticulturalists did not become violent until they came into contact with intrusive states.  So, for example, the Yanomamo people of the Amazonian rain forest, whom Napoleon Chagnon made famous as the "fierce people," were said by Brian Ferguson to show the effects of a century of violent conflicts with European invaders.

Finally, most recently, the Rousseauans have adopted a Quasi-Rousseauism that breaks totally with Rousseau, because they concede that hunter-gatherers in the state of nature show the violence of homicide and feuds, and yet the Rousseans insist that this violence is not war.  Therefore, they can argue that war in the strict sense is not natural for human beings, but is a purely cultural invention of the states that began to appear around 5,000 years ago.  The Quasi-Rousseauans include Raymond Kelly and Douglas Fry.

Gat argues that this Rousseauan retreat from Rousseau is in response to the growing evidence from primatology, archaeology, and ethnography that largely confirms Hobbes's claim that the state of nature is a state of war.  As in his book, in surveying the evidence, Gat stresses the importance of Aboriginal Australia as the best natural laboratory for studying the hunter-gatherer way of life.

The primatological evidence includes the evidence for chimpanzee warfare, in which bands of adult male chimps belonging to one chimp community raid the territory of other communities, and if they have the numerical advantage over their opponents, the raiders attack or kill their opponents, and then the raiders return to their community, without suffering any injury to themselves.  This kind of behavior is similar to what human hunter-gatherers do when they launch raids, often at night, into the territory of other groups and make surprise attacks on their opponents.  Bonobos, however, do not show such violent behavior; and thus the Rousseauans look to the bonobos as their models for our primate ancestry.

The archaeological evidence includes skeletal evidence of injuries or lethal assaults from attacks, ancient weapons and shields, and signs of defensive fortifications.

The ethnographic evidence comes from reports of how hunter-gatherers have lived.  Since preliterate people have no written records of their history, the only records we have come from European observers.  Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau relied on the reports of Europeans who first discovered foraging societies in Africa and the New World.  The problem here, however, is the "contact paradox":  we cannot know how these people have lived until we contact them, but then any contact can distort their behavior.

As Gat indicates, the Australian Aboriginals appear to be the only case where the contact paradox is minimized.  Until the Europeans first arrived in Australian in 1785, Australia was an isolated continent of hunter-gatherer bands and tribes, with no pastoralists, agriculturalists, or states.  The earliest English reports of how they lived showed a history of lethal feuds, raids, ambushes, with fighting between individuals, families, and tribes.

Gat shows that surveys of the evidence for violence and warfare among hunter-gatherers and prestate horticulturalists manifest rates of violent death as high as 25% of adult males and 15% of the adult population.  These rates of violent death drop dramatically with the establishment of formal government and laws, thus showing the Hobbesian pacification of life under the Leviathan.  Those rates have dropped even more in modern liberal states, as Steve Pinker and others have shown.

Oddly enough, the Quasi-Rousseauans agree that there really is a pattern of declining violence here.  Their only disagreement is their insistence that the violence in the state of nature is personal violence--homicide and feuding--that does not satisfy any proper definition of war.  Gat responds to this by arguing that Hobbes and Rousseau saw "war" as including any kind of violence, and by arguing that there is evidence for large group-against-group conflicts among hunter-gatherers (such as the Australian Aboriginals) that should count as war.

The emotional intensity of this debate over the evolution of war is explained by Gat as reflecting the false assumption that if we see war as a natural evolutionary adaptation, then we must conclude that the pursuit of peace is a futile denial of human nature.  Gat denies this by arguing that while war is a naturally evolved capacity, it is not a biologically determined necessity.  We have evolved capacities for both peace and war, and whether we have war or peace depends upon the ecological and cultural circumstances of life.  If we understand this, we can look for ways to make peaceful cooperation more likely and violent conflict less likely.

In all of this, Gat is implicitly taking Locke's position.  Locke's state of nature is a state of peace, because human beings are naturally social animals--bound together by familial, tribal, and cultural bonds--who engage in mutually beneficial cooperation, which shows how human beings with natural reason can grasp a natural moral law, and enforce that law with the natural disposition to punish offenders.  And yet, Locke's state of nature can easily become a state of war, because where everyone has the natural power to punish offenses against the natural law, with individuals tending to be partial to their own interests, people tend to fall into endless feuding and raiding.  To escape from that natural state of war, the establishment of government and law, so that there is a common judge to settle disputes under the rule of law, can provide the conditions of peace.  Nevertheless, when those with governmental power rule arbitrarily and absolutely for their own interests and against the public interest, then the people can reclaim their "natural executive power of the state of nature" in resisting that tyrannical rule. 

As the rhetoric of Lockean liberalism succeeds in promoting the ideas of government by the consent of the governed directed to securing individual rights to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness, we see ever declining violence and the spread of the liberal peace, as described by Gat, Pinker, and others.

I have developed these points in other posts here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

War and the Lockean State of Nature in Aboriginal Australia

During my recent travels in Australia (Brisbane and Sydney) and New Zealand (Wellington and Auckland), I thought about how those countries have been two natural laboratories of human evolution.

New Zealand was the last major land mass to be settled by human beings.  There were no human beings in New Zealand prior to about 1300 AD, when the Polynesian ancestors of the Maori people navigated their way to those islands.  The Maoris were preliterate people living in tribal chiefdoms without a state.  The first brief European contact occurred in 1642 when two Dutch ships under the command of Abel Tasman sailed to Golden Bay at the top of the South Island.  After a skirmish with some local Maori attacking in their canoes, Tasman sailed away without landing and never returned.  In 1769, James Cook, on the first of his three voyages around the world, became the first European to land on New Zealand and establish contact with the Maoris, who lived as independent tribes, often at war with one another, although they were also bound together by trading networks. Beginning with Cook, the British and Maori established a barter trade.  I will return to this evolutionary history of New Zealand in a future post.

In contrast to the recent human settlement of New Zealand, the first human settlers of Australia arrived over 50,000 years ago, probably crossing a land bridge with what is now New Guinea.  Until James Cook's mapping of Australia's east coast in 1770 and the first British establishment of a penal settlement in Sydney in 1788, Australia was an isolated continent of Aboriginal hunter-gatherers--with no agriculturalists, pastoralists, or states.  When the Europeans arrived, they found a continent of over 300 tribes of hunter-gatherers.  This was a perfect laboratory for the study of human evolution as hunter-gatherers, which constituted over 90% of human evolutionary history, and which can be identified as our evolutionary state of nature.  To resolve the debate among political philosophers--such as Hobbes, Locke, Spinoza, and Rousseau--over the state of nature, the study of Aboriginal Australia should be crucial.

Since human beings in the state of nature--like the Aboriginals of Australia and the Maoris of New Zealand--have been preliterate people, they have left no written records of their history.  Anthropologists from literate societies have tried to write the history of these "prehistoric" people through the ethnographic field research study of hunter-gatherer societies that have survived into recent centuries.  But this creates the "contact paradox"--to study hunter-gatherers we must contact them, but this contact changes them from what they were before contact.  By the time anthropologists write their ethnographic reports, the hunter-gatherers have been influenced by their contact with agriculturalists and state societies.

