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.

The Darwinian Science of the Natural Right to Punish in Lockean Liberalism

John Locke's liberalism depends ultimately on two inseparable doctrines--the idea of the state of nature and the idea that in the state of nature everyone has the "executive power of the law of nature."  These two ideas sustain the fundamental thought of Lockean liberalism--that each individual has a natural right to defend himself against those who use or threaten force that would deny his liberty, that the only proper role of government is to use force defensively against aggressors who have initiated force, and that each individual has the right to resist a government that itself becomes an aggressive user of force to threaten individual liberty.

Those two ideas--the state of nature and the natural executive power to punish--are empirical claims about human nature and human history.  Darwinian science can help us test those claims against the pertinent evidence.

I want to make a general point here about the study of political philosophy.  Much of the study of the history of political philosophy is rightly devoted to studying the history of ideas. But ultimately shouldn't our primary concern be judging the truth of those ideas based on our assessment of the relevant evidence?

So, for example, Darwinian anthropology can confirm the reality of the state of nature as the original condition of humanity by showing how our earliest hunting-gathering ancestors lived in nomadic foraging bands, in which all adults lived as equally free individuals, aggressively defending their autonomy against bullies who might try to dominate them.  This was the evolutionary state of nature in which human nature was shaped.  Some of my posts on this can be found here and here, with links to others.

Some of the scholarly commentators on Locke would object that Locke saw the state of nature as a moral fiction rather than as a historical reality.  John Dunn, for example, claimed that Locke's idea of the state of nature represents "neither a piece of philosophical anthropology nor a piece of conjectural history," because it has "no transitive empirical content whatsoever" (1969, 103).  Other scholars see Locke's state of nature as both historical reality and moral fiction (Ashcraft 1968, 1987; Waldron 1989).  And some others emphasize Locke's account of the state of nature as the natural history of primitive foraging bands like the American Indians (Myers 1998; Pangle 1988; Strauss 1953, 230-31).

The decisive evidence for Locke's state of nature as an anthropological historical reality is Locke's reliance on the many anthropological reports about the American Indians, which was part of the European intellectual interest in New World natural history arising from the European discovery of America (Arneil 1996; Batz 1974; Elliott 1972; Glat 1981; Martens 2016; Meek 2011).  I have emphasized the importance for Locke of books such as Jose de Acosta's The Natural and Moral History of the Indies (ST, sec. 102).  In his edition of Locke's Two Treatises, Peter Laslett provides footnotes with quotations from the books on America in Locke's library that echo Locke's description of the state of nature.  Studying such books led Locke to declare: "In the beginning, all the World was America," and therefore it is a "Pattern of the first Ages in Asia and Europe" (ST, secs. 49, 108).

Here I will turn to Locke's account of the natural right to punish, which he calls the executive power of the law of nature.  This will be followed by another post on the evidence from Darwinian anthropology supporting Locke's idea.

Locke claims that in the state of nature, there is a law of nature "that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his Life, Health, Liberty, or Possessions" (ST, sec. 6).  But then he immediately qualifies this no-harm principle by saying that one may rightly harm another in punishing someone for an offense against the law of nature.  This must be so because the law of nature could not be a true law if it were not enforced by punishment of those who violate it.  Enforcing the no-harm principle requires harming those who would harm us.

In the state of nature, Locke explains:

"The Execution of the Law of Nature is in that State, put into every Mans hands, whereby everyone has a right to punish the transgressors of that Law to such a Degree, as may hinder its Violation.  For the Law of Nature would, as all other Laws that concern Men in this World, be in vain, if there were no body that in the State of Nature, had a Power to Execute that Law, and thereby preserve the innocent and restrain offenders, and if any one in the State of Nature may punish another, for any evil he has done, every one may do so.  For in that State of perfect Equality, where naturally there is no superiority or jurisdiction of one, over another, what any may do in Prosecution of that Law, every one must needs have a Right to do" (sec. 7).

Notice that Locke does not rely on divine punishment to enforce the law of nature.  The law of nature, like all the other laws that concern "Men in this World" would be in "vain" if individual human beings did not punish the offenders of that law.  This punishment has two distinct purposes: restraint and reparation (secs. 8, 10-11).  Punishing for restraint is to prevent or deter misconduct, and everyone has the right to punish for this purpose.  Punishing for reparation belongs only to the injured party, who seeks some recompense for the damages he has suffered.

Locke indicates that this human punishment of offenders in the state of nature works at three levels.  Through first-party punishment, individuals punish themselves through conscience and guilt (secs. 8, 21, 122, 209).  Through second-party punishment, individuals punish their tormentor through retaliation and revenge (secs. 8, 10-11, 18-19).  Through third-party punishment, individuals can join with those who have been injured unjustly for a collective punishment of the offender (sec. 10).

Locke suggests, however, that there are at least three problems with relying on the individual right to punish to enforce the law of nature in the state of nature (secs. 123-126).

First, there's the problem of knowledge:  many individuals do not have a clear and unbiased knowledge of the law of nature.  In the Letter Concerning Toleration (43), Locke says that the American Indians are "strict Observers of the Rules of Equity and the Law of Nature."  But in the Second Treatise (sec. 123), he says that in the state of nature "the greater part" of men are "no strict Observers of Equity and Justice."  In fact, some men are so "degenerate" that they have no knowledge of the law of nature, and they become like wild animals in their violent attacks on others (ST, secs. 10-11, 128).

