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Private property led to capital accumulation, disparities of wealth, violence, subjugation, slavery. Once you found yourself cultivating a piece of land, ownership emerged: the field you toiled over was yours. In his Discourse on the Origin and the Foundation of Inequality (1755), humans went from being solitary brutes to companionable, egalitarian hunter-gatherers but with the rise of metallurgy and agriculture, things had taken a dire turn: people were civilized, and humanity was ruined. Natural law theorists later offered fable-like notions of how politics arose from the state of nature, culminating in Thomas Hobbes’s mid-seventeenth-century account of how the sovereign rescued prepolitical man from a ceaseless war of all against all.īut it was Jean-Jacques Rousseau, a hundred years later, who popularized the idea that we could peer at our prehistory and discern developmental stages marked by shifts in technology and social arrangements. Aristotle saw the formation of political entities as a tripartite process: first we had families next we had the villages into which they banded and finally, in the coalescence of those villages, we got a governed society, the polis. That the history of our species came in stages was an idea that came in stages.