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Why Do Philosophers Talk so Much and Read so Little About the Stone Age? False factual claims in appropriation-based property theory
Karl Widerquist
Visiting Associate Professor, Georgetown University-Qatar Karl@Widerquist.com
Word Count: 9,523
NOTE: “Self-citations” in this article refer to: Karl Widerquist “A Dilemma for Libertarianism,” Politics, Philosophy, and Economics 8, No. 1, February 2009, pp. 43-72.
Introduction
Political philosophers often talk about the Stone Age. They tell stories about the state of nature, the origin of government, and the appropriation of property, all of which occurred in prehistory, but they seldom refer to evidence of what actually happened in the Stone or Bronze Ages. Political philosophy (or political theory)1 is not an empirical discipline, but it cannot be unconcerned with the truth of factual claims. On many issues, philosophers are very good about treating truth claims appropriately. For example, the philosophical debate on the ethics of global warming is well informed by primary research. But when it comes to the Stone Age, many philosophers make (and seem willing to accept) broad pronouncements with little or no supporting evidence.
Perhaps they believe their claims are obviously true. If so, they must be prepared to back them up if they turn out to be controversial. Perhaps they only intend to examine the ramifications of controversial factual claims without researching them. If so, they must admit
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that their conclusions are tentative. Perhaps they believe fact checking is the job of another discipline. Unfortunately, there are no empirical researchers trolling through philosophical journals looking for claims to investigate. If we neglect to do so much as read the relevant empirical literature, we are in danger of passing on false claims year-after-year or century-after- century.
Perhaps philosophers believe their claims are metaphors illustrating a deeper, underlying, purely normative argument. If so, they should state it explicitly. Readers should not have the burden of constructing argument out of metaphor. At the very least, philosophers should be clear about whether a factual statements is unsupported because it is a metaphor, or because they believe it is an obvious truth. Yet, when the claim involves prehistory, philosophers have a surprising willingness to accept this kind of ambiguity, even though relying on a claim as an obvious truth is nearly the opposite of relying on it as a metaphor.
The subject of this article has nothing to do with the fact-value distinction. Pure ethical theory does not require factual claims, but applied ethical theory always does. This article is directed at applied ethical theories and theories that are ambiguous about whether or not they are applied.
This essay presents a through investigation of truth claims in the natural rights justification for private property based on unilateral appropriation (some version of which is involved in most arguments for strong private property rights). This theory is a good example of the undisciplined use of factual assertions about the Stone Age. Property rights advocates typically tell an appropriation story as if it were true, present little or no evidence that it is true, make no explicit claim that it is a metaphor, and seldom state an underlying a priori argument capable of replacing the metaphor. Philosophers have extensively explored the normative difference between natural property rights theory and competing theories, but they have paid little attention to the factual claims embedded in the appropriation story. Are they necessary to support property rights advocates’ conclusions? If so, are they true?
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“Part One” demonstrates that appropriation-based property rights theory is an applied theory. This demonstration is necessary because many property rights advocates have been unclear about the extent to which they rely on empirical claims, even though many of them explicitly draw on factual premises at important points. “Part Two” examines these claims against evidence from anthropology and archeology. It finds that they are certainly unsubstantiated and possibly refuted. “Part Three” discusses the implications of the argument.
Part One
Property rights advocates are well aware that their theories rely on empirical facts. Nozick writes, “Justice in holdings is historical; it depends on what actually has happened.”2 Loren Lomasky writes, “What is in fact the case carries moral weight”.3 Rothbard writes, “We can only find the answer [to who owns property] through investigating the concrete data of the particular case, i.e. through ‘historical’ inquiry.”4 Yet, the works of these authors contain little historical inquiry. They seem to believe that, although historical investigation might be necessary to show that any particular person’s claim to any particular piece of property is justified, no such investigation is necessary to prove their general conclusion. That is, private property rights extend over all or most resources; those rights imply strong (possibly overriding) moral limits on government’s powers of taxation, regulation, and redistribution.5
In Nozick’s version of the natural rights argument, justice in holdings is determined entirely by the repeated application of three principles: original acquisition (appropriation), voluntary transfer, and rectification. The second and third principles are fairly straightforward. Most of the attention in the debate of natural rights theory focuses on appropriation.
Although there are many different versions of appropriation theory, basic elements of it are common to all and well known. The first person to do X with a resource appropriates it unilaterally.6 That is, she establishes ownership without the need for the consent of anyone else.
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This X can be discovery, first use, first occupancy, first claim, first labor, and so on. Israel Kirzner endorses discovery. Lomasky and Jan Narveson both endorse something like first use or first occupancy.7 Probably the greater number property rights advocates, including Rothbard, Boaz, and (tentatively) Nozick, follow John Locke in endorsing first labor: particularly the transformation of the resource through labor.
If labor is the criteria, a hunter appropriates her kill but not the land on which she hunted because she transforms only the kill. A farmer, on the other hand, appropriates both the crops she planted and the land that she cleared, because she transforms both. Discovery, use, occupancy, and claim would seem to bestow ownership on hunter-gatherers, although most property rights advocates seem unwilling embrace that possibility.
The lack of connection between current titleholders and original appropriators is the only empirical issue that is received significant attention in the debate over property rights theory, but critics and supporters alike agree that the vast majority of modern property rights cannot be traced by a series of just steps to original appropriation. This problem is not necessarily fatal. Again, most property rights advocates are open to the idea that many current property titles might be unjust. Their main concern is to justify the general pattern in which someone’s private property rights place extensive moral limits on government. Still in a world in which the true heirs of the original appropriators cannot be found, we need some basis on which to say X owns this and Y does not. I have elsewhere argued that property rights advocates solve this problem (tacitly or explicitly) by invoking a fourth principle I call the “statute of limitations,” which can take the form of a time limit on rectification of past wrongs, adverse possession, abandonment and re-appropriation, or relative title.8
The statute of limitations cannot free property rights advocates from the need for empirical investigation of prehistoric appropriation, because it frees current holders—whoever they are—from the need to make a connection to original appropriation. Governments have held sovereignty for a long time, and most property rights advocates admit that sovereignty is
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essentially the assertion of landownership. Nozick imagines a small utopian community that exists on jointly held land. “The community will be entitled then, as a body, to determine what regulations are to be obeyed on its land; whereas the citizens of a nation do not jointly own its land and so cannot in this way regulate its use.” Lomasky writes, “[S]uppose that title to all property was conferred to one person, the king, and no one else owned anything. It would follow that should anyone make use of any item except with the sufferance of the king that person would be guilty of interference.” Rothbard writes, “If the State may be said to properly own its territory, then it is proper for it to make rules for anyone who presumes to live in that area.”
Thus, all three recognize the conceptual possibility of what I will call a property-owning government (a state that owns full or partial interest in its territory). They need to show that the state cannot or does not have just ownership of its territory. Property rights advocates cannot simply rule out a property-owning government on the grounds of its inability to show an unbroken chain of just transfers to original appropriation, because private property holders have the same inability. Unless property rights advocates can come up with a reason to apply the statute of limitations selectively, it protects a property-owning government as well as any other property owner.9
I have argued elsewhere that natural rights theory cannot rule out a property-owning government on a priori grounds. Arguments based on negative freedom, self-ownership, the “Lockean proviso,” the need for consent, the supposed inherent criminality of government, and so forth fail to drive a wedge between the ownership of resources by government and the ownership of resources by any other corporate entity.10 Therefore, property rights advocates have to rely on empirical claims how appropriation and subsequent trade actually occurred.