Second, there's the problem of partiality: individuals being partial to themselves often cannot render impartial judgment in their own cases, and they are often negligent or unconcerned in judging the cases of others.

Third, there's the problem of cost:  punishment can be too costly to execute, because the offender will fight back and inflict injury on those who try to punish him.

To solve these three problems, people will give up their powers in the state of nature for legislating, judging, and executing the law of nature (secs. 128-131).  They will consent to enter a political society with governmental institutions for legislating, judging, and executing positive laws for the whole community that conform to the law of nature.  This can solve the problem of knowledge, because the legislative power will publicly promulgate the laws.  This can solve the problem of partiality, because the judicial power will decide legal cases through impartial and fair judges.  This can solve the problem of cost, because the executive power will employ the collective force of the community to punish lawbreakers in ways that minimize the costs of punishment for individuals.  All of this should serve the common good of the whole community--in securing the natural rights of all individuals to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness.

Of course, this goal can never be fully achieved, because the inevitable conflicts of interest that arise in every community will incline those with political power to use that power to favor their own interests over the interests of others, and thus government will often fail to promote the public good in securing the natural rights of all.  If government becomes utterly tyrannical, then the rights of those being exploited are less secure under government than they would have been in the state of nature, because in a tyrannical government, the rulers can use the collective force of government to exploit the ruled (secs. 91-93).

If the government was imposed on the people by conquerors, and if the people never consented to that government, even if only by acquiescence, then they are still in a state of war in a state of nature, and they can exercise their natural executive power in violent resistance to their rulers (secs. 175-196J).

If the people did originally consent to their government, they can still rightly resist their government when it becomes tyrannical, because "the Obligations of the Law of Nature, cease not in Society" (sec. 135).  And so if government does not conform to the law of nature, individuals have the natural right to resistance in meeting force with force.

The question will always be "Who shall be Judge whether the Prince or Legislative act contrary to their Trust?" Locke's answer is "The People shall be Judge."  Or even "every Man is Judge for himself." They can "appeal to Heaven," as did Jephtha, which is to say that they can go to war against their government, and this dispute will be settled by battle (secs. 20-21, 239-243).

The assertion of natural rights depends on the forceful resistance to tyranny, which suggests that it is really true that might makes right.  Natural rights emerge in history as those conditions for human life that cannot be denied without eventually provoking the natural human tendency of individuals to forceful rebellion against exploitation. Thus it is that individuals claim their executive power of the law of nature in punishing those who violate their natural rights.

But then we might wonder why Locke refers to this teaching about the natural executive power as a "very strange Doctrine" (secs. 9, 13).  Leo Strauss and the Straussians--such as Michael Zuckert (1994)--have argued that Locke is intimating that this doctrine is "very strange" in the sense that it breaks with the traditional Aristotelian and Thomistic teaching about natural law.  As a statement of the traditional teaching, Strauss (1953, 222) cites a passage in Aquinas's Summa Theologica (II-II, q. 64, a. 3), in which Aquinas answers no to the question "Whether it is lawful for a private individual to kill a man who has sinned?"  Aquinas explains that only those with public authority to punish criminals can do this, not private individuals.

Strauss is silent, however, about the fact that a few pages after this passage, Aquinas answers yes to the question "Whether it is lawful to kill a man in self-defense?" (II-II, q. 64, a. 7).  Killing in self-defense is not murder as long as one's primary intention is to save innocent life from attack, and killing the attacker is an unavoidable side effect.  One can rightly kill an attacker in self-defense only when there is no non-lethal way to stop the attacker.  Contrary to Strauss's claim, this seems to coincide with Locke's teaching that when innocent life is threatened by an attacker, and there is no way to call in a public authority to stop the attack, then at that moment one has been put into a state of nature where one can use one's natural executive power to kill the attacker, thus enforcing the right of self-preservation in the law of nature (secs. 11, 16, 18).

Strauss is also silent about Aquinas's argument that vengeance (vindicatio) is lawful and virtuous so far as it moves us to punish harmful wrongdoers, either in defending ourselves from harm or in avenging a harm (II-II, q. 108, aa. 1-3).  Aquinas explains that vengeance belongs to the virtue of justice, and it expresses a natural inclination that we share with other animals who show an irascible power to retaliate against those who attack them.  This natural inclination to punish those who threaten us with harm expresses "natural right" (ius naturale).  (I have written a post on Aquinas's remarkable support for vengeance, in contrast to the turn-the-other-cheek teaching of the Sermon on the Mount.)  Obedience to law, Aquinas observes, depends on the fear of punishment (ST, I-II, q. 92, a. 2; q. 100, a. 9).  So, if there is a natural law, there must be a natural punishment.

This natural law of punishment through self-defense and vengeance was recognized by Thomas Hobbes in The Leviathan, if only briefly, and then elaborated by Richard Cumberland in his Treatise of the Laws of Nature.  Cumberland's account was a likely source for Locke's idea of the natural executive power, as suggested by Strauss (1953, 222, n. 83) and Zuckert (1994, 364-65).

