Why Did They Assume Only Humans Had Politics?

Political Beings

The presumption that only human beings engaged in politics emerged from an assumption about humanity’s exceptionalism. This excluded other kinds of living beings, including plants, fungi, cold-blooded animals, birds, and even other mammals. Yet, even a half-century ago, its sureties had become increasingly outdated: clearly, nonhuman animals could convey complex information and fashion tools, and even possess specific artistic abilities and preferences. Parrots and apes utilize human language; crows use tools in relation to depth and gravity; dolphins communicate via third party interlocutors. Wherever the line between humans and nonhuman animals was drawn, it kept being erased.

These insights refracted back upon other human/nonhuman interactions—working with dogs, riding with horses, living with cats—which turned out to be far more complicated, emotive, and interactive than commonly believed. Similarly, divisions between phylum proved less consequential; mammals’ “complexity” is no greater than those of fish or birds. In other words, life across the eukaryotic spectrum has far more capacity than previously believed. The 2022 discovery that fungi communicate using electrical “words” destroyed the idea that only animals had such abilities: so too did trees, mushrooms, potentially even slime molds. ¹ And, among these capacities, the critical objects of politics figure centrally: power, hierarchy, representation, decisionism, collectivity.

Today, most recognize Sylvia Wynter as the most famous philosopher of the early twentieth century; during most of her lifetime, however, not only did the general public remain unfamiliar with her writings, but also very few professional philosophers or political theorists engaged her seriously. Yet her research changed how philosophy and political theory thought of human beings, especially in reference to colonial history and nonhuman life. ² Understanding how nonhumanity had long encompassed Black, female, and colonized people necessitated displacing the “genre of man,” Wynter argued, replacing it with affiliations between these “non-men.” ³

Drawing on, and expanding, W. E. B. DuBois’s dictum “Everything is mankind,” Wynter revealed human history as an amalgamation of the human and nonhuman. ⁴ Those in her orbit, for example Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, continued this project, illustrating the historical porosity of the nonhuman boundary, as well as its deployment as exercises of power, oppression, and delegitimation. ⁵ Robbie Shilliam and Alexander Weheliye, similarly influenced by Wynter, focus on the “modalities” of non-human being, on the histories of political belonging, and on the materiality of flesh that transcends humanity. ⁶

Other theorists had simultaneously been expanding the intersections of human and nonhuman agency, alongside Wynter’s work: Jane Bennett, Karen Barad, Manuel DeLanda, Rosi Braidotti, and Bruno Latour. ⁷ Each argued against conceiving politics and society as strictly and only human, humans and other matter as co-constitutive, albeit in entangled ways. Grouped roughly together as “new materialists,” these political theorists recognized that matter has its own “morphogenetic capacities” and followed Achille Mbembe’s dictum: “the concept of agency and power must be extended to non-human nature.” ⁸ Such an expanded understanding did not come easily to humans, clearly, but these thinkers opened the possibilities that politics could operate outside of humanity. In their volatile combination with the work of Wynter, the decolonization of political science had begun. ⁹

Deep Pasts

Such entanglements raise the question: when did humanity begin? The question became contested once theories of evolution emerged: followers of Haekel, Lamarck, and Darwin started searching backward for an origin. Wherever humans diverged from other apes, they assumed, one would also find the source of art, language, and politics. But as the above analysis has shown, this division proved increasingly difficult as certain discoveries became widely accepted.

For much of historical time, this was not a difficulty. Whether theologically (God created humans in the past 6000 years), by fiat (humanity truly began with the creation of writing), or through deliberate ignorance (we can never know when humans emerged, so it must be unimportant), most theoretical approaches found ways to sidestep the issue of origins. Far more important to political theory was the emergence of politics. The fictions of contract promulgated by European theorists such as Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau served as foundational myths. They and other contract theorists argued that primordial humans wandering individually in the forest had no notions of society or power, so the real question should be “How and why was politics invented?”

But their fables misrepresent humanity’s history and therefore misrepresent politics as well. Human prehistory held more complexity and organization, as revealed by non-Western smaller societies, many of which did not utilize writing, and by early twenty-first-century discoveries using carbon dating and nuclear DNA analysis. Those findings transformed understandings of preliterate peoples and even nonhuman hominins.

The first of these—the metaphorical and representative utilization of nonliterate and antiliterate societies to stand in for prehistorical peoples—had a long and often ugly history. Many of the above contract theorists presented Native peoples from the then-recently-engaged Americas to stand in for ancient presociety. In doing so, they overtly misrepresented Native politics, social relations, and economies as nonexistent; even in their own times, many Europeans recognized the absurdity of these claims. However, this comparison entails a critical implication: if one recognizes that seminomadic tribal groups have political relations (with one another, with other tribes, and with temporal continuity), one must also accept that politics does not require cities, nation-states, or pastoralism. ¹⁰

The second—the discovery of humanlike but not human species—transformed public understanding of the capacities of nonhumans and prehumans. From the determination in 1864 that Homo neanderthalensis comprised a separate species from humans and the recognition of Homo erectus (found in Java in 1891) as a precursor to humans to the discovery in the 1970s of multiple individuals from Australopithecus afarensis in East Africa, the realization that humans were not the only kind of homo led to a gradual acknowledgment of alternative capacities. That erectus created tools, that Homo heidelbergensis utilized fire, that Neandertals decorated their bodies with jewelry—each acknowledgment brought the realization that they, too, employed the stuff of politics.