Nozick uses what he calls, “hypothetical history.” He argues that if “the hypothetical just history is ‘close’ to the actual history,” the structure it produces “will be as just as one can expect to get.” But if hypothetical history involved in producing the structure that now exists necessarily involves either rights violations or implausible assumptions about what people have consented
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to, that structure must be ruled unjust. He tells one hypothetical history in which private property arises justly, one in which a minimal state arises justly out of a protective association, and two in which a more-than-minimal state arises unjustly or with implausible assumption.
The three hypothetical histories involving government all begin with individual private property rights in place. Unsurprisingly, powerful governments violate those property rights. The other hypothetical history is the standard Lockean appropriation story in which individuals in a state of nature go into an unclaimed wilderness, clear the land, and establish private property rights. The operative premise in these hypothetical histories is that individual private property precedes collective property: resources are unowned when private individuals come along but they are individually owned when collectives come along. That is an empirical assertion about events that took place in prehistory.
Nozick challenges people who believe in any other form of property to “provide a theory of how such property rights arise.” Once of frees oneself from Nozick’s Stone Age presumption, this challenge is not difficult:
(1) A hunter-gatherer band discovers, uses, occupies, and claims land. Later, they jointly begin to farm that land and hold it jointly. Anyone who does not want to participate in that project under those rules may go off into the wilderness alone or with whomever they choose. Therefore, everyone who remains agrees to these terms as much as anyone agrees to a market transaction. Eventually this group parcels out land to individuals with the understanding that it is subject to taxation, regulation, and redistribution by the collective. (2) An individual, Lockean appropriator chooses not to join any protective association. She protects her estate herself. She enlarges it through strategic marriage alliance, primogeniture, and rectification in defensive wars until one day her estate is the size of England and he calls herself “the Queen.” In both (1) and (2), a more-than-minimal government comes into existence without violating the principles of appropriation, voluntary transfer, or rectification.11
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Nozick’s only available response to these examples is that his “hypothetical just history is ‘close[r]’ to the actual history.” Yet, Nozick presents no evidence about how original appropriation actually happened. His justification for such strong, individual private property rights, therefore, rests entirely on uninvestigated assumptions about events that occurred in the Stone Age. Nozick distracts attention from this assumption and focuses it on his moral theory, but his moral theory says only that people should respect each other’s ownership rights. It says nothing about whether rent-collecting landlords or tax-collecting governments have a better empirical claim to ownership. Without empirical evidence, Nozick has given us no reason at all to accept his conclusions about limited government.
Nozick is not they only property rights advocate who distracts attention from the extent to which his conclusions rely on empirical assumptions. David Boaz endorses Nozick’s entitlement theory without discussing its empirical base.12 Tibor Machan phrases like “the natural right to private property,” but in four works on the issue, he does not spell out how a natural resource becomes private property, and thus, his theory does not indicate whether private title holders or governments have a better claim to hold that natural right.
Jan Narveson is somewhat more explicit about his empirical claims. His original appropriators are “pioneers.” Such a person appropriated private property rights, because that was “what the agent saw herself to be in the way of enabling herself to do.” He claims, “When the first Asian crossed the land bridge to Alaska ... did she then get title to the whole of North America? Certainly not. ... it cannot plausibly be argued that her activity, what she saw herself to be doing, was using a whole continent or anything like it.”13 Yet he refers to no evidence to show that the original appropriators actually saw themselves to be establishing individual rather than collective land rights. We are to take it on faith that the ancient Olmecs saw themselves as right-libertarian pioneers? Certainly this claim needs investigation.
Israel Kirzner stresses present rather than past discovery as the justification for ownership. This would seem to take his theory out of the Stone Age, but he admits that the issue
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of how the original inputs became property is of “primordial importance.” This forces him to make factual assertions about the origin of property: “When I find an unowned natural object and, considering its annexation worthwhile, proceed to take physical possession of it, I have discovered it.”14 Like Nozick, Kirzner establishes only that someone can take possession of natural resources.
At least one property rights advocate, Loren Lomasky, recognizes that the standard appropriation-based justification of property relies on unsubstantiated empirical claims. He writes, “A classically liberal theory of property rights holds that natural relations obtain between persons and objects in the world. These relations precede civil society and thereby establish claims to property that are prior to social determination.”15 He discusses empirical (as well as moral) weakness of that theory.16 He attempts to reconstruct a rights-based theory of property without reference to prehistory. But he ends up falling back on similar empirical premises. He writes:
If A comes to possess I, to use I in the service of his projects, and thereby values the having of I, then A has appropriated I. ... A has reason to acknowledge and respect B’s having I* conditional upon B recognizing and respecting A’s special interest in I. ... A has reason to reject the imposition of a system of collective control over all goods that will determine whether A is entitled to have I.17
This conclusion works if A has appropriated I as an individual, but not if he has appropriated I as part of a collective. Suppose A is a citizen, and I, which A comes to possess is the benefit he receives from government taxation, regulation, and redistribution within its territory. Suppose I* is the holding of a title to resources within the government’s territory. Therefore, consider how Lomasky would have to revise the above statement:
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• If A comes to possess I (shared ownership of government-held territory), to use I in the service of his projects, and thereby values the having of it, then A has appropriated I. A only has a reason to acknowledge and respect B’s having I* (a property title) conditional upon B recognizing and respecting A’s special interest in the taxation, regulation, and redistribution of property titles. Therefore, A has reason to reject the imposition of a system of privatized control over all goods that will determine whether A is entitled to have shared ownership of government-held territory (I).
If I can be a share in the land held by a marriage, a partnership, or a corporation, why not a share in the land held by a corporate entity called a government? As far as I can tell, Lomasky’s answer to that question is:
[P]ersons come to civil society with things that are theirs. A socially defined system of property rights must be responsive to what persons have. In no respect does a civil order entail the collectivization of property.18
On an a priori basis, natural rights theory can say people come to civil society with only one thing—self-ownership. Whether they come with other anything else is an empirical claim, and all property rights advocates agree that at least many people come into civil society without private property rights in land. Consider how Lomasky would have to revise this statement to free it from this empirical content:
• Persons might come to civil society with things that are theirs. A socially defined system of property rights must be responsive to what persons might or might not have. In no respect does a civil order entail either the collectivization of private property or the privatization of public property.
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In other words, devoid of its empirical content, Lomasky’s argument says nothing about whether governments should have the power of taxation, regulation, and redistribution.
Lomasky’s empirical claim, “[P]ersons come to civil society with things that are theirs,” is very much the same as that “classically liberal” premise he was trying to distance himself from, “property rights ... precede civil society.” He makes no attempt to verify it; he’s voiced a great deal of skepticism about it. Yet, he explicitly employs it as a necessary premise in his argument for limiting government.
Murray Rothbard unambiguously rests his conclusions on the empirical content of his appropriation story. His original appropriator is a “homesteader” or “pioneer”, who “clears and uses previously unused virgin land and brings it into this private ownership.”19 Recognizing the conceptual possibility of government ownership of its territory, he writes, “our homesteading theory ... suffices to demolish any such pretensions by the State apparatus.”20 He doesn’t explain precisely how a hypothetical story can “demolish” anyone’s ownership claims, but he later on writes, “There is really only one reason for libertarians to oppose the formation of governmental property or to call for its divestment: the realization that the rulers of government are unjust and criminal owners of such property.”21 That is, if they came to ownership unjustly.