Near the end of Chapter 31 of Leviathan, Hobbes has a short section on "natural punishments."  Hobbes observes that natural laws are enforced by the natural punishments that arise as natural consequences of violating those natural laws.  So, for example, injustice is punished by the violence of enemies.  Or as he puts it in the Latin version of Leviathan, "those who use violence are punished by the violence of others; . . . and such are what I call natural punishments" (Hobbes 2012, pp. 572-73).

Cumberland's Treatise, first published in 1672, was one of the first attempts to refute Hobbes's theories.  In arguing that Hobbes was inconsistent with himself in denying the obligations of the law of nature in the state of nature, Cumberland points out that Hobbes's remarks about "natural punishments" show how, even in the state of nature without any civil government, human beings are naturally inclined to vengeance against those who violate the law of nature, which provides the natural sanction for that law of nature.  And since human beings are equal in their liberty in the state of nature, each individual would have the equal natural right to punish wrongdoers, so that the likely costs of wrongdoing would outweigh any likely benefits.  Consequently, even those men who might be so evil as to lack any conscience that would recognize God's punishment of sin could not escape the punishment coming from human vengeance against injustice (Cumberland 2005, I.26, V.25).

The crucial point here is that for natural law to be truly natural, it cannot depend upon belief in divine law enforced by eternal rewards and punishments from God as the moral lawgiver.  A purely natural law can be sanctioned by the natural human propensity to punish violent injustice, which expresses a natural inclination to vengeance shared with other animals.

This is an important element of the Lockean liberal argument for religious liberty and toleration.  If the good moral order of any society depends on certain religious beliefs, this supports using legal coercion to enforce those religious beliefs.  But if the natural moral law can be enforced by natural punishments, regardless of religious beliefs, then there is no justification for legally compelling belief in religious doctrines thought to sustain moral conduct.  This point is clear in Locke's Letter Concerning Toleration, where he argues that it is unjust for the European conquerors of America to use legal coercion to compel the American Indians to convert to Christianity, because these "innocent Pagans" are "strict Observers of the Rules of Equity and of the Law of Nature, and no ways offending against the Laws of the Society" (Locke 2010, 40, 76-77).  The natural right to punish those who violate the laws of nature enforces those laws without any need for religious beliefs about divine punishment.

Here, then, is the fundamental idea of Locke's natural executive power, implicit in the thought of Aquinas and Hobbes, developed by Cumberland, and elaborated by Locke.

Once we have traced this idea in the history of ideas, the next step for the serious student of political philosophy is to test the truth of this idea by formulating some testable predictions that follow from this idea, and then we must gather and assess the relevant empirical evidence.  I can think of at least seven testable predictions.

1.  In the human prehistoric foraging era and in ethnographies of foraging bands, we should see evidence for retaliatory violence by individuals acting against other individuals who harm them or threaten to harm them.

2.  We should see evidence for vengeful violence in some nonhuman animals, particularly those closely related to humans.

3.  We should see evidence for a natural human propensity to punish cheaters in experimental games.

4.  We should see evidence for neural mechanisms in the human brain for first-party, second-party, and third-party punishment.

5.  We should see evidence in human natural history for weapons and social mechanisms that reduced the costs of punishment.

6.  We should see evidence in human history that the establishment of bureaucratic states during the agrarian era had a generally pacifying effect in reducing human violence.

7.  We should see evidence in human history of resistance to tyrannical dominance and support for political institutions favoring some approximation to the equal liberty of the evolutionary state of nature.

I have written various posts on how Darwinian science might confirm these predictions.  I will say more in some future posts.


REFERENCES

Aquinas, Thomas. 1981. Summa Theologica. Westminster, MD: Christian Classics.

Arneil, Barbara. 1996. John Locke and America: The Defense of English Colonialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Ashcraft, Richard. 1968. "Locke's State of Nature: Historical Fact or Moral Fiction?" American Political Science Review 62: 898-915.

Ashcraft, Richard. 1987. Locke's Two Treatises of Government. London: Allen and Unwin.

Batz, William G. 1974. "The Historical Anthropology of John Locke." Journal of the History of Ideas 35: 663-670.

Cumberland, Richard. 2005. A Treatise of the Laws of Nature. Ed. Jon Parkin. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund.

Dunn, John. 1969. The Political Thought of John Locke. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Elliott, J. H. 1972. "The Discovery of America and the Discovery of Man." Proceedings of the British Academy 58: 101-125.

Glat, Mark. 1981. "John Locke's Historical Sense." Review of Politics 43: 3-21.

Hobbes, Thomas. 2012. Leviathan. 3 vols. Ed. Noel Malcolm. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Locke, John. 1988. Two Treatises of Government. Ed. Peter Laslett. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Locke, John. 2010. A Letter Concerning Toleration and Other Writings. Ed. Mark Goldie. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund.

Martens, Stephanie. 2016. The Americas in Early Modern Political Theory. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Meek, Ronald. 2011. Social Science and the Ignoble Savage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Myers, Peter C. 1998. Our Only Star and Compass: Locke and the Struggle for Political Rationality. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.

