ABSTRACT
A society such as Hume describes would be a harsh place. It would resemble the Italian village of Montegrano that Edward Banfield (1958:110) described in the 1950s: ‘any advantage that may be given to another is necessarily at the expense of one’s own family. Therefore, one cannot afford the luxury of charity, which is giving others more than their due, or even justice, which is giving them their due.’ Montegrano is a mean world, where daily life is ‘brutal and senseless’ (Banfield, 1958:109), much like Hobbes’s ‘nasty, brutish, and short’ existence. All who stand outside the immediate family are ‘potential enemies,’ battling for the meagre bounty that nature has provided. People seek to protect themselves from the ‘threat of calamity’ (Banfield, 1958:110).