Most significantly, the 2010 tracing of nuclear DNA showed that Neandertals and humans not only existed simultaneously but also interbred. ¹¹ Soon after, findings revealed the same occurrence between humans and another hominin, Denisovans. These discoveries clarified the potential activities of deep historical time. Not only did nonhumans likely engage in politics, but also human development may well have been a result of politics. As one now-forgotten political theorist commented, “the human brain is a consequence of political activity, not its cause.” ¹² These revelations of deep-past coexistence of various Homo species in spaces of conflict, disorder, and cooperation highlight the nonexclusivity of politics.

Native Informants

Nonhuman and prehuman politics were not the sorts obscured by the inattentions of the field, but their relegation at least could be partially excused because they were difficult to observe. Not so for the numerous descriptive, normative, and empirical alternative human approaches to politics already extant, which nonetheless remained categorized as external to real politics. Multiple political organizations, operating across extensive time and space, long predated the European notion of the nation-state, and many of these persisted at the time of, and subsequent to, European contact. Although some (e.g., the Chinese dynasty) were well known, others (e.g., the Quechua/Incan empire) languished in temporal and linguistic obscurity, at least for political science.

Many of these existed simultaneously to the rise of the state form. In their attempts to control the land of the Americas, Spanish, Portuguese, French, and English colonists traded with, fought, and formed treaties with these polities. The Europeans called them “nations” or “tribes” but in large part lacked the conceptual capacity to understand their organizational structures, instead merely assuming simple analogies (e.g., that “chief” was equivalent to “king.”) Yet the European nation-states understood their importance and clearly recognized them as alternative political formations. ¹³

Many Indigenous polities adapted—or were forced into—forms recognizable to settler colonial powers. Some were inspirational for new state political forms, such as the influence of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy on the institutionalization of federalism. ¹⁴ Some deliberately became overtly constitutional, such as the nineteenth-century Cherokee. ¹⁵ The United States defined the majority as “tribes,” with the ability to make traditional claims only using circumscribed and authorized language, such as claiming “sovereignty” in the face of plenary power. ¹⁶ Yet many Native people continued to practice traditional political practices, bolstered by linguistic, geographical, and conceptual continuity.

In the early twenty-first century, many political organizations turned to Native activists for leadership. They began learning from and even incorporating Indigenous insights and theoretical perspectives. In the United States, “water protectors,” made most visible to non-Natives in the fossil-fuel pipeline conflicts, conceptualized longer-range consequences than did the blinkered interests of corporations. In the then-colonized state of Hawai’i, Kānaka Maoli protestors prevented Mauna Kea from further desecration perpetuated by a narrow and circumscribed idea of “scientific advancement.” As the dominance of electric vehicles emerged, Paiute protected Peehee Mu'huh from lithium mining.

These examples were not merely extensions of European concepts of “the environment” or “nature.” In each case, local indigenous organizations recognized the land and the watershed as political actors, worthy of protection and engagement, rather than simple inorganic matter. (Often, scientists and traditional environmental groups opposed Native claims, as in the “need” for lithium for battery-powered cars.) In other words, they did not consider politics something done only by human beings. Instead they recognized multiplicitous political relationships between humans, sacred landscapes, nonhuman animals, and flows and bodies of water.

Native politics connects closely to the previous two categorizations. On one hand, non-Europeans were placed in an imagined past, their coevalness rejected. On the other, their politics often involved nonhumans: animals, mountains, rivers. To understand nonhumanity as a source and basis for politics allowed Native theorists the insights that have led political theory to its present state. This ability to see the connections and influences outside of humanity made these activists some of the most influential of the past 50 years.

Life Worlds

Today, we clearly know that humanlike species are not the only political actors. Until historically recent years, however, a great lack determined the limitations of knowledge of lifeforms on other worlds. As Enrico Fermi presented his paradox: given that the universe’s size and diversity should have generated multiple forms of non-Earthly life, including lifeforms much more technologically advanced than our own, why had humans never seen any evidence of those? Fifty years ago, none had emerged; most dismissed “flying saucers” as hallucinations, transplanetary travel as impossible, alien beings as fantasia. A lack of evidence fueled conspiracies and paranoias, and multiple clumsy denials from various governments did nothing to dismiss them.