Pangle, Thomas. 1988. The Spirit of Modern Republicanism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Strauss, Leo. 1953. Natural Right and History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Waldron, Jeremy. 1989. "John Locke: Social Contract Versus Political Anthropology." Review of Politics 51: 3-28.

Zuckert, Michael. 1994. Natural Rights and the New Republicanism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

The Embodied Capital Theory of Life History Supports Locke on Parental Care in the State of Nature

Leo Strauss taught his students at the University of Chicago that any serious student of the history of political philosophy must assume the possibility that what the great philosophers have taught might be true.  Writers of the textbooks on the history of political philosophy--like that of George Sabine--had assumed the truth of "historicism"--that all the great philosophers have been so imprisoned by the cultural prejudices of their time and place that they could not see the truths about political life that contemporary readers can see today.  But Strauss argued that historicism is itself the great cultural prejudice of our time that cannot be affirmed as true without contradicting itself, and therefore serious thinkers must consider the possibility that the human mind can free itself of common opinions and apprehend what is simply true, and thus that the great philosophers--from Plato and Aristotle to Rousseau and Nietzsche--might help us to see some truths about human nature and human history that go beyond the largely unexamined opinions of our day.

Roger Masters was one of the students at Chicago who was persuaded by Strauss's argument, and Masters devoted himself to the careful study and translation of the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, with the thought that Rousseau was one of those great philosophers who might teach something about the truth of human nature and politics.  Masters became one of the leading translators and scholars of Rousseau in the 1960s.  He was particularly interested in Rousseau's account of the state of nature and social contract reasoning as compared with Thomas Hobbes and John Locke.

Then, in the 1970s and 1980s, Masters began to study evolutionary science and Darwinian anthropology, with the thought that this science of human evolution might illuminate the debate between Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau over the state of nature.  Masters thus became one of the first political scientists to apply Darwinian science to the study of political philosophy.

According to Rousseau, neither Hobbes nor Locke recognized that in the state of nature human beings were so completely solitary that they would have lived in a state of peace and equality without any dependence on other human beings.  Masters wrote this as his English translation of one of Rousseau's passages in the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality:

"Alone, idle, and always near danger, savage man must like to sleep, and be a light sleeper like animals which, thinking little, sleep so to speak all the time they do not think.  His self-preservation being almost his only care, his best-trained faculties must be those having as principal object attack and defense, either to subjugate his prey or to save himself from being the prey of another animal." (Rousseau 1964, 112)

This was published in 1964 in Masters' edition of The First and Second Discourses.  Then, in 1982, when Masters read Frans de Waal's Chimpanzee Politics, which describes the complex political lives of chimpanzees competing for power and alpha male dominance in small groups, Masters saw that this implied that the earliest evolutionary ancestors shared with chimpanzees and human beings were probably highly political animals.  He also saw that anthropologists studying the societies of human hunter-gatherers had shown the complex social order of these primitive human groups. Consequently, it seemed that biologists and anthropologists had shown that human beings in a state of nature could not have been utterly solitary, as Rousseau claimed. 

And if Strauss was right about taking seriously the possibility that the teaching of a great philosopher like Rousseau could be true, this must include the possibility that the teaching could be false.  Philosophers make empirical claims about human nature and human history that could be either confirmed or denied by scientific research.  So, Masters had to admit that Rousseau's teaching about the state of nature had been refuted by Darwinian science.  "Like chimps," Masters concluded, "humans are by nature social animals with innate political behaviors of a sort ignored by Rousseau in the passage I'd translated" (Masters 2013, 227).

I agree with Masters about this, because in a series of posts, I have argued that the evidence from evolutionary science and political anthropology allows us to judge the philosophic debate over the state of nature and to conclude that while Rousseau was mostly wrong, Hobbes was partly right, and Locke was mostly right.  This illustrates how the study of the history of political philosophy can become a biopolitical science.

Consider, for example, how Locke's account of the human family as the "first society" in the state of nature is confirmed by the "embodied capital theory" of the evolution of human life history, which is supported by lots of evidence gathered by Darwinian primatologists and anthropologists.

In the Two Treatises, Locke gives both religious and natural explanations for human familial bonding in the state of nature.  It shows the "wisdom of the great Creator" that He has created human beings with desires for monogamous marrying and for mothers and fathers jointly caring for their children (1970a, 86-89; 1970b, 77-80).  This can also be explained through the natural history of animal reproduction as adapted to the feeding niche for each species.  For some frugivorous animals who feed on grass and plants, whose offspring can survive shortly after birth without much parental care, Locke explains, mothers care for the offspring with no need for fathers to provide any parental care, and consequently there is no need for any enduring bond between the sexual mates.  But for those carnivorous animals who feed on meat from hunting, there is a natural need for an enduring pair-bonding of the sexual mates to provide biparental care.  If mothers cannot feed themselves and their offspring without the help of males, because they need the meat provided by male hunting, or if birth-spacing is short that mothers can often have multiple dependent offspring requiring prolonged care from both parents, then these animals will have a more enduring conjugal bond; and this is true for human beings.  As compared with other animals, human offspring are dependent on adult care for a long period of childhood, in which children cannot produce enough food to feed themselves.  During this period of dependence, offspring must be not only nourished but also educated, because complex human social life requires a prolonged period of social learning in which children learn the skills they will need to become productive adults.