The study of Aboriginal Australia minimizes this contact problem, because the purely hunting-gathering way of life of the Aboriginals was isolated from the rest of the world for over 50,000 years, and consequently whatever the Europeans saw in Australia during their first contact can be considered perhaps the best picture of our evolutionary state of nature.  Hobbes and Locke thought the European reports about the American Indians might be the best account of the state of nature--"In the beginning, all the world was America," as Locke said.  But the European discovery of Australia might be even better--In the beginning, all the world was Australia.

Azar Gat has made that argument in claiming that the evidence for warfare in Aboriginal Australia refutes the assertion of Rousseauian anthropologists that the state of nature was perfectly peaceful and that war was a late cultural invention coming only after the adoption of agriculture and the state.  Some of the best evidence for Aboriginal warfare in Australia comes from William Buckley (1780-1856).  Buckley was brought to Australia in 1803 as a convict on a convict ship that established a settlement at Port Philip (now Melbourne).  He escaped shortly afterwards, and for 32 years he lived with an Aboriginal tribe--the Wallarranga.  He learned their language, married one of their women, and joined in all of their activities.  In 1835, he returned to the white settler community.  For a few years, he worked as an interpreter and mediator for the English in dealing with the Aboriginals.  He then moved to Hobart, Tasmania, where he lived for the rest of his life.  He told his life story to John Morgan, a Tasmanian newspaper editor, who wrote The Life and Adventures of William Buckley, published in 1852.  Although some people have questioned the accuracy of his stories, some anthropologists who have studied the Australian Aboriginals have said that his account of life with the Wallarranga seems quite accurate.

Buckley describes many lethal feuds, raids, and ambushes among the Aboriginal tribes.  The most common cause of the conflicts was disputes over women and retaliatory vengeance.  He describes their weapons of war--clubs, spears, boomerangs, and shields.  Remarkably, there were no bows in Aboriginal Australia.  He also relates his observations of cannibalism.

Buckley reports that a typical tribe was composed of 20 to 60 families.  Some people--such as skilled hunters and warriors--had high social status, and leading men could have more wives.  But "they acknowledge no particular Chief as being superior to the rest" (86), which distinguishes them as pure hunter-gatherers unlike the chiefdoms of the Maori.

Here's one example of Buckley's reporting of warfare.  He describes his tribe meeting about 300 members of the hostile Waarengbadawa tribe:

"A general fight now commenced, . . . spears and boomerangs flying in all directions.  The sight was very terrific, and their yells and shouts of defiance very horrible.  At length one of our tribe had a spear sent right through his body, and he fell.  On this, our fellows raised a war cry; on hearing which, the women threw off their rugs, and each armed with a short club, flew to the assistance of their husbands and brothers. . . . Even with this augmentation, our tribe fought to great disadvantage, the enemy being all men, and much more numerous."

". . . I had seen skirmishing and fighting in Holland; and knew something therefore, of what is done when men are knocking one another about with powder and shot, in real earnest, but the scene now before me was much more frightful--both parties looking like so many devils turned loose from Tartarus.  Men and women were fighting furiously, and indiscriminately, covered with blook; two of the latter were killed in this affair, which lasted without intermission for two hours; the Waarengbadawas then retreated a short distance, apparently to recover themselves. . . ."

". . . Soon after dark the hostile tribe left the neighborhood; and, on discovering this retreat from the battle ground, ours determined on following them immediately, leaving the women and myself where we were.  On approaching the enemy's quarters, they laid themselves down in ambush until all was quiet, and finding most of them asleep, laying about in groups, our party rushed upon them, killing three on the spot, and wounding several others.  The enemy fled precipitately, leaving their war implements in the hands of their assailants and their wounded to be beaten to death by boomerangs, three loud shouts closing the victors' triumph."

"The bodies of the dead they mutilated in a shocking manner, cutting the arms and legs off, with flints, shells, and tomahawks."

"When the women saw them returning, they also raised great shouts, dancing about in savage ecstasy.  The bodies were thrown upon the ground, and beaten about with sticks--in fact, they all seemed to be perfectly mad with excitement; the men cut the flesh off the bones, and stones were heated for baking it; after which, they greased their children with it, all over.  The bones were broken to pieces with tomahawks, and given to the dogs, or put on the boughs of trees for the birds of prey hovering over the horrid scene" (60-61).

Some people have questioned the reliability of Buckley's reports, but many other historical accounts of Aboriginal warfare written by other European observers in the first few decades after contact confirm Buckley's stories.  There is also extensive skeletal evidence of violence among the Aboriginals across Australia studied by archaeologists (Allen 2014; Pardoe 2014).  This evidence includes cranial depression fractures and parrying fractures in the bones above the wrist that show the damage from face-to-face combat or from raising the arm in defense against attacks by a club or other weapon.

In response to this evidence for lethal violence among the Aboriginal Australians, some Rousseauian anthropologists like Douglas Fry have argued while this shows that hunter-gatherers engaged in homicide, this is purely personal violence that is not really war.  Gat identifies these anthropologists as "Quasi-Rousseauians," because they have given up on Rousseau's claim that hunter-gatherers were perfectly peaceful.  But even this modified Rousseauism fails, because much of the violence that Buckley describes includes battles between tribes that clearly qualifies as warfare, because he relates battles involving hundreds of people.  Of course, if one defines war in such a narrow way, as Fry does, so that raiding, ambush, and feuding are not defined as war, then forager conflict is not war.  But if one defines war as lethal conflict between independent societies, as Steven LeBlanc (2014) does, then the Australian Aborigines certainly engaged in war.  As Buckley indicated in the passage above, he had fought as a British soldier in the Napoleonic wars, and he compared his experience in a European war with the warfare he saw in Australia.

Thus, as Gat concludes, the evidence of Aboriginal Australia seems to show 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, Buckley and others have reported that the Aboriginal Australians 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.

Like many of the social scientists involved in this debate over the evolution of war, Gat assumes that the debate is between two alternatives, represented by Hobbes and Rousseau, and he ignores Locke as taking a third position.  Consequently, he fails 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.  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.

In his new book The Causes of War and The Spread of Peace, Gat comes close to recognizing that the evidence from Aboriginal Australia sustains Locke's account of the state of nature.  Gat says that Locke's "more balanced depiction of pre-state as compared to state societies was suggestive" (39).  Oddly, however, Gat says that "Locke, like Hobbes and Rousseau, was not a researcher of the past but a political philosopher defending a particular political creed.  His interest was the present."  Gat does not notice that Locke, like Hobbes and Rousseau, studied the earliest ethnographic reports about hunter-gatherers as evidence for the state of nature.

Some of my earlier posts on Gat can be found here and here.

The same ethnographic and archaeological evidence of hunter-gatherer warfare in Aboriginal Australia has been found around the world--including Europe, North America, South America, and New Guinea (Allen and Jones 2014).  This supports the conclusion that hunter-gatherers both simple and complex have engaged in socially sanctioned lethal conflict between independent societies, and that this long evolutionary history of warfare can be traced back to early hominins.  This shows that human beings have an innate propensity to warfare shared with chimpanzees (Wrangham and Peterson 1996; Wrangham and Glowacki 2012), although human beings can also choose not to act on that innate propensity, particularly when their lives have been shaped by a Lockean liberal culture that favors declining violence.

Posts on the "chimpanzee model" for the evolution of war can be found here, here, and here.


REFERENCES

Allen, Mark W., and Terry L. Jones, eds. 2014. Violence and Warfare Among Hunter-Gatherers. London: Routledge.