The major source for envisaging life on planets other than Earth came from a particular genre, then called either “science fiction” or (more accurately) “speculative fiction.” In short stories, novels, television, and films, authors proposed multiple hypotheses of what such life would look like and how it would act, especially in relation to humanity. Would otherworldly beings share humanity’s desires for war and conquest, or would they lead us to new expansions in consciousness and prospects? ¹⁷

Speculative fiction’s motivating ethos concerns possibilities: technological potentials, of course, but also of concepts, physics, and life. What kinds of experiences, relations, transformations can be conceivable? It thus proved capable of postulating non-Earthly forms of life and nonhuman kinds of intelligence. Often set in a specified future—now a tired trope, overused even in academic writing—such fictions could highlight contemporary issues by tracking possible implications and developments. The confirmation of other planets and other lifeforms motivated a considerable amount of speculative fiction, and the implication of politics that operated profoundly differently from (or, more unimaginatively, similarly to) earthly versions proved irresistible to fiction.

As a result of qubit communication, all earthly complex communicative lifeforms now know of multiple non-Earthly beings. ¹⁸ No one can deny that these civilizations operate politically. But on first contact (2036), those best prepared to figure out translation protocols were those with formative backgrounds in speculative fiction, and the few political scientists conversant in the genre proved most capable of expanding the field.

Why was this discipline, founded in the presumption that different systems of governance could be systematically organized along the lines of the biological sciences, so poorly prepared for profound alternatives? ¹⁹ The committee hypothesizes two major reasons. First, political scientists had profoundly normalized a very few models of politics, often presuming that “real” politics operated solely along lines of voting or (at the global level) nation-states, thus inuring them to other possibilities. Between their ahistorical knowledge and limited pattern recognition, their ability to conceptualize politics outside of liberal republicanism, authoritarianism, fascism, and socialism impoverished their horizons. A second, related, possible reason assumes that the readings, data, and texts of the average political scientist—the “literature reviews” of core concepts—deliberately excluded the imaginative and fanciful. These embedded assumptions that politics correlates only with the particularities of the day, with the possibilities already extant. Thus, genres requiring imaginativeness remained external to the field.

Other Reasons

All of these changes depended on the overthrow of what had previously counted as “reason.” As philosophy and political theory were increasingly understood as a crucial component of oppressive systems, their privileging of certain kinds of logics and presumptions were justly attacked. ²⁰ Where Immanuel Kant had famously centered “man” as the proper subject of meaning, feminist, postcolonial, Native, and other critics exhumed how this centrality had obscured multiple kinds of subjugation, excluding many kinds of being from the practices of reason. Technological transformations, too, have brought the limitations of reason into high relief.

The most dramatic emerged as what we now commonly know as “mechanical logics” or, more colloquially, “computhink.” Early hints that computational logic might differ from human logic had been proposed in speculative fiction, but even there it resembled human thought. Early experiments in “artificial intelligence” used human cognition as the touchstone. Even the famed Turing Test, from 1950, was based on likeness; computer writing being indistinguishable from human communication was the measure of whether or not machines could “think.” ²¹ Once again, a restricted account of the human became the normative standard for assessing and dismissing the intelligence and agency of nonhuman and nonliving forms: mensuration and technology, thus imperceptibly underwritten and tied together.

When computers themselves began to develop their own operating systems, however, the limitations of using humanity as the definition of reason became apparent. The futurist Ray Kurzweil had predicted this liminal event as early as 2005, but even he had modeled intelligence and rationality on human capacities, presuming that computers would merely extend a model of intelligence in a linear fashion beyond what their creators could understand. ²² Even his name for this, taken from John von Neumann—“the singularity”—implies one trajectory, one line of ascent.

Computers, of course, surprised everyone. Whatever their original programmers intended, their logics have been multiple, contradictory to one another, and unpredictable. Humans’ inability to understand how computhink operates was widely expected. But the incomparability of some computational logics with others, their mathematically or philosophically falsities that nonetheless are empirically useful, and their overt employment of logical fallacy and paradox: these have destabilized assumptions of reason’s unity.

The effects on political theory have been dramatic. The central figures of its intellectual history (Kant, Hegel, Rawls) as well as the greater intellectual currents (positivism, liberalism, republicanism) relied on logical unity: noncontradiction, excluded middles, and self-identity. That reason itself could betray these allegedly bedrock principles has meant a profound rethinking and reworking of philosophy. Previously marginal figures such as Gottfried Leibniz, Alfred North Whitehead, William James, and Donna Haraway demanded attention. Each had, in their time, undercut the hegemony of what was then called reason, assumed to be ideal, determinative, and exclusive to humans.

Alongside the discoveries and recoveries listed above, this rethinking of reason both resulted from, and helped promote, the disentangling of humanity from power. Although obviously naïve, the assumption that only humans had politics retained an iron grip on the minds of people in the early part of this century, and explaining why and how this could have been the case has been the purpose of this report. ²³ One consequence of a long process of subjectification, which exclusively considered the European “man” as political thinker, actor, and participant, was the explosive innovation and creativity that resulted from its unseating. ²⁴ Today, we can only reflect on the immense suppression of history, evidence, and information that holding this conclusion required.