Rothbard clearly believes the only way a collective could obtain ownership of land is by usurping that right from individual owners. We can tell he recognizes the importance of this empirical premise because his examples of abusive governments begin with a story of government aggressively seizing land from private individual property holders.22
He seems to think this claim is obviously true. He refers to empirical support for other claims, such as that property law can exist in the absence of state sovereignty,23 but he seems to think his claim to know what the original appropriators were thinking is so obvious that it needs no empirical support. However, one source that Rothbard cites for something else does contain
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support this claim. The source is not empirical work, but a right-libertarian treatise by F. A. Hayek. He writes:
[T]he erroneous idea that property had at some late stage been 'invented' and that before that there had existed an early state of primitive communism ... has been completely refuted by anthropological research. There can be no question now that the recognition of property preceded the rise of even the most primitive cultures .... [I]t is as well demonstrated a scientific truth as any we have attained in this field.24
Hayek cites three sources to support this claim. I have been able to find two of them. The first of these, although written by an anthropologist, Bronislaw Malinowski, is not a piece of empirical research but yet another right-libertarian treatise. The passage Hayek quotes uses a priori reasoning to argue that people must have property but it does not refer specifically to any empirical evidence to confirm. Hayek’s second source, A. I. Hallowell, writes that property rights “of some kind” are universal, but not that individual private property rights are universal. He refers some of Malinowski’s empirical research, writing “Malinowski’s conclusion was that, ‘ownership, therefore, can be defined neither by such words as ‘communism,’ nor ‘individualism,’ nor by reference to ‘joint-stock company’ systems or ‘personal enterprise’.’” This conclusion is not nearly as strong as Hayek implies.
In all of the property rights literature cited here, these three citations are the only empirical support offered for the claim that individual private property rights precede civil society. It cannot bear the weight that has been place on it. If there is a property rights advocate who has conducted a more thorough investigation, he or she isn’t cited by any of the author’s mentioned here. We need a more thorough investigation to find out whether this claim is in fact a “well demonstrated a scientific truth.”
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Part Two surveys anthropological and archeological literature to find evidence for this “classically liberal” hypothesis that “these relations precede civil society.” Who were the first private property holders? Who were the first collective property holders? Do private land claims tend to precede collective claims? Do individuals, acting as individuals, perform the first appropriative acts or is there evidence of collective or government appropriation?
Part Two
If we want to know how property developed, we have to look at the best available evidence. Most of the events we’re interested in—the first use of resources, the development of state powers, and the development of something recognizable as private property—occurred in prehistoric societies. That is, societies that do not keep written records. They are also called preliterate or non-literate societies. Anthropologists find evidence about prehistoric societies from the distant past by comparing three sources: direct archeological investigation of long passed societies, historical accounts of early contact between non-literate and literate people, and ethnographic investigation of contemporary non-literate societies.25
To the extent that we are interested in people who lived thousands of years ago, the use of people living in non-literate societies today is inherently problematic. Economically simple modern societies are separated from our distant ancestors by as many generations as we are, and those who managed to maintain an economically simple lifestyle into modern times might only have done so because they occupied marginal land.26 They might have been affected by years (or centuries) of contact with more complex societies.27 Anthropologists try to get a picture of life in the distant past by triangulating these different kinds of data. If ethnographic investigation find that people with similar technology in many different parts of the world today share certain elements of social organization, and if archeological and historical investigations indicates that
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people in the distant pasted shared some of those elements, we can begin to get some idea how people lived in the distant past. At least, that is the best method available at this time.
This article traces the development of property through four different forms of social organization: bands, autonomous villages, chiefdoms, and states (each of which is defined in its own section below). These four forms of organization were first defined by Elman Service as “stages” in social evolution.28 Few anthropologists today view them as part of a uni-linear progression. They are not intended as homogenous, discrete, non-overlapping categories but as reference points on a rough continuum from economically simple to more economically complex societies.29 Anthropologists use these categories to further our understanding of history and prehistory by developing a picture of the regularity and variability within and between each form. These categories are not the only legitimate way to classify societies, but they do capture important differences in social organization that ethnologists have observed in diverse communities around the word and that archeologists and historians have found evidence of in the past.
We cannot say that every complex modern society passed through all four of these forms of social organization, but we can be fairly confident that the earliest states developed out of chiefdoms; the earliest chiefdoms developed out of autonomous villages; and the earliest autonomous villages developed out of hunter-gatherer bands.30 Therefore, understanding these reference points will give us some idea of how property and government developed.
A. Hunter-gatherer bands
Early humans, like other primates, lived in small foraging groups. Aside from intellectual ability, cooperation is the most significant difference between human foragers and other primate foragers.31 Other primates forage almost entirely for themselves and for their infants,32 while humans usually forage in groups and share what they have.33 Morton Fried argues that the
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institution of sharing accounts for the human success that has dominated Earth’s history over the last 2 million years.34
Human-style, cooperative, hunter-gatherer bands probably developed sometime in the long interval between the branching off of humans from other apes (about 2 million years ago) and the appearance of biologically modern humans (at least the last 60,000 years ago and arguably more than 125,000 years ago). The hunter-gatherer band was probably the only form of social organization until about 15,000 or 20,000 years ago, and the most common form until only a few thousand years ago. The last remaining fulltime hunter-gathers are probably giving up the lifestyle in this generation, although some groups might continue to survive on more-than-half- time foraging into the future.35
Most known hunter-gatherer bands had about 15 to 50 people including children and elderly.36 They had fluid membership; larger bands could split into smaller bands, and individuals could leave one band to join a related band nearby.37 Bands are usually nomadic within a fairly defined range.38 Many farmers spend some of their time foraging, but the common definition of a hunter-gatherer band is a nomadic group, whose only productive activities are forms of foraging: hunting, gathering, and fishing.39
The proposed criteria for appropriation (discovery, use, labor, etc.) all literally imply that property is far older than humanity. Most primates live in foraging groups with well-defined territories. In fact, they tend to define and defend their territories tend much more rigidly than human hunter-gatherers.40 Beavers, bees, and ants transform the land with their labor. If we didn’t make some qualification to appropriation theory, we would have a duty to respect a great deal of animal property rights. Yet, I know of no property rights advocates who are willing to do so. Perhaps it goes without saying that appropriation requires sentience. But if so, property does not begin with a person performing an appropriative act on a previously unused resource. The first truly sentient human must have lived in a foraging group that already had a delineated foraging territory. It is very unlikely that this person would also have claimed new territory for
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her band. Perhaps then, property begins with an act of inheritance rather than an act of appropriation.
If first claim, first use, or first occupancy by a sentient being establishes ownership, our hunter-gatherer ancestors appropriated most of world except for Antarctica, some remote islands, mountain tops, deserts, and so on. What sort of property rights did they establish?
