ABSTRACT
Man is a family man. That is one starting point for any sensible discussion of politics. Man is, in Rousseau's phrase, "everywhere in chains" that bind him in a social order with some of his fellows and against others. Man is an animal prone to quarreling, jealous of his own rights, which he is ever eager to increase at the expense of others. Man in a state of nature is as much a political and social creature as he is in modern civilization. If man has any "natural rights", they derive not from any presumed primal state of independence. "Man has never been free", Joseph de Maistre declared in response to Rousseau. Our rights must come not from nature but from our nature, human nature, and that natural law that is the behavioral code of the human species. Since these assertions are controversial, they need proof, or at least evidence to back them up.