Allen, Mark W. 2014. "Hunter-Gatherer Violence and Warfare in Australia." In Violence and Warfare, eds. Allen and Jones, 97-111.

Gat, Azar. 2017. The Causes of War and The Spread of Peace: But Will War Rebound? Oxford: Oxford University Press.

LeBlanc, Steven. 2014. "Forager Warfare and Our Evolutionary Past." In Violence and Warfare, eds. Allen and Jones, 26-46.

Morgan, John. 2002 (orig. 1852). The Life and Adventures of William Buckley. Ed. Tim Flannery. Melbourne, Australia: The Text Publishing Company.

Pardoe, Colin. 2014. "Conflict and Territoriality in Aboriginal Australia: Evidence from Biology and Ethnography." In Violence and Warfare, eds. Allen and Jones, 112-132.

Wrangham, Richard, and Dale Peterson. 1996. Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Wrangham, Richard, and Luke Glowacki. 2012. "Intergroup Aggression in Chimpanzees and War in Nomadic Hunter-Gatherers: Evaluating the Chimpanzee Model." Human Nature 23:5-29.

Neither Hobbes Nor Rousseau: The Lockean Way in the Evolution of War and Peace

The recurrent debate over the evolution of war and peace is commonly framed as a choice between Hobbes and Rousseau.  And yet the opponents in this debate end up agreeing on a position that is neither Hobbesian nor Rousseauean but Lockean.  Thus does the evolutionary anthropology of war and peace confirm John Locke's account of the state of nature and the evolution of government.

In his editorial introduction to War, Peace, and Human Nature (Oxford University Press, 2013), Douglas Fry adopts the argument of Marshall Sahlins (in The Western Illusion of Human Nature, 2008) that the study of war and peace is distorted by the bias in Western culture towards a Hobbesian view of human nature as innately violent.  This bias is said to run throughout Western history--from Hesiod and Thucydides to Machiavelli, Hobbes, and the American founders.  Contemporary scientists like Edward O. Wilson, Azar Gat, Richard Wrangham, and Steven Pinker show this cultural bias in their claim that human beings have an evolved propensity to war and violence shaped in the ancient history of their hunter-gatherer ancestors.  By contrast, Fry says, those who can free themselves from this Hobbesian cultural bias can see that the scientific evidence from archaeology, anthropology, and primatology proves conclusively that war was not natural for our nomadic foraging ancestors, and that war first arose as a cultural invention less than 10,000 years ago with the development of agriculture, dominance hierarchies, and centralized states.

One obvious question about Fry's argument is how he and a few others like Sahlins were able to break out of the Hobbesian bias of Western culture.   When Sahlins first stated this argument in 1976--in The Use and Abuse of Biology: An Anthropological Critique of Sociobiology--he said that his liberation from the Hobbesian bias came from his understanding of the modern anthropological concept of culture, which was first stated by Rousseau.  "Rousseau justifies the title some would give him as the true ancestor of anthropology by arguing the status of war as a phenomenon of cultural nature--precisely against the Hobbesian view of a war of every man against every man grounded in human nature" (8-9).

Even when he did not explicitly acknowledge Rousseau's influence, Sahlins embraced a Rousseauean view of human evolutionary history.  This is evident, for example, in his famous essay on "The Original Affluent Society" (published in Stone Age Economics, 1972).  Sahlins explains that in a hunting-gathering society, the means for satisfying  wants are limited, but the wants themselves are also limited.  Unlike the modern bourgeois, whose wants are always greater than the means for satisfying them, savages can fulfill their limited material needs easily and thus have plenty of leisure.  "We are inclined to think of hunters and gatherers as poor because they don't have anything; perhaps better to think of them for that reason as free" (14).  Moreover, they are free from domination, because their rough equality of wealth prevents any subordination of the poor to the rich.  There is no war.  And they have a rich social life organized around family and kinship.  In contrast to the selfish competitiveness of bourgeois society, this hunter-gatherer society is a "kinship community" of sharing and mutual aid.  This corresponds to the second stage of human evolution in Rousseau's Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, the stage of "nascent society" that comes with the emergence of family life.  Rousseau pronounces it "the happiest and most durable epoch," and generally "the best for man" (Masters ed., 146-47, 151). 

In Fry's edited volume, Darcia Narvaez restates Sahlins' argument for the life of  Rousseauean hunter-gatherers as superior to the life of Hobbesian bourgeois society.  While hunter-gatherers are virtuous, cooperative, generous, and egalitarian, she claims, the people in bourgeois societies like the United States are vicious, competitive, selfish, and hierarchical.  She also explains that hunter-gatherers are superior in their "sense of Spirit," their "higher consciousness," and their "right-brain  holistic orientation" (343, 354).

According to Locke, the original state of nature was a state of peace that easily became a state of war.  A state of nature exists whenever human beings live without a common superior with authority to settle disputes among them.  Insofar as they can live together according to customary norms of fairness as judged by ordinary reasoning, this is a state of peace.  But when some individuals exercise force without right against others, this becomes a state of war.  In the state of nature, each person has the "executive power of the law of nature," which is the power of each person to punish those who injure them, and thus each person takes the law into his own hands.  The state of nature can be a state of peace when all or most people agree on the customary rules of behavior as enforced by informal mediation and arbitration.  But it becomes a state of war when it falls into a cycle of revenge and feuding in which life, liberty, and property are so insecure that people seek out some formal system of law and government to keep the peace (ST, 6-14, 123-31).

The state of nature is a social state because all human beings must begin their lives as children dependent on parental care.  Sexual mating, conjugal bonding, and parental care constitute the family as a natural social unit securing survival and reproduction.  And thus kinship becomes the primary social bond and the source of social authority (FT, 86-89; ST, 52-84).

In the original state of nature, human beings lived as hunter-gatherers--gathering wild plants and hunting wild animals (ST, 26-31).  This hunting-gathering way of life prevailed for most of human history until the development of agriculture and pastoralism, so that human beings began cultivating domesticated plants and herding domesticated animals.  This agrarian way of life provided the conditions for a sedentary existence with a growing human population and the emergence of formal governmental rule (ST, 32-38).

Locke thought that the original hunting-gathering way of life could be seen among the most primitive of the American Indian bands.  "In the beginning, all the world was America," and thus this was "a pattern of the first ages" (ST, 14, 49, 108).

Locke agreed with Hobbes that a centralized state was necessary to adjudicate disputes in a way that would overcome the tendency to feuding when each person is the judge and executioner in his own case.  But Locke also saw the tendency for the power of the centralized state being abused by rulers for the exploitation of the ruled.  And thus he sought ways to limit the power of government to securing the conditions for peaceful cooperation to emerge as a largely self-regulating order in civil society.  This would combine the individual liberty that had been enjoyed by hunter-gatherers and the high civilization that had been made possible by an agrarian and commercial economy.

In the current debate over the evolution of war, it seems to me that the opposing sides can agree on most of this Lockean account of human social evolution. 

First, they can agree that Hobbes and Rousseau were wrong in depicting the original condition of human beings as a totally solitary state, because even the most primitive hunter-gatherers live in families and kinship groups that enforce informal customary norms of good behavior.  Rousseaueans like Sahlins prefer to start with what Rousseau thought was the second stage of human evolution--the "nascent society" of family life--and thus they reject Rousseau's conception of the first stage as a condition of solitary animals with no social ties, and they accept Locke's account of family as the "first society."  Human beings are naturally social animals who began their evolutionary history living in families and in local and regional groups bound together by ties of kinship, language, and culture.

