Anthropology coalesced as a distinct academic discipline in the nineteenth century when ethnocentric ideas were dominant in Western Europe. Most educated Westerners believed in the superiority of Western society, the dichotomy between natural man and civilized man, the inevitability of progress, and the inevitability of everyone sharing the benefits of that progress. Before anthropology became its own discipline, it was a branch of philosophy. Hobbesian ideas were not merely influential in anthropology; they were foundational. The history of anthropology is largely a history of how these ideas were overcome, but Hobbesian viewpoints of some kind have never entirely gone away. There is an on-going anthropological debate about violence levels and wellbeing in small-scale stateless societies, and there has been recently a flourish of “neo-Hobbesian” writing.

To characterize any contemporary anthropological research as Hobbesian is perhaps an exaggeration because philosophers and anthropologist ask different questions. Philosophers ask (or more accurately, claim to know) whether violence is intolerably high in stateless societies. Anthropologists have tended to focus on much simpler questions, such as, what levels of violence can be observed in stateless societies? And how do they compare with the levels of violence observed in state societies? In our terms, anthropologists tend to examine the weak violence hypothesis. No empirical scientist we know of has thought the strong violence hypothesis worthy of rigorous investigation.

The same issue affects the Hobbesian hypothesis. Philosophers claim to know that everyone in state society is better off than everyone in stateless society. Few anthropologists have thought of that claim as worthy of investigation at all, but they have investigated issues that are relevant to it, such as what the life expectancy is of people in stateless society; how healthy they are; how much leisure time they have; and so on. So for the most part, Chapters 9 and 10 will attempt to translate literature investigating questions that interest anthropologists into answers that are relevant to very different questions posed by philosophers. To say that any anthropologist has a generally Hobbesian view today is to say that they have negative opinions about the welfare and violence levels in stateless societies. It would be hard to find one who thought stateless peoples were under “continuall feare, and danger of violent death” (Hobbes 1962 [1651]: 100) or that they were worse off than everyone in state society.