Many diverse anthropological studies show that the economically simplest human societies—those with lifestyles most similar to the lifestyles of original appropriators—did not choose to establish anything like individual private property in land. Lee and Daly write, one “characteristic common to almost all band societies (and hundreds of village-based societies as well) is a land tenure system based on a common property regime.... These regimes were, until recently, far more common world-wide than regimes based on private property.”41 Martin Baily examined anthropological observations of more than fifty hunter-gatherer bands and autonomous villages, and found that they all had collective claims to territory.42 Some hunter-gatherers, such as the Mbuti Pygmies of central Africa and the Nayaka of southern India, view land “not an object that can be owned but something that people can be closely associated with and related to.”43 The Inuit of arctic North American and the Hadza of east Africa have no exclusive territoriality at all. Woodburn writes “The Eastern Hadza assert no rights over land and its ungarnered resources. ... they do not even seek to restrict the use of the land they occupy to members of their own tribe.”44 Among both human and non-human foraging primates, no individual can claim exclusive use of any piece land, and no individual can be excluded from resources she needs to maintain her existence.45
Human foragers have something more like private property rights in food and tools, but those rights are seldom exclusive and not usually appropriated by individualistic labor mixing.46 Hunter-gatherers have a strong obligation to share what they have (including things that they have made and big game they have killed) and little reciprocal obligation to produce.47
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According to Hill and Hurtado, “Property was never really private, and sharing was the most important aspect of the behavioral code.”48 According to Kristen Hawkes,
Among modern tropical foragers, hunters generally do not control the distribution of meat from big animals. Large carcasses are treated more as a communal resource, like a public good from which many claim shares. ... A hunter cannot exclude other claimants, nor can he exchange portions of meat with other hunters (or anyone else) for obligations to return meat (or anything else).49
Fried writes, “in a simple egalitarian society the taking of something before it is offered is more akin to rudeness than stealing.”50
A property rights advocate might be tempted to argue that this evidence, rather than disproving the individual appropriation hypothesis, merely shows how quickly collectives violated individual property rights. Perhaps the collective’s treatment of big game as common property is an example of early collectivist aggression against individual private property rights.
This argument is not merely wishful thinking unsupported by evidence; it is substantially contradicted by evidence. Most hunter-gatherers prefer to hunt for big game, even though big game is treated as common property of the band regardless of who kills it.51 Social approval, prestige, and competition for wives seem to be adequate incentives to get males to hunt for the whole band.52 More importantly, individual hunter-gatherers could have created the institution of private property if they wanted to. All hunter-gatherers are free to leave the band and to start their own band with whoever wants to join. If 6 to 10 adult hunter-gatherers wanted to start a band that recognized the hunter’s natural right to exclusive ownership over the kill, no one would have interfered with them. Yet, although we know that hunter-gatherer bands split for many other reasons, we don’t know of any who split for that reason. All known hunter-gatherers (in all
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climates and geographies from the arctic to the tropics) exercised their free will to establish a collective property regime.53 As the original appropriators, it was their right to do so.
This evidence raises doubt about whether individual appropriation is a natural right. A natural right must be something that all humans want or need, something that all humans must respect in others to respect their humanity. But yet this “natural right” of individual appropriation was not see as natural at all until long after most land was already discovered, used, occupied, and claimed by groups of individuals who chose to hold that land and most of what it produced collectively. Individual private property was apparently not practiced by anyone for the first 100,000 years of our existence as humans; it is not practiced by our closest primate relatives;54 and there is no evidence that it was practiced by our hominid ancestors during the 2 million years separating humans from other primates. People in some parts of the world have never have practiced this institution in their history. This supposed natural right contravenes what some anthropologists have found to be a far more ancient principle: the belief that wild places could not be appropriated by any individual.55 To say that individual appropriation is a natural rights is to say that all humans chose to live unnaturally for most of our existence as a species.
Many property rights advocates deal with hunter-gatherer bands either by ignoring them entirely or by employing an appropriation criteria, such as first labor, that supposedly excludes bands’ territorial claims. This strategy has two difficulties.
First, to say that hunter-gatherers do not transform their land through labor is another factual assertion that requires empirical investigation. Just because hunter-gatherers don’t farm does not mean that they leave the land just as they found it. Earth was very different in 10,000 BCE, after hunter-gatherers covered it, than it was in 500,000 BCE, when hominid foragers were confined to a small part of Africa. For example, some researches believe that hunter-gatherers hunted many large animal species to extinction.56 This may have been unwise, but it must count as a serious transformation of the land, more so than clearing the land of trees, which can easily grow back.
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Second, excluding hunter-gatherers from land appropriation implies that whatever they do with land is not enough to obtain the right to keep doing it. Even though they obtain the right to the meat or fruit they collect, no matter how long they have been foraging, they do not obtain the right to go on foraging without interference.57 The appeal of individual private property rights supposedly relies on the appeal of freedom from interference. If you are the first one to use a resource, no one can stop you from what you’re doing; no one can judge you or impose their way of life on you. The endorsement of the farmer and the miner’s right to aggressively interfere with hunter-gatherers runs completely contrary to that appeal. If that endorsement were an aberration, the appeal of the theory can be restored by disavowing it. But it appears that counting hunter-gatherers as owners of land implies that the original property rights to most of the land on Earth were collective property rights. To maintain the belief that property is necessarily individual and private, property rights advocates either have to come up with some story why land, initially appropriated by collectives, must necessarily get into the hands of individuals, or they have to accept that the endorsement of the aggressive dispossession of hunter-gatherers is a fundamental part of their theory.
Whichever argumentative strategy property rights advocates might take, we have look to the development of economically more complex societies to see whether the theory actually leads to an individual property rights regime.
B. Autonomous villages
The simplest known settled communities are villages with populations of 100 to 600 people.58 Most anthropologists call these kinds of communities “tribal societies,” but some prefer the term “autonomous villages.” I use the latter term both because it is more descriptive and because, the word “tribe” is commonly used many different ways.
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Many autonomous villages survived into the Twentieth Century, and ethnographers have extensively studied them. A few people continue this lifestyle today.59 Autonomous villages tend to have a nominal headman with no real power, little economic inequality, and no explicit fixed rules.60 In all known autonomous villages, there is virtually no trade or specialization.61 All individuals, (including headmen & religious leaders) produce their immediate family’s consumption.62 There are usually no fixed property rights in land; all members of the village are entitled to access to land, but not necessarily a particular plot.63 Like bands, autonomous villages have fluid membership. Although they have the technological capacity to support a population in the thousands, they are prone to split when their populations increase to more than a few hundred, and autonomous villages with populations of more than 600 are rarely if ever observed.64
Autonomous villages were first societies to assert land rights stronger than simply territoriality and to engage in farming. However, they did not do it in that order.65 The oldest known autonomous villages appeared about 15,000 years ago, in areas where foraging was sufficiently abundant to support settled people. The oldest known agricultural villages appeared only 8,000 or 10,000 years ago.66 Many of the oldest know agricultural sites were built on sites that had already been occupied by settled hunter-gatherers. It is easy to imagine why: settled hunter-gatherers have much greater ability to experiment with agriculture than nomadic hunter- gatherers do.
Therefore, agriculture follows rather than coincides with a major change in the institutions of property ownership. This sequence has important implications. Remember that this natural rights theory is supposed to be based on a sober and realistic understanding of human nature, of who we are, of what we actually do, and of the rights we actually need. Property rights advocates assume that when people transform the land with their labor by becoming farmers, they naturally require a greater right to that land than they required when they merely hunter- gatherers. Agriculture must, therefore, coincide with a great change in the kind of rights people
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want hold in land. But apparently this change in property rights was not something that the first agriculturalists thought they needed. They continued the same property rights regime as their settled hunter-gatherer ancestors.