The second point of agreement is that Locke and Hobbes were right about the need for government to secure peace through the formal rule of law.  This is what Steven Pinker identifies as the "Hobbesian pacification," which is the first step in the history of declining violence.  Fry and others who seem to be critics of Pinker agree with him about this.  For example, Fry agrees that while hunter-gatherers can maintain some social order through "self-redress"--"taking justice into one's own hands"--this tends towards uncontrolled feuding and raiding that makes it desirable to have a rule of law imposed by government (see Fry's Beyond War, 90-99, 223-26).  (What Fry calls "self-redress" corresponds to what Locke calls "the executive power of the state of nature.") Governance is better than anarchy.  People in stateless societies with high rates of violence--like the Waorani and the Yanomamo--can see "the potential of police, courts, and a code of law for achieving justice without raiding and revenge killings" (223).  L

The third point of agreement is that our evolved human nature is neither basically violent nor basically peaceful, because that human nature contains mixed motives, and the expression of those motives depends on the circumstances of life.  As Pinker says, "human nature accommodates motives that impel us to violence, like predation, dominance, and vengeance, but also motives that--under the right circumstances--impel us toward peace, like compassion, fairness, self-control, and reason" (483).  Thus, Pinker declares: "violent tendencies are not hydraulic but strategic, deployed only in circumstances in which the potential gains are high and the risks are low" (37).  Robert Sussman agrees with this.  "I am not trying to ignore the role of aggression and competition in understanding primate and human social interactions," he declares.  "We are all aware that humans are capable of warfare and violence; it is a part of our behavioral repertoire, part of the human behavioral totipotentiality.  Thus, of course, it is part of our biology and our inheritance, just as is peaceful behavior and the ability to love" (in War, Peace, and Human Nature, 108).  Both Sussman (97) and Pinker (619-20) agree in rejecting the idea of a "warrior gene."  They agree that the expression of violence depends upon the circumstances in which human beings act.  Fry agrees with Richard Wrangham and Pinker that males tend to be more violent than females, but that the expression of this male propensity to violence is flexible in being open to environmental or cultural influence (Fry, Beyond War, 166-74; Wrangham and Peterson, Demonic Males, 231-58). 

This openness to environmental or cultural influence has made it possible over the past few centuries for the growth in Lockean liberal culture to produce declining violence in all the ways studied by Pinker in his Better Angels of Our Nature.  The Rousseauean critics of Pinker seem to agree with him about this modern liberal culture of declining violence, and thus they disagree with Rousseau's pessimism about the degrading effects of bourgeois liberalism.  The only disagreement is that the Rousseauean critics see this declining violence as an n-shaped curve: no war at all over human history during the foraging era, a spike in war beginning 10,000 years ago, and then a recent drop in war (Fry, War, Peace, and Human Nature, 15-16).

The fourth point of agreement among those debating the evolution of war is that "complex" warfare is not a natural adaptation but a cultural invention that began about 10,000 years ago with the development of agriculture and settled societies.  In his lecture at the Mont Pelerin Society meeting in the Galapagos, Wrangham gave the following explanation of the difference between "simple" and "complex" warfare:

"The major difficulty in identifying warfare from skeletal remains is that war includes two styles of military practice, only one of which can be recognized archaeologically.  In terms of fighting, the distinction is between complex and simple warfare: complex warfare regularly includes battles (escalated conflicts between committed opponents), whereas simple warfare is largely confined to surprise attacks such as raiding.  In terms of social organization, the distinction is between hierarchy and acephaly (lack of formal leadership)."

"A society that practices complex warfare and battles, and has a military hierarchy, is said to have 'true warfare' or to lie above the military horizon (Turney-High 1949).  In this system, soldiers fight under orders from leaders and battles are frequently lethal.  The result of a specific encounter can thus be a large number of deaths on both sides, which (especially when combined with metal weapons) is easily detected archaeologically.  Such battle evidence currently goes back to about 8,000 BC in the Middle East (Qermez Dere, Iraq, Ferguson 2006).  True warfare is therefore normally thought to begin within a few hundred years of the origin of agriculture 10,000 years ago, resulting from the development of hierarchically organized states."

"'Simple warfare,' by contrast, is practiced by small-scale acephalous hunter-gatherer and farmer societies whose warriors fight voluntarily, and whose communities are not integrated with each other by any political officials.  It consists mainly of raiding and feuding.  Simple warfare tends not to include battles, but when battles occur they normally stop after a few deaths.  Massacres can occur when one side has a massive power advantage, such as burning a hut full of opponents, but the majority of deaths in simple warfare occur when raiders kill victims in a surprise attack.  Raids often kill very few victims, such as only one, followed by the aggressors immediately making a rapid and complete retreat in order to avoid the risk of being confronted.  The fact that in simple warfare most deaths occur in very small numbers explains the difficulty of distinguishing archaeologically between murder and war." (4-5)

But now we see the one big disagreement in the recent debates.  Like Hobbes and Locke, Wrangham and Pinker identify feuding and raiding among hunter-gatherers as war, even if a "simple" kind of war.  But their Rousseauean critics deny that this counts as war at all.  Fry agrees that nomadic foragers show lethal violence, but he argues that the "personal nature" of this violence means that such violence cannot be identified as war.  He explains: "The targets of homicide attempts are rarely randomly chosen members of other groups.  They are offenders who have committed specific misdeeds or acts of abuse" (War, Peace, and Human Nature, 11).

Notice, however, that despite this disagreement over how exactly to distinguish murder from warfare, there is agreement that hunter-gatherer societies can show high rates of homicidal violence from feuding.  For Locke, it is this very tendency to violent feuding that turns the state of nature from a state of peace into a state of war.

Sapolsky on the State of Nature: Hobbes or Rousseau? Why Not Locke?

The question of whether the original state of nature for human beings in foraging bands was a state of war or a state of peace has been a contentious question in the history of political philosophy, beginning with Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau.  This continues today to be one of the most intensely  debated questions in the social and biological sciences, with some people (such as Richard Wrangham, Azar Gat, and Steven Pinker) adopting the Hobbesian view of the state of nature as a state of war, and others (such as Douglas Fry, Brian Ferguson, and Robert Sussman) adopting the Rousseauian view of the state of nature as a state of peace.  Remarkably, however, these folks never recognize the Lockean alternative--that the state of nature is predominantly a state of peace that easily becomes a state of war--even though they often end up agreeing implicitly with this Lockean view. 

Weighing the evidence and arguments in this debate supports the conclusion that Hobbes was partly right, Rousseau was mostly wrong, and Locke was mostly right.  I have argued for this assessment in various posts (here, here, and here). 

It is surprising to see how this modern debate repeats the same pattern over and over again.  First, it's assumed that the only choice is between Hobbes and Rousseau.  Then, some people try to argue for the Hobbesian position, and others try to argue for the Rousseauian position.  And yet, eventually most agree that neither extreme position is completely right.  But they cannot recognize the Lockean position as superior to both, because they haven't thought about Locke's argument, or how the evidence gathered by modern scientists might confirm what Locke says.

