Abstract
Political philosophers have long drawn explicitly or implicitly on claims about the ways in which human behaviour is shaped by interactions within society. These claims have usually been based on introspection, anecdotes or casual empiricism, but recent empirical research has informed a number of early views about human nature. We focus here on five components of such views: (1) what motivates human beings; (2) what constraints our natural and social environments impose upon us; (3) what kind of society emerges as a result; (4) what constitutes a fulfilling life; and (5) what collective solutions can improve the outcome. We examine social contract theory as developed by some early influential political philosophers (Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau), who viewed the social contract as a device to compare the 'natural' state of humans with their behaviour in society. We examine their views in the light of recent cross-cultural empirical research in the evolutionary social sciences. We conclude that social contract theorists severely underestimated human behavioural complexity in societies lacking formal institutions. Had these theorists been more informed about the structure and function of social arrangements in small-scale societies, they might have significantly altered their views about the design and enforcement of social contracts.
Highlights
Social media summary: Social contract philosophers overlooked the central role of informal social institutions in governing human behavior
Empirical claims about human society From its earliest beginnings, political and social philosophy has been conceptual and empirical, albeit at a very general level. This is true of those usually considered political philosophers, and and especially of sociologists, economists, historians and essayists such as Herodotus, Thucydides, Ibn Khaldun, Montaigne, Gibbon, Smith, Malthus, Ricardo, Marshall and Weber, all of whom made contributions that have had a lasting impact on political philosophy, broadly considered
There would be no point in thinking about humans in isolation, independently of the social and political context in which they live. This means that, in examining the work of these thinkers, we will distinguish under item 3 between the kind of society which emerges when human beings interact in a state of nature, and that which emerges in a modern society with formal institutions
Summary
The range of possible political philosophers we might have chosen to cover is vast. For this paper we draw examples from three thinkers (Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau) who developed a ‘social contract’ approach to political philosophy. There would be no point in thinking about humans in isolation, independently of the social and political context in which they live This means that, in examining the work of these thinkers, we will distinguish under item 3 between the kind of society which emerges when human beings interact in a state of nature, and that which emerges in a modern society with formal institutions. The work of Robert Boyd and Peter Richerson has been influential in this regard – see Boyd and Richerson (1985) and Richerson and Boyd (2005) In this spirit we hope that an attempt to draw out some implications for political philosophy from empirical research in evolutionary social science, in particular cross-cultural human behavioural variation, is an appropriate tribute to The descent of man on the 150th anniversary of its publication.
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