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This chapter provide an overview of two books, in which we name, define, and debunk the following false claims that still play important roles in contemporary political theories although they are not always defined and defended explicitly:
1. The Hobbesian hypothesis: sovereign states and/or the liberal private property rights system benefits everyone (or at least harms no one) relative to how well they could reasonably expect to live in the state of nature – i.e. a society lacking one or both of these institutions.
2. The appropriation hypothesis: private property in the form of liberal ownership rights develops naturally while collective, communal, common, or government-held property rights systems do not.
3. The natural inequality hypothesis: inequality is natural and inevitable, i.e. economic, social, and/or political equality cannot exist and/or cannot be created without a significant loss in negative freedom.
4. The market-freedom hypothesis: a market economy (and/or capitalism) is more consistent with negative freedom than any other economic system.
The third and fourth of these claims are not obviously claims about prehistoric or small-scale societies, but they are universal claims about all societies and so they include claims about even the most remote and distant societies from contemporary thinking.