So, for example, much of the debate over the past 20 years was initiated by Lawrence Keeley in War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage (1996).  He frames the debate as a choice between Hobbes and Rousseau (5-32).  And, as the subtitle of his book indicates, he seems to take the side of Hobbes against Rousseau.  But then he concedes that neither Hobbes nor Rousseau got it right: "If Rousseau's primitive golden age is imaginary, Hobbes's perpetual donnybrook is impossible" (178).  And yet he never considers the possibility that the archaeological and anthropological evidence that he surveys in his book could be seen as supporting Locke's position as mostly right.

One can see the same pattern repeated in the debate sparked by Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (2011).  In a report on this debate in Science, the author says that the debate is rooted in the dispute between Hobbes and Rousseau; and he identifies some scholars as Hobbesians and others as Rousseauians (Andrew Lawler, "The Battle Over Violence," Science 336 [2012]: 829-30).  But then he reports that most scholars agree that neither Hobbes nor Rousseau are completely right.  "They do not argue for a Rousseauian perspective. But that doesn't mean they're ready to embrace a Hobbesian view, either" (830).  The reader is left wondering whether there is some third alternative that is closer to the truth.

I see this pattern again in Robert Sapolsky's new book Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (2017).  Sapolsky is a primatologist (particularly, a baboonologist) and neuroscientist at Stanford University, who is famous on the Stanford campus for his popular lecture courses, and also famous around the world for his lectures on YouTube from his course "Introduction to Human Behavioral Biology" that have attracted over a million views.

I first heard him lecture at Stanford in 1988 when I was auditing courses in the Program in Human Biology.  Now, in his new book, we have a massive (790 pages in small print!) magnum opus that brings together much of his thinking from that human behavioral biology course.  The book also has the casual hipster wit that makes his lecturing so engaging for students. 

Sapolsky's book is a comprehensive textbook surveying all of the work over the past forty years--since the publication in 1975 of E. O. Wilson's Sociobiology--on the biological bases of social behavior.  Like his teacher Melvin Konner, Sapolsky explains behavior as arising from a complicated interaction of many biological, psychological, and cultural factors, in which every single factor exercises some causal power only in the context of all the other factors.  He is particularly interested in explaining social cooperation (humans at our best) and violent aggression (humans at our worst).

Explaining the deep evolutionary roots of human violence leads him into the debate over whether warfare is rooted in the evolved human nature of our ancient nomadic hunter-gatherer ancestors, or whether war is a relatively recent cultural invention that began only a few thousand years ago when human beings moved into sedentary agricultural societies ruled by militaristic states. 

Here he follows the recurrent pattern in this debate that I have just sketched.  He says the debate is "Hobbes-versus-Rousseau" (305-27).  He generally takes the side of the Rousseauians--particularly, Douglas Fry--in criticizing the Hobbesians (Keeley, Pinker, Wrangham, Napoleon Chagnon, and others).  And he tells the story of how a baboon troop that he studied in Kenya experienced a change in their social culture, so that they became less aggressive and more peaceful, less Hobbesian and more Rousseauian, which shows the cultural flexibility emphasized by the Rousseauians.  But then he concedes that neither Hobbes nor Rousseau got it completely right.  "So, Hobbes or Rousseau? Well, a mixture of the two, I say unhelpfully" (325).  He never mentions Locke or considers whether a Lockean account of the state of nature might be best.

In reviewing Sapolsky's book for the New York Times Book Review, Richard Wrangham generally praised the book.  But he also criticized Sapolsky for becoming a "partisan critic" in his account of the Hobbes-versus-Rousseau debate over the evolution of human violence.  Sapolsky's Rousseauian partisanship is subtle in that it depends mostly on his remaining silent about evidence and argumentation that contradict the Rousseauian claims.  For example, he endorses Marshall Sahlins' claim that nomadic  hunter-gatherers were "the original affluent society" (317-18).  But he is silent about the anthropologists who have shown  that Sahlins' argument is not supported by the evidence, which I have indicated in a previous post.

Similarly, Sapolsky relies on the research of Douglas Fry to support the conclusion that nomadic hunter-gatherers have always been peaceful (322).  But Sapolsky is silent about the many criticisms of Fry's reasoning, which I have surveyed in a previous post.  For example, Fry has failed to recognize that many of the modern hunter-gatherer bands that he has identified as peaceful have been surrounded by militarily superior farmers, and so it's hardly surprising that the hunter-gatherers have not gone to war in such circumstances.

Sapolsky says that there is no archaeological evidence for warfare among Paleolithic hunter-gatherers.  There is, however, one recently discovered site in northern Kenya dated at around 10,000 years ago that had the skeletons of 27 people killed in a massacre.  Sapolsky says that this is not evidence for ancient warfare among nomadic hunter-gatherers, because the victims here seem to have been sedentary hunter-gatherers, who were living along the shoreline of Lake Turkana, where there was probably abundant fish and game animals; and so the attackers wanted to steal this "prime beachfront property" (321). 

Sapolsky does not tell the reader that the discoverers of this site could not agree on this.  As I indicated in a previous post, one member of the team accepted the interpretation repeated by Sapolsky--that this is evidence for ancient warfare arising among sedentary hunter-gatherers, who were no longer living a nomadic life.  But another member of the team had a different interpretation.  She said that while there is lots of evidence of warfare "among settled, sedentary communities," the discovery in Nataruk is the first "archaeological record of armed conflict between early nomadic hunter-gather groups."  She suggested that the foragers who were massacred had not established a settlement on the lake, but rather they were a "small traveling band of hunter-gatherers who stopped by a lagoon to hunt or fish."  And so, she seemed to adopt the Hobbesian interpretation of this archaeological discovery as confirming that warfare was prevalent among our earliest foraging ancestors, and thus deeply rooted in our evolved human nature.

But no matter which interpretation one accepts, this confirms Locke's claim that our ancient hunter-gatherer ancestors lived in a state of peace that easily became a state of war whenever there was any resource worth fighting over--like a good fishing spot.

Sapolsky seems to agree with this when he says that even purely nomadic hunter-gatherers "are no tie-dyed pacifists," because they often engage in lethal violence (323).  If so, then Sapolsky's account of the state of nature is neither Hobbesian nor Rousseauian but Lockean.

But what about Sapolsky's baboons, who showed, he argued, that even if their evolved nature is Hobbesian, they can develop a social culture that taps into their "inner Rousseau"?  I have written a post on Sapolsky's earlier reports of this in 2004 and 2013.  In his new book, he emphasizes the great "flexibility" and "social plasticity" that this shows in baboon life, which sounds like what Rousseau identified as the "perfectibility" of human ancestors, so that nature put no limits on how far human beings could be transformed by cultural history.

In the earlier reports, however, Sapolsky suggested that baboon "perfectibility" is not unlimited.  The changes brought by cultural history are "within the limits of baboon sociality," and the new culture of Forest Troop did not bring "an unrecognizably different utopia."  There was still a dominance hierarchy.  There was still displacement aggression, although it had been reduced.  And while the rate of reconciliations had increased, the need for reconciliations showed the persistence of conflict.  Sapolsky even indicated that the overall rate of aggressive conflict in Forest Troop was similar to other troops.  So despite the cultural malleability shown here, "there are not infinite amounts of social plasticity in a primate social system."