In contrast to Locke, Rousseau argued that human beings in the "pure state of nature" were asocial and almost completely solitary animals.  Men and women encountered one another by accident and engaged in sexual intercourse whenever the desire moved them, and then they immediately left each other and felt no tie to one another.  Mothers nursed their children for a short time.  But as soon as the children could feed themselves, they left their mother, and they soon would no longer recognize one another.  So while the maternal attachment to children was the one social bond in the state of nature, it was only a momentary bond that created no enduring social recognition between parents and children and no support for the mother and child from the father (Rousseau 1964, 108, 112, 120-21, 130-31, 137, 142, 147, 216, 219).

In one of the longest notes in the Second Discourse (1964, 213-20)--note l--Rousseau quotes the entirety of sections 79-80 of Locke's Second Treatise, where Locke lays out his reasoning for monogamous pair-bonding and biparental care in the state of nature.  Rousseau denies the factual truth of Locke's claims about animal reproduction and parental care, and accuses him of making the same mistake that Hobbes made in projecting what we see in human beings today back into the state of nature. 

Against Locke, Rousseau insists that primitive human beings were totally frugivorous in their feeding and not at all carnivorous.  Mothers and children who feed on grass and plants can easily feed themselves without any need for meat from male hunters.  Furthermore, Rousseau argues that fact that human females have only two teats indicates that they rarely have more than one child at a time that needs care, and thus mothers and children have no need for help from the men.

Over the past 100 years, studies of human hunting-gathering societies and comparative studies of other primate and mammalian societies have provided evidence that Rousseau was mostly wrong, and Locke was mostly right.  This evidence shows that as compared with other mammals and primates, human beings show at least five distinctive traits (Balshine 2012).  The first four pertain to human life history.  Human beings have an unusually long lifespan.  They have also have an unusually long period of juvenile dependence on adults.  They show an unusual pattern of support for reproduction from older post-reproductive adults.  And they show male support of reproduction through the provisioning of females and their offspring.  The fifth distinctively human trait is unusually large brains that bring increased capacities for social learning, teaching, and thinking about cognitively challenging problems.  Human hunter-gatherers, who live in what the early modern philosophers called the state of nature, show all of these traits.

One persuasive evolutionary theory that fits all of this evidence for these distinctively human traits is the embodied capital theory developed by Hillard Kaplan and his colleagues (Kaplan et al. 2000).  The main idea is that the human species show an evolutionary adaptation for a feeding niche based on high-quality, nutrient-dense, and difficult-to-acquire foods, which is a skill-intensive niche that requires extended learning through big brains.

Chimpanzees and other nonhuman primates feed mostly on leaves, small, unripe fruit, and large, ripe fruit, which constitutes over 90% of their diet.  Gathering this food requires so little skill and effort that young chimpanzees after they have been weaned can gather enough to feed themselves.  Chimpanzees do extract some food from nuts and insects in ways that require some skill that has to be learned.  And the males do engage in some hunting that requires some skill.  But the extracted food and the hunted meat is a very small portion of their diet, and the skills required for acquiring this food are not very complicated.

By contrast with chimpanzees, over 75% of the diet of human foragers is meat from hunting, which requires great skill that comes only from adult males who have learned those skills over a period of 30 years or more.  In contrast to leaves and fruit, meat is higher quality food, rich in protein, and highly concentrated, but it is also more difficult to acquire.  Hunted meat provides the nutrition necessary for the growth and maintenance of big brains that consume high levels of metabolic energy.  And it is these big brains that are necessary for learning the skills necessary for successful hunting.

Unlike chimpanzees, adult male human foragers must produce food for the feeding of women and children.  Human children consume more food than they produce until about age 20.  Human females consume more food than they produce throughout their childhood and their years of reproductive fertility.  Human females produce slightly more than they consume only after menopause and before old age.  Human females can have shorter birth intervals than apes do, because human females get food subsidies from adult male hunters, so that mothers can care for two or more children at a time.  Most of the production of food comes from adult males (ages 25-55) through hunting, who share their food with women and children.

Tracking and killing wild game of many different species is an intellectually challenging problem that takes many years of social learning with a large brain that requires many years of growth.  Consequently, both mothers and fathers must make many years of resource investments in the rearing and educating of their children before they can become productive contributors to reproductive fitness.

If this is the scientific description of the state of nature--of the original life of our earliest human ancestors--then Locke was mostly right, and Rousseau was mostly wrong.  This would then be an example of how Darwinian science can contribute to the study of the history of political philosophy by helping us to judge the claims that the philosophers have made as being true or false.

REFERENCES

Balshine, Sigal. 2012. "Patterns of Parental Care in Vertebrates." In Nick J. Royle, Per T. Smiseth, and Mathias Kolliker, eds., The Evolution of Parental Care, 62-80. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Kaplan, Hillard, Kim Hill, Jane Lancaster, A Magdalena Hurtado. 2000. "A Theory of Human Life History Evolution: Diet, Intelligence, and Longevity." Evolutionary Anthropology, 9:156-185.

