KARL WIDERQUIST

This is an odd book with an odd history. Grant and I began working on it in about 2007, but we didn't know who the other one was until 2010. For me, it started when I was at Tulane University shortly after I completed an article called “A Dilemma for Libertarianism,” which examines the Lockean attempt to justify private property rights by telling a story of “original appropriation.” My argument was that if you tell a slightly different appropriation story, the same principles justify a monarch or a democratic assembly owning all the property. Thus, Lockean principles don't say anything at all about whether property should be private or public. When I explained this argument to a prominent libertarian (or “propertarian,” to use this book's term), he responded, “What a colossal counterfactual!”

I thought that was the worst possible response a propertarian could give because their appropriation story is a fanciful tale about rugged individuals who go into “the state of nature” to clear land and bring it into cultivation. Do propertarians actually think this story is true? After thinking over their arguments I realized to some extent the answer is yes. They think at least that there is truth in it, that “private” “property rights” are somehow more natural than public or communal “territorial claims.” So, I set out to read a little bit of anthropology and write a short 4,000-word article disproving that utterly ridiculous claim. But over the following nine years that 4,000-word article has grown to a research project involving at least two books, two spinoff articles, an online appendix, and maybe more after that. The original subject of that original article is now one of the topics planned for the second book.

As I read a little more anthropology, I realized that the sources I had started with were not a broad representation of the relevant anthropological thought. So, I read some more and began to think about other dubious anthropological claims floating around modern political philosophy. I spent most of the academic year 2007–8 and much of the next (both years at the University of Reading in the United Kingdom) reading anthropology, archaeology, and history— not quite sure what I was looking for, but able to relate most of what I was learning to political philosophy in my field.