I have argued that we see three levels of social order in these baboons--baboon nature, baboon culture, and baboon individuals.  The repertoire of social behavior characteristic of a baboon species sets the natural limits of baboon sociality.  This baboon nature constrains but does not determine baboon culture.  And, finally, nature and culture constrain but do not determine individual behavior.

I will be writing more posts on Sapolsky's book.

West on the American Founding (7): Zuckert and the Evolutionary State of Nature

West and Zuckert agree that the fundamental idea for the natural rights philosophy of the American founders was the state of nature.  West writes: "The state of nature is the basis of the founders' understanding of politics.  If human beings are born free and equal in a natural state, subject only to the laws of nature, then government is a product of human making to secure the equal natural rights of the citizens" (409).  Zuckert sees the Declaration of Independence structured as a syllogism, in which the second paragraph states the major premises arranged in a temporal sequence corresponding to the history of human political experience, which begins with the pre-political condition in the state of nature, where all men are free and equal and endowed with certain unalienable rights (18-19).  If that is not true, the Declaration's syllogism fails.

Many critics of social contract theory and of the Declaration of Independence have denied the historical reality of this state of nature.  After all, all human beings have been born into societies, subjected to the authority of their parents and others in their society.  Human infants living a solitary life would soon die.

Although this criticism might apply to Rousseau's account of the state of nature as an utterly asocial condition of solitary individuals, it does not apply to Locke's account of the state of nature as human beings living in social bands of hunter-gatherers without formal government or laws but with customary norms of conduct that constitute a law of nature.  For Locke, the historical reality of this state of nature is evident in the life of the American Indians, who lived the sort of hunting-gathering way of life that must have characterized our ancient human ancestors: "In the beginning, all the world was America."

As I have indicated in some other posts, Locke studied the reports of the American Indians living in foraging bands as evidence of how human beings originally lived in a state of nature prior to the turn to agriculture and the establishment of government, and most of what Locke inferred has been confirmed by modern research in evolutionary anthropology. 

Here Locke was following the lead of ancient authors like Lucretius and Dicaearchus, who saw that the first human beings must have lived as hunter-gatherers, which Dicaearchus called "the state of nature."  Although the Declaration of Independence does not use the term "state of nature," the idea is implied in the claim that human beings are naturally equal in their liberty until "governments are instituted among men."

Remarkably, however, Zuckert argues that "the Declaration does not present literal or empirical history, but moral history." "The Declaration is not speaking of some primordial prepolitical condition in which human beings wander the forests 'lonely as a cloud'" (23).  The Declaration's history is actually "mythic history" (145). But then he seems to contradict this when he says that the Declaration is exploring "the primeval human condition, the condition prior to the establishment of government and prior to all humanly established laws and rights" (102).

Moreover, Zuckert recognizes that Jefferson, like Locke, thought that the American Indians showed the historical reality of the state of nature (68-69).  According to Jefferson, the Indians manifest "the circumstance of their having never submitted themselves to any laws, any coercive power, any shadow of government.  Their only controls are their manners, and that moral sense of right and wrong, which, like the sense of tasting and feeling, in every man makes a part of his nature.  An offense against these is punished by contempt, by exclusion from society, or, where the case is serious, as that of murder, by the individuals whom it concerns" (Notes on the State of Virginia, Query XI). 

Jefferson's insight here into the evolution of the moral sense in foraging bands has been confirmed by the evidence gathered and analyzed by evolutionary anthropologists like Christopher Boehm, who see the evolution of morality through indirect reciprocity, or what Locke called "the law of reputation," which has been the subject of a post.

From the evolutionary anthropology of the 18th century Scottish philosophers and historians, Jefferson adopted the "four stages theory" of human evolutionary progress--hunting, pastoral, agricultural, and commercial (see Jefferson, Letter to James Madison, Jan. 30, 1787; Letter to William Ludlow, Sept. 6, 1824; and Ronald Meek, Social Science and the Ignoble Savage, 1976).

West quotes a remark by John Adams that West takes as expressing a "view shared by all the founders" (103):

"Men, in their primitive conditions, however savage, were undoubtedly gregarious; and they continue to be social, not only in every stage of civilization, but in every possible situation in which they can be placed.  As nature intended them for society, she has furnished them with passions, appetites, and propensities, as well as a variety of faculties, calculated both for their individual enjoyment, and to render them useful to each other in their social connections.  There is none among them more essential or remarkable, then the passion for distinction. A desire to be observed, considered, esteemed, praised, beloved, and admired by his fellows, is one of the earliest, as well as keenest dispositions discovered in the heart of man" (Discourses on Davila, II).

The natural sociality of human beings, even in the primitive state of nature without government, and the evolution of a natural moral law from the natural social concern for praise and blame have been corroborated by modern research in evolutionary anthropology.

West argues that the American founders did not see the state of nature as something found only in the distant primeval past, because they thought it was an ever present reality.  So, for example, when the Americans declared their independence from Great Britain, they momentarily entered the state of nature until they instituted a new government over them.  Moreover, in affirming the natural right to revolution, the Americans understood that people could enter the state of nature at any time in the future when they might judge that their government was not securing their natural rights, and that they must invoke their natural right to alter or abolish their government, and institute new government that might seem to them most likely to effect their safety and happiness by securing their natural rights.

I agree with this, but I also believe that Locke was correct in thinking that the only way to explain how these natural rights are really natural for human beings is to see how they express the primordial human nature shaped in the original state of nature of our hunter-gatherer ancestors.

The State of Nature in the American Revolution: Confirming Locke, Denying Hobbes

In his Second Treatise, John Locke identifies five ways in which the state of nature arises in human history.  First, when our hunter-gatherer ancestors lived without formal institutions of government, they were living in a state of nature, in which all human beings are equally free; and during Locke's lifetime, he saw that the foraging bands of native Americans were still living in such a state of nature (ST, 49, 101-111).  

Second, people living under a government can choose to leave that country, and thus revert to a state of nature, and then they can emigrate either to another society with a ruling government or to a vacant part of the world where they can set up a new government (ST, 113-18, 121).  

Third, whenever people living under a government find themselves under the immediate attack of aggressive individuals, and there is no way to call in the protection of government, then the people under this threat have the natural right to momentarily enter the state of nature, so that they can reclaim "the executive power of the law of nature" to punish those who violate that law of nature, which includes the natural right of killing in self-defense (ST, 19).  

Fourth, whenever a government is dissolved, the people revert back to the state of nature, and they have the right to establish a new government by consent; this includes the dissolution of government by popular rebellion against a government that has become despotic (ST, 211-43).

Fifth, all the rulers of independent governments around the world are in a state of nature in their international relations because there is no world government over them (ST, 14).

In all five of these ways, we can see Locke's state of nature in the American Revolution.  Much of the evidence for this is conveniently collected in a book by Mark Somos--American States of Nature: The Origins of Independence, 1761-1775 (Oxford University Press, 2019).

1.  THE ORIGINAL STATE OF NATURE

First of all, many American colonial thinkers explicitly recognized that many of the Native American Indians were living in a state of nature as described by Locke.  As early as 1725, John Bulkley, a prominent clergyman and surgeon in colonial Connecticut, quoted from Locke's account of the state of nature in the Second Treatise and argued that the "Aborigines of this Country" were living in this state of nature.  Bulkley also followed Locke's lead in applying Jose de Acosta's Natural and Moral History of the Indies (1604) to the Native Americans.  (Bulkley's writing can be found in Exploring the Bounds of Liberty: Political Writings of Colonial British America from the Glorious Revolution to the American Revolution, eds. Jack P. Greene and Craig B. Yirush [Liberty Fund, 2018], I: 595-627.)