Masters, Roger. 2013. "On the Relationship between Liberalism and Darwinism," in Stephen Dilley, ed., Darwinian Evolution and Classical Liberalism: Theories in Tension, 217-236. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.

Locke, John. 1979. Two Treatises of Government. Edited by Peter Laslett. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. 1964. The First and Second Discourses. Translated by Roger D. and Judith R. Masters.  New York: St. Martin's Press.

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.

Strauss, Darwin, and the Pursuit of a Comprehensive Natural Science

In their recent essay (“Skepticism, Experience, and Science”), Glenn Ellmers and J. Eric Wise claim that the scholars in the tradition of Leo Strauss have failed to include the knowledge gained by modern natural science—particularly, physics and biology—as part of their recovery of the skeptical political philosophy that began with Plato and Aristotle.[1]  Consequently, they have failed to show how political philosophy as the architectonic science can contribute to the pursuit of a modern comprehensive science of the whole. 

Instead of engaging the deep questions raised by modern science about the universe and the place of human beings in that universe, Ellmers and Wise contend, Straussian scholars have withdrawn into a narrow academic profession devoted mostly to commentaries on old texts that repeat the standard interpretive themes of the Straussian tradition of thought.  Ellmers and Wise say that increasingly the new generation of students is losing interest in Straussian teachers who have little to say about the profound issues arising in modern science and technology.

Ellmers and Wise suggest but do not elaborate what I see as the explanation for this situation—Strauss’s fear that the victory of modern natural science over Aristotelian science has created a problem for natural right for which there is no adequate solution that would allow natural right to be rooted in a comprehensive science of nature.

The Problem of Natural Right

As Strauss explained it in the Introduction to Natural Right and History, the problem for natural right is that modern natural science is antiteleological and reductionist, and thus it denies the natural teleology and irreducible complexity of the human species that support the Aristotelian science of natural right.[2]  Strauss thought this was evident in the antiteleological and reductionist science of Darwinian evolution.  The mistake of Strauss (and many of his students) is in failing to see how Aristotle’s biological science of the natural ends and natural kinds of life has been confirmed and deepened by Darwinian biology in ways that support a modern science of natural right.[3]

According to Strauss, natural right in its classic form requires a teleological view of nature, because reason can discern what is by nature good for human beings only if they have a natural end distinctive to the human species.  Strauss thought Aristotle had the clearest view of this dependence of natural right on natural teleology.  But “the issue between the mechanical and the teleological conception of the universe is decided by the manner in which the problem of the heavens, the heavenly bodies, and their motion is solved,” and through modern science “the issue seems to have been decided in favor of the nonteleological conception of the universe.”  The motion of the heavenly bodies is determined by mechanical causes that act without ends or purposes, and thus there is no cosmic teleology to support natural right.

This creates a dilemma, Strauss explained.  If the science of man is to be part of a nonteleological science of nature, then human action must be explained by reduction to physical impulses, which seems inadequate to explain the purposefulness of human action.  The only alternative appears to be “a fundamental, typically modern, dualism of a nonteleological natural science and a teleological science of man,” but this rejects the comprehensive naturalism of the premodern exponents of natural right such as Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas.

Neither reductionism nor dualism was fully satisfactory for Strauss.  He concluded: “The fundamental dilemma, in whose grip we are, is caused by the victory of modern natural science.  An adequate solution to the problem of natural right cannot be found before this basic problem has been solved.”  “Needless to say,” Strauss then added, “the present lectures cannot deal with this problem,” because the lectures published as Natural Right and History are “limited to that aspect of the problem of natural right which can be clarified within the confines of the social sciences.”

Remarkably, the reader of Natural Right and History reaches the end of the book without ever seeing a solution to this problem of reconciling natural right and modern natural science.  Moreover, neither Strauss nor his students (with the exception of Roger Masters) have ever attempted to solve this problem.[4]

Amazingly, in the "Preface to the 7th Impression" of Natural Right and History in 1970, just three years before his death, Strauss spoke of his "preference" for natural right, which sounded like the historicist position as he described it in his book.

The two unsatisfactory alternatives in Strauss’s dilemma can be called “reductionist monism” and “transcendentalist dualism.”  According to reductionist monism, everything should be ultimately reducible to physical mechanism, but this cannot adequately explain the evident purposefulness of human thought and action.  According to transcendentalist dualism, human beings are uniquely free to transcend the nonteleological realm of natural causes, but this typically modern dualism denies us the comprehensive science of nature that we need to make the whole intelligible as a whole.

The Search for Comprehensive Science

In a lecture course on “Natural Right” that Strauss taught in 1962, he explained his reluctant acceptance of transcendentalist dualism.[5]

Seeing that the approach which is peculiar to modern natural science leads to a distortion of human phenomena, the most convenient thing to do is to speak of a dualism of the sciences: the sciences of nature and the sciences of man as man. . . . This distinction was generally known in Germany as the distinction of the natural and cultural sciences. . . . You have heard of this as the humanistic understanding of man in opposition to the scientific understanding of man. . . . So this dualism of sciences is a convenient practical solution.  But—and here I agree with the positivists—there is a need for an ultimate unity of science.  So this dualism of science can be accepted only as provisionally indispensable.  But this comprehensive science is today only a pious wish; and therefore one cannot say more than that it is to be desired.