Also, the property rights regime that these original appropriators chose to establish was not the individualist system that property rights advocates suppose. Individuals in known autonomous villagers are interested in use-rights in land, not individual land ownership.67 The most important of these rights is that each member of the community maintains direct and independent access to land and other resources with which they can secure their needs, but an individual claim to be the owner of any particular plot of land does not seem to have been important.68 Autonomous village land rights have been described as “ambiguous and flexible”69 or “overlapping and complex.”70 Fried observes, “in most rank societies, the concept of title, of legally specific ownership, is absent. A population, with its ranked head, is associated with area,” but they have little power to keep out newcomers.71 There is, however, usually individual excludability in crops; each family would keep what they produced.72
The ambiguity and complexity of property rights in simple agrarian societies is probably the source of Hayek’s overstatement about the existence of property right. In most cases, we can say that kinships groups owned the village because they hold rights to that land against other kinship groups. But the kinship groups held the land collectively. Individuals could not alienate their share of ownership in the village and they clan couldn’t deny them direct access to land. Hayek’s source, Malinowski, studied tribes with clan-based ownership, not the kind of individualistic private property postulated in the appropriation story.73
A “headman” was sometimes spoken of as the “owner” of his group’s real estate, but he acted more like the administrator of his group’s possessions.74 Either way, the headman present a difficulty for property rights advocates. If he was the owner, the original appropriator was also the government of the village. If he was not the owner, the original appropriator was the village
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collective. Neither one implies that the original appropriator was an individual private property holder.
Once again, a property rights advocates might be tempted to interpret this situation as an example of original individual appropriators being victims of group interference. But once again, such an interpretation is contradicted by evidence. Autonomous villages habitually under-used resources and were therefore able to settle disputes by splitting.75 As in band societies, individuals were free to leave and set up a society with a private property regime. Although thousands of village societies are known to anthropology, there does not seem to be any ethnographic, archeological, or historic study showing evidence that any village created the institution of individual private land ownership or that villagers desired to do so. The reasonable conclusion is that the first farmers voluntarily chose to hold land collectively. As the full owners under appropriation theory, they were, of course, within their moral authority to do so.
Once again, this observation has great importance for property rights theory. Supposedly, what we really care about are the normative principles underlying appropriation theory. These principles lead us to respected individual private property only because—supposedly—the first people to mix their labor with the land created individual private property. Instead, we find even using this criteria, the original appropriators established something very different than individual private property. Why did the earliest agriculturalists tend to be collectivists? Baily argues that land simply isn’t very valuable to the earliest farmers with the simplest techniques; they would clear it, farm it for a few years and move on. What they needed at any given moment was access to some land, not permanent exclusive control over any piece particular piece of land. Individual ownership of land comes when it makes sense economically, often with fertilization or irrigation.76
This observation provides a possible way out for property rights advocates. They might argue that fixed property comes later than Locke supposed; not with first transformative labor- mixing, but with more sophisticated techniques, when land is transformed so much that
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exclusivity becomes more appealing. Another possible way out for property rights advocates would be to suppose that even though the original appropriators held lands as clans, their property rights were eventually transferred into the hands of private individuals. To examine these possibilities we have to look further ahead in prehistory.
C. Chiefdoms
A chiefdom is something like proto-state, consisting of at least several villages brought under a single rule. They tend to have populations in the “low thousands to tens of thousands.”77 The first chiefdoms probably came into existence within the last 10,000 years. Many chiefdoms survived into the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, and a few are still not fully incorporated into nation-states today. Chiefdoms can support some economic specialization. Archaeological evidence shows that the oldest known chiefdoms had the earliest signs of socio-economic differentiation.78 They were the earliest and simplest know forms of social organization in which some individuals were excluded from direct access to the resources to sustain life. They were the first to have a permanent specialist rulers who did not produce their own food.79 Chiefdoms sometimes maintained large joint projects such as irrigation, flood control, temple or monument building.80
The chief and the elite group can have varying levels of authority depending on the size and complexity of the chiefdom. Some chiefdoms, usually smallest ones, were only slightly less egalitarian than tribal societies.81 Others were extremely inegalitarian with powerful rulers, rigid class distinction, and sometimes slavery.82 In larger Polynesian island groups, chiefs commanded powers of life and death over their subjects.83
Chiefdoms are the simplest and presumably earliest form of social organization with excludability in property and persons who can be clearly identified as individual owners. Yet, these original private property holders do not fit the model supposed by property rights
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advocates. The property owners were the chiefs, who both owners and governors.84 Why were these powers combined? Probably because the economies were so simple: the separation of different areas of power (economic, religious, political, etc.) only seems to have become possible in more complex economies.85 Timothy Earle writes, “In all cases, economic power was in some sense basic to the political strategies to amass [political] power.”86 And, “[T]he evolution of property rights by which chiefs control primary production can be seen as basic to the evolution of many complex stratified societies ... the significance of economic control through varying systems of land tenure is a constant theme.”87
Hawaii provides an excellent case study, because chiefdoms existed there without contact with more economically complex societies until the late 1700s, and good historical records were taken in the early years of contact. In an in-depth study of Hawaiian chiefdoms, Timothy Earle finds that chiefs were the only people in pre-contact Hawaii who could be spoken of as owners: of colonizing canoes, of landholding descent groups, of irrigation projects, of the irrigated land, of particularly productive land.88 They did the things a Lockean appropriator is supposed to do. “[T]he environment was transformed into a cultural world owned by a class of ruling chiefs.”89 Chiefs financed the construction of irrigation canals, and thereby appropriated the most productive lands. They acted as managers of irrigation projects. And they apparently financed and led the expeditions that originally brought people to the islands in about 600CE.90 Earle also finds evidence of various forms of ownership-based chiefly power in other times and places such as pre-Columbian South America, Iron-Age Denmark, Olmec Mexico, the pre-Columbian Mississippi basin, Bronze-Age Britain, and pre-Roman Spain.91
Once established as owner-governors, Hawaiian paramount chiefs treated their chiefdoms as for-profit businesses. They hired and fired community chiefs, who hired and fired konohiki (local managers), who allocated lands to commoners in exchange for labor.92 The konohiki also had the power rescind land for nonpayment of labor.93 Earle writes:
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In chiefdoms, control over production and exchange of subsistence and wealth creates the basis for political power. In Hawai’i, community chiefs allocated to commoners their subsistence plots in the chief’s irrigated farmlands in return for corvée work on chiefly lands and special projects. By owning the irrigation systems, and thus controlling access to the preferred means of subsistence, chiefs directed a commoner’s labor. Where you lived was determined by whose land manager ‘put you to work’.94
Property rights advocates could argue that the first chiefs were probably took power by violent aggression. This is undoubtedly true for chiefdoms that developed out of autonomous villages. It might not be true for chiefdoms that were founded by colonizing expeditions to uninhabited islands. I presume the aggressive possibility is far more common. However, establishing that the earliest chiefs were usurpers would be far from sufficient to support the conclusions property rights advocates wish us to draw. The question is not whether chiefs usurped power, but from whom they usurped it. Property rights advocates ask us to assume that governments must have usurped power from individual property holders.
But there is no evidence of that such people existed. We know chiefs did not take power from any ownership class because no ownership class predated chiefdoms. Chiefs are the earliest known people to hold exclusive individual property rights. They only preexisting entities that chiefs could have usurped power from—autonomous villages and hunter-gatherer bands—did not practice the institution of individual private property in land.