In 1768, the Massachusetts House of Representatives sent a letter to their colonial agent in London, which argued that the colonists had a natural right to property, so that the British Crown could not take their property without their consent.  James Otis and Samuel Adams were probably the primary authors of this letter.  In one passage, they wrote:

"Property is admitted to have an existence, even in the savage state of nature.  The bow, the arrow, and the tomahawk; the hunting and the fishing ground, are species of property, as important to an American savage, as pearls, rubies, and diamonds ae to the Mogul, . . . . And if property is necessary for the support of savage life, it is by no means less so in civil society" (quoted in Somos, 68, n. 29).

Particularly interesting here is the recognition that the American Indians had a natural claim to property in their hunting and fishing grounds.  Bulkley had argued that the Indians did not own the land on which they hunted and fished, because they had not invested their labor in the land by cultivating it for agriculture; and consequently, the colonists in Connecticut could claim the land that they had appropriated for farming.

Remarkably, the freedom that the American Indians enjoyed in their state of nature was so attractive that many of the English and French settlers chose to become Indians--"White Indians" they were called.  Hector de Crevecoeur observed that "thousands of Europeans are Indians, and we have no examples of even one of those Aborigines having from choice become Europeans!"  Some of the Europeans who became Indians said that they did this because they had "the most perfect freedom."  In his study of the White Indians, historian James Axtell suggested that "it may well be that the adults who chose to become Indians did so for some of the reasons that many of their countrymen turned to revolution" (The Invasion Within: The Contest of Cultures in Colonial North America [Oxford University Press, 1985], 302-303, 327, 377).

In applying the Lockean understanding of the state of nature to the American Indians, the American colonists saw that in that state of nature all men were equally free and independent, in that no man could rule any other man without that man's consent.  They saw that this natural equality of liberty did indeed apply to all men, including slaves, and to all women as well as men.  This radical conception of human equality of rights was clearly affirmed, for example, by James Otis in his 1761 speech in Paxton's Case and in 1764 in his Rights of the British Colonies Asserted and Proved.

2.  EMIGRATING TO THE STATE OF NATURE

Some of the colonists argued that it was this equal freedom in the state of nature that had drawn so many of the original European settlers to leave Great Britain and go to America, where they could revert to the state of nature.  This would illustrate what Locke identified as the second way in which people could enter a state of nature by leaving their native country to find freedom somewhere else.  For example, in 1765, Dennys Deberdt, who had just been appointed the colonial agent for Massachusetts in London, wrote a public letter that claimed that all the colonies, except Georgia and Nova Scotia, were settled by Englishmen fleeing oppression and seeking "civil and religious liberties," and that when they moved to America, "they were then in a state of nature, under no civil government, but what they form'd themselves."  Their colonial charters should therefore be understood as "compacts" with Britain to which they had freely consented.

3.  SELF-DEFENSE IN THE STATE OF NATURE

The revolutionary colonists also contended that once Great Britain violated those original compacts with the colonies and launched an attack on the rights of the colonists--their natural rights and their rights as Englishmen--the colonists could rightly invoke their natural right of self-defense in the state of nature, which was Locke's third way in which people could return to a state of nature.  The American colonists, however, expanded the individual right of self-defense to a collective right of the American people to defend their community against attack.

One of the clearest statements of this idea came some years after the Revolution in James Wilson's Lectures on Law (1790-1791):

"The defence of one's self, justly called the primary law of nature, is not, nor can it be abrogated by any regulation of municipal law.  This principle of defence is not confined merely to the person; it extends to the liberty and the property of a man; it is not confined merely to his own person; it extends to the persons of all those, to whom he bears a peculiar relation--of his wife, of his parent, of his child, of his master, or his servant: nay, it extends to the person of everyone, who is in danger; perhaps, to the liberty of everyone, whose liberty is unjustly and forcibly attacked.  It becomes humanity as well as justice" (Works of James Wilson, ed. Robert Green McCloskey [Harvard University Press, 1967], 2: 609).

Thus, the people acting as a community could exercise their natural right of self-defense in defending their liberty from unjust attack.

The revolutionary colonists also protested against King George III's attempts to disarm the colonists as a violation of their natural rights and their rights as Englishmen.  That individuals have a natural right to momentarily enter a state of nature in defending themselves against attacks has been recognized by the U.S. Supreme Court as a natural right that is also a constitutional right.  This was most clearly stated in District of Columbia v. Heller (2008) and McDonald v. City of Chicago (2010), which ruled that cities and states that ban handguns have violated the natural right to keep and bear arms for self-defense, a natural right protected in the Second and Fourteenth Amendments.

In the McDonald decision, Justice John Paul Stevens wrote a dissent in which he argued that recognizing the right of individuals to carry handguns for self-defense is contrary to the state's monopoly on legitimate violence.  In support of this argument, he quoted from section 128 of Locke's Second Treatise, which speaks of the powers individuals have in the state of nature that they must give up when they enter civil society.  In the state of nature, a man has the power "to do whatsoever he thinks fit for the preservation of himself and others within the permission of the Law of Nature."  But when he joins a particular political society, he "gives up" this power that he had in the state of nature.  But here Stevens ignores what Locke says in explaining that a man "gives up" natural rights only "the better to preserve" them in a civil society, and that a man in civil society may kill a thief or anyone who acts as an aggressor threatening his life, in circumstances where there is no way to call in officers of the government for protection (ST, 18-19, 131).

4.  IN THE STATE OF NATURE AFTER THE DISSOLUTION OF GOVERNMENT

In 1774, the American colonists were divided by a debate between Patriots and Loyalists over the state of nature.  The Patriots believed that since the British imperial government over the colonies had been dissolved, the Americans had been thrown back into a state of nature, in which the American people had the natural authority to establish a new government to secure their natural rights.  The Loyalists believed that Parliament still had governmental authority over the colonies, and therefore the Americans were not in a state of nature, although there was a need to settle the American disputes with Parliament in a way that would preserve American liberty while maintaining Parliamentary rule over the colonies.

On September 5, 1774, the Continental Congress met in Philadelphia for the first time.  On the next day, they began their debates; and Patrick Henry of Virginia was the first to speak.  Here is what John Adams wrote in his Diary for that speech:

Mr. Henry. Government is dissolved. Fleets and Armies and the present State of Things shew that Government is dissolved. -- Where are your Land Marks? your Boundaries of Colonies.

We are in a State of Nature, Sir. I did propose that a Scale should be laid down. That Part of N. America which was once Mass. Bay, and that Part which was once Virginia, ought to be considered as having a Weight. Will not People complain, 10,000 People Virginians have not outweighed 1,000 others.

I will submit however. I am determined to submit if I am overruled.

A worthy Gentleman Ego near me, seemed to admit the Necessity of obtaining a more Adequate Representation.

I hope future Ages will quote our Proceedings with Applause. It is one of the great Duties of the democratical Part of the Constitution to keep itself pure. It is known in my Province, that some other Colonies are not so numerous or rich as they are. I am for giving all the Satisfaction in my Power.