Strauss’s reference here to the distinction known in Germany is apparently pointing to Wilhelm Dilthey’s separation of the Naturwissenschaften (natural sciences) from the Geisteswissenschaften (the sciences of the human mind or spirit, the sciences of culture, or the humanities).  The natural sciences seek causal explanations of the objectively observable realm of Nature.  The humanities seek interpretive understanding of the subjectively experienced realm of Spirit or Mind or Culture, which is the uniquely human realm.  The social sciences are in between these two opposing positions, and thus torn in opposite directions.  It has been common for conservative political philosophers—Roger Scruton, for example—to invoke this dualism as a way to defend humanistic knowledge against the expansive claims of modern natural science.[6]

This division of the intellectual world into two or three utterly separated realms of study explains the fragmented incoherence of academic life today, an incoherence that also infects our cultural life generally.  That’s why Strauss yearned for an ultimate unity of thought in a “comprehensive science.”  And that seems to be what Ellmers and Wise are striving for in arguing that the Straussians need to see the unity of the sciences through the architectonic science of skeptical political philosophy.

As an escape from Strauss’s dilemma that moves towards a comprehensive science of nature that supports natural right, I have argued for a Darwinian liberal education that sustains Darwinian natural right, which rests upon what I call “emergentist naturalism.”  Unlike the transcendentalist dualist, I affirm the continuity of nature and the integration of human beings within the natural order.  Unlike the reductionist monist, I affirm the irreducible complexity of nature, in which novel properties emerge at higher levels of organization that cannot be reduced to lower levels, so that the uniqueness of human beings as a natural kind comes from the emergent properties that distinguish the human species, which include those distinctively human natural ends that constitute the ground of natural right.  I thus draw from a long tradition in Darwinian biology of thinking about emergent evolution, which Ellmers and Wise acknowledge in referring to “the overwhelming evidence for such ‘emergent’ order in evolutionary biology.”

Straussians need to see that evolutionary biology recognizes emergent differences in kind when differences in degree pass over a critical threshold of complexity.  In his lecture in 1962, Strauss criticized the theory of evolution for teaching that “there is no essential difference between man and the brutes because man has developed out of the brutes.”  But while Darwin did say in The Descent of Man that the difference between man and the higher mammals “great as it is, is certainly one of degree and not of kind,” he also suggested in various passages that there is a qualitative difference in kind insofar as human beings are unique in their capacities for conceptual thought, symbolic language, and moral judgment.[7]

While Darwin recognized the uniqueness of human capacities as showing a difference in kind, he feared that acknowledging this would suggest a radical difference in kind due to a miraculous creation of “spiritual powers” beyond nature.[8]  He did not see that an emergent difference in kind allows for qualitative novelty but without any miraculous break in the underlying continuity of nature.  A radical difference in kind would suggest a transcendentalist dualism with an absolute separation between natural law and human freedom.  An emergent difference in kind recognizes human uniqueness without such a dualistic separation.  So we can explain the specialness of the human mind as arising from the evolution of the primate brain passing over a critical threshold of size and complexity, where uniquely human powers arise that cannot be seen in lower primate brains. 

Leon Kass has made the same point in suggesting that Darwinian biology supports an emergent naturalism in which novel traits arise in evolutionary development at each higher level of organization in an “unbroken line of descent,” so that differences in degree pass over a critical threshold leading to differences in kind.[9]

Darwin also recognized the natural teleology that supports natural right.  But contrary to Strauss, this natural teleology in organic life is not a cosmic teleology of the heavenly bodies but an immanent teleology displayed in the goal-directed activity of living entities and processes.  This is the sort of teleology that Aristotle studied in his biological works.

Near the end of his life, Darwin read Aristotle's explanation of biological teleology in The Parts of Animals; and Darwin saw that he really was bringing back into science a teleological conception of living nature that was originally formulated by Aristotle.[10]  So Strauss and his students are wrong when they assume that Darwinian science denies the Aristotelian teleology necessary for natural right.

Aristotle and Darwin show us that it is possible to root natural right in an immanent teleology of living beings rather than a cosmic teleology of the universe.  Strauss himself points to something like this in one passage of Natural Right and History:

However indifferent to moral distinctions the cosmic order may be thought to be, human nature, as distinguished from nature in general, may very well be the basis of such distinctions. . . . the fact that the atoms are beyond good and bad does not justify the inference that there is nothing by nature good or bad for any compound of atoms, and especially for those compounds which we call “men.” . . . We must distinguish between those human desires and inclinations which are in accordance with human nature and therefore good for man, and those which are destructive of his nature or his humanity and therefore bad.  We are thus led to the notion of a life, a human life, that is good because it is in accordance with nature.[11]

If the good is the desirable, and the naturally good is the naturally desirable, and if the naturally desirable is rooted in our natural human instincts, then the question of natural right becomes the question of how best to understand the range of our instinctively natural desires.  This assumes an immanent teleology of human nature that does not require a cosmic teleology of the universe.  And while cosmic teleology has been refuted by modern natural science, the immanent teleology of evolved human nature can be supported by modern evolutionary science.

