Examines the origin and development of the private property rights system from prehistory to the present day Traces the origin and development of the private property rights system from prehistory to the present day showing that it was not the product of 'appropriation' and 'voluntary trade' but of a long history of violent aggression Reviews the long history of contradictory explanations why inequality is supposedly natural and inevitable or an inevitable feature of a free society Uses anthropological evidence to show that some societies have maintained strong equality and extensive freedom Addresses the negative-freedom argument for the market economy by showing that the hunter gatherer band economy has much more extensive negative freedom This book debunks three false claims commonly accepted by contemporary political philosophers regarding property systems: that inequality is natural, inevitable, or incompatible with freedom; that capitalism is more consistent with negative freedom than any other conceivable economic system; and that the normative principles of appropriation and voluntary transfer applied in the world in which we live support a capitalist system with strong, individualist and unequal private property rights. The authors review the history of the use and importance of these claims in philosophy, and use thorough anthropological and historical evidence to refute them. They show that societies with common-property systems maintaining strong equality and extensive freedom were initially nearly ubiquitous around the world, and that the private property rights system was established through a long series of violent state-sponsored aggressions.

About the Author
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).

Reviews
"This book fills an important interdisciplinary need in joining anthropology to philosophy. It continues the argument Widenquist and McCall started in their earlier book, Prehistoric Myths in Modern Political Philosophy. Both books debunk out-of-date and incorrect assumptions about human society that somehow remain foundational in political philosophy. The prior book focused on the ideas of Thomas Hobbes, and The Prehistory of Private Property develops and expands this line of thought. The authors do a real service by opening up comparative scholarship to new perspectives about the inevitability of inequality, capitalist markets, and private property. Anyone interested in how human societies operate and how western scholars have portrayed them will find this a compelling read." -Michael E. Smith, Arizona State University



Book Information
ISBN 9781474447430
Author Karl Widerquist
Format Paperback
Page Count 288
Imprint Edinburgh University Press
Publisher Edinburgh University Press