The Distinctions between Virginians, Pensylvanians, New Yorkers and New Englanders, are no more.

I am not a Virginian, but an American.

Patriots like John Adams, Samuel Adams, and Roger Sherman agreed with Henry in arguing that they were in a state of nature, and that they would need to establish a new government.

On September 8, Joseph Galloway spoke for the Loyalists in denying that the colonists were in a state of nature.  Here is what Adams wrote in his Diary:

Mr. Galloway. I never could find the Rights of Americans, in the Distinctions between Taxation and Legislation, nor in the Distinction between Laws for Revenue and for the Regulation of Trade. I have looked for our Rights in the Laws of Nature -- but could not find them in a State of Nature, but always in a State of political Society.

I have looked for them in the Constitution of the English Government, and there found them. We may draw them from this Soursce securely.

Galloway went on later to propose a Plan of Union, which would create a Colonial Parliament that would act together with the British Parliament in legislating for the colonies.  The Congress voted to reject this plan, and the plan was even stricken from the records of the Congress's proceedings.

Loyalists like Galloway had to contend either that the state of nature never existed, or that while it could exist, it was a dangerous condition of violent disorder, and therefore should be avoided at all costs.  In taking the second position, they assumed a Hobbesian view of the state of nature as a "war of all against all."

Patriots like Henry had to contend that the state of nature was a reality of human history, and that it could be a state of social order in which people act as a community capable of establishing a new government.  Thus, the Patriots assumed a Lockean view of the state of nature as a social state of peace, even if it could become a state of war in the absence of government.

The Patriots thought that the experience of Massachusetts in 1774 confirmed their view of the state of nature.  As a result of Parliament's passage of the Coercive Acts in the spring, the government of Massachusetts under its colonial charter was dissolved, and Massachusetts was reduced to a state of nature; but the people of Massachusetts organized themselves through hundreds of local meetings and committees of correspondence to create extralegal governing bodies that could send delegates to the Continental Congress, which could then become a provisional government for a union of the colonies.

We can see here that the fundamental debate in the American Revolution and American Founding was over the state of nature.

This debate continued in some form throughout the Founding period.  For example, when the Constitutional Convention of 1787 proposed the ratification of its Constitution as a substitute for the Articles of Confederation, some of the opponents of ratification argued that the Constitutional Convention did not have the legal authority to frame and propose this Constitution.  They made two arguments.  First, in February of 1787, the Congress of the United States under the Articles of Confederation had recommended a Convention that would propose alterations in the Articles.  But then the Convention in Philadelphia proposed a Constitution that consisted not of alterations in the Articles but a total substitution for the Articles, which went beyond the authorization of the Congress.  Secondly, while under the Articles of Confederation (Article XIII), any "alteration" of the Articles would have to be ratified by the legislatures of all thirteen of the states, the Constitutional Convention proposed that the new Constitution should be submitted to a convention of delegates "chosen in each State by the People thereof," and that the Constitution would come into effect as soon as the conventions of nine states had ratified it.  Far from being a mere alteration or revision of the Articles of Confederation, the Constitution of 1787 looked like a revolutionary overthrow of the Articles, with an appeal to the authority of the People in a state of nature to establish a new government to better secure their natural rights.

In The Federalist, James Madison responded to this objection by in effect admitting that the Constitution Convention was proposing a Second American Revolution based on the principles that justified the First American Revolution.  He did this in two ways.  First, he invoked the revolutionary language of the Declaration of Independence.  He claimed to speak for those at the Convention:

"They must have reflected, that in all great changes of established governments, forms ought to give way to substance; that a rigid adherence in such cases to the former, would render nominal and nugatory, the transcendent and precious right of the people to 'abolish or alter their governments as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness;' since it is impossible for the people spontaneously and universally, to move in concert towards their object; and it is therefore essential, that such changes be instituted by some informal and unauthorised propositions, made by some patriotic and respectable number of citizens" (no. 40).

In doing this, the Framers of the Constitution were "recurring to the absolute necessity of the case; to the great principle of self-preservation; to the transcendent law of nature and of nature's God, which declares that the safety and happiness of society are the objects at which all political institutions aim, and to which all such institutions must be sacrificed" (no. 43).

Second, Madison says that the Framers of the Constitution must have understood that what they were doing in 1787 was similar to what was done by the American Revolutionaries in 1774 to 1776:

"They must have recollected that it was by this irregular and assumed privilege of proposing to the people plans for their safety and happiness, that the States were first united against the danger with which they were threatened by their antient government; that Committees and Congresses, were formed for concentrating their efforts, and defending their rights; and that Conventions were elected in the several States, for establishing the constitutions under which they are now governed; nor could it have been forgotten that no little ill-timed scruples, no zeal for adhering to ordinary forms, were any where seen, except in those who wished to indulge under these masks, their secret enmity to the substance contended for" (no 40).

Notice that without using the term state of nature, Madison implicitly affirms that the Framers of the Constitution had entered a state of nature in which the People had the natural right to dissolve the Articles of Confederation and establish a new national government through the Constitution that would better secure their rights.

And if we see the Constitution as the Second American Revolution, should we also see the Civil War and the Civil War Amendments (13-15) as the Third American Revolution.  Because didn't America need that Third Revolution to fulfill the original promise of the First Revolution to secure equality of rights for all men and women, which required the Civil War as an "appeal to Heaven" and new amendments overturning the constitutional protections for slavery and establishing the "equal protection of the laws"?

5.  INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS AS A STATE OF NATURE

The Declaration of Independence concludes with the Continental Congress declaring "that these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do."

Just as in the state of nature, all individuals are free and independent, and so any social order is based on the mutual consent of those individuals, likewise in the international state of nature, all states are free and independent, and so any international order is based on the mutual consent of states.  So here we see how for Locke, and other theorists of the state of nature, international relations are a fifth way in which human beings can be in a state of nature.

In their thinking through this idea, the American Revolutionaries were much influenced by their reading of Emer de Vattel's The Law of Nations, or Principles of the Law of Nature Applied to the Conduct and Affairs of Nations and Sovereigns (1758).  Vattel's fundamental principle was that the law of nations was the law of nature of individuals in the state of nature applied to states.

Much of the modern theorizing about international relations and international law has turned on this idea of international politics as a state of nature.

CONCLUSION

In the American Revolution, we can see the five ways in which the Lockean state of nature appears--in the original human condition of hunter-gatherers, in human emigration from an established government, in individual and collective self-defense against attacks, as a consequence of the dissolution of government, and in international relations.

We can also see here that the American Revolution was a historical experiment that confirmed Locke's account of the state of nature as superior to Hobbes's.  For Hobbes, the state of nature must always be a state of war; and therefore it must be avoided at all costs.  For Hobbes, any government is better than none, because peace is always better than war.  

But for Locke, the dissolution of government does not necessarily lead to the dissolution of society and the state of war.  Although there is always the risk that it will collapse into a state of war, a state of nature can be a state of peaceful cooperation as people organize themselves into a social order without any formal government.  And therefore, even though the state of nature is risky, there are circumstances in which it can become a sanctuary from a condition that is even worse--the loss of liberty under the rule of an oppressive government.  For Locke, people consent to government with the trust that it will secure their natural rights.  When a government has violated that trust, the government can be dissolved, and the people can regroup as a society in the state of nature and establish a new government.  The American people did that in the American Revolution.