The closest thing to small private holders in Hawaiian chiefdoms were the konohiki, who were appointed by the chief to serve his interest. Thus the relationship between government and small holders in these actually existing early governments was the opposite of the relationship Nozick supposes in his imagined early governments. Instead of small holders with an appropriation-based claim to property appointing a government to serve the small holder’s interests, we see a government (with a possible appropriation-based claim to property)
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appointing small holders to serve its interests. The only connection that the konohiki have to original appropriation is through the government. The konohiki’s claim to have the right to manage the land they control is because the ultimate landlord, the paramount chief, chose them rather than someone else. Even if the chief’s ancestor’s illegitimately usurped power from someone, giving the chief’s ownership rights to his appointees would do nothing to rectify that wrong.
None of the potential claimants to be the original appropriator gives property rights advocates what they need. If chiefs are the original appropriators, natural rights theory implies monarchy. If autonomous villages or hunter-gatherer bands were the original appropriators, natural rights theory implies that we should return the land to the people as a group. Either way, instead of a limit on government power over its territory, appropriation theory provides a justification for it.
If the institution of individual private property developed by strengthening the claims of people like the konohiki, the belief that government somehow interferes with private property holders with an appropriation-based claim to property is backwards. To find out where the institution of individual private property emerged, we need to examine the development of full states.
D. Early states
By 5,000 years ago some chiefdoms became so large and complex that they could be called states or empires. Some archeologists use the term “early civilizations.”95 States differ from chiefdoms in size, level of economic specialization, and the power and stability of government. Although all early states were still primarily agricultural, they had complex economies with specialist warriors, administrators, rulers, and professionals. They were also the first to leave behind historical records.
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All early states for which there is sufficient available information were extremely hierarchical—politically, economically, and socially.96 They were ruled by kings with the aid of a small, powerful ruling group. The upper classes were no more than a few percent of the total population, but they controlled most the surplus wealth, lived luxurious lifestyles, made all decisions about policy and administration, and justified their position by claiming special supernatural origin.97 Lower class agricultural laborers, who were generally barred from social mobility, made up the bulk of the population (probably well over 90 percent), and faced not even the pretence of equal protection of the laws.
Bruce Trigger studied seven early civilizations across the world: the Aztecs, the Maya, Yoruba-Benin (of sub-Saharan Africa), the Inca, Egypt, Southern Mesopotamia, and the Shang (of China). He found that they all had kings who united religious, economic, and political power.98 Even the highest-ranking commoners were most often state employees, such as scribes, soldiers, and administrators.99
It appears that private property did not exist in the earliest states. A small upper class in each state controlled wealth and made policy decisions, but they were usually also government officials who received land as a revocable reward for government service.100 In the Americas, institutional land assigned to individuals in return for service “constituted a major source of revenue for the nobility, all of whose active male members were involved in some sort of state service.”101 In all early states for which adequate documentation exists, the legal system protected government property and upper-class privileges.102 “A defining feature of all early civilizations was the institutionalized appropriation by a small ruling group of most of the wealth produced by the lower classes. ... Farmers and artisans did not accumulate large amounts of wealth, although they created virtually all the wealth that existed in these societies.”103 In some cases local kin groups continued to hold land collectively. This practice is probably a holdover from earlier forms of social organization.104
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Most experts in the development of early civilizations seem to agree that “private property is a recent innovation,” which did not exist in the earliest states.105 Taxation developed simultaneously with the transfer of land from collective property to private property:106 very much the opposite of the story property rights advocates tell in which collectives assert control over land that had previously held by individual private owners rather than collectives.
Trigger argues that although private land cannot always be ruled out, there is “no evidence that such land existed in most early civilizations.”107 He does in fact rule out private ownership in five of the seven early civilizations in his study (the Aztecs, the Maya, the Yoruba, the Inca, and the Shang): “That leaves Mesopotamia and Egypt as early civilizations in which some land might have been privately owned.”108 In Mesopotamia, private land was a late development. Maisels finds that land in prehistoric and early-historic Mesopotamia was owned by temples, clans, or collectives.109 Land was held collectively prior to 3000BCE, after which “increasing amounts of land fell under the control of temples or palaces, but some of it appears to have become the property of individual creditors. ... It is less certain that private land existed in the Old Kingdom of Egypt.”110 Nevertheless, it goes too far to say that kings owned all the land in their territory. Kings often claimed ownership of all lands (perhaps a idea carried over from chiefdoms?), but in practice their actual hold over land was weaker than full ownership.111
Something truly recognizable as an individual private title to land emerges only later and only in certain places such as Rome and medieval northern Europe. Chinese civilization, for example, never evolved a strong sense of private property,112 except perhaps under the 21st Century communist regime. Some property rights advocates who portray private property as an ancient and ubiquitous institution appear to have been mislead by beginning their analysis in Greece and Rome.113
Property in the earliest states looks much different, and it appears in a way seems to the hypothesis that the earliest private property holders were more like the konohiki than original appropriators who owe nothing to the state.
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Once again, the findings of this investigation have important consequences for property rights theory. Supposedly government control over property can be established only by interfering with private landholders, but there is very little evidence to support this supposition. They certainly interfered with someone, but landholders tended to be the beneficiaries rather than victims of that interference. Any connection that private landholders have to the original appropriators seems to have come through the state, and it is, therefore, directly or indirectly dependent on the legitimacy of the state’s ownership of its territory.
This problem for natural rights theory becomes more evident when we look at land rights that owe their origin to colonization. In many cases, governments have invaded taken land from bands, villages, and chiefdoms who do not practice private property so that privileged members of the state can hold that land as private property.114 Someone in this story is the victim of government interference, but it is not the private property holders.
Part Three
Property rights advocates have been repeating the same appropriation story for more than 300 years: Property begins when individual “homesteaders” plant the first crops thereby appropriating individual private property. Collective entities, such as governments, appear only later and obtain property only be interfering with individual private property holders. If the normative theory behind it is correct, and if this story is true, the private property rights place great moral limits on government.
Unfortunately for property rights advocates, there is no reason to believe that this story is true, and very good reason to believe it is false. There is no evidence that the original appropriators were homesteaders who established individual private property rights. Hunter- gatherer bands and autonomous villages held land as groups. The first individuals to hold exclusive property rights were not private owners but chiefs who were both owners and
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governors. It is very likely the first chiefs and monarchs usurped power, but there is no evidence that they usurped power from individual private property holders; there is not even evidence that a class of private property holders preceded chiefs.
Something recognizable as individual private property emerges only later, and the first holders appear to have received it as a reward for service to the king. If so, the rights that they have over that land are whatever rights the king chose to bestow on him. If the king chose to retain the powers to tax, regulate, and redistribute that property, so be it. If the king’s claim to that property was illegitimate, an individuals’ claim stemming from their service to the king is also illegitimate.
Property rights advocates have failed to prove their case. That property rights advocates have pass on false factual claims in the philosophy literature for so long should certainly be worrying.
The available historical evidence does not give us reason to believe that private corporations or individuals have a stronger appropriation-based claim to hold the rights they hold than governments have to hold the rights they hold. I cannot say that it is impossible to make an argument separating government and private land rights without reference to spurious factual claims, but I can say that none of the property rights advocates cited in this article succeed in doing so. The government is just a landlord. If we trace the history of the its land claim we will not find an unbroken chain of just transfers to the original appropriation, but the same is true for any landlord.
