Prehistoric Myths in Modern Political Philosophy
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The state of nature, the origin of property, the origin of government, the primordial nature of inequality and war – why do political philosophers talk so much about the Stone Age? And are they talking about a Stone Age that really happened, or is it just a convenient thought experiment to illustrate their points?
Karl Widerquist and Grant S. McCall take a philosophical look at the origin of civilisation, examining political theories to show how claims about prehistory are used. Drawing on the best available evidence from archaeology and anthropology, they show that much of what we think we know about human origins comes from philosophers’ imagination, not scientific investigation.
Karl Widerquist is Professor of Political Philosophy at SFS-Qatar, Georgetown University. He is co-editor of Prehistoric Myths in Modern Political Philosophy(with Grant S. McCall, Edinburgh University Press, 2017), Basic Income: An Anthology of Contemporary Research (with Yannick Vanderborght, Jose Noguera, and Jurgen De Wispelaere, Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), Exporting the Alaska Model: Adapting the Permanent Fund Dividend for Reform around the World (with Michael W. Howard, Palgrave-MacMillan, 2012), The Ethics and Economics of the Basic Income Guarantee (with Michael Anthony Lewis and Steven Pressman, Ashgate, 2005) and co-author of Economics for Social Workers: The Application of Economic Theory to Social Policy and the Human Services (with Michael Anthony Lewis, Columbia University Press, 2002). He was a founding editor of the journal Basic Income Studies, and he has published dozens of scholarly articles. Grant S. McCall is Associate Professor in Anthropology at Tulane University, as well as the director of the Center for Human-Environmental Research, a New Orleans-based nonprofit research institute aimed at exploring and improving human responses to environmental change. His publications include Prehistoric Myth and Modern Political Philosophy (co-editor with Karl Widequist, Edinburgh University Press, 2017), Strategies for Quantitative Research: Archaeology by Numbers (Routledge, 2018) and Global Perspectives on Lithic Technologies in Complex Societies (co-editor with Rachel Horowitz, University of Colorado Press, 2019).