This chapter applies anthropological evidence of violence in smallscale stateless societies, arguing that the strong violence hypothesis is clearly falsified and that the verdict on the weak version is more complicated. These points require a complex discussion.

One issue complicating it is that the anthropologists researching the relevant evidence have been interested in a slightly different set of claims. Anthropological studies simply ask what the levels of violence in states and stateless societies are with less concern for comparative claims and no discussion of the tolerability issue that is central to the contractarian debate. Therefore, we have to draw from research primarily aimed at one set of questions to a discussion of slightly different questions. Another complication is the difficulty of determining levels of violence in both prehistoric and modern stateless societies, neither of which has generally kept birth and death records. As we discuss below, the ethnographic and archaeological efforts to fill in that missing data are difficult and tentative.

With an eye to our goal, the first three sections of this chapter examine the anthropological research on this issue more or less as anthropologists do. Section 1 uses anthropological and historical evidence to examine violence in prehistoric stateless societies, early states, and contemporary states. Section 2 reviews evidence from modern stateless societies. Section 3 collects what we take to be anthropologists’ consensus view of violence in stateless societies. The last three sections apply this information to the philosophical questions under discussion. Section 4 evaluates the strong and weak hypotheses in light of this information, arguing that societies in which sovereignty is most absent maintain the ability to keep violence at tolerable levels. Because this finding rejects 350 years of accumulated theory of sovereignty, Section 5 briefly addresses that theory, discussing how bands are able to maintain peace without the institutions of state. Section 6 concludes and makes way for the broader discussion of the overall Hobbesian hypothesis in Chapter 10.

ARCHAEOLOGICAL AND HISTORICAL EVIDENCE OF VIOLENCE IN HUMAN PREHISTORY AND IN STATE SOCIETY

State-level civilizations are a new and unusual development in humans’ tenure on earth. Therefore, the question of how pervasive violence was in prehistoric stateless societies is, in reality, a much more general question concerning the frequency of violence outside of the exceptional conditions under which most people live today.