A property rights advocate could respond to this evidence by accepting that governments own most of the property in the world. Anarcho-capitalism exists; landownership just happens to be dominated by about 200 corporations called governments. I expect that few if any property rights advocates will have this reaction. Why would theorists so committed to accepting any pattern of distribution refuse to accept this one? Hayek and Nozick both accuse egalitarians of being motivated by envy,115 but perhaps property rights advocates are motivated by another kind
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of envy: the envy a lord has for his king. The lord forgets that the king’s power over the land is of the same kind and same origin as the lord’s power. If the king is unjust his power must be returned to the people, not usurped again by jealous lords.
Notes
1 I use the terms political philosophy and political theory interchangeably. 2 Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia, p. 152.
3 CITE: 130, emphasis original.
4 Rothbard, The Ethics of Liberty, p. 51,
5 Property rights advocates disagree about how strong those limits are. Nozick wants a minimal state. Rothbard wants no state at all, but they share the belief that private property rights imply strong limits on what government can do.
6 CITE Attas characterizes appropriation in this way.
7 CITE: Lomasky; Narveson.
8 Self-citation; Epstein 1995. Simple Rules for a Complex World. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, pp. 64- 67. Rothbard, The Ethics of Liberty, p. 63. Edward Feser, 'There is no Such Thing as an Unjust Initial Acquisition', Social Philosophy and Policy 22 (2005): 56-80 argues that most past injustices simply aren’t rectifiable, p. 79. Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia, includes several statements that appear to be tacit endorsements of the statute of limitations including, p. 158, p. 160 (“ignoring acquisition and rectification”), and pp. 230-231. CITE: Lomasky
9 Self-citation.
10 Self-citation.
11 Self-citation.
12 Boaz , pp. 65-74.
13 CITE: Narveson, pp. 83-86.
14 Kirzner , pp. 153-155.
15 CITE: Lomaksy, pp. 118-119.
16 CITE: Lomaksy, pp. 113-120.
17 CITE: Lomaksy, pp. 130-131.
18 CITE: Lomaksy, 131.
19 Rothbard The Ethics of Liberty. pp. 49, 56-58, 172, 183.
20 Rothbard The Ethics of Liberty. , pp. 48-49.
21 Rothbard The Ethics of Liberty. , 56.
22 For example, “Let us say that Ruritania is ruled by a king who has grievously invaded the rights of persons and the legitimate property of individuals,” p. 54; “All that ‘feudalism,’ in our sense, requires is the seizure by violence of landed property from its true owners,” pp. 66-67.
23 Rothbard The Ethics of Liberty. , 178; 178n3; 178n4
24 CITE: Hayek, Law, Legislation, and Liberty, p. 108.
25 Clark 1968. "Studies of Hunter-Gatherers as an Aid to the interpretation of Prehistoric Societies." In Lee and DeVore (ed.) Man the Hunter. New York: Aldine, 276-280.
26 Renfrew 2007. Prehistory: the making of the human mind. London: Phoenix, p. 141; Fried 1967. The Evolution of Political Society: An Essay in Political Anthropology. New York: Random House, p. 53-54; Lee 1968. "What Hunters Do for a Living, or, How to Make Out on Scarce Resources." In Lee and DeVore (ed.) Man the Hunter. New York: Aldine, 30-48, p. 43.
27 Lévi-Strauss 1968. "The Concept of the Primitive." In Lee and DeVore (ed.) Man the Hunter. New York: Aldine, 349-352; Colchester 1984. Rethinking stone age economics: Some speculations concerning the pre-Columbian
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Yanoama economy. Human Ecology 12: 3, 291-314; Lee and Daly 1999. "Foragers and Others." In Lee and Daly (ed.) The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Hunters and Gatherers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1-19, p. 6. 28 CITE: Service
29 CITE:
30 I will not be dealing with nomadic herding societies, which are often classed as chiefdoms, although they don’t fit neatly into any of these categories.
31 Washburn and Lancaster In (ed.), , pp. 301-303; Fried , pp. 106-107; Hawkes, O'Connell and Blurton Jones 2001. Hunting and Nuclear Families: Some Lessons from the Hadza about Men's Work. Current Anthropology 42: 5, 681- 709.
32 Fried , p. 44.
33 Lee "Primitive Communism and the Origin of Social Inequality." In (ed.), p. 231; Lee The !Kung San: Men Women, and Work in a Foraging Society. 458-461; Bird-David 1990. The Giving Environment: Another Perspective on the Economic System of Gatherer-Hunters. Current Anthropology 31: 2, 189-196.
34 Fried , pp. 106-107.
35 Burch 1998. "The Future of Hunter-Gatherer Research." In Gowdy (ed.) Limited wants, unlimited means: A reader on hunter-gatherer economics and the environment. Washington, DC: Island Press, 201-17; Murdock 1968. "The Current Status of the World's Hunting and Gathering Peoples." In Lee and DeVore (ed.) Man the Hunter. New York: Aldine, 13-20; Roscoe 2002. The Hunters and Gatherers of New Guinea. Current Anthropology 43: 1, 153- 162.
36 Fried , p. 113; Lee and Daly "Foragers and Others." In (ed.), , especially p. 3.
37 Turnbull 1968. "The Importance of Flux in Two Hunting Societies." In Lee and DeVore (ed.) Man the Hunter. New York: Adline, 132-137; Bird-David 1994. Sociality and Immediacy: or, past and present conversations on bands. Man 29: 3, 583-603; Boehm , pp. 72-73, 86-87; : Woodburn 1968. "Stability and Flexibility in Hadza Residential Groupings." In Lee and DeVore (ed.) Man the Hunter. New York: Aline, 103-110; Bird-David Sociality and Immediacy: or, past and present conversations on bands. ; Leacock 1998. "Women's Status in Egalitarian Society: Implications for Social Evolution." In Gowdy (ed.) Limited wants, unlimited means: A reader on hunter- gatherer economics and the environment. Washington, DC: Island Press, 139-164, pp. 142-143.
38 Bird-David Sociality and Immediacy: or, past and present conversations on bands. ; Turnbull In (ed.), , p. 135.
39 There are more liberal definitions, and as with anything, there is always difficulty drawing the line. Roscoe, .
40 Boehm . , p. 29.
41 Lee and Daly "Foragers and Others." In (ed.), , p. 4.
42 Baily, , p. 185.
43 Bird-David The Giving Environment: Another Perspective on the Economic System of Gatherer-Hunters. , pp. 190-192.
44 Woodburn "An Introduction to Hadza Ecology." In (ed.), , p. 50; CITE: Hoebel, E. A. 1954. The Law of Primitive Man. Cambridge, MA, p. 59,
45 Lee "Primitive Communism and the Origin of Social Inequality." In (ed.), pp. 231-232; Lee The !Kung San: Men Women, and Work in a Foraging Society. , p. 456; Bird-David The Giving Environment: Another Perspective on the Economic System of Gatherer-Hunters. ; Fried , p. 58. See also Section 1.
46 Bird-David The Giving Environment: Another Perspective on the Economic System of Gatherer-Hunters. .
47 Some anthropologists find almost no evidence for reciprocity: Bird-David The Giving Environment: Another Perspective on the Economic System of Gatherer-Hunters. ; Bird-David Beyond the 'Original Affluent Society": A Culturalist Reformulation. ; Hawkes, O'Connell and Blurton Jones Hunting and Nuclear Families: Some Lessons from the Hadza about Men's Work. . Others find some such evidence: Gurven 2006. The Evolution of Contingent Cooperation. Current Anthropology 47: 1, . Fried , p. 62 f3.
48 Hill and Hurtado Ache Life History: The Ecology and Demography of a Foraging People. , p. xii.
49 Hawkes 2001. "Is Meat the Hunter's Property? Big Game, Ownership, and Explanations of Hunting and Sharing." In Stanford and Bunn (ed.) Meat-Eating and Human Evolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 219-236.
50 Fried . , p. 75.
51 Hawkes "Is Meat the Hunter's Property? Big Game, Ownership, and Explanations of Hunting and Sharing." In (ed.), ; Leacock In (ed.), , p. 145; Hawkes, O'Connell and Blurton Jones Hunting and Nuclear Families: Some Lessons from the Hadza about Men's Work. .
52 Hawkes, O'Connell and Blurton Jones Hunting and Nuclear Families: Some Lessons from the Hadza about Men's Work. , p. 695.
53 Boehm , pp. 72-73.
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54 Hawkes "Is Meat the Hunter's Property? Big Game, Ownership, and Explanations of Hunting and Sharing." In (ed.),
55 Katz 1997. Private Property versus Markets: Democratic and Communitarian Critiques o Capitalism. American Political Science Review 91: 2, 277-289, p. 284.
56 CITE: Blitzkreig.
57 See, Narveson 1998. Libertarianism vs. Marxism: Reflections on G. A. Cohen's Self-Ownership, Freedom and Equality. The Journal of Ethics 2: 1, , p. 14n.
58 Renfrew , p. 142; Boehm , pp. 3-4; Lee "Primitive Communism and the Origin of Social Inequality." In (ed.), , p. 236; Wilson 1988. The Domestication of the Human Species. New Haven: Yale University Press, p. 3.
59 Roscoe, .
60 Fried; Boehm .
61 Fried , pp. 129-130.
62 Fried , pp. 129-132, 177.
63 Sahlins 1974. Stone Age Economics. London: Tavistock, pp. 93-94; Baily 1992. Approximate Optimality of Aboriginal Property Rights. Journal of Law and Economics 35, 183, p. 92.
64 Fried , p. 113.
65 Renfrew argues that the propensity to assign value to goods seems to have developed with sedentism, which preceded agriculture by thousands of years.
66 Renfrew , pp. 142-145, 161.
67 Herskovits 1965. Economic Anthropology: The Economic Life of Primitive Peoples. New York: W. W. Norton.
68 Sahlins Stone Age Economics. , p. 93.
69 Earle Bronze Age Economics: The First Political Economies. , p. 326-327.
70 Sahlins Stone Age Economics. , pp. 92-93.
71 Fried , p. 177.
72 Baily, , pp. 191-192.
73 Hoebel, E. A. 1954. The Law of Primitive Man. Cambridge, MA.
74 Fried , p. 117.
75 Bandy, .
76 Baily, , pp. 191-195.
77 Earle 2002. Bronze Age Economics: The First Political Economies. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, pp. 15-16.
78 Thomas 1999. Understanding the Neolithic. London: Routledge, p. 229; Renfrew , pp. 152, 164, 173-176.
79 Fried , p. 186-190.
80 Earle 1997. How Chiefs Come to Power: The Political Economy in Prehistory. Stanford: University Press; Earle 2000. Archaeology, Property, and Prehistory. Annual Review of Anthropology 29, 39-60; Earle Bronze Age Economics: The First Political Economies. .
81 Boehm , p. 98; Trigger 1990. "Maintaining Economic Equality in Opposition to Complexity: An Iroquoian Case Study." In Upham (ed.) The Evolution of Political Systems: Sociopolitics in Small-Scale Sedentary Societies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 119-145.
82 Lee "Primitive Communism and the Origin of Social Inequality." In (ed.), , p. 239; Boehm , p. 255.
83 Bellwood 1987. The Polynesians. London: Thames and Hudson, pp. 31-33.
84 Earle How Chiefs Come to Power: The Political Economy in Prehistory. ; Earle Bronze Age Economics: The First Political Economies. .
85 Earle How Chiefs Come to Power: The Political Economy in Prehistory. , pp. 210-211.
86 Earle How Chiefs Come to Power: The Political Economy in Prehistory. , pp. 74-75.
87 Earle Bronze Age Economics: The First Political Economies. , pp. 327-328.
88 Earle How Chiefs Come to Power: The Political Economy in Prehistory. , pp. 43, 44, 72, 73; Earle Bronze Age Economics: The First Political Economies. , pp. 61-62.
89 Earle How Chiefs Come to Power: The Political Economy in Prehistory. , p. 45.
90 Earle How Chiefs Come to Power: The Political Economy in Prehistory. , pp. 43, 68-72, 82.
91 Earle How Chiefs Come to Power: The Political Economy in Prehistory. , pp. 94-95, 102; Earle Bronze Age Economics: The First Political Economies. , pp. 61-62, 345; Earle Archaeology, Property, and Prehistory. .
92 Earle How Chiefs Come to Power: The Political Economy in Prehistory. , p. 79.
93 Earle How Chiefs Come to Power: The Political Economy in Prehistory. , pp. 82-83.
94 Earle How Chiefs Come to Power: The Political Economy in Prehistory. , p. 7.
95 Trigger Understanding Early Civilizations: A Comparative Study. .
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96 Trigger Understanding Early Civilizations: A Comparative Study. , pp. 44-45. The Harappa of the Indus Valley may have been an exception, but there simple is not enough evidence to make a firm conclusion. Possehl, Raval and Chitalwala 1989. Harappan Civilization and Rojdi. Boston: Brill Archive.
97 Trigger Understanding Early Civilizations: A Comparative Study. , pp. 145-153.
98 Trigger Understanding Early Civilizations: A Comparative Study. , pp. 71, 79, 91. 99 Trigger Understanding Early Civilizations: A Comparative Study. , pp. 154-155. 100 Trigger Understanding Early Civilizations: A Comparative Study. , pp. 147, 153. 101 Trigger Understanding Early Civilizations: A Comparative Study. , p. 323.
102 Trigger Understanding Early Civilizations: A Comparative Study. , p. 265.
103 Trigger Understanding Early Civilizations: A Comparative Study. , p. 375.
104 Earle Archaeology, Property, and Prehistory. , p. 48.
105 See Trigger Understanding Early Civilizations: A Comparative Study. , p. 332; Fried , p. 201. 106 Earle Archaeology, Property, and Prehistory. , p. 48.
107 Trigger Understanding Early Civilizations: A Comparative Study. , p. 332.
108 Trigger Understanding Early Civilizations: A Comparative Study. , p. 332.
109 Maisels , p. 219.
110 Trigger Understanding Early Civilizations: A Comparative Study. , pp. 332-334.
111 Trigger Understanding Early Civilizations: A Comparative Study. , pp. 314-315; Earle Archaeology, Property, and Prehistory. , p. 47.
112 Trigger Understanding Early Civilizations: A Comparative Study. , p. 239.
113 CITE.
114 CITE.
115 CITE: Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty, p. 93; CITE: Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia, p. 240.
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