The Natural Science of Political Theory and Political Practice

If I am right about this conception of Darwinian natural right as part of a comprehensive natural science, Straussian scholars might wonder what difference this could make for their research and teaching, as largely devoted to the interpretation of classic texts in studying the theory and practice of politics.

I can respond with two illustrations.  First, if we are studying the political theory of the state of nature in the texts of Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau, we can adjudicate this debate among the political philosophers by looking to the account in Darwinian anthropology of the hunter-gatherer human ancestors in the evolutionary state of nature.  Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau studied carefully the European reports of what the American Indians in the New World were like, because, as Locke said, “In the beginning, all the world was America,” and so the American Indians provide “a pattern of the first ages in Asia and Europe.”[12]  Now we have 200 years of anthropological evidence and theorizing about the life of human foragers in the state of nature, which we can use to clarify and perhaps even resolve the debate between Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau.  My conclusion from this is that Darwinian anthropology shows that Hobbes was partly right, Rousseau was mostly wrong, and Locke was mostly right.[13]  This conclusion is open to dispute.  But at least this illustrates how the Straussian study of political philosophy could draw knowledge from Darwinian science as a step towards the comprehensive science that Strauss desired.

As a second illustration, if we are studying the political practice of American statesmanship as manifest in Abraham Lincoln’s career, and if we have a special interest in explaining his Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863, we could apply the intellectual framework of “biopolitical science” as the Darwinian science of political animals.  This requires that we understand evolutionary political history as moving through three levels of analysis—the natural history of the species, the cultural history of the group, and the individual history of animals within the group.  To fully comprehend the nature of politics within the natural order of the whole, we must understand the unity of political universals, the diversity of political cultures, and the individuality of political judgments.  We can see these three levels of biopolitical history manifest in Lincoln’s decision to issue the Emancipation Proclamation: we can see it as an event in the natural history of cooperation and conflict in the human species, in the cultural history of the debate over slavery in America, and in the individual history of Lincoln as a political actor in American history.[14]

If Strauss was right about the “need for an ultimate unity of science” that would solve the problem of natural right, then what I have sketched could move us toward this goal--the comprehensive science of nature that supports Darwinian natural right.

---

[1] Glenn Ellmers and J. Eric Wise, “Skepticism, Experience, and Science,” The American Mind blog, americanmind.org/essays/skepticism-experience-and-science.

[2] Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), 1-8.

[3] Here I briefly state some points that I have elaborated elsewhere: Darwinian Natural Right: The Biological Ethics of Human Nature (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998), 231-48; “Defending Darwinian Natural Right,” Interpretation 27 (2000): 263-77; “Darwinian Liberal Education,” Academic Questions 19, n. 4 (2006): 6-18; Darwinian Conservatism: A Disputed Question, ed. Kenneth C. Blanchard (Exeter, UK: Imprint Academic, 2009), 104-111; “Darwinian Conservatism Versus Metaphysical Conservatism,” The Intercollegiate Review 45 (Fall 2010): 22-32;  Political Questions: Political Philosophy from Plato to Pinker, 4^th ed. (Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press, 2016), Chapter 14 on Strauss.

[4] See Roger Masters, The Nature of Politics (New Haven, CN: Yale University Press, 1989); Masters, Beyond Relativism: Science and Human Values (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1993); and Larry Arnhart, “Roger Masters: Natural Right and Biology,” in Kenneth L. Deutsch and John A. Murley, eds., Leo Strauss, the Straussians, and the American Regime (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999), 293-303.

[5] An audio of this course is available at the website of the Leo Strauss Center: https://leostrausscenter.uchicago.edu/course/natural-right-autumn-quarter-1962  My quotation is found at 24-29 minutes into session 2.

[6] See Roger Scruton, On Human Nature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017), and Larry Arnhart, “Roger Scruton’s Fallacious Argument in On Human Nature,” https://darwinianconservatism.blogspot.com/2017/11/roger-scrutons-fallacious-argument-in.html

[7] Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, 2 vols., 2^nd ed. (London: J. Murray, 1871), vol. 1, pp. 54, 62, 70, 88; vol. 2, pp. 391-92).

[8] Darwin, Descent, vol. 1, p. 186.

[9] Leon Kass, The Hungry Soul: Eating and the Perfecting of Our Nature (New York: Free Press, 1994), 12, 14, 39, 59-63, 76-79.uhUHH

[10] See Allan Gotthelf, “Darwin on Aristotle,” in Gotthelf, Teleology, First Princiles, and Scientific Method in Aristotle’s Biology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 345-69, and Larry Arnhart, “The Biology of Natural Right: Aristotle, Darwin, Strauss, and Rand,” http://darwinianconservatism.blogspot.com/2013/09/the-biology-of-natural-right-aristotle.html

[11] Strauss, Natural Right and History, 94-95.

[12] John Locke, Second Treatise of Government, secs. 49, 108.

[13] See Arnhart, Political Questions, 189-93, 228-36, 284-93.

[14] See Larry Arnhart, “Biopolitical Science,” in James E. Fleming and Sanford Levinson, eds., Evolution and Morality (New York: New York University Press, 